“There’s a potential for abuse” of the term, said Burke. In June of 2019, the day after Canada’s parliament declared a national climate emergency, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau approved an expansion of the Trans Mountain Pipeline that would triple the amount of crude oil transported from the Alberta tar sands to the West Coast and shipped around the world. Sometimes, the cognitive dissonance between emergency rhetoric and actual policy is dizzying. Of the dozens of countries worldwide that have declared an emergency, only eight are on track to meet their commitments under the Paris Agreement. But cities don’t have the technology or the money to decarbonize alone, and at the national level, the benefits of declaring an emergency are murkier.
Here's Howįor cities, declaring an emergency can be a gateway to addressing the climate problem sometimes local governments pair the declaration with a promise to go carbon-neutral or to create special, global-warming focused task forces. To support our nonprofit environmental journalism, please consider disabling your ad-blocker to allow ads on Grist. “The downside is it also allows people to declare an emergency and then not do anything.” “It can be quite useful to have people declare emergencies,” said Tom Burke, the co-founder of E3G, a European climate change think tank. But even after dozens of national declarations, there’s limited consensus on what the term means, or whether it actually leads to cutting CO2 emissions.
Treating the crisis like a war or a pandemic, the thinking goes, would focus governments on a single objective - and, in the U.S., could even mobilize billions of dollars in funding. Proponents argue that calling climate change an “emergency” could pressure governments to take sweeping and immediate action on global warming. According to an estimate from the Climate Mobilization, a U.S.-based advocacy group, 950 million people, or 12 percent of the world’s population, currently live under a “climate emergency.” Today, at least 38 countries around the world - including the whole of the European Union, Japan, and New Zealand - and thousands of towns, cities, and counties have issued some kind of resolution declaring climate change a crisis. wouldn’t be the first country to declare a climate emergency. And although Biden has frequently spoken about the “climate emergency” - and referred to it that way on the White House priorities list - he has stopped short of issuing a formal declaration. That same month, António Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations, encouraged every country in the world to adopt emergency resolutions until carbon dioxide is no longer building up in the atmosphere. In December, more than 380 environmental groups sent a letter to Biden’s transition team, urging him to issue an executive order invoking the National Emergencies Act. The push for a “climate emergency” has been building for some time.
“If there ever was an emergency, the climate crisis is one,” Schumer said. On Monday night, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow that the newly inaugurated president should declare climate change a “national emergency,” unlocking over a hundred additional presidential powers to tackle the overheating planet. Just a week into his term, President Joe Biden is already under pressure to act more swiftly on climate change.
0 kommentar(er)
