It’s a f&%#ing climate emergency! Why aren’t we acting like it? (w/ Seth Klein)

This episode aired on March 15 2025.

Seth Klein joins host Erin Blondeau to talk about the 6 Markers of Climate Emergency Framework. 

Marker 1: Spend what it takes to win.

Marker 2: Create new institutions to get the job done.

Marker 3: Shift from voluntary & incentive-based policies to mandatory measures.

Marker 4: Tell the truth about the severity of the crisis & communicate urgency.

Marker 5: Leave no one behind.

Marker 6: Indigenous rights & leadership are essential.

Learn more: https://www.climateemergencyunit.ca/emergencymarkersframework

About the 6 Markers of Climate Emergency

We believe that it’s not too late to change the course of the climate emergency and prevent more catastrophic suffering. But to do this, we need the kind of transformational change not seen since the Second World War.

We got a glimpse into emergency mode during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the government failed to sufficiently hit Marker 5 (leave no one behind.)

As explained in Seth’s book, the Canadian government took extraordinary measures during the Second World War to ensure that it successfully navigated and confronted the rise of fascism. During the war, the government hit Markers 1 through 4 big time, and partially hit Marker 5.

These war-time measures worked once, and can be used again to fight the most dangerous threat we have ever faced: the climate crisis. But, it can’t be overstated how important it is to expand on the war-time measures of WWII to empower historically excluded populations of today and nurture a more just society for our future generations.

When asking people to enlist in a grand societal undertaking, we have to make a commitment to them that the society that will emerge from the other end of that effort will be more just and fair than the one they are leaving behind.

Credits:

Written and produced by Erin Blondeau and Doug Hamilton-Evans. Hosted by Erin Blondeau with special guest Seth Klein. Music by Anjali Appadurai. Audio editing by Blue Light Studios. Artwork by Geoff Smith. 

Learn more at climateemergencyunit.ca/podcast

Transcript

Hello and welcome back to breaking case of emergency, a podcast about mobilizing Canada for the climate crisis with audacious solutions rooted in justice and workers' rights. I'm Erin Blondeau, and I'm very excited about today's episode because I'll be having a conversation with our team lead, Seth Klein. But before we get into it, I do wanna lay down some context for today's episode. So in case you haven't noticed, we're in an emergency, multiple emergencies, actually. The climate crisis is raging all across the world, and it's only getting worse.

2024 was the hottest year on record. We face numerous tipping points. And earlier this year, Los Angeles experienced devastating wildfires that destroyed entire neighborhoods. Last summer, it was Jasper. And a few years before that, it was the heat dome and more wildfires and atmospheric rivers.

And our governments are still not taking it seriously despite declaring a climate emergency in 2019. And while this is happening, the massive gap between the ultra wealthy and the rest of us is widening. And the rich, they keep pitting us against each other, trying to distract us from what's really happening. It's getting harder to find safe and affordable homes, to pay for the basic necessities of life like food and baby formula and medicine, and we're seeing the global rise of the far right of authoritarianism and fascism powered by xenophobia, white supremacy, and the failures of capitalism. The cracks in the foundations of the liberal democratic order are widening.

And while this podcast may be hosted by the climate emergency unit, we recognize that all of this is connected and a climate response that doesn't improve the lives of working people and forge a more just and equitable society is just not gonna cut it. What we really need to do is act like it's an emergency, not like it's some blip in the status quo that some tinkering around the edges can solve. We need transformational change that leaves no one behind. That's a lot, but the good news is that Canada has done this before. During the second World War, we transformed our entire economy and tech and took extraordinary measures to combat fascism.

At the climate emergency unit, we take lessons from this period of history and push for Canadian society to respond to the crisis on a wartime footing, but without the bloodshed, the nationalism, and the conquest. It's all inspired by a book called A Good War, Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency. Seth Klein is the author of this book, and he also happens to be our director of strategy, our team lead, and our guest for today's episode. Welcome, Seth. Hey, Erin.

Glad to be here. Yeah. So glad to have you. And we wanted to dedicate this episode to talking about the framework that kind of guides our work at the Climate Emergency Unit, and it's a concept that grew out of your book. And we call it the six markers of climate emergency.

So I like to think of the markers as kind of like a rubric to tell if a government or institution is actually acting in climate emergency mode. And I know for me, it's hard sometimes to understand what governments and politicians are doing. And so the framework helps me decipher if they're just gaslighting us or if their actions and their policies are actually matching the crisis that we're facing. So let's dig into this into the six markers and kinda talk through each one and maybe get a little history lesson. How does that sound, Seth?

Sound it sounds great. That is exactly what they're for. Okay. Perfect. So first, let's talk a little bit about your book.

So how did you arrive at the good war model, and why is it important for us to work in an emergency framework? Yeah. Well, so as you alluded to, my book is all structured around lessons from Canada's mobilization in the second World War and applied in the present to the climate emergency. But it didn't start off that way. I started off wanting to write a book about how we mobilize in the face of the climate emergency.

And in the original book outline, there was only gonna be and I should say I I had been working on the climate file for many years. I was increasingly frustrated that governments were stuck in incremental mode. I wanted to write something that would push them. But in the original book outline, there was only gonna be one chapter about lessons from the second World War. And, you know, I'm not an historian, but I thought, hey, let's dig into the World War 2’s story because, you know, for everybody who has in in the back of their minds, can we really do this?

Do we can we really transform and retool the economy in the space of just a few years? I thought, well, let's let's look at the World War 2 example because we kinda did. And so I started to dig in, and the more I dug into that research, it started to blow my mind, and I started to see more and more parallels. And even though I had been on the climate file for many years, as I dug into that history, it was forcing me to look at that material with fresh eyes through the lens of emergency. It was like suddenly realizing, oh, this is what it looks and feels and sounds like to actually be in emergency mode.

And I found that the parallels went well beyond just retooling the economy. You know, they applied to how you mobilize the public, how you navigate Canadian Confederation, the impact of inequality, the role of young people, the role of Indigenous people, what did we do for returning soldiers, and is there a model there for just transition for fossil fuel workers today? How did we pay for it? Just so many parallels. And I remember turning to my partner one night and saying, you know, I think I have to rewrite the whole I I think I have to rewrite the whole, outline.

I think the whole book's about World War 2. And so that's how the book became what it was and and and why the title, is what it is. But it starts with a basic premise, which is what we have been doing is not working. You know, we've been at this for decades, and yet we have fundamentally failed to bend the curve when it comes to driving down our greenhouse gas emissions, our carbon pollution. And, and so I was looking for a new model that would try to galvanize, something new.

Mhmm. And there's so many important lessons in that book, especially for now, for the unprecedented everything that we're dealing with right now. What do you think about our current model? What what do you think is not working about our current model? 

You know, if I had to sum it up in a sentence, I I think, you know, we we do have a federal climate plan. We have provincial climate plans in some provinces, but they are all stuck trying to incentivize our way to victory. You know, we have price signals and rebates, and it's all voluntary. And, really, Erin, it's no way to prosecute the fight of our lives. And so that's that's what led me to gravitate towards this framework. But I should say too, I did come to it easily.

Like, as you may as you know, you know, I started my political life in the peace and disarmament movement, and I'm the child of Vietnam War resisters. So if you'd said to any of my high school friends that I'd written a war story, they'd be very surprised. And yet, I just became convinced that we needed a wartime scale response to actually achieve the pitch and pace of what's required in an emergency. And the more I dug into it, the more I started to find some hope. That something remarkable happens when we start to see an emergency, as an emergency that new possibilities open up.

Mhmm. And I do love that about the markers that it really does provide hope about how we can move through this. So what Seth, let's go through those six markers off the top. What are they and how are they supposed to be used? Right.

Right. Yeah. So in the end, the question that I got all the time was, okay, how do you know when a and you said it off the top. How do you know when a government is actually in emergency or, really, the leadership of any institution is in emergency? And so that forced me to distill, you know, the 400 page book into what we, at the Climate Emergency Unit call the six markers of emergency.

And they are, number one, that you commit to spend what it takes to win. Number two, that you create new economic institutions to get the job done. Number three, that you shift from, voluntary measures and incentivization measures and and move to mandatory measures. Number four is that you tell the truth. You tell the truth about the severity of the crisis and and what's required to meet it. Number five is you commit to leave no one behind, Understanding that a real mobilization requires social solidarity, and inequality is toxic to social solidarity. And that when you're asking people to undertake something big, you have to commit to them that that their economic and employment, security needs will be met. And number six, you center Indigenous leadership rights and title. So those are the six markers. And as I say, they were written with an eye to senior levels of government, but, really, they apply to the to the leadership of any large institution.

It could be a municipal government, an Indigenous nation, a crown corporation, a union, a pension fund, a faith institution, a post secondary institution. Anyone can use these markers as a litmus test really of, hey. Is my leadership… do they get it? Are they actually in emergency mode? Mhmm.

And for any listeners right now, we will have the markers in our show notes as well for easy access. So let's dive into marker number one, which, like you said, is spend what it takes to win. So, Seth, what is the historical precedent behind this? 

Yeah. So the benefit of an emergency or wartime mentality is that it forces government out of an austerity mindset. We got a little bit of a taste of that in the first year of the pandemic when, the federal government was spending a lot of money. And as a result, Canada's debt to GDP ratio went from about 30% to 50% in a single year. That's a big jump in a single year. But, Erin, it still pales in comparison to what we did in World War 2. Canada finished World War two with a debt to GDP ratio well over a 100%, And the the minister in the Mackenzie King government who oversaw a lot of that spending and who oversaw this incredible ramp up in military spending, military equipment, production was a a guy named C.D. Howe. And when he was, pressed about this ramp up this unprecedented ramp up in spending, he famously replied, if we lose the war, nothing will matter. 

And I think that's very apt for for, the present. And in order to pay for that, ramp up in spending, during the war, the government instituted victory bonds. They brought in new forms of of of progressive taxation. There was an excess profits tax during the second World War. So the kind of profiteering, that we have seen in the pandemic and in the years since the pandemic, that was actually illegal in the second World War. And I think we're gonna need those kinds of measures again as we, as we mobilize to confront climate. We're gonna need wealth taxes.

We're gonna need, windfall profits taxes again. How much are our government spending on the climate emergency right now? And how much enough. Not nearly enough. Just to give you an example, just to throw some numbers at you.

Back to that comparison to the first, year of the pandemic. During most of that year, the federal government was spending in order to fund the the CERB and the wage top up. They were spending, in the order of about $5,000,000,000 a week for most of that that year. In comparison, the federal government spending on climate is about $16,000,000,000 a year. So $5,000,000,000 a week versus $6,000,000,000 a year.

One is emergency. The other is not. So, really, I I would say federal government spending on the on on climate action, it's not just that it's a little less than it should be. It's probably off by about, a a fivefold order of magnitude. And one of the the targets that, a number of climate economists talk about is that we should be spending 2% of GDP, which is which in Canada is about, last I looked about $56,000,000,000. So we're now spending 16. We need to spend a lot more. Now it's interesting that, you know, NATO also has this target that we should be spending 2% on military. And it's telling, I think, that you've got politicians falling over themselves over who's gonna hit that 2% military target, sooner. And yet we cannot get them to apply the same thinking to the climate emergency even though that's really the bigger security threat.

Mhmm. Definitely. And I think one thing one question that we always get asked about this, and and you did touch on it a little bit, is how are we gonna pay for that? Yeah. Well, I I think I've I've given you some ideas.

There's there's and in my book, I list a whole bunch of ways in which we can raise new revenues. Some of it, I think, can be done, you know, through the Bank of Canada, and some of it through new forms of of taxation. I do think we need an excess profits tax or what's sometimes called the windfall profits tax again, and we need wealth taxes again. And this, again, was part of what was extraordinary about the spirit that prevailed in the second World War where you had, you know, senior leaders in the corporate sector telling other business leaders why they had to suck it up and accept the excess profits tax. And, by the way, that excess profits tax was much more, draconian, if you will, than anything contemplated today.

The way it worked in the second World War is once a corporation's profits reached above what the pre war average was, their taxation rate was a 100%. And here you had the corporate sector, you know, and their leaders saying saying to them why they had to suck it up and accept it because that's what it means to be united in a common cause in the face of an emergency. Mhmm. And I think I I feel like a lot of people don't have a lot of imagination for what these kinds of programs would look like. And that's one of the huge things about your book that impacted me is that looking at the lessons throughout history, we can see that we don't actually need that big of an imagination. We just need to read up on our history a little bit. 

Yeah. There's one other lesson around CD how to and if you will, the CD moment that we find ourselves in again, particularly in the wake of Trump's tax on economic attacks on Canada, which is an awful lot of what we need is capital spending. A lot of climate infrastructure, whether it's rail or renewable energy or things like that, and, they have income, you know. People pay monthly utility bills.

They pay to take the train, And we could and should be doing an awful lot of this through crown crown corporations. Like, we have we have so much capital at our disposal if we choose to deploy it in meeting this emergency moment. Yeah. And I think this is very related to marker two, which is create new institutions to get the job done. So what happened in the second World War in terms of creating new institutions, and how can we apply that to today?

So, yeah. And forgive me for you'll find, Erin, I'm I I find I often sound like everyone's weird great uncle always talking about the war. But, but here's the thing. During World War 2, starting from a base of virtually nothing, the Canadian economy and its labor force pumped out a volume of military equipment that is simply mind blowing. So during those six years, Canada with a population about roughly a quarter what it is today, produced 800,000,000, excuse me, 800,000 military vehicles, more than Germany, Italy, and Japan combined. 16,000 military aircraft ultimately building the fourth largest air force in the world at the time. You you and I reside in British Columbia in a province where we seem unable to build a single BC ferry anymore. But in the war, the BC shipyards produced about six excuse me, about 350 ships. Again, from a base of almost nothing, naval architects had to be recruited from The UK and The US. A whole labor force had to be recruited and trained.

The Vancouver Shipbuilders, union local went from a small local of 200 guys to the single largest local of of men and women in the country. That's what it looks and sounds and feels like to actually be in emergency mode. And, remarkably, the Canadian government, under the leadership of this guy, C.D. Howe, in order to expedite that ramp up in military production, established 28 crown corporations to to meet that moment. Howe was really became a source of great fascination to me. He he was no lefty.

Right? But, you know, he sat on the on the the right flank of Mackenzie King's cabinet. He'd made a lot of money in the private sector, but he was, like, seized with the task. He's happy to give contracts to the private sector, but he was in a hurry. And anytime the private sector couldn't quickly do what needed doing, he created another crown enterprise to do it.

He also undertook detailed economic planning to ensure that wartime production was prioritized. So he's carefully, He's appointing people to carefully, coordinate supply chains to to make sure that, military production is prioritized. That's what it looks like to be in emergency mode and deploy your resources to get the job done. And sadly, in response to climate emergency, we've seen nothing like this. So I can contrast to CD Howe's twenty eight wartime enterprises, the Trudeau government has basically established two notable crown corporations during its time in office, the Canada Infrastructure Bank, which is rather ponderous and has has accomplished not that much.

And the other one, I hate to tell you what it is, it's the Trans Mountain Pipeline Corporation. It's the one that makes us all the proud, owners of a six year old oil pipeline from Alberta to our province. If our government really saw the climate emergency as an emergency, it would, like CD Howe did, quickly conduct an inventory of all of our conversion needs and determine how many heat pumps and solar rays and wind farms and electric buses we're gonna need to electrify virtually everything and end our reliance on fossil fuels. And then we would establish a new generation of public corporations, federal, provincial, municipal, Indigenous, to ensure that those items are manufactured and deployed at the at the requisite scale. Yeah.

And this I was gonna ask you. So when I think of this marker, I think a lot about one of our core campaigns, which is the Youth Climate Corps campaign, which would be a new institution that we would need to create to get the job done of transitioning us away from fossil fuels. So can you think of any other, like, institutions to help us meet this moment that that we should be creating? Well, first of all, just to elaborate on what you just said, I think the youth climate corps, YCC, is exactly the kind of new economic institution that we need. I mean, one of the things that that's so appealing to us at the Climate Emergency about this Youth Climate Corps campaign is that the Youth Climate Corps ticks almost five out of the six boxes in terms of our six markers of emergency.

It involves spending what it takes. It is a new institution to get the job done. It's part of how we communicate the truth of what we need. It's part of how we ensure that no one is left behind, especially younger people in this transition ahead of us. And if done right, it would center Indigenous leadership rights and title.

So so it hits multiple markers, but in particular, it's an example of creating a new institution, that gets the job done, and that would allow us to say to young people, you know, anyone 35, if you understand this emergency, and you wanna get trained up in a career to help us meet this moment, We have a place for you. Nobody nobody will be turned away. And and as we have found in our work, Erin, the work you and I do together with our team, there are tens of thousands of young people who are waiting for that invitation. And, you know, just to be your weird uncle again, in the war, you know, Canada was a population of about 11,000,000 people, over a million of them enlisted, which is remarkable. That's a mobilization.

Sixty four percent of them under the age of 21. They left their farms. They they delayed their careers. They deferred their studies because they understood the emergency to be in that moment. And even though the infrastructure was not initially there to receive those young volunteers, nobody was turned away because why would you do that in an emergency?

Mhmm. Exactly. Yeah. And, you know, I I wish so badly that we had this program, you know, ten years ago because I've told this story before. But, for my partner and I, you know, we had our son about eight years ago.

And, you know, we we were struggling financially, and we didn't have a lot of job options. And my partner seriously considered joining the military as the only low barrier work option available to him. And we didn't decide to move forward with that, but if a youth climate corps was around then, we both would have enlisted, and we could have saved ourselves years of economic hardship. Yeah. I love hearing your example of that.

And I'm I'm fairly certain if, it existed and I was, you know, fresh out of school, I I would want to enlist there. And your comparison is exactly right, you know, like, if you think about what is there really is currently only one national youth employment and training program that's genuinely barrier free, particularly for young people, from disadvantaged populations, and it's the military. And we damn well should offer people a better alternative. Mhmm. I agree.

Okay. So switching gears a little bit. In your book, you use the term embrace economic planning as a part of this new institution's marker. And those that are more conservative or right wing might kind of recoil at this framing. But can you tell us a little bit more about what that would look like?

Yeah. Well, you know, again, I'll go back to that second World War example. You know, Canada's government, in the in the lead into World War two was still largely a free market oriented government. I mean, that's partly why the government had done mostly nothing during ten years of the depression. And the private sector still played a key role, in World War 2.

But vitally, if and this is really the key lesson, is that when you are in an emergency, we do not allow the market to determine the allocation of scarce resources. In a time of emergency, that's not how we should be making decisions. So let me give you an American example out of World War 2, and look at auto production and the big three automakers in Detroit. So The US declared war two years later than Canada in December of 1941. In February of 1942, which is to say two months later, the last civilian automobile rolled off the assembly line in Detroit.

And for the next four years, their production and sale was basically illegal in The United States Of America. Now those private companies were still very active. They were working full tilt. They were all in full employment. They were still making money, but they didn't get to decide what would be produced because that's not how you approach an emergency. So, really, I think a key lesson here is when you're mobilizing in the face of emergency, you need to kind of reject the straight jacket of neoliberal economic thinking and and cast off those free market ideas and assumptions that have kept us from doing what needs to be done in the face of emergency. 

Yeah. And I think that that is a really great segue into one of the markers that I you know, I'll admit I had to do a little bit of reading around this one, and I had to, come to terms with it. But now it makes a lot of sense, especially put into this context. And the marker is marker number three, shift from voluntary policies to mandatory measures. So, Seth, elaborate on this one for us a little bit. 

Yeah. So I said off the top of the podcast that for for effectively, for three decades, we have accomplished very little when it comes to actually reducing our greenhouse gas emissions. And the best you can say is that for the last twenty years, they've basically been flatlined. They're not coming down at the pitch and the pace that the science and justice demands of us.

So why is that? And I think a major reason is that if you survey the federal and provincial climate policies to date, what they almost all have in common is that they're voluntary. We encourage change. We incentivize change. We offer rebates and tax credits.

We send price signals. What we have decidedly not done is actually require change. As I said earlier, the government's trying to incentivize our way to victory, and it isn't it ain't gonna work, and it's no way to prosecute the battle of our lives. If we're going to meet the urgent carbon pollution targets that we need to hit, we have to set clear near term dates by which certain things will be required. For example, we would say that you'll no longer be permitted to sell or, a fossil fuel burning vehicle as of, like, four years from now, much sooner than the mandates that have been talked about to you know, right now, there's we have those vehicle mandates for 2035.

Well, look. Twenty thirty five, that's not emergency. And in the political cycles in which, we operate, it's kind of political imagination. We need we need to set dates that are much sooner than that. And as I pointed to in that World War two example from The States, it is possible to retool assembly lines much, much faster.

We would mandate that all new buildings are not permitted to tie into natural gas lines or use other fossil fuels within a year, which is something that Vancouver did three years ago, but most communities, and most provinces have not done anything like that. We would ban fossil fuel, advertising and advertising by fossil fuel companies and fossil fuel vehicles. So that's what I mean by mandates that would actually signal that we are truly, in emergency mode. Yeah. And so many of these, ideas are tied into other markers as well.

Like, I'm thinking about the tell the truth marker that we're gonna talk about and how that ties into, kind of the fight around the prohibition on natural gas in in homes. There's just, you know, a lot of misinformation. But And it's interesting to me, Erin. You know, you you mentioned there, at the top of the question how you struggled with this one yourself as a lot of people do and as the government as governments do. And, again, I'm gonna go back to World War 2.

At the beginning of World War 2, the government of Canada and The US and The UK were all very nervous that they might have to bring in rationing. They were afraid, which is a form of mandate. They they were afraid that if they brought that in, they would face a kind of popular revolt. But as the war progressed, they did have to bring in rationing, and something interesting happened. They were hugely popular, because rationing became a way that everyone could do their bit, but not only do their bit, do their bit in a way that while knowing that everybody else was too.

That their neighbors, regardless of their their their class or income, that everyone was gonna have to abide by the same rules. That's one of the benefits of of mandates, is that, you know, again, if you think to the the first year of the pandemic, it was actually the public ahead of our governments on a lot of COVID mandates saying make it mandatory, make it mandatory. Now why is that? I think a big piece of that is because most of us in the main wanna do right by our neighbors and fellow citizens. But it irks us all, understandably, that we would do the right thing only to have our neighbors undo our good work.And that's the benefit of a mandate is you don't have to worry about your neighbors. Your neighbors are gonna have to do it too. 

Mhmm. Yeah. This is so fascinating. And I'm I'm just thinking about our current political leaders, you know, from the federal Liberals to the conservatives to the new Democrats and even to our provincial governments. Is anyone coming close to meeting this marker in in an adequate way? Well, federally and provincially, no, with maybe some exceptions. One of the things when it comes to buildings, one of the examples I like to point to is the fact that in PEI, under a conservative government no less, if your household income is, under a hundred thousand, they just give you a heat pump. You know, let's not make this complicated.

We do have federal and provincial mandates on climate. In particular, we have building mandates that in, you know, here in BC, for example, new buildings are supposed to be, zero emission by 2030. We have vehicle mandates nationally and in some provinces around new vehicles having to be, net zero or, excuse me, zero emission, but it's 2035. So those are mandates, but the dates communicate the opposite of emergency, and they're not politically real because they don't kick in under the mandate of the people making the decisions. They kick the can down the road.

But you're asking, is there anybody who's there? I mean, I'm gonna I'll tell you a story that I'm quite biased in telling. My wife's a politician. She's now a provincial politician, but for six years, she was a municipal councilor here in Vancouver where where we live. And she was the councilor who brought in six years ago, the climate emergency motion in Vancouver, and that resulted in the fact that, as I say, it's been quite a few years now that new buildings in Vancouver are not allowed to use fossil fuels for space and water heating.

That's emergency. And, and I remember when she was working on that policy and and when news of that policy was shared with FortisBC, the big you know, the gas retail company here in our province, and and, you know, they got all, excited and set their hair on fire about it. And and that for her was was proof that that this was a genuine emergency policy. Mhmm. And, again, this is tied to marker four, which is one that I, you know, I work in communications, so I resonate very deeply with this one. And I also, get very angry when I see the politicians and fossil fuel corporations not telling the truth. So marker four is tell the truth about the severity of the crisis and communicate a sense of urgency. Correct. 

So, Seth, what is the his again, let's let's take it back to World War two. What are the lessons? What are the lessons? 

Yeah. Tell the truth and rally the public at every turn. And, you know, it's funny. When I was writing my book and I was I would tell friends about the World War two model I was using, and they would often people would say to me, oh, yeah. But back then, everybody understood the emergency. They understood the threat to be a clear and present danger. No. They didn't. You know, if you were in Europe or Asia, the the threat was a clear and present danger.

If you were in Canada, it was on the other side of one of two oceans. It took leadership to mobilize the public in Canada in World War 2. And what became clear in my study of that is in frequency and in tone, in words and in actions, emergencies need to look and sound and feel like emergencies. You know, if you were attending a faith institution in the second World War, if you were attending a post secondary institution in the second World War, everything about that daily experience told you you were doing so at a time of emergency. And, interestingly, you know, you know, you you work in in in climate communications, and you'll you know that there's this perennial debate about, you know, do we do should we be scaring people or offering them hope?

You know, what motivates people? And it's it's always been my feeling that that's a false debate, that we need both. And the leaders that we best remember from the second World War were these outstanding communicators who walked this careful line where they were simultaneously forthright about the severity of the threat and yet still managed to impart hope. That's the magic. That's what we're going for.

And their messages were amplified by a news media that knew what side of history they wanted to be on and by an arts and entertainment sector that was keen to rally the public. And, again, I think we we witnessed something of that in the first year of the pandemic where, you know, we saw the prime minister giving briefings in front of his house every morning. The messages were ubiquitous. We got daily press briefings. We heard regularly from public health officials.

The media took seriously its duty to provide us with necessary information on a daily basis. None of that consistency and coherence, however, is present with respect to the climate emergency. And when our governments don't act as if the situation is an emergency or worse, when they send contradictory messages by simultaneously approving new fossil fuel infrastructure like pipelines or LNG, they're effectively communicating to the public that it's not an emergency. Yeah. Exactly.

And I think, you know, the flip side to tell the truth is don't tell lies. And fossil fuel corporations have known about the devastating impacts of their actions for decades, even before governments did, I think, in some cases. And and they've spent billions to see doubt and confusion. And last year, the UN secretary general, he condemned the oil and gas companies as the godfathers of climate chaos for spreading disinformation. And he also called for a worldwide ban on fossil fuel advertising, and I think that fits really well in with this marker.

Yeah. Well, your example of, UN secretary general Antonio Guterres is exactly right. Here is a a leader who leads like an emergency leader, who talks about what is necessary, who tells the truth, and who names the corporate interest that we're up against. But when was the last time we heard a federal or provincial elected leader in Canada speak like that? We never have. We never have. 

But to your other the the first part of what you were asking, so this is one one side of this is telling the truth. And by the way, one of the other campaigns we're involved in is a campaign directed to the CBC itself, our public broadcaster, to tell the truth on a daily basis in a climate emergency report and and to to fulfill a function like they did in COVID and like they did in the second World War, but they're not doing it yet on climate. And as our public broadcaster, they should. But then the flip side is we need to stop the lies and stop the disinformation.

And so another campaign that we've been involved in, but which is led by CAPE, the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment, is this campaign to to ban fossil fuel advertising. And it's been spearheaded by MP Charlie Angus who who has put a private member's bill, forward, because when we continue to allow this ubiquitous advertising from the fossil fuel companies, it's it's a kind of poison in the in the public realm, and it's confusing. Like, what does it mean when people and young people are told on the one hand that this is a serious crisis, and on the other hand, they get bombarded with this advertising? Then they they're left wondering maybe it isn't an emergency, or at the very least, they fail to connect the dots as much of the public does between the burning of fossil fuel, between the burning of fossil fuels and the and the climate crisis itself. Yeah.

And this has, you know, so many impacts on society as well. We we see the trickle down effect of the, the fossil fuel industry's disinformation. We see that come down to a societal level that kind of manifests in these climate counter movement activism things. You know, we see a lot of climate disinformation activism happening, but we are gonna talk about that in a in an upcoming episode. And I feel like I could talk about it for a long time.

So let's let's move on to marker number five, which is leave no one behind. And this is kind of like our the just trend the basis of the just transition. So, Seth, tell us about this marker. Leave no one behind. 

It is so important. You know, as I said off the top, a true mobilization requires social solidarity, and inequality is toxic to social solidarity. You know, there are these climate policy wonks out there who have a tendency to say, you know, don't link the fight on climate to inequality or all these other messy social justice issues. Don't make it any more complicated, it's hard enough as it is, they're wrong. They're wrong, first of all, because these issues are inherently connected. The richer you are, the higher your emissions.

The poorer you are, the more vulnerable you are to climate change. But second, we need to link these things, tackling climate and confronting inequality because that's how we win. A successful mobilization requires that people make common cause across class and race and gender and that the public have confidence that sacrifices are being made by the rich as well as middle and modest income people. You know, just to go further back in history, Aaron, in the first World War, inequality and really rampant and grotesque profiteering undermined social solidarity and consequently, it undermined recruitment. It's partly why we had the conscription crisis in the first World War.

Like, what does it mean on the one hand to ask a bunch of people to voluntarily offer up their lives, maybe pay the ultimate sacrifice while other people are making a killing. And, and so consequently at the at the beginning of the second World War, the King government Mackenzie King government understood that. It was fairly recent history for them, and so they took these bold steps to lessen inequality and limit excess profits, as I mentioned earlier. So they brought in these these new progressive taxes, but also on the spending side, like, even though they were spending like never before on the military side of the war, the war also saw the introduction of Canada's First major income support programs. The family allowance comes in during the war.

Unemployment insurance comes in during the war. This famous Marsh report that really laid the this commission that laid the groundwork for the whole post war welfare system was written and released during the war and offered up to Canadians as this pledge and this promise that the country they would come back to would look different and be more just than the one they were leaving behind. That's when the mobilization happens. That's when the recruitment numbers start, really getting hit. So so the point in in remembering all of this as we face today's threat and the need for mobilization is really twofold.

First, to appreciate how inequality is is really a barrier to cross society mobilization, and second, to understand that effective mobilization isn't just about building more planes or tanks back then or today more wind turbines and solar panels, it requires policies that fulfill that promise that we're gonna better look after one another and guarantee good jobs and income supports for people and that people will be treated with dignity and fairness. Because when you're asking people to share in a great undertaking, that's how you keep everyone on the bus. And a and a key piece of this marker as well is that just transition pledge. You know, Erin, there's about 300,000 Canadians right now who are employed in the fossil fuel industry. Now that's a lot of people, and we need to make a compelling offer to those people and their communities as we engage in this transformation.

But but, again, to be your weird uncle, 300,000 is is a lot of people, but think about this. In the war, from a population about the quarter of what it is today, over a million Canadians enlisted and over a million Canadians were directly employed in military production. They all had to be recruited and trained up. And then after the war, they all had to be reintegrated into a peacetime economy, and we did that with audacious income support programs and housing support programs and post secondary programs that basically doubled the size of the post secondary sector in Canada and transformed the lives of thousands of people. If we could do that then, there's every reason to believe we can do that again today.

In fact, the task today is not as hard. Yeah. That is that's such an inspiring vision for what things could look like now, especially as I see a lot of, politicians moving into, this idea of nationalism as a defense for, you know, the trade war that we've just entered. And and I think a lot of people are thinking about this idea of leave no one behind right now, especially as Canada is weirdly facing threats of annexation from The United States. So, Seth, how can a just transition tie into protecting the jobs and livelihoods of Canadians now?

Well, one piece of it is the the the idea that we were talking about earlier, which is the youth climate corps, something that would say to everyone 35, we have a place for you and nobody will be turned away. And we'll spend two years training you up in work that will be a a good career for much of your adult life, responding to emergencies, making communities and and our ecosystems more resilient to climate change and driving down emissions with renewable energy and building retrofits and transportation. And that matters at a time like this when we're under economic threat from the Trump administration, because very often it's young people who are the the the last hired first fired, who may be experiencing the brunt of that economic insecurity. But then I think we need programs that aren't just for young people. We've also campaigned on this idea of a just transition transfer.

Like, what if the federal government spent roughly 25,000,000,000 a year transferring resources to, provincial and territorial governments and first nations, governments, to fund climate infrastructure and training for people, with good paying unionized, jobs. By the way, you know, we've long said that the just transition transfer should be in the tune of 25,000,000,000 a year. If we imposed an export tax of 15% on our oil and gas exports to The United States, that's about how much money it would raise, and it could fund a big chunk of that. Yeah. Seth, I think that I think that makes a lot of sense, and it kind of is the perfect segue to marker number six, which is Indigenous rights and leadership are essential.

And this is something that we cannot emphasize enough because clearly in the second World War, and honestly all throughout Canadian history, the colonial institutions have majorly failed on this and have deliberately harmed and marginalized Indigenous nations. So talk us through this one, Seth, and how can we learn from the sins of the past on this one? Yeah. Yeah. And indeed the sins of the past.

I mean, I mentioned off the top, my book is all structured on lessons from the second World War, and they're mostly positive lessons. But there are there there there's a part of the book that is really about what are the what are the lessons of the things that we don't wanna do again? The things that brought us shame, the response to refugees, the squashing of civil liberties, the poisoning of Indigenous lands. So, you know, I would say the the government in World War 2 hit the first five of the markers, for the most part, but certainly not this one. And in this emergency, we need to hit it.

And there's a whole bunch of reasons why we need to hit it. First of all, because it's already under Indigenous leadership, that we're seeing more action. About 20% of the major renewable energy projects in the country are under indigenous leadership, far in excess of their share of the population. But I actually think it's more than that, and let me, let me illustrate my point with another World War 2 story. I wanna tell you the story about a a World War 2 vet.

So one morning as I was writing my book in 02/2019, a news item came across the radio about the death of a fellow named Louis Levi Oaks, the last of the Mohawk code talkers from the community of Akwesasne. Just, interestingly, people might remember from their high school history class, but at the beginning of World War 2, it was really important to the Canadian government that they would independently declare war separately from separate from Britain. But interestingly, the Iroquois Confederacy, what today we call the Haudenosaunee which includes the Mohawk, also independently declared war on Germany which resulted in many Mohawk men enlisting. Oakes died at the age of 94. The code talkers were these indigenous soldiers who were tasked with using their own languages to communicate secret military information among allied forces.

And when news reports came out of Oaks' death, his daughter revealed that astonishingly, Oakes hadn't told his own family what he did during the war for seven decades because they'd been sworn to secrecy. And only in his late eighties when stories of the code talkers were made more public did he finally reveal what he had done, and then he gets this congressional silver medal and special honors from the Assembly of First Nations and the Canadian House of Commons. Oakes was one of 17 code talkers from Akwesasne, but there were hundreds of others from Indigenous nations across North America, Because as the war was unfolding, the the secret codes of the allies kept getting, broken by the Nazis and the Japanese, armies until the US Marines discovered that enemy forces were unable to crack Navajo if there was a Navajo guy talking to another Navajo guy. And so they ultimately employed, 33 Indigenous languages at various branches of the allied forces, including a number from Indigenous nations in Canada. But as I learned about this, it struck me that there is in this piece of the wartime history a tragic irony that here are two countries, Canada and The US, that spent generations trying to erase Indigenous languages from the earth, literally beating them out of children in residential schools, only to then discover that these languages were the unbreakable code.

That's what they were dubbed in the war, Credited as having been vital to victory in certain battles. And then if you fast forward to today, I I think you can say the same thing about Indigenous rights and title, which similarly our two countries have spent generations systematically abusing and violating and ignoring. And yet, as our mainstream politics dithers and dodges on meaningful and coherent climate action over and over again, it's been the assertion of Indigenous title and rights that keeps buying us time, slowing and blocking new fossil fuel projects until our larger politics comes into compliance with what the science says we have to do. In fact, a couple of years ago, the Indigenous Environment Network and and, Oil Change International published a report that tried to quantify how many greenhouse how much greenhouse gas emissions remained underground because of Indigenous led efforts to block fossil fuel projects, and they calculated it to be roughly equivalent to about 25% of North American domestic emissions. I mean, wow.

Talk about buying us time. Mhmm. Yeah. Well, I didn't know that story about the code talker. That's very interesting.

And, yeah, you know, you're reminding me of something, that Indigenous Climate Action says all the time, which is indigenous rights, are the solution to climate change, and it's it's so true. And I did just wanna make a final point on this, which, again, comes back to the tell the truth marker, which, you know, is that colonialism has never ended, and we're still seeing fossil fuel expansion on Indigenous land without their consent. We see we see it with the Wet'suwet'en land defenders. We see Grassy Narrows still dealing with the impact of decades of environmental racism. And so, yeah, we need to tell the truth about this, and we need to center Indigenous knowledge and leadership in this fight.

Yeah. Absolutely. And and act in solidarity when those land defenders are engaged in the fights that they're engaged in. Yeah. Absolutely.

And criminalized. And so I wanted to bring something up that's not actually in your markers, but it is in your book. And, you know, it's the idea that Canada is not an island. And while our domestic greenhouse gas emissions may be, you know, technically small at a global level, we are a major exporter of fossil fuels and a huge consumer per capita. Climate change knows no borders.

And as one of the world's wealthiest countries, we have a responsibility to help other countries that have been exploited by Western nations like Canada and have also been the hardest hit by the climate crisis and also the least responsible for it. So you wrote, this is not a matter of charity, but of necessity and justice. And our colleague at the Climate Emergency Unit, Angelia Padrai, is actually leading a file on this to get Canada to pay its fair share globally. Seth, can you tell us about Canada's role, on the world stage in terms of climate? Yeah.

Well, this is another area where we have yet to truly act in emergency mode. And, again, the World War two example is telling I mean, this fight today, like that fight, these are global fights that are won with allies. We don't win any of these things alone. We have a particular responsibility to get our own government to, get its house in order and to act on our behalf, and we have to do that knowing that millions of other people of goodwill are doing the same in their countries with their governments. But we also have to support them in those efforts as one of the historic large emitters as Canada is and as a major exporter, as you said.

Like, right now, our fossil fuel, the the greenhouse gas emissions embedded in the oil and gas we export are greater than our domestic emissions. So we're we're peddlers of this deadly substance, and we're also a wealthy country, which means we have to help, poor countries meet this moment, make pay for this transition, really in the same way that we need just transition domestically, we also need just transition internationally, and we have a special duty to increase those financial transfers, to get that job done. And ironically and, you know, people are always wringing their hands and saying, oh, do we really have the money? Well, again, when when the world had to be reconstructed after World War two, even though we had just spent an extraordinary amount of money, suffered incredible losses, had a debt to GDP ratio of over a 100%, much more than it is today, Canada still spent the the the years right after World War two, spending a lot of money on that reconstruction, understanding that that was that was part of getting that job done. And we're gonna have to do that again today, and we should pay for it in at a global level also with with with wealth and and, taxes like international like, taxes on international financial transactions and global wealth taxes, to get to to to spend what it takes to win.

Yeah. I can't wait to dive more into this, with our colleague Anjali in a future episode. So, Seth, we have covered so much today. I wanna ask you, is the climate movement actually in emergency mode? In the summer, you wrote a piece in the National Observer that argued that the climate movement is not in emergency mode.

Can you offer us a few words that might be able to kick us into gear of on this one? Yeah. I think that's true, Aaron. I I think, you know, just as we criticize our governments for not being in emergency mode, I think, as a movement, we also have to admit that we're in our own form of denial. And, we are also stuck in incremental mode and a and a and a kind of rinse and repeat cycle that's just not working.

Yeah. I think I I I definitely can see the time for civil disobedience coming up if our government cannot get out of incremental mode? You know, at what stage does that need to come? But, again, future episodes to come on this. Yeah.

I do think we actually need we I'm looking forward to that discussion. Figuring out the role of peaceful civil disobedience is certainly a part of it. You know, when I was writing my book, I I I interviewed politicians, federal and provincial, who, I were were people who I thought understand climate and yet whose governments were engaged in in incremental solutions. And they they often all they they all said to me something very similar, which is, oh, well, you have to meet the public where they're at and bring them along. And if you go too fast, then, you risk a right wing backlash.

And so as a movement, we accepted that, and we let them go slow. And now we have the worst of all worlds, which is, milquetoast climate policies and still the populist right wing backlash. So we need a different approach. Yeah. I a 100% agree.

Okay. Seth, we covered so much today, and and it was a lot, and I'm sure people might kind of forget some of it. So can you end us off with some advice on how people can remember the six markers in case they forget? Well, as you said, you'll put the link to the six markers in the show notes, but sometimes I like to give people a little trick that if they're gonna if they forget the markers, a little heuristic, if you will. So if you really wanna know if if a policy a climate policy is a climate emergency policy, here's my trick.

Look at the reaction of the fossil fuel companies. If reps from the fossil fuel companies are on the stage with the government saying they can get behind this plan, you do not have a climate emergency plan. If, on the other hand, you can see some panic in their eyes, then maybe you're on to something. Yeah. Seth, I like that trick.

And are you optimistic that we can actually do this? It's a really hard question. For me, I think it's only a matter of time when our governments are actually in emergency mode and hitting these markers. What we don't know is whether it will come in time, and, you know, how much loss we will experience before we actually are collectively in emergency mode. And I find it a struggle to answer that question of how you know, whether I'm optimistic about that.

You know, I I tend to fall back on this quote from, this great climate scientist named Kate Marvell, and she says, in the face of the climate emergency, we don't need optimists. We need heroes, which she defines as people who are prepared to do what needs to be done without the assurance of whether or not we'll be successful. And that too, for me, has resonance from the World War 2 story. Right? I said before, a million Canadians enlisted, all those young people, and I like to remind people that, what they didn't know, and that is they didn't know if they would win.

You know, we know with the benefit of history in the rearview mirror how their story ended, but they didn't. And they mobilized anyway. And in the process, they surprised themselves by what they were capable of achieving and the speed and scale of it. And I think that's gonna have to be the spirit, that we go with today. Thank you, Seth.

I think that's a great point to leave to leave, this conversation at. So thank you so much for this conversation, Seth. And for our listeners, if you like what you heard, please subscribe and like and share this podcast with a friend. Until next time, see you guys later.