Who says there is a climate emergency?

To be clear: the question is not who says we should be concerned about climate change – which is something there is wide agreement on – but who has been promoting this specific idea, which has been repeated in headlines around the world since early 2019, of declaring a climate emergency.

It is worth asking where this idea comes from for several reasons. One is uncertainty as to the exact meaning being attributed to it by those supporting its promotion. This is a particular concern since the status of an emergency can be used by governments as a justification for exceptional measures, including the abrogating of normal democratic procedures. Even if citizens do not intend to endorse that interpretation, there is still a concern that intensely concentrating attention on climate indicators can serve to deprioritise attention to other important ecological and development issues. Indeed, given that matters of climate policy are complex and merit extensive deliberation – something that can be peremptorily truncated by declaring an emergency – it is a further concern that even raising questions like this is liable to be dismissed as ‘climate denial’.

We are told the idea is backed by science, but ‘emergency’ is not a scientific concept, and the idea of a ‘climate emergency’ is not well-defined. All we know is that in practice it means enforcing a Net Zero carbon emissions policy. This reduces the whole complex problem, of how climate changes and how human societies should respond, to a matter of carbon accounting, which itself admits of such creative manipulation that the measure of ‘Net Zero’ means something very different indeed from actually zero emissions.

This article looks at what we know about how the idea came to international prominence. The purpose is not to dispute the seriousness of climate change as part of our epochal ecological crisis but to uncover the interests that the particular measure of declaring an emergency really serves.

I

The suggestion that the message comes from scientists appears to be evidenced by the World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency 2022 published by William J. Ripple and colleagues along with a further 11,000 signatories. The authors make the point that scientists have a moral obligation to “tell it like it is”. They refer to research of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and specifically the IPCC (2018) report.

However, the IPCC report does not mention the word emergency. This should be no surprise given that it is not a scientific term. Interestingly, none of the IPCC report’s 61 authors appear to be among Ripple’s signatories. (At any rate, I checked the first thirty authors listed on the IPCC report and found none is a signatory to Ripple’s Warning.) Nor do Ripple and colleagues explain exactly what it means for an institution or administration to declare a climate emergency.

So one cannot be sure what all those signatories thought they were committing to. It is entirely possible that their general endorsement of the IPCC’s assessment has been leveraged to imply they have given informed support to a more particular idea than many of them may have carefully considered in any serious detail. In fact, since the idea of ‘climate emergency’ is so ill-defined, it could not have been carefully considered. Not only does the Ripple article offer no clear definition of ‘climate emergency’ it also offers no discussion of the relative importance or urgency of climate change compared to other issues either of ecological protection, on the one hand, or development, on the other.

The language of emergency implies an urgent concentration of attention and resources that would normally be distributed across other problems; it can mean deprioritising other even quite important values. In an emergency, exceptional measures can be deemed necessary and justified. This was illustrated when, a few weeks after declaring a climate emergency, the UK government passed a law committing the country to a net zero emissions policy requiring investment of more than £1 trillion. This ‘had not been part of any political programme or manifesto offered to the public’, writes Philip Hammond (2021). This ‘extraordinary and unprecedented move’, he adds, ‘clearly bypassed the sorts of democratic deliberation and decision-making processes that would normally be expected to precede a government passing legislation with such far-reaching implications.’

II

A question to consider, therefore, given that the idea is not itself of scientific provenance and that scientists signing up to it are at most just endorsing it, is who actually promoted the idea in the first place and on what basis. Had it been groups of scholars, one would expect to find signs of this emerging from the scholarly literature. In fact, the idea of climate emergency did appear in the literature as early as 1994, following the 1992 Rio Summit which established the United Nations Framework on Climate Change (UNFCC); and academic discussion of the topic developed at a very gradual rate over the next quarter of a century, as indicated by Google Scholar returns shown in Figure 1, until 2018. Mentions of the term then show a remarkable leap.

Google Scholar returns by year for the search term “climate emergency”

If the sudden upsurge registered from 2019 onwards had been due to a particular new discovery, then one would expect to find it presented in some seminal paper(s) with immediately noticeable citations published around 2018/19. Yet the Scholar search for mentions of “climate emergency” during that period pulls up on its first page no highly cited pieces, and those it does return happen to be predominantly critical discussions of the idea. The most highly cited paper I could find, although still with just 82 citations as of February 2024, was a decidedly critical piece by Mike Hulme. What therefore remains to be explained is the nearly sevenfold increase in the number of articles mentioning “climate emergency” in 2019.

Given that climate change had been recognized as a challenge already for some decades, something to explain is why the scholarly literature in 2019 has this sudden narrowing of focus. The first World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity (1992) covered a wide range of environmental, and social, challenges, with climate being mentioned as just one aspect of the wider situation. Likewise, in 2009, when Johan Rockström and colleagues published their influential paper ‘A Safe Operating Space for Humanity’, they signalled nine major areas of ecological concern, with climate change being just one amongst these. What, then, has changed in our understanding that now makes climate change feature as a uniquely important ecological challenge, with all the others meriting so much less public concern and, potentially, even being exacerbated by climate-focused measures that neglect their wider ecological impacts? Given that no particular new climatological or ecological insights between 2017 and 2019 can account for this, we have to look elsewhere.

III

In 2019, “climate emergency” was declared word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries. From within academia, Federica Cittadino (2019) noted that the expression, used increasingly in the media – including The Guardian newspaper – ‘has been chosen as a substitute for “climate change” in order to better convey the urgency of global warming.’ What had spurred this?

It had been in August 2018 that the world’s media drew attention to the school student Greta Thunberg and her ‘climate strike’ in Sweden. By 25^th January 2019 Thunberg was addressing the World Economic Forum in Davos declaring that ‘our house is on fire!’. More specifically, she stated:

‘According to the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change], we are less than 12 years away from not being able to undo our mistakes. In that time, unprecedented changes in all aspects of society need to have taken place, including a reduction of our CO₂ emissions by at least 50%.’

One might imagine that the powerful people assembled in Davos could have apprised themselves of the IPCC’s 2018 Summary for Policy Makers without needing to listen to a 16-year-old’s dramatic but contentious take on its headline points. The event had the look of a rather contrived enactment of ‘speaking truth to power’.

So where did this understanding of ‘truth’ about climate change come from? As it happens, Thunberg’s noted ‘house on fire’ speech echoed the opening words of a 2016 strategy document produced by the psychologist Margaret Klein Salamon called Leading the Public into Emergency Mode which advocated a ‘WWII-scale climate mobilization’ (Salamon 2016, 3). Salamon’s argument was that:

‘the climate movement must fully adopt the language of immediate crisis and existential danger. We must talk about climate change as threatening to cause the collapse of civilization, killing billions of people, and millions of species.’ (Salamon 2016, 21)

Salamon was co-founder, in 2014, of an advocacy organisation called The Climate Mobilization (TCM) which aimed to build support for a national mobilization to address the climate emergency, and she is Executive Director of the Climate Emergency Fund (CEF). As a psychologist rather than a natural scientist, her expertise lies not in assessing the material threats that might be posed by climate change but in understanding how perceptions of threat can be produced:

‘The way we respond to threats — by entering emergency mode or by remaining in normal mode — is highly contagious. Imagine the fire alarm goes off in an office building. How seriously should you take it? How do you know if it is a drill or a real fire? Those questions will be predominantly answered by the actions and communications of the people around you, particularly people designated as leaders. If they are chatting and taking their time exiting the building, you will assume that this is a drill. If people are moving with haste, faces stern and focused, communicating with urgency and gravity, you will assume there is real danger and exit as quickly as possible.’ (Salamon 2016, 14)

Thus, in 2016, she crafts the message that Thunberg was later to make famous.

At that time, the deputy director of TCM, Ezra Silk claimed ‘We need to go on to an emergency war footing like right now … The climate is already dangerous, we’re already in an emergency.”’ Later in the year, the national platform committee of the US Democratic Party approved the amendment proposed by TCM activist Russell Greene to lead ‘a global effort to mobilize nations to address this threat on a scale not seen since World War II.’ (Romm 2016) Greene had argued that the US should ‘move first in launching a green industrial revolution, because that is the key to getting others to follow; and because it is in our own national interest to do so.’ (Greene 2016) The one concrete environmental objective mentioned is to ‘draw down carbon sharply on the path to 100% clean, renewable energy and zero net greenhouse gas emissions.’ (Greene 2016)

By the end of 2016, another lobbying organisation called We Don’t Have Time had declared ‘We are going to build a global grassroot community to hold all our leaders responsible.’ When, on 20 August 2018, Thunberg began her school strike, their CEO, the Swedish entrepreneur Ingmar Rentzhog was, as Thunberg recounts, ‘among the first to arrive. He spoke with me and took pictures that he posted on Facebook.’ She adds that she had briefly been a youth adviser to them, but, on discovering ‘they used my name as part of another branch of their organisation that is a start up business’, she severed her connection with them. Indeed, in November 2018, a public offering of shares in their business was launched with a prospectus boasting that they had ‘attracted significant attention from international media’, ‘spread the hashtag #WeDontHaveTime on social media and established contacts with opinion leaders, activists, policymakers and scientists.’ Certainly, the promotion of the Emergency message has had enthusiastic support from sections of the business community that see it as a profitable opportunity – an opportunity supported by UN advocacy of trillion dollar investments in the new sector (AFP 2019).

This makes less mysterious why the powerful gathered in Davos did not mind having truth spoken to them by a young school striker and why the owners of the world’s media had allowed such a decisive projection of Thunberg onto a global stage. For while it is often claimed that big business is aligned with fossil fuel interests in opposing ‘green’ alternatives, the fact is that policies supporting the growth of carbon markets have strong support. As Bryan Walsh puts it,

‘For all the agita over the influence of shadowy conservative philanthropists like the Koch brothers, the cap-and-trade campaign was backed by powerful progressive foundations that donated hundreds of millions to environmental groups between 2008 and 2010—and those philanthropists, like their conservative counterparts, had highly strategic and disciplined aims.’ (Walsh (2011)

A 2011 editorial in Nature magazine notes that ‘environmental groups in favour of cap and trade mobilized $229 million from companies such as General Electric and other supporters to lobby for environmental issues’; and Matthew Nisbet suggests that the promotion of cap-and-trade ‘may have been the best-financed political cause in American history’ (Nisbet 2011; see also Worldwatch 2014, 122)

These developments can be traced back at least as far as the 2007/8 crash. For instance, in 2007, The Rockefeller Brothers Fund announced, with the support of President Clinton, their commitment to the climate campaigning organisation 1Sky (Rockefeller Brothers Fund 2007). Part of its core mission was to call for the ‘transformation of the U.S. energy priorities to create a clean energy future’ (Philanthropy News Digest 2008) In 2011 it was merged into fellow Rockefeller-funded campaign organisation 350.org, founded in 2007 by Bill McKibben, which has led the campaign for divesting from fossil fuels. Max Blumenthal observes:

‘Since the Rockefeller Brothers Fund answered 350.org’s call to divest from fossil fuels in 2014, the foundation’s wealth has increased substantially. As the Washington Post reported, “the Rockefeller Brothers fund’s assets grew at an annual average rate of 7.76 percent over the five-year period that ended Dec. 31, 2019.”’

And as McKibben himself notes,

‘The institutions that divested from fossil fuel really did well financially, because the fossil fuel industry has been the worst performing part of our economy… Even if you didn’t care about destroying the planet, you’d want to get out of it because it just loses money.”’

This sets in salutary perspective the notion that promoting a policy of Net Zero carbon emissions, whose implementation depends on the existence of carbon markets, from which huge profits can be derived, is a matter of ‘speaking truth to power’.

IV

‘Speaking truth to power’, as it happens, is a theme hammered home in the promotional video for an organisation called Covering Climate Now that has played a key role in getting the world’s media to promote the language of climate emergency (Nisbet 2019). Launched in April 2019 by The Nation and the Columbia Journalism Review in association with The Guardian as a non-profit organization, its purpose was to create a ‘new playbook for journalism’ relating to the climate challenge. Its Guide To Making The Climate Conversation urged journalists to link stories about extreme weather events to climate change as a matter of routine practice, because ‘[e]ven in the absence of explicit attribution data, it’s accurate to say that climate change is making extreme weather more common and more severe.’ It provided sample language for making the connection, in line with which The Guardian then issued a memo updating its own official style guide: the term ‘climate change’, said the paper’s editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner, ‘sounds rather passive and gentle when what scientists are talking about is catastrophe for humanity’; instead ‘the preferred terms are “climate emergency, crisis or breakdown”.’ (Carrington 2019)

This linguistic shift – amplified across the news media – appears to have played a crucial role in activating the mobilization that the campaigners had been clamouring for and big investors had been supporting. By April 2020 Salamon could boast on the website of We Mean Business (a coalition representing, according to Cory Morningstar (2019), 477 investors with 34 trillion USD in assets) that the campaigning had ‘led more than 1400 global governments to declare a Climate Emergency’ (We Mean Business, 2020). According to a survey by UNDP and Oxford University published in 2021, 64% of people in 50 countries ‘said that climate change was an emergency’ (UNDP and University of Oxford 2021). According to the Climate Emergency Declaration website, as of February 2024, ‘2,355 jurisdictions in 40 countries have declared a climate emergency. Populations covered by jurisdictions that have declared a climate emergency amount to over 1 billion citizens.’

V

Evidently, then, while there was no significant new scientific discovery during the past twenty years that dramatically shifted human understanding about the causes, costs or benefits of climate change, and no significant public debate was entered into about its relative importance or urgency compared to other issues of development, on the one hand, or ecological protection, on the other, there was a significant shift in business sentiment regarding the sectors in which future investment would be most profitable, and there was a shift in language used to discuss climate concerns that served to generate public support for that new – putatively ‘greener’ – business direction.

The drive to declare a Climate Emergency has been rather successful. I have presented in critical terms the fact that investors in ‘green’ technology who stand to reap substantial profit from it have been playing a key part in achieving that success. But I anticipate the objection that this does not necessarily mean it is a bad idea for the wider public. So, allowing the assumption that it could indeed be the ‘win-win’ situation they claim, a question is how a democratic public would be able to arrive at a considered judgement to this effect.

For the situation today is one in which the possibility of public deliberation about whether it is really a good or bad idea is in practice being quite systematically pre-empted. People who try to raise questions about the simple policy direction imposed are branded as ‘climate change deniers’ – even though, in many cases, they are deeply committed environmentalists with a good understanding of climate change. Indeed, many of the people cited above, because they have presented critical questions or commentary, have been stigmatised as ‘climate deniers’, sometimes with dark insinuations of being sponsored by the fossil fuel industry. This has served as a pretext for disregarding their questions and comments. Such a response is encountered not only in the press and social media but also to some extent within academic discussion. This is a problem for society because it locks us into a policy direction that is not responsive to discovery or debate, and on a basis that is less clear and certain than its proponents would have us believe.

VI

As a postscript, I recognize that, as things stand, there is a good chance the question pursued in this article itself may be classified as climate denial. I nevertheless hope that any genuine error or oversight in it will be pointed out by readers in the comments section below. It is shared as a working paper intended to be part of a chapter in the book I am currently writing on Propaganda and the University. Responses to comments will be incorporated in the book with due acknowledgement.