Below the Radar Transcript
Episode 241: The Politics of Climate Emergency Mobilization — with Seth Klein
Speakers: Samantha Walters, Am Johal, Seth Klein
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Samantha Walters 0:06
Hello listeners! I’m Sam with Below the Radar, a knowledge democracy podcast. Below the Radar is recorded on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. On this episode of Below the Radar, our host Am Johal is joined by Seth Klein, Team Lead and Director of Strategy of the Climate Emergency Unit, a 5-year project of the David Suzuki Institute that Seth launched in early 2021. Am and Seth discuss how he and his team are working to mobilize Canada for the climate emergency, including their latest project evaluating how the CBC reports on climate. Enjoy the episode!
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Am Johal 0:47
Hello, welcome to Below the Radar. delighted that you could join us again this week, we have a special guest who's joined us for the second time on the podcast. Wonderful to have Seth Klein with us from the Climate Emergency Unit. Welcome, Seth.
Seth Klein 1:00
Hi Am, good to be back.
Am Johal 1:01
Yeah, Seth, maybe we can pick up— Let's start with you introducing yourself a little bit.
Seth Klein 1:06
Sure. My name is Seth Klein. For many years, I was with the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives. Left there about five years ago, wrote this book called The Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency. I'm now team lead with a five year project called the Climate Emergency Unit. So I work with a small team across the country on climate emergency ideas.
Am Johal 1:30
I was just chatting with Sam Walters, who is of course, on our Below the Radar team here that Seth, we've known each other longer than Sam has been alive.
Seth Klein 1:40
Ouch.
Am Johal 1:41
The 90s. When you came out here to set up the BC office of the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives. I was just at a fundraiser the other night at Fraserview Hall. Wonderful, saw you there, as well. Maybe we can begin with you just talking a little bit about where your book came from. And also, you know, series of activities you've been involved with after the book has come out?
Seth Klein 2:02
Sure. Well, like I said, I was 20 years at the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives. When you work at a progressive social justice think tank, you forever live in this space between what you think needs to happen, and what our politics seems prepared to entertain, no more so than when it comes to climate. And over the years, we were doing more and more climate work at the CCPA. And the, you know, the problem with following the climate file is the more you follow it, the more panicked you become. And then I decided I wanted to leave and just focus 100% of my time on the climate emergency, and write a book that would try to tackle that gap between what the scientists urgently tell us we have to do, and what our politics seems capable of undertaking. So that's what I did, I took a year to write this book. The book took its own little twist. In the original book outline, I was going to have a single chapter on lessons from the Second World War, because I think most of us have this question in the back of our head, like, can we really retool the whole economy in the space of this narrow window of time that we have. And I thought, you know, I'm gonna dig into the world war two story, because we kind of did, we kind of did retool the whole economy. And I'll see if there's some lessons there. And the more I dug into it, the more parallels I started to see. And it actually started to blow my mind a little bit like, I'd been on the climate file for years, as I said, but it was forcing me to look at it through fresh eyes, through the lens of emergency, it was like, Oh, this is what it looks and sounds and feels like to treat an emergency like a real emergency. And I remember turning to my partner one night, a couple months into the book project and going, you know, I think I have to rewrite the whole outline, I think the whole book's about World War Two. And I think I remember talking to you around that time. And so that's what I did. I wrote this book that's all structured around the Second World War, and lessons from 80 years ago applied to the present emergency. It came out three years ago. And I realized, I had all these ideas now for what genuine climate emergency policies could and should look like. And then that— and then David Suzuki and Tara Cullis gave me this home with the David Suzuki Institute to create this thing, this project called the Climate Emergency Unit, the whole idea of which was to forge coalitions and joint initiatives around these genuine emergency ideas.
Am Johal 4:35
Now, in terms of the lessons of the Second World War, you know, there's one thing is around the mobilization around crises that happened as a result, or the use of the state in particular ways, both in terms of production, mobilization of people, goods, other types of things, but also, it's the aftermath of the war as well, in terms of its reconstruction of redefining a purpose. You had international institutions built up, you know, a lot of the global economic system, World Bank, all these types of things, things that became problematic later on, of course, but in terms of that post—
Seth Klein 5:11
And a little perverted from their original intent.
Am Johal 5:15
Exactly. And so wonder if you can just speak a little bit to some of the sort of larger ideas, both in terms of the mobilization of the state when it comes to crises like a war, but also in their aftermath in terms of their redistributive quality or the kind of policymaking to get beyond the crisis.
Seth Klein 5:32
You know, one of my mentors when writing the book was this guy, Alex Himelfarb, who was briefly— he was clerk of the Privy Council in the last two years of the Chretien government and the Martin years. Most left wing clerk we've ever had. And he said something that always stuck with me, which was that the most insidious legacy of 40 years of neoliberalism isn't the tax cuts, or the spending cuts or the privatization, or the deregulation. It's the sapping of our imagination, and of our faith and our capacity to do great things. This, to me, was what became so attractive about this world war two story. It was kind of exploding my sense of imagination. And, you know, I find when I engage with policymakers today at different levels of government, and I do a fair bit of that in my work now, that's— the thing that I'm most struck by, is the failure of imagination. And so I'm trying to excavate in the book, this 80 year old reminder of what speed and scale looks like, and what it looks like to kind of throw out the rulebook and create these audacious new institutions. You alluded to some that came in after the war, again, you know, very, at a global level, the speed and willingness to create whole new institutions.
Am Johal 6:59
Well, even you know, public health care, pensions, like all of these things didn't exist—
Seth Klein 7:04
That's right.
Am Johal 7:06
The Beveridge Report—
Seth Klein 7:07
Well, okay, so you mention Beveridge. So the Canadian equivalent was the Marsh report, and Marsh had studied with Beveridge. And after the war, he would go on to be, to come to this city and head up the School of Social Work at UBC. But, you're absolutely right. There are key... Transformative things happen in crises. So during World War Two, not only is the government spending like gangbusters on all this military production, but understanding that they had to forge a kind of new sense of social solidarity in order to get the mobilization and recruitment that we needed. Canada's first major income transfer programs came in during the war, unemployment insurance came in the war, the family allowance came in during the war. And this famous Marsh commission report is done during the war and is offered up to Canadians as this pledge. And it lays the whole architecture for the whole post war, social welfare net, including pensions and public pensions, including health care. And it's offered up to Canadians as this pledge, and this promise that the country they will come back to, will look different and be more just than the one they were leaving behind. That's when the magic happens. That's when the mobilization happens. That's when the recruitment really starts to pick up. But it wasn't just on the low end, either. In terms of transfers to lower income people. You also saw, you know, increases in taxes for the wealthy and for corporations. You saw the introduction of an excess profits tax during the war. Remarkable in how it was structured, what today we would call a windfall profits tax, although it was more ambitious. The way they went about it in the war, was they went to every industry before the war, they looked at their profits in the four years before the war, still Depression years, and averaged it out. And then they said to every company across the country, this is your annual limit until the war is over. That's what it means to be in a fight together. Meaning that once your profits hit that level, your top marginal tax rate was 100%. You know, even in business, people were prepared to go along with that, because that's what it meant and felt like to be in the grand undertaking together.
Am Johal 9:35
Yeah. And of course, then the expansion of social and affordable housing as well, to this metaphor of the Second World War, I think the thing that ties—
Seth Klein 9:43
What became the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation was born in the war. And during the war itself, the federal government created 28 Crown corporations, in order to expedite this ramp up of military production. So this is what I mean about excavating this sense of possibility. And this reminder of oh, this is what ambition and speed and scale looks like, when we're serious.
Am Johal 10:09
And as you said, the expansion of neoliberalism. We have a sense of amnesia of what the possibilities of the role of the state and its mobilization and sometimes, the war metaphor can throw people off a bit, but I get your point around that there is a point where the state can be mobilized as a collective aspect to intervene in a crisis. And this oftentimes in a neoliberal moment certainly wasn't what was thought of in the imagination of people.
Seth Klein 10:37
Or at the time. Often, you know, people would hear, when I was working on the book, friends, including you, you know, people would say, you know, it was a different time and people kind of got it then and had a sense of what the state could do. Mostly that's not true. Like I'm convinced that if you had said to Canadians in 1938, this gang in Mackenzie King's cabinet, do they have what it takes to completely transform Canadian society and the economy as was about to happen? I'm quite certain most of them would have said, no, not this gang. And they had no reason to believe otherwise, because the same gang had done mostly nothing for 10 years in the Depression through all that hardship. But this is the point that when you actually see an emergency as an emergency, and we all got a bit of a taste of this in the first year of the COVID pandemic. Things become possible that didn't seem possible.
Am Johal 11:36
Yeah, certainly, the pandemic definitely brought the state back into play as this. It's an efficient way to bring about things like vaccines and other places. And so when we think about the climate crisis then, and of course, you know, we're seeing parts per million hit 424. And otherwise, all of these limit points of 1.5 degrees all the way to 4 or 5 degrees by the end of the century, depending on which scenario one follows. You know, the science was started in the 50s, Charles David Keeling's Keeling curve was being measured in the 50s. By the 70s, there was basically at least a scientific consensus. It's the political mobilization aspect. Now, I've interviewed Charles David Keeling's son, who— he holds the Mauna Loa record at Scripps Institute. And so he measures the impact of oxygen on the expansion of carbon dioxide. And, you know, he brings up the Manhattan Project, he brings up the post Second World War context as well. So there's an alignment in many ways, and he's very much a scientist rather than a political person, per se. But I'm wondering how you sort of, when you think about the climate crisis today, what are the kinds of things that the state can be intervening or at least mobilizing the public around, the stakes of the urgency that we have at particularly in this moment where what we do today won't have impact until a few decades afterwards? One of the things when I interviewed Ralph Keeling was that, you know, his view of it, because he had been in— it's the family business, you know, following this record. And what he said to me was, it's almost as if things need to get worse before they get better, because this notion of the emergency happens at different scales, it's with us, but the sense of, you know, there's what happened in Hawaii, what happens in the wildfires here, it goes away. And it's sort of happening in an asymmetrical fashion.
Seth Klein 13:32
There's things about the way climate operates that makes this challenging, you know, it moves in slow motion. Extreme events don't happen everywhere at the same time. And it's different from past crises in other complicating ways as well. Like, for example, I cut my teeth politically as a teenager in the 1980s in the peace and disarmament movement, kind of pre the end of the Cold War. Now, that was also an existential threat. But it operated differently, right? It either would or wouldn't happen. Climate doesn't work like that. Climate, as the saying goes, is a matter of degrees. It is already happening. And to your point, even if we do everything absolutely right starting tomorrow, it will probably get worse before it gets better. And yet, you have to do this work with this sense that every incremental fraction of a degree matters, some of its locked in. And we are under even the best case scenario, going to experience tragic losses before we turn this thing around. And yet, to not do everything in our power to prevent the next incremental increase is a kind of first world conceit and obscene. That's the challenging time in which we reside. But you are asking, you know, what does it actually look like to approach climate in this emergency fashion? So first of all, let's name what's not working about our current approach. My beef with the federal government's approach, provincial government approaches, is that if you look at our climate policies to date, and I will say that I think we're going to start to see, having kind of merely flatlined our emissions at an historic high for about 20 years, I think we're going to start to see a bending of the curve in a good direction, but not at the pitch and pace that science and justice demands. And why is that? I think it's because when you look at federal and provincial policies to date, they're all voluntary. What we're effectively trying to incentivize our way to victory. You know, we send price signals when we have carbon pricing, rebates, tax credits, different enticements and encouragement. This is no way to prosecute the fight of our lives.
So instead, the framework that my team and I employ with the climate emergency unit, and it's derived from the lessons of the book, is a framework we call the six markers of emergency. How do you know when the leadership of a government or really any large institution is actually in emergency mode? Well, you know, when it hits the six markers, which are, you spend what it takes to win, you create audacious new institutions, particularly economic institutions to get the job done. Marker three is you move from voluntary and incentive based policies to mandatory measures. Number four is you tell the truth about the severity of the crisis. Number five is you commit to leave no one behind, understanding as we were talking about previously, that mobilization requires social solidarity, and inequality is toxic to social solidarity. And marker six is you centre indigenous leadership rights and title. Those are the six markers of emergency. I'd say the Canadian government hit the first five pretty well in the Second World War. I would say our government in the first year of the pandemic, actually, you know, with some misses, mostly hit all of them. And with respect to the climate emergency, neither the federal government, nor any provincial government of any political stripe in this country, it's not just that they don't hit all the markers. They don't hit any of the markers. So that's the framework where we're measuring, what does it actually look like to spend what it takes to win? What does it look like to create a new generation of public enterprises to mass produce and deploy everything we need to decarbonize our society? What does it mean to set near term dates by which certain things will be required, to tell the truth and to stop pedaling a falsehood that we can be serious about this while still doubling down on the extraction of fossil fuels? What does it mean to have a robust just transition counter offer to people and communities who feel dependent on fossil fuels? And what does it mean to actually honor and respect rights and titles?
Am Johal 17:55
I think one of the aspects of this sort of war metaphor, wartime, is also the levels of using the state or other institutions to mobilize the public behind a policy direction. You know, polling would indicate there's lots of support for climate change, etc. But when it comes down to other factors, the political leadership as it is, tends to be tepid, or it cuts corners or doesn't go as far as we would like it to. But I don't know if enough is being done also to kind of mobilize the public around the urgency.
Seth Klein 18:29
Not nearly enough.
Am Johal 18:30
Yeah. So civil society organizations do that. But in terms of broader mainstream public to get them behind the urgency in the support where, essentially, the politics and the bureaucracies would need to follow. Wondering if you could speak a little bit to that.
Seth Klein 18:44
Yeah, well, you're actually giving me a great segue to talk about two of our campaigns with the unit. So before I launch into the campaigns, let's lay the groundwork, again, to play with that war metaphor. People would often say to me on the premise of my book, oh, everyone understood the threat then to be clear and present. No, they didn't. If you're in Europe or Asia, the threat was clear and present. If you're in Canada, it was on the other side of two oceans. It took work to get the public on board and rallied and ready to mobilize. And that's true again today. When you look at the public opinion polling in Canada, what you see is a very muddied and mixed affair. On the one hand, a majority of Canadians are anxious about climate, they now see it as an emergency, they don't see that emergency as somewhere else, somewhere in the distance, they see it now. They want the government to take bolder action. In the main, that's what we find. However, the basic level of climate literacy is appalling. And that's most reflected in the fact that if you, that only about half of the Canadian public correctly understands that the main source of global warming is the combustion of fossil fuels. And given that, it's easy for industry and government to make mischief and say to people, well, we're doing good stuff on climate, even while they double down on fossil fuel extraction.
So we have a lot of work to do to connect the dots for people about what actually causes climate change. And then to present the solutions, because that's the other piece of it is people don't know what the solutions are, or that they are readily available to us. So what do we need? Well, one of our campaigns is that there should be some sort of climate emergency information agency, well funded at the federal government level. Like we're all getting bombarded with advertising from the LNG industry and from the Pathways Alliance and the, you know, the oil sands companies Where the heck is the federal advertising? Telling us A, how serious this is, what actually causes this, and what the solutions are and what each of us can do to get there? It's completely absent. So we need some sort of an agency, like we had in the war that does that work. And then we have another campaign where we've partnered with your colleagues here at SFU, Community Engaged Research Initiative, on a quieter campaign focused on the CBC itself, on their role as our public broadcaster in a time of emergency. Because they also are not yet meeting the moment. The CBC climate reporting has gotten better. When they report on extreme weather events, they've gotten better at connecting it to climate, but not connecting the next dot, which is what causes climate and burning fossil fuels. But also where the CBC has most of its excellent climate programs is in these sort of standalone shows, The Nature of Things, CBC's What on Earth, Planet Wonder. So we did this research project with your colleagues, where we had volunteers across the country tracking the morning shows, and the main national shows on radio and TV with an instrument to sort of track every time they heard a climate story and what kind of coverage there was. And what emerged is, you know, like I said, they need to do a much better job. And a key recommendation out of that, is that we need to have a daily climate emergency report, not in a standalone show, embedded in our flagship shows, like the National and the world at six. And our morning radio shows. If our morning CBC radio shows across the country can all make time for hourly sports and business reports, then surely, to god, they can have a morning climate emergency report that tells us how the battle for our lives is unfolding at home and abroad.
Am Johal 22:53
I still want to know the Canucks score, Seth.
Seth Klein 22:58
The what?
Am Johal 22:10
I still want to know the Canucks score.
Seth Klein 22:58
I'm not saying get rid of sports reports. Or the business report. But—
Am Johal 23:03
Given that we have a weather report, we should have a climate report.
Seth Klein 23:07
We should. We should. And you know the business report also every hour like, so much of this is symbolic, right? Who's paying close attention? No one's like pulling over in their car and calling their stockbroker or whatever I mean, these reports are communicating to people, what matters, what's important. And that's missing.
Am Johal 23:27
And you also did a few recordings in this booth with a few sort of sample shows as well, which we'll link to in the show notes when this comes out.
Seth Klein 23:37
That's right, we thought we would model for the CBC, if you had a morning climate emergency report, what might it sound like? And so we teamed up with Ziya Tong and we tried to do them a service.
Am Johal 23:48
Yeah, so the report just got released a couple of weeks ago. And I'm wondering if you can sort of summarize some of your findings. And also, you know, some of your conversations you've had with people at the CBC and otherwise.
Seth Klein 24:01
Yeah, well, so we took a random two week window, late April, early May. And like I said, with 30 volunteers across the country, tracking all of these shows. It's interesting like the window that we chose ended up being when all of these fires started to break out, particularly in Alberta. In fact, the Alberta election was launched in that two week window, and they ended up declaring a provincial state of emergency. And yet, nobody was talking about climate change. So the overall finding was that only just under half of the shows had any climate reporting. But we included in that, extreme weather events. So of those that did have something, the bulk of those were, in fact, extreme weather events, and fewer than half of those connected to climate, but only a tiny fraction, about 9%, made a connection back to fossil fuels. Less than a quarter talked about solutions. A tiny, tiny fraction, 6%, had any kind of sense of what individuals themselves could do. So our findings overall is that the CBC is doing a little better. They're doing some good climate journalism, but it's sporadic and inconsistent and often missing from that daily programming. They need to do a better job of connecting the dots, as I said, and connecting to solutions. But that core finding is that we really need a kind of national climate emergency unit within the CBC itself, well resourced, with a team of people, a team of correspondents who can do that daily reporting across the network. For me, you know, this is a bit— I talk about this in the book around the role of the CBC in the war. Lucky for us, the CBC was actually created three years before World War Two. And it was then only a radio service. And it played a very instrumental role in rallying the public. Every night, people would listen to— they actually listen to Lorne Greene. Does that name mean anything to you? So if you're, I mean, you're younger than me, if you're my parent's generation, Lorne Greene was Pa Cartwright on Bonanza.
Am Johal 26:15
Yeah, yeah, totally.
Seth Klein 26:16
But if you're a child of his 70s like me, he was the original Commander Adama in the first very cheesy Battlestar Galactica. Right.
Am Johal 26:24
I saw the reruns of the other one, so.
Seth Klein 26:27
Yeah. Oh, so good. Before he went to Hollywood, Lorne Greene was the CBC's first news reader through the war. Canadians affectionately referred to him as the voice of doom. He had this fantastic deep voice, right? And they played a key role. So that's what kind of leads me to say, okay, CBC. What's your job today? You're asking what, how it's been received? Our report is being circulated in the CBC, well circulated, we keep hearing from people inside that it's being shared, it's being referenced in meetings, the editor in chief of CBC News and I have had a bit of a correspondence about it, but they're pretty guarded. And we're in an odd moment, where, you know, the Federal conservative leader is leading chants of ‘defund the CBC’ across the country. And the CBC tends to get into this, you know, batten down the hatches mode, like, because they're so afraid, they become extra paranoid, I think, that the perception that they're somehow biased. And so if anything, they pull back, I think, in terms of this aggressive reporting. And that's not what we need right now. I think the public wants to see the CBC do this job, they think they would be more inclined to rally to the CBC's defense, if the CBC meets this moment. And, you know, people often say to me, you know, again, back to the war reference, oh, do I want the CBC to be this propagandistic outfit like they were in the war? No, we want our news to be factual and science based, but also, in the context of a civilizational threat, we want them to pick a goddamn side. And they did in the war, and Canadians would have been appalled if they'd done otherwise.
Am Johal 28:17
I'm going to speak a little bit to you know, there's the possibilities of how the state or media can intervene in these large existential questions. You know, as you mentioned, the nuclear period was a kind of potential existential threat that had to be dealt with. And this is a different kind of one that moves in its duration in a different type of way. It's a cultural kind of battle, as well, in terms of— but you also have, you know, in the Canadian context, you know, provinces like Alberta, you know, driven by the energy economy, having its own sort of communication secretariat set up to monitor and police—
Seth Klein 29:00
Make mischief.
Am Johal 29:01
Make mischief. And so, the state can also play the other side of that card, particularly in a place like— So we can maybe speak a little bit to kind of like those phenomenon, which are also very recent in terms of, you know, they're trying to, in their their words, combat propaganda against the oil industry.
Seth Klein 29:18
Yeah. So in some cases, as you say, where the state is, effectively a petro-state, they're on the other side of the equation here, trying to block progress, and do the bidding of the fossil fuel industry. And that's challenging. There's no question about it. The very fact of the, and this is one of the things I wrestle with in the book. The very fact of the quagmire of Canadian Confederation complicates matters. Like, if we were a unitary state, like many states in Europe, this would be easier. And instead— but we're not. And we got to work with the hand we're dealt in. You know, the federal government often has a hard time trying to contend with some of these provinces that are challenging, but I also think that can get overplayed, you know, Mackenzie King also had to deal with a lot of ornery premiers, some very big, big and troublesome personalities, Bible Bill Aberhart in Alberta and Mitch Hepburn, these guys hated his guts too. And yet something happens in an emergency. And they all ended up on the same page. I also think— so one of our other campaigns, by the way, in the unit, is this call for a new federal transfer that I would call a climate emergency just transition transfer. It was actually an idea, an idea cooked up with a guy named Gil McGowan, the president of the Alberta Federation of Labor. I was interviewing Gil for the book. And now Gil's an interesting guy. Here he is in Alberta, and yet head of the Federation of Labor, I think you'd be pretty hard pressed to find a Labour leader who gets climate as well as Gil does. But Gil was also making the point that the rest of the country needs to appreciate that places like his province have more heavy lifting to do. This is hard for Alberta and Saskatchewan and Newfoundland. And he was, you know, wondering, do we need to tweak the equalization formula or something like that, to recognize that, and I was like, Oh, you don't want to do that, you know that these programs mostly work the way they're supposed to. What if instead, we imagined an entirely new federal transfer, purpose built for this task. And it would have three key elements, this just transition transfer. First of all, it would be big, like 1% of GDP about $25 billion a year. But it would also be different from other federal transfers, save for health or education, in two important ways. One, instead of divvying the money up by population, we would divvy the money up by greenhouse gas emissions. So Alberta is the source of 38% of Canada's greenhouse gas emissions, that's about, that's like, four times their share of the population. We freeze that in time, and we say, okay, Alberta, you're gonna get 38% of the money. So this becomes challenging. If you're the premier of Alberta, are you supposed to scoff at a program that's sending you seven or $8 billion a year. But the second twist is that we wouldn't send the money to the provincial government, because it's not to be trusted on this matter. Instead, we would have new just transition agencies in every province, jointly governed by the feds, the provinces if the ante in, municipal governments, indigenous governments, to receive that money and deploy it in a way on climate infrastructure that aligns with what those jurisdictions need to lower their greenhouse gas emissions and get off fossil fuels. But that's a way that we could recognize the unique challenges of our Confederation, and yet make it work. So I think it can be done. It's harder. But it is not impossible.
Am Johal 33:04
So Seth, coming out of the book, you mentioned the CBC project, wondering if you can mention a few more projects that you're currently working on that are, you know, sort of an outcome of the book or an outcome of the work in the climate emergency unit?
Seth Klein 33:19
Well, so our unit has been part of initiating different joint campaigns, as I say, here in British Columbia, we were an initiator of what's now the BC climate emergency campaign. So that's a joint effort of about 30 organizations that have been pressing the provincial government to transform its clean BC plan, its climate— official climate plan, into a genuine climate emergency plan. It produced this open letter to the BC government listing 10 actions that would do so. And over 550 organizations have signed that call. We have a similar thing that we were part of in Ontario, Ontario climate emergency campaign. We have the CBC campaign, as I mentioned. We've partnered with the Canadian Association of Physicians for the environment on a campaign that they lead, to ban fossil fuel advertising. That would signal an emergency, right? What does it mean to say to people this is an emergency and still have them ubiquitously have to see fossil fuel company advertising and fossil fuel vehicle advertising? So there's an initiative to ban that. We work on campaigns to ban new buildings from being hooked up to gas. We have this just transition transfer campaign. And then one where we put a lot of our energies is this campaign for Youth Climate Corp. In fact, when I give talks, I find the Youth Climate Corps call in some ways the most emotionally resonant. So just to be your weird uncle again about the war. In the war, Canada was a population of about 11 million people. Over a million of them enlisted, which is itself mind blowing. Of those million plus who enlisted, 64% of them were under the age of 21. They left their farms, they delayed their careers, they deferred their university studies, because they understood the emergency to be in that moment. I give a lot of talks to young people. And I think there are 10s of 1000s of them in Canada, who get the emergency and they are ready to rally in our collective defense again. And they're like, where's my goddamn invitation?
What if we had a program that said to everyone under the age of 35, if you get the emergency, you want to spend two years serving in this moment, getting skilled up and trained up in the skills that we're going to need for the next 20 years to transition our society. We have a place for you. Nobody will be turned away. I think that could be transformative. It would tell you, it tells the truth, right? It signals, okay, we're in emergency mode. It's part of spending what it takes to win. It is a new institution, it centers that principle of leaving no one behind, and done right structured and governed right, it could center indigenous rights and title and leadership. A few weeks ago, there's been a similar call in the States for a civilian climate corps, led by this group The Sunrise Movement in the States. And it landed this fall a big victory, with Biden kind of making a downpayment on the American Climate Corps. And it was bolstered by some polling in the states that showed support that was like through the roof. Even a majority of Republicans were like, sounds great. But no one had polls in Canada. So I decided to commission a poll from Abacus Data. And sure enough, majority support across the country, across political lines, saying this sounds like a really good idea. But the most interesting part of the poll to me, the second question we asked in the poll was only asked to those under 35. And it's, and we asked them, if a program like this existed, would you— how likely would you be to consider enrolling for two years? 65% of them said they would consider it. And they could say like definitely, probably, maybe. On the definitely, I thought, you know, maybe 5% would say definitely? 15% said definitely. Now, Am, there are about 9 million Canadians between the ages of 18 and 35. 15% of them is 1.3 million Canadians. Not saying maybe, saying I get it, sign me up. Like we— sometimes I feel like the government gets so twisted up with these esoteric technical approaches to climate. You know, we talk about carbon pricing and contracts for difference and, and tax credits and output pace pricing systems. God's sake, could we just—we should just sign these people up!
Am Johal 38:02
It's interesting that the policy questions end up you need to have a Master's in Public Policy to understand the intricacies. So it doesn't do a great job of mobilizing people, in as much as it might be an appropriate way to shake down the appropriateness of public policy. It rarely covers off the narrative or the enthusiasm required to capture people's imagination.
Seth Klein 38:26
And I shouldn't say there is— That's right, this could be a path to a real mobilization. And there is an active campaign trying to press the BC government to adopt this and sort of go first, show the rest of the country. And in our kind of pitch to them is in the same way that Medicare is Saskatchewan's gift to Canada and $10 day childcare is Quebec's gift to Canada. Maybe the youth climate corps could be British Columbia's gift to Canada.
Am Johal 38:52
Any other projects you wanted to share?
Seth Klein 38:54
I mean, those, that gives you a flavor of the kinds of emergency campaigns we're part of, I guess, the one thing we haven't talked so much about is the need for these new Crown enterprises. I'll give you one good example out of our province, take heat pumps, for example. We urgently need everyone to, you know, get a heat pump. But how are we trying to do it? We do it through incentives, we do it through these rebates, but they still cost a lot. It's still complicated. You got to get multiple bids from multiple private providers. And something else is happening, which is in this private market of heat pump installation, there's profiteering and gouging going on, that's escalating the price. We need a new Crown Corporation or maybe just a subsidiary of BC Hydro, that is mass producing and installing these things. Bring, get the economies of scale, bring the price down, take the profit motive out, have an army of installers, like I converted my house three and a half years ago, it was expensive. It was complicated. You know, it's kind of like taking a car to the garage, right? You're trying to figure out who's trying to bill me less than than the other guy. Enough! You know, in Prince Edward Island, we recently saw this whole carving out of carbon price for Atlantic Canadians or people who heat their homes with with oil. Why do we make this so complicated? In Prince Edward Island under a conservative provincial government, if your household income is under $75,000, they just give you a heat pump. Let's just do that.
Am Johal 40:41
Yeah, there's so many different interventions we can make and certainly getting the power of provincial or federal government behind it would certainly accelerate the pace at which we can reduce CO2 emissions. Yeah. Wondering if there's anything you'd like to add, Seth?
Seth Klein 40:57
I think we've covered it. I mean, mostly, maybe I should just, we started with the war. So let's end with the war. Okay. We live in an ambiguous time. I think a lot of people who follow or work on climate, wrestle with despair. Understandably. Like, are we actually going to do this in time? And the truth is, we don't know. Where I take some solace from that story is, you know, the, that those million plus people who enlisted, what they didn't know, when they rallied in the face of fascism 80 years ago, is similarly, if they would win. It's sort of, it's to state the obvious, but it's only in the rearview mirror of history that we know how their story ended. They didn't. And there was a good chunk of the war's early years when the outcome was far from certain. And they did it anyway. And in the process, they surprised themselves by the speed and scale of what they were able to accomplish. And that's going to have to be enough for us now to do what we have to do.
Am Johal 42:02
Seth, are there any future writing projects you're going to be taking on?
Seth Klein 42:06
I don't have another book in me at the moment. I should mention I do write a regular column in Canada's National Observer, which I try to use to seed what genuine emergency approach and genuine emergency ideas would look like.
Am Johal 42:20
Seth, thank you so much for joining us on Below the Radar.
Seth Klein 42:23
Thanks Am.
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Samantha Walters 42:26
Below the Radar is a knowledge democracy podcast created by SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Thanks for listening to our conversation with Seth Klein. Head to the show notes to find out more about the variety of campaigns the Climate Emergency Unit runs. If you would like to support our podcast, you can donate at the link in the description below. Your generous donation will help support the podcast's activities and associated public events with SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Thanks again for listening, and we’ll catch you next time on Below the Radar.
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