Boykoff: Time to declare a climate (or energy) emergency?

Twenty-five months ago, the devastating Hawaii firestorm on Maui tore through Lahaina. Shortly thereafter, U.S. President Joe Biden remarked that he had already “practically” declared a climate emergency. 

Seventeen months later — in his first day back in office — President Donald Trump declared a “National Energy Emergency” and invoked the National Emergencies Act. On signing the Executive Order, Trump remarked that it “means you can do whatever you have to do to get out of that problem.” A Trump administration official — who chose to remain anonymous — later elaborated that a “national energy emergency will unlock a variety of different authorities that will enable our nation to quickly build again, to produce coal and natural resources, to create jobs, to create prosperity, and to strengthen our nation’s national security.”

Nowadays, there have been frequent, convergent and strong signals that the unprecedented climate changes that we have been experiencing constitute concern and possibly an “emergency.” 

Advocates for “climate emergency” declarations have argued that such actions can heighten public awareness while addressing issues of dependency on fossil fuels, sustainability, and political and institutional inertia as it relates to our relationships with carbon-based energy generation and consumption.

Advocates for “energy emergency” have sought to unlock funding and political support for continued extraction, distribution and consumption of fossil fuels. These are forceful and multi-layered promotion networks, as oil and gas industry took in $3 billion a day inflation-adjusted profits for the last 50 years, according to the World Bank.

However, there is substantial confusion about what climate (or energy) emergency declarations may mean — symbolically and consequentially — for science, politics and policy, economics, law, human rights and public health sectors, among others. So I am writing a book called “Climate Emergency: Understanding What’s Coming” to help make sense of these developments across the globe, addressing questions such as:

• How may emergency language shape our capacities and abilities to respond to human-caused climate change, at international, national, regional and local levels?

• How do emergency actions — diverging from business-as-usual behaviors — shape and impact intersecting dynamics involving freedom, justice, liberty, dignity and rights of non-human and human communities across the planet?

While emergency declarations have the potential to accelerate climate actions sensitive to environmental justice, there are also grave concerns that potentially unchecked sovereign power could also be wielded through these decisions. Moreover, emergency politics have historically faced risks of eco-authoritarian state surveillance, coercion, military-police repression of dissent and abuses of power through emergency capabilities granted to leaders.

Powers that can be mobilized through these possible actions have only begun to be understood at international, national and subnational scales in the context of climate and environmental action. And while emergency pressures — alongside “climate crisis” calls — continue to mount, there remains bewilderment about what these declarations and decisions could mean in various contexts.

Our understanding of climate change has often been understood through science. Climate change is fundamentally a consequence of energy imbalance. Humans have contributed to disruptions through the burning of fossil fuels and patterns of land use. Carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere — the greenhouse gas that contributes most to climate change — is 50% higher than it was at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Moreover, 2024 was the warmest year in nearly 150 years of recorded history, while the last ten years have been the ten hottest years since record-keeping began. So, has the stage been set to declare an emergency? Is this a climate crisis too?

While climate change is one of the most prominent challenges in these turbulent times, emergency declarations clearly aren’t cure-alls. Yet the ways that climate actions are described and discussed — including emergency language — influence collective action. Chosen ways to approach climate change engagement can reverberate across various conditions and contexts, with uneven power flowing through local, national and international levels.

How, where, when and by whom “emergency” expressions are made matter significantly. These expressions carry symbolic as well as material consequences, at multiple scales across distinct political, social and cultural dimensions around the globe. This book (with Cambridge University Press) interrogates how emergency language may help as well as hinder efforts to effectively address climate change in the 21st century. I’ll share more about this periodically in this column as I move to publication.

This is a biweekly sustainability and environment column authored by Max Boykoff. Boykoff is a faculty member at the University of Colorado Boulder, though these the views expressed here are based upon his scholarly expertise and research/creative experience as well as personal views and should not be considered the university’s official position on any specific issue. Email: mboykoff@gmail.com. 

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