Another step backwards for climate

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/04/2025 (341 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It should have been a warning sign to see quite so many hard hats in the White House Rose Garden for U.S. President Donald Trump’ s recent “Liberation Day” party. Within a day, stocks had lost more than a trillion dollars and there was widespread talk of a global recession. Hard hats were clearly no defence.

On the next day, Trump decamped to Florida to play golf and the world was left scrambling to figure out how and why the U.S. president seemed to be reshaping long-standing trading systems. Was he trying to embrace the isolation that had been favoured by European fascist regimes in the 1930s? Was he echoing the free-trade debate that had gripped Canada’s 1988 federal election?

One thing was certain. Trump had no concerns that trade wars might overshadow climate change.

It was evidently irrelevant to him that there was another global issue that threatened to reshape the Earth. On his first day in office in his first term, he signed an executive order to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord. In this term, he gave free reign to Elon Musk to use the Department of Government Efficiency to dismiss scientists across departments and essentially to dismantle the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, the agency that could foretell critical weather and climate patterns. On the day of his tariff announcements, his only reference to oil and gas production was that the future would be built on “Drill, Baby. Drill.”

Trump was stepping all over environmental concerns that had defined the United States since the spring of 1970. Earth Day, April 22, 1970, was born as a reaction to Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking book Silent Spring and a disastrous oil spill just off of Santa Barbara, Calif. The first Earth Day saw 20 million Americans take to the streets in protest. By 1990, Earth Day had become a global phenomenon involving 200 million people in 141 countries.

This year in Manitoba, Seniors for Climate is taking the lead in organizing Earth Day actions and festivities. The group was born just last fall as a reaction to the gen Z’s complaints that baby boomers had created the problems of a warming climate and then dropped the ball.

So Seniors for Climate invited about a dozen environmental and climate groups to join in the planning of Earth Day at the Manitoba Legislative Building, April 22, 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. The merger of the two generations has brought both youthful vigour and elder experience to the planning. With luck, there will be fun activities and significant speeches to celebrate the Earth and to attract enough people to make it clear to governments that the health of the Earth is still a key concern, even in a world with economic woes caused by Trump tariffs.

The Manitoba government is typical of how administrations are trying to balance two competing challenges. It has already put $1.5 million to provincial manufacturers and exporters and another $1.5 million to agricultural producers to offset huge tariffs from both the U.S. and China.

Manitoba also has a Climate and Green Plan that calls for greenhouse gas emission reductions of 5.6 megatonnes by 2027. Critics say this is laudable, but unlike other provinces, Manitoba has not set long-range goals. They say the province’s small steps like the addition of 51 EV charging stations or free access to provincial parks hardly make up for Manitoba’s lack of vision.

On the evening of April 8, Trump turned everything upside down when he went on social media to ask people to “be cool.” The next day he surprisingly put a 90-day hiatus on most tariffs, except for China.

Canada is deeply embroiled in the upcoming election. Almost every conversation in the campaign has included the word “tariff.” There is even talk from both major parties about building new pipelines.

But climate concerns have not disappeared. This week, mayors of 50 towns and cities across the country wrote an open letter urging federal candidates to remember climate change has caused millions of dollars of damage in the form of fires or floods.

Election day is now less than two weeks away. That’s when Canadians will have to decide if they want to focus exclusively on the economy, or remember that climate change is the ultimate challenge for us all.

Ingeborg Boyens is a former journalist, writer and editor. She is now a member of Seniors for Climate, MB.