When Voting for Climate Means Voting for the Economy

Right now, everyone seems to have elections on their minds. BC has just wrapped up an unusual provincial election, the U.S. presidential election ends in just under a week, and Canada’s next federal election is a year away at the absolute most. 

One thing that these elections all have in common is that any meaningful discussion of climate change is being pushed aside in favor of other issues, most often the economy and cost of living crisis. In BC, the conservatives made it clear that they would expand BC natural gas production. The NDP appeared to be more climate friendly, but in 2023 the party greenlit two major LNG projects which use fracked gas from the Coastal GasLink pipeline. 

In the U.S., the sole televised debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump treated climate change as an afterthought – there was only one question focused on it, and that came right at the end of the debate. Harris, the more climate-friendly of the two candidates, openly touted the Biden administration’s increases in natural gas production. As I write this newsletter, massive hurricanes have just buffeted the U.S. coast, but few elected leaders – or those up for election – seem interested in addressing the root cause.

Looking at polling for these different elections, the economy, cost of living, and housing prices always appear at the top of voters’ concerns. It’s understandable why this is the case – for millions in Canada, it’s becoming harder and harder to make ends meet. This spring, 45 per cent of Canadians reported that rising prices were ‘greatly affecting’ their ability to meet day-to-day expenses. For many who are struggling, caring about the impacts of climate change – which some feel could be years, or decades from now – feels impossible when their quality of life and ability to pay for basic necessities is being threatened now. 

But this is the crux of the issue – climate change isn’t a distant problem. Rising temperatures are already affecting us today, and they’re exacerbating the cost-of-living issues that have eclipsed climate change in political dialogues.

Take the cost of groceries – in early 2024, the term ‘heatflation’ joined other new inflation-related portmanteaus like shrinkflation, and it describes how rising temperatures are increasing the cost of household staples, such as oil, rice, and chocolate. All these crops have either proven vulnerable to increased heat, or the resulting extreme weather, and when yields struggle, prices go up. Coffee, a daily staple for more than 20 million Canadians, is threatened by droughts in Brazil and Vietnam, and coffee prices have subsequently risen 23 per cent between July 2020 and July 2024. 

This is of course just the beginning – 2024 research by the journal Nature estimates that by 2035, food prices may be rising by as much as three percentage points per year due to climate change alone. With as many as two million Canadians already visiting food banks some months in 2024, how many of us can withstand those steady price increases? 

While the impact of higher grocery prices will be catastrophic for many families, none of us will be left unscathed by worsening extreme weather. Just this month, we’ve seen two major hurricanes cause widespread destruction in the U.S., one a category 4 and the other briefly a rare category 5 hurricane – the former of which caused 228 fatalities and roughly $87 billion in damages. 

Closer to home, unprecedented rainstorms that hit Montreal and Toronto this summer caused insurance claims of roughly $3.5 billion, and insurance losses from the wildfire that destroyed roughly a third of Jasper this summer have now passed $1 billion. These bigger and more frequent extreme weather events are costing us. In Canada, home and mortgage insurance grew by an average of 33 per cent between April 2018, and April 2023. In some cases, it’s becoming harder to have your home insured to begin with. About 10 per cent of Canadian homes are now uninsurable for flood risk, and in the U.S. some insurance companies have abandoned entire regions or states. 

One of voters’ top cost of living concerns this year is the rising cost of homes while wages largely stagnate. If purchasing a house already felt unachievable, the problem will only worsen as insurance premiums rise. And then, in a worst-case scenario, people who achieve their dream of owning a home may lose it in a flood or fire with no insurance policy to make up for the damages.

I don’t want to minimize the serious effects of the current cost of living crisis that voters are focused on right now, but elevating those concerns at the expense of climate action is shortsighted. A government under pressure to fix the economy may be able to pull some financial levers to ease the challenges Canadians are facing, but if we don’t curb our emissions, there will be no actions we can take to mitigate a world that has warmed beyond 1.5 or 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels. And it’s hard to fathom what the world would look like if we pass 3 degrees of warming, which the UN now says will be likely if we don’t take broader action soon. Voting for climate in an upcoming election means voting for a healthier economy, not only now, but for decades to come.