The moderators of Wednesday night’s Democratic presidential debate devoted seven minutes to the subject of global warming. But nothing the candidates said during those seven minutes advanced the conversation as much as the first twelve words Senator Kamala Harris said about climate change during Thursday night’s debate.
Asked to explain what she would do about climate change, Harris first took a step back. “I don’t even call it climate change,” she said. “It’s a climate crisis.”
HARRIS: 'It's a climate crisis. It represents an existential threat to us as a species.' Sen. Kamala Harris speaks about the Green New Deal, the Paris Climate Accord, and climate change #DemDebate pic.twitter.com/XKKZrk4UVy
— NowThis (@nowthisnews) June 28, 2019
The idea that we should replace the term “climate change” with “climate crisis” has been bubbling up in environmentalist circles for a long time, but it started gaining mainstream attention last month, when The Guardian announced that it was changing its official style guide to recommend terms like “climate emergency, crisis or breakdown” over simply “climate change.” The reasoning, according to Guardian editor-in-chief Katharine Viner, was simple accuracy. “Huge-scale and immediate action is needed to slash emissions, but they are still going up—that’s an emergency or crisis,” she said. “Extreme weather is increasing and climate patterns established for millennia are changing—hence breakdown.”
Since then, more media outlets have started changing their terminology. As Grist reported last week, that includes Spanish news agency EFE and Noticias Telemundo, the top U.S.-based Spanish-language news provider. Their reasoning was similar, Telemundo’s executive vice president of network news Luis Fernández said:
“The scientific community and linguistics experts agree that the world is facing a climate emergency.”
By pushing that conversation further into the mainstream on Thursday night, Harris did the planet, and its inhabitants, a much-needed favor.