David Suzuki on Climate Change

Q: It’s clear you haven’t lost your passion for a lot of the issues that you care about, but do you ever feel like you’re banging your head against the wall? If you look at public opinion data, climate change is often well down the list of priorities for most Canadians.

When you see that, where do you find the motivation to continue speaking to the values you believe are important?

A: I believe an informed public will do the right thing. Public concern in the late 1980s was right at the top and we had the first international conference on the atmosphere in 1988, where there were 300 people, over 40 governments, environmentalists, scientists, private sector people, you name it.

At the end of that conference, they said global warming represented a threat to humanity, second only to global nuclear war. If the world had followed the conclusions from that conference, we would not have the problem we face today and we would have saved trillions of dollars and millions of lives.

Now, it is too late.

I’ve never said this before to the media, but it’s too late. I say that because I go by science and Johan Rockström, the Swedish scientist who heads the Potsdam Institute, has defined nine planetary boundaries. These are constraints on how we live. As long as humans, like any other animal, live within those nine constraints, we can do it forever, and that includes the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, the pH of the oceans, the amount of available fresh water, the nitrogen cycle, etc.

There are nine planetary boundaries and we’ve only dealt with one of them—the ozone layer—and we think we’ve saved ourselves from that threat. But we passed the seventh boundary this year, and we’re in the extreme danger zone. Rockström says we have five years to get out of the danger zone.

If we pass one boundary, we should be shitting our pants. We’ve passed seven!

And, if you look at those boundaries, like the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, we’ve had 28 COP meetings on climate change and we haven’t been able to cap emissions.

We’re on our way to more than a three-degree temperature rise by the end of this century, and scientists agree we shouldn’t rise above one and half degrees.

Q: You say we’re too late to address climate change? That’s a pretty stark quote. Does that mean you’re giving up on the fight?

A: I’m not giving up on the immediate years, but the focus on politics, economics, and law are all destined to fail because they are based around humans. They’re designed to guide humans, but we’ve left out the foundation of our existence, which is nature, clean air, pure water, rich soil, food, and sunlight. That’s the foundation of the way we live and, when we construct legal, economic and political systems, they have to be built around protecting those very things, but they’re not.

Q: You’ve been quoted many times over the last couple decades saying it’s not too late to tackle climate change, so when did you come to this realization that the battle is lost?

A: It’s been coming all along.

We had previously said that the choice with climate change was mitigation and adaptation, and people began saying 20 years ago that we had to talk about adaptation. Other people said we can’t talk about adaptation because that acknowledges that climate change is real and impacting people. Well, we’re way past the time when we should have been thinking about adaptation.

Look, I’m not giving up in the sense of not doing anything, but Trump’s election was the dagger in my heart. Trump’s win was the triumph of capitalism and neoliberalism, and he’s going to wreak havoc. There’s nothing we can do about that, except maybe incremental changes. That’s not what we need. We need revolution. Can you have a peaceful revolution? I don’t know.

But I’m saying, as an environmentalist, we have failed to shift the narrative and we are still caught up in the same legal, economic and political systems.

For me, what we’ve got to do now is hunker down. The units of survival are going to be local communities, so I’m urging local communities to get together. Finland is offering a great example because the Finnish government has sent a letter to all of their citizens warning of future emergencies, whether they’re earthquakes, floods, droughts, or storms. They’re going to come and they’re going to be more urgent and prolonged.

Governments will not be able to respond on the scale or speed that is needed for these emergencies, so Finland is telling their citizens that they’re going to be at the front line of whatever hits and better be sure you’re ready to meet it. Find out who on your block can’t walk because you’re going to have to deal with that. Who has wheelchairs? Who has fire extinguishers? Where is the available water? Do you have batteries or generators? Start assessing the roots of escape. You’re going to have to inventory your community, and that’s really what we have to start doing now.