Ideas - Decades on, David Suzuki sees the same problem: human-first mindset (via Front Burner)

Episode Date: July 23, 2025

After more than four decades of activism and advocacy, David Suzuki is one of the most renowned and respected voices in the environmental movement. So when he says it's too late to stop climate change, people take notice. And that's now exactly what he's saying.He's delivering this message as Prime Minister Mark Carney's government focuses on fast-tracking major projects it deems to be of national interest, which could include a new pipeline for fossil fuels from Alberta. Suzuki says that, despite his understanding of the climate crisis, Carney — like all of us — is trapped by the economic and political systems we've created. And for Suzuki, our only hope for survival is to scrap those systems entirely.In this special episode from our colleagues at Front Burner, David Suzuki joins host Jayme Poisson on the podcast for a wide-ranging discussion from what a world of irreversible climate change looks like to what he describes as the "madness" of continued investment in fossil fuels to the lessons environmentalists of the future can take from the past. More episodes of Front Burner can be found here: https://link.mgln.ai/fb-ideas

You sailed beyond the horizon in search of an island scrubbed from every map You battled crackens and navigated through storms Your spades struck the lid of a long-lost treasure chest While you cooked a lasagna There's more to imagine when you listen. Discover bestselling adventure stories on Audible. This is a CBC Podcast. In this episode of Ideas, David Suzuki in his own words, where he shared some of the

most important lessons he's learned throughout his life. And in this special bonus episode from Frontburner, CBC's flagship daily news podcast, David Suzuki joins host Jamie Poisson for another powerful conversation that digs further into those lessons. It's a wide ranging discussion, from what an unlivable climate change world could look like, to what he calls the madness of continued fossil fuel investment, to the wisdom future environmentalists can take from the past. In the interview, Suzuki doesn't hold back. He argues that Mark Carney's Canada First political vision still puts the planet last. And that's, in his words, moral and economic madness.

After more than four decades of environmental advocacy, when David Suzuki says it's too late to stop climate change, people listen. But to be clear, he still believes the fight should continue. Have a listen. Hi everyone, I'm Jamie Poisson. What bothers me is that in a world that's becoming extremely complex, in which the environment in many ways is being ravished very rapidly,

rather than trying to recover our good environment, our clean air and clean water and so on, we may begin to say, well, let's adapt man to the noxious gases in the air and the dirty water. For a lot of us Canadians, David Suzuki is synonymous with environmentalism. He's been a vocal advocate for environmental causes since the 1970s. So when someone that renowned says that it is too late to stop climate change, people take notice. And that is exactly what he said in an interview with iPolitics earlier this month. He said that the planet has passed too many thresholds and that climate change and the disasters that will come with it are now inevitable. The interview caused quite a stir. Mr. Suzuki has gone on to

clarify that the fight is not over and that there is still more to be done, but it's going to be a tall order, especially with a federal government that seems to be keen on building another pipeline. So today on the show, I am joined by David Suzuki from Vancouver. Mr. Suzuki, thank you so much for coming on to Frontburner. Thank you for having me. It's great to have you. So I mentioned that interview that you did with iPolitics where you said that at this

point climate change is inevitable, that it is quote, too late. And when you say that climate change is inevitable and that it's too late, just what do you mean by that exactly? What does that look like? Well, we've had the warnings that the climate is changing as a result of the amount of carbon we're putting in the atmosphere. The big warning that was recognized internationally

was in 1988, and that's when a major international meeting was held in Toronto. And Brian Mulroney, reelected Prime Minister, opened the whole meeting. It was a big deal. There were over 40 government representatives from around the world there, scientists, environmentalists, the business community. They were all there. And at the end of the conference, they said, we are conducting an experiment with consequences we can't predict, but with catastrophic results that will be second only to a global nuclear war. So there it was, the call, the danger, and they called for a 20% reduction in 15 years

in emissions. If we had done it, we wouldn't have the problem we have today. We would have literally saved trillions of dollars. We would have saved millions of lives, but we didn't pay attention. And ever since then, the warnings have been coming in as the science has been getting stronger and stronger. And in 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a special report and said, look, we're heading towards 1.5 degree rise above pre-industrial levels. The IPCC report that came out said 1.5, absolutely.

We've got to keep it to that. If we go above that, all chaos results and we can't anticipate what it will be. And after that report came out, marijuana became legal in Canada and guess what disappeared from the conversation? The media, I think have simply failed to put the, you know, we're all caught up now in 24 hour news cycles, so anything older than 12 hours seems dated.

You know, you got to get the latest. So marijuana became far more important than the IPCC report. Report after report has been coming in. We now have hit 1.5 degrees this year rather than 2,100. We're on our way to three. But to me, the most damning report was the work of Johann Rockström, who's the head of the Potsdam Institute in Germany. And he has defined nine planetary boundaries that every animal species has to live within

these limits. You know, pH of the oceans, the carbon in the atmosphere, the amount of available fresh water, the nitrogen cycle and so on. If we pass any one of these nine boundaries, we should be really scared stiff. And what we've done is passed six of the nine boundaries, we're going to pass a seventh and we passed that this year. So seven of the nine planetary boundaries. He says, I don't believe for a minute it's true, but he says we have five years. If we can pull back, radically pull back everything, we can get out of the danger zone in five years. Sorry, when you say, you know, for a minute believe it's true, you don't believe that we can do it in, like that it's possible to even do it in five years. Exactly. I mean, the 1988 was a call and we've had 28 cop

council, committee of all parties meetings on climate, 28 now or 29. And we haven't even been able to cap emissions, let alone reduce them. You know, and, and Antonio Guterres, the secretary general of the United Nations, said a couple of years ago, any further investment in exploration for fossil fuels or building a fossil fuel infrastructure, and that includes things like pipelines, is moral and economic madness. And so, you know, Mark Carney, who knows more about the climate change

than any other prime minister we've ever had, still is talking pipelines and has never stopped talking pipelines. It's about getting, yes, pipelines built across this country so that we can displace imports of foreign oil. It's about building out the m energy infrastructure more broadly uh... here in alberta which i would add uh... would include uh...

uh... for uh... projects such as the pathways it's about building energy corridors and trade corridors including potentially up uh... from here uh... through to uh... new of it also we have additional deep water ports and opportunities there. This is moral and economic madness. As Antonio Gutierrez says, you know, our production of more and more fossil fuel emissions is

digging our own grave. And if you're digging your own grave, the first rule is stop digging. I want to come back to Prime Minister Carney in a moment, but of course, we are seeing the effects of climate change right now, wildfires, weather events like floods. But I wonder if you could paint a picture for me of what you think this world is going to look like in the future. I have no idea. I mean, there are catastrophic things like

the release of massive amounts of methane to much more powerful greenhouse gas and carbon dioxide. We've been focusing on burning, you know, fossil fuels, but there's all this methane up in the Arctic that's frozen. to much more powerful greenhouse gas and carbon dioxide. We've been focusing on burning fossil fuels but there's all this methane up in the Arctic that's frozen that's now thawing out. And Guy McPherson, an ecologist from Arizona said years ago, we're going to be extinct by 2035 because that methane is going to be released. He calls it a methane gun. Now people go,

ah, we don't know enough, you don't know. But the reality is there's all that methane and it's now melting and coming out into the atmosphere. I don't know. I mean, we know that the oceans are absorbing most of the increased heat. The oceans are heating up. The results in terms of the coral reefs and the shellfish that can't take the amount of carbon in the water, these are changes that are happening now before our eyes. I have no idea what the long term consequences will be except the most crude way of saying, you know, we're going to have more drought, there are going to be more and more places like Albuquerque, New Mexico that will be uninhabitable. If you now jack up the temperature in these

southern states where you're having a hundred days, consecutive hundred days of 100 degree or more temperature, 100 degrees Fahrenheit, you know, it's unlivable. My concern is that the units of survival into this changing world are going to have to be local communities and to the extent that we prepared for these catastrophic warming, you know, will determine how much longer we can retain ourselves. But you know, the economy is going to collapse. That's been warned about by economists from Sir Nicholas Stern to Mark Carney himself have been warning about the economic consequences of continued elevation and temperature. It's a different world. To me, the question is, is it going to be the American way, which is as warming gets up, it's every man for himself or every country for himself and to hell with everybody else? Or are we going to work together and understand that we have to change our lifestyles

tremendously that we can't go on the same the way we are? How are we going to prepare and enter into this period? Right, but even let's say we do that, right? We change our lifestyles tremendously. I mean, listening to you now, is it too late? Well, I mean, all the indications are, I just take the science seriously. The science tells us we've passed all of these tipping points and we have simply run out of time to reverse it. We can't go back. And so all of this stuff, you know, Bill Gates and all these people are pouring money into how can we take carbon out of the atmosphere and all of that.

While we're still continuing to pump the stuff out, this is crazy. We can, I think that we have to reduce our emissions radically, that is get off fossil fuels. But you know, we aren't even saying what has to be said, which is we cannot burn all the fossil fuels that are in the ground that we know about. It's got to be left in the ground. No politician would dare to say we've got to leave the fossil fuels in the ground. And Mark Carney, who knows what the problem is, you think Danielle Smith doesn't have him by the neck and saying, look, don't talk about no

pipelines. We need pipelines. It's the economy of Canada. We had a prime minister of Canada for nine and a half years who said, what? We can't do anything about climate change. He didn't believe in it. But doing something is crazy economics. That's what Stephen Harper's assessment was. Anybody can go around talking about targets. What's the actual results? Ours have been going down. Other countries' emissions for the most part are going up. World emissions are going up.

Canada's have not been going up. That says the economy is more important than the atmosphere that gives us air to breathe, that gives us weather climate and the seasons. This is madness. But all the arguments still are all the economy at the next COP meeting in Belém, Brazil. Guess what? The biggest delegation will continue to be the fossil fuel industry who are going to do everything they can to keep emissions rising. For years, I have been told the CBC, you can't say that. You can't say that. That's too depressing. Even my organization,

the David Suzuki Foundation, we're a charity. They say, you can't do that. Alberta will come after us. You can't do that. And so you can't say it. I am not a part of the David Suzuki Foundation except by my name. And I had to say the science is in. It's too late to avoid the consequences, but that doesn't mean you give up then. What do we do to at least stop digging the grave? Just talking about fossil fuels here and the prime minister, One of the arguments is that we are kind of at this real moment of economic vulnerability right now, specifically because of the change in dynamic with our relationship with the United States under President Trump. And so we need these kind of projects like a pipeline that would bring more of our oil

to Tidewater to remain an independent and prosperous nation. Well, is that right? You tell me. You state that as if it's true that we need the pipeline, we need the continued effort on fossil, to pump out our fossil fuels to keep our economy going. Then to me, the conclusion is if that's true, that we've got to continue what is an unbelievably destructive industry. We've got to keep that going even though they've been lying to us for years, taking money from the government

in subsidies. We've got to keep that going to keep the economy going. Well, if our economy is built on that kind of thing, then we're going to pay the price for it. You see, where I disagree with Mark is that he believes that you can use market forces and instruments, economic instruments to bring this juggernaut under control. And it's the economy itself, it's not just fossil fuels, it's the economic demand for constant growth. Steady growth forever in a finite world is impossible, simply impossible. And we are not living within our means. We're living on the biological capital that should be inherited by our children and grandchildren. We're using that up to keep the economy growing. This is just – it's crazy. So I think starting with the assumption that the fossil fuels in

Alberta have to be got out to export to other countries where it will be burned and release the carbon into the atmosphere. And this is the craziest kind of fossil fuel, the tar sands, you know, very, very water intensive fuel. We want to do that. I would say the obvious thing is if you care about survival, stop supporting that kind of part of our economy. We've got to find alternatives. But if you begin with the assumption, it's got to be got out to the tidewater to keep the economy growing. We're done. That's crazy. That's absolutely crazy. When you know what the problem is, you know what part of the solution is. Stop burning fossil fuels. What do you make of the prime minister's argument

that this theoretical pipeline, which he recently said is likely going to be one of these projects of national interest that will be able to bypass some environmental regulations and other laws, that they would be used for decarbonized oil. Yeah. Yeah. Just for our listeners, I think the idea here is that the emissions it would produce would

be offset by some sort of carbon capture technology. And so just what do you make of that argument? That doesn't exist. That's the whole point. We've been using the argument in the fossil fuel industry. If they're confronted and had to face the question of climate change, has always said, look, technology will get us out of this. There are all kinds of ways of reflecting light in the atmosphere. One of the biggest names is David Keith, a Canadian who's at the University of Chicago now saying, well, we can have a fleet of 747s working around the clock every day of the year,

spraying sulfur compounds to reflect sunlight back out. I mean, this is the conceit of our species, that we're so smart, we've screwed things up, but we're going to solve it by more technology, which is going to get us deeper and deeper into the hole. Yeah, I just don't buy that kind of argument, but it's been Mr. Trudeau got us into this crazy economic system with the pipeline that's now been the Trans Mountain pipeline. He put in what, $5 billion into the pipeline that is now over $34 billion in this pipeline on the crazy idea that we need to get more of that tar sands oil out to Tidewater so that we can have more tax revenue to find a way out of our dilemma. That's like saying, look, we know that smoking causes cancer, but we've got to get more people

to smoke more cigarettes for the tax dollars. I mean, this is just craziness. All to protect that economic system, which is itself crazy because as Partha Dasgupta, a UK economist, showed, the nature isn't a part of the economic system that we've created because the economics is built on human productivity and human innovation. And Mark Carney, before he was even a politician, wrote in his book Values that this economic system says that Amazon, Jeff Bezos' gigantic company, is valued by the economy in the tens of billions of dollars, while Amazon, the rainforest, the greatest terrestrial ecosystem on the planet,

has no economic value until it is logged, mined, dammed, or grows soybeans, cattle, or cities. Now, that's why I say the system itself is so screwed up. It's crazy. It's just a crazy system. We don't acknowledge that we're not the center of the action. We're living. We are alive and we can live well because nature is the producer of everything that we need. Clean air, clean water, clean soil to grow our food, clean energy from the sun. That's the foundation of our very lives and the economy pays no attention to that. And then we think, oh, we've got the politicians, we just have to get the right people elected. The best politician we've ever had as a minister of the environment,

Stephen Gilbo, I said to him after he'd been in office a couple of years, you should resign because you can't even tell the truth. You can't say how bad it is and that we're in an emergency and we have to pull out all stops. We had the best Minister of Fisheries and Oceans, Joyce Murray. She was great, but she couldn't in battles over fish farms. She couldn't say the important thing is that we've got to protect the health of the oceans. She's a Minister of Fisheries and Oceans. Did they tell you that they can't say this stuff? Well, the fish and oceans don't vote. The environment doesn't vote. The reality is their survival as politicians and therefore they are serving people, not the environment.

The minister of forests, trees aren't his constituency, it's people that want to cut them down. So we've created these systems, but they're all about us. They're not about nature. The Prime Minister, do you see the same person now that you see in values, the book that Mr. Carney wrote? Yeah, I think he's navigating a very different world thanks to Mr. Trump. But all Mr. Trump has done is to amplify the issue that has to be confronted. And Mr. Carney will not. He's an economist. That's his whole life. He obviously believes in it. He's swallowed it. How can he possibly then get out and say, oh my God,

this system within which I operate is itself the agent of destruction? He can't. So he, enlightened as he is, is trapped by the systems that we've created. We're all trapped. And the only way out is what Naomi Klein and people like that are saying. We need systemic transformation. Well, transformation is another word for revolution.

And you can't use a word like revolution, but if we don't have transformation, then we're just doing what I and environmentalists have been doing for a long time, hoping for incremental change. But they haven't changed the fundamental drive of steady growth. You sailed beyond the horizon in search of an island scrubbed from every map. You battled Krakens and navigated through storms. Your spade struck the lid of a long-lost treasure chest. While you cooked a lasagna. There's more to imagine when you listen. Discover best-selling adventure stories on Audible.

Has online porn changed sex forever? What's left to know about Bitcoin? And why does the internet suck so much right now? These are the kinds of questions we set out to answer on CBC's Understood, a podcast that I help produce. I'm Joyta Shingupta, and part of my job is to look deeper than the daily headlines and find stories at the intersection

of business, technology, and culture. Want to know more? Know it now with Understood. Find the latest season wherever you get your podcasts. Mr. Suzuki, knowing where you are now and kind of looking back on your career, what would you have done differently about the way that you approach this fight throughout your life? I don't spend my time, you know, wishing that I could change history by – could have changed history. What's done is done. But you can learn from it. As an environmentalist, I say we have fundamentally

failed to shift the narrative. When we began the foundation in 1990, environmentalists were at the top of the agenda. The environment was at everybody's concern. We were going towards the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992. The environment was up there. When Brian Mulroney was re-elected in 1988, he said the environment's important. I'm going to appoint my most important new politician as Minister of the Environment, Lucien Bouchard. Remember him? He was a star that came in. I interviewed him months after he was appointed

minister and I said, Mr. Minister, now that you've been in here a while, what do you think is the most important environmental issue? And right away he said, global warming. And that really blew me away. This is 1988. I said, how serious is it? He said, it threatens the survival of our species. We have to act now. 1988, he said it. The politicians had got it and what happened? He left and now I guess Quebec separation was more important than the survival of our species. If you look at the history of what we've done, the scientific

community in 1992, over half of all Nobel Prize winners alive at that time signed a document, World Scientists Warning to Humanity. And it started, human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. And they defined what had to be done. And we didn't do anything about that, World Scientists Warning, so that 25 years later, 15,000 scientists signed it from a hundred and eighty four countries in the world, signed war, world scientists warning to that everything had got worse. Why haven't we put science above everything else? Well, I mean, why? Like I, I have the energy minister on this show a couple of weeks ago and I've been thinking a lot about something he said.

He said that we were talking about the Building Canada Act that would sort of push through these national projects, potentially a pipeline, right? And he said this is what Canadians voted for. And it's actually not clear to me that he was wrong, right? That maybe this is what Canadians voted for. Why has this fallen off? Why are people no longer really seized with it? Why do they not vote on it?

Well, I think the reality is that the liberals were absolutely rock bottom. And had Mr. Trump not intervened at a time when Mr. Carney happened to come in, Mr. Trump elected Mark Carney. Canadians didn't vote for Mark Carney because of what he offered in terms of a way forward in terms of the environmental crisis or anything. They voted for Mark Carney as a way to avoid or try to avoid the heavy consequences of dealing with Donald Trump. Mr. Trump single-handedly kept out someone who by his statements embraced what Mr. Trump's approach is. So I thank Mr. Trump for getting Mr. Carney elected, but I don't see that he'll be much different from Trudeau or any of the other liberal ministers we've had in the past because

they're trapped by the system. And the system says that Alberta is a critical part of the voting audience and right now they're putting all their eggs in the oil basket. So he will not have the strength to say unless he says, I don't care about re-election, I only care about what has to be done now. That's the only way we're going to get out of this. We have to get climate change and species extinction, all these other problems out of the political realm and make it something that confronts all of us. The way we do in science fiction movies, when an invader from outer space lands and starts killing people indiscriminately. We have an alien invasion

right now. It's not an alien species from outer space. It's an alien mindset that thinks we're in control and it's all about us. For most of human existence, we knew we were embedded in nature and depended on us. We were dependent on it. But now most of us live in big cities where our primary focus is on our jobs. We need a job to buy the things that we need. And so the economy assumes this high position and nature, we think, oh, nature's out there in parks and so on. We never think if we don't have air for three to four minutes, we're dead. If we have to breathe polluted air perpetually,

we're sick. And yet we use air, this most important sacred gift from nature as a garbage can. And we won't pay a cent. Damn it all. I will not pay a carbon tax to use nature as a garbage can and we won't pay a cent, damn it all, I will not pay a carbon tax to use air as a garbage can for our fossil fuel emissions. Anyway, I'm just going on in a crazy rant. I'm sorry, you know, this is why at this point, to everybody who believes that, you know, the systems,

the legal, economic and political systems, they're what have to be changed or altered or refocused, but we can't destroy them. To them, people like me sound like mad men. We are mad because the system is now our enemy. Mr. Suzuki, I want to thank you very much for this. Thank you. All right, that is all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you soon. That was an episode of CBC's daily news podcast, Frontburner. New episodes drop every weekday

and you can find them wherever you get your podcasts. And be sure to follow the feed so you don't miss an episode.