'It's too late': David Suzuki says the fight against climate change is lost
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His view are well-known to anyone who has listened to his broadcasts. He is a clear and articulate speaker.
Edit: I agree with xnx's point that "the climate change "movement" and messaging is so bad and misguided that it is counterproductive." Suzuki is one of the exceptions, his arguments are logical, straightforward and backed up by scientific fact.
For anyone who wants more specific information about the dire situation of humanity, that's very easy to find. He mentioned Johan Rockström so you can check out his work. Or Eliot Jacobson. Or James Hansen. Or the reports that the IPCC publishes. And on Substack, Richard Crim puts out The Crisis Report regularly. It's full of detailed analysis with references to published papers.
One or two degrees will not incinerate you, but it might affect some crops, and then some food prices, and then there could be some starving, and poverty, and disease. Things could escalate quickly.
Also, wasn't there something about, you know, caring for the generations to come? Maybe I misremember...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-17/us-spendi... | https://archive.today/EBmaI
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/09/climate-...
there will be plenty of empty houses for the generations to come.
It's still part of Malthusian theory, it's just the logical conclusion of population collapse after resource depletion.
Back around 2007 it was a HUGE topic and many of us thought we'd be living in hell by 2025. Yet here we are and climate change rarely even makes the news.
What I said about the media is that they talked about climate change a whole lot more back then compared to now. Beside the Iraq War it was one of the big topics that everyone was always talking about. Nowadays it seems more of a background issue.
In your memory what was the zeitgeist at the time?
For most of my life it has been something like: we recently crossed some threshold, if we don't act now we'll cross this other one, disaster is 15-30 years out. Recent freak natural disaster is going to become a yearly thing.
How is the saying: "Aviate, navigate, communicate". We are strictly in an aviate phase.
Personally I think China was and is the most equipped to solve the problem. They have the talent, have the top-down leadership that is supposedly required to implement solutions, and are well aware that the future belongs to them.
Sure, if you dismiss all the news about floodings etc.
Just because it's not titled "flooding due to climate change" ....
Just think of the 10 year lynx-hare cycle https://jckantor.github.io/CBE30338/02.05-Hare-and-Lynx-Popu... where nature adapts constantly.
Now think about the fact that Lynxes have a max age of 15 years plus and the cycle takes 10 years.
I really don't think that the climate change messaging is bad and misguided. At the end of the day, it's because climate change advocacy is underfunded and there is a lot of money in oil.
If climate change messaging was nicer, it's hard for me to see how anyone would care more anyway. On the other hand, if climate change advocates had real money behind it on the order of big oil PR and regulatory capture, you would see change and legislation really quick.
There are large swaths of the world that are unlivable today without significant cooling. When summers with over 45 Celsius (fifties in some parts) are becoming more and more common poor people without access to air-conditioning are suffering. These areas are becoming larger and larger.
Just because us in the western temperate climates are fine, does not mean that the effects of climate change will not be felt somewhere in the world today or in the next decade.
But if they’re wrong, that’s also bad news. It means our scientific institutions failed us, and the political trust placed in “studies” will collapse. The next time someone says “science says…”, society may not listen.
Either way, it’s a precarious place to be. Until then, enjoy the summer — it might be the coolest one we have left.
That horse has already bolted. See eg. vaccinations and autism, efficacy of COVID vaccines, etc.
Academic science is more religion than actual religion.
Climate change doesn't just make it a bit hotter at home - it corrodes the entire environment. Floods, fires, storms, drought, crop yields, etc.
It will make us all poorer and then it will start to kill many of us directly with heat or indirectly through secondary effects (including war). And we'll discover too late that our prosperity depends on the prosperity of each other and the environment.
No man is an island.
We're already there. Turns out it has nothing to do with science at all, but rather propaganda and political messaging. If you just tell people science is wrong and bad then they internalize that, regardless of the state of science.
This confirms what many of us know to be true - what people believe has only a very loose tie to reality. Populist messaging is the future.
I've been hearing about this fight for my entire life. People are extremely passionate and self-righteous about it and have science to back up everything they believe, so why was there never a single unified plan with a single unified movement behind it?
Not enough of the population was properly educated on the risks, and therefore a solid plan was never even conceived.
We needed lots of people thinking about it in order to do that, while most people just discussed it superficially and were easily provoked, manipulated or distracted.
A handful of smart people just needed to get together and come up with a solution. Then the governments of the world implement it. I understand that the second part is difficult. But did the first part ever happen?
Things don't work this way, unfortunatelly. This kind of thinking just pushes the problem to someone else do deal with, which only serves to shift up blame. Small groups are vulnerable to corruption, or distractions, or silly power plays.
We needed _lots_ of people with good education and reasonable awareness of the risks, it was the only way to have a chance to develop a more solid plan.
However, you got your way. There are small groups of smart people working on these issues. But many, many of us know that their chances are slim (due to the shortcomings mentioned earlier). Unfortunatelly, not that many to form a critical mass.
The internet, cell phones, social media, fracking, AI, the fall of the Soviet Union, war in Iraq, changes in attitudes towards family, sexuality. Just to name a few.
All of these things just kind of happened without the public having asking for them. Why then has a slight, gradual reduction in greenhouse gases been so hard?
In the whole human history, only one disease was erradicated: smallpox. It took centuries, countless smart people, reasonable awareness of many counter-intuitive ideas, and we almost failed. Going to the moon was easier.
I mean... Why do the smart people not "just" develop a perfect economic plan? Or "just" end world hunger? Or "just" stop global conflicts?
Anyway, there have been multitudes of plans and strategies and actions to chip away at the problem. All of them require sacrificing political capital, raising taxes and the costs of products, and effort. And you get nothing substantial in return.
So while the entire scientific community tried pushing education and solutions galore, the political and corporate establishment fought tooth and nail against any aspect that did not immediately profit them. To the point that now an entire party in the richest country on Earth that holds all three branches of government uses opposition to solving the problem as one of the core tenants of their platform.
Anyway, what is the solution that the scientific community proposed and that was killed by the political and corporate establishment?
What is the plan that the non-US countries have implemented to eliminate the problem?
This has been agreed multiple times, most notably the Paris agreement of 2015, which set deadlines for countries to achieve carbon neutrality.
The plan failed in e.g. the US because politicians didn't follow through. Trump literally withdrew from the Paris agreement.
All but 3 countries in the world participate in the Paris agreement. This includes all big CO2 emitters, like China, US (now withdrawn), India and EU countries.
"Be fit!" is a goal.
"Go to the gym at least 5 days a week" is a plan.
If you're going to tell me it was the Democrats vs the Republicans, then please explain why countries outside the US haven't made it happen yet. China is a country full of scientists and engineers and the opposition there is non existent.
I'm led to believe that the scientists and activists are all led by the same empirical research and share a broad consensus. So why then is there no plan or even a concept of a plan after 30 years of talking about all this?
Scientists and industry work together all the time to enact sea changes in the world around us. The AI revolution is a recent example. No legislation or government was needed.
Most of the biggest changes in our lifetimes have happened due to private actors, not government getting involved.
Activists shouldn't have existed at all. Science informs government there's a problem, government informs the population and creates multiple policies to address the problem, industry works within those policies to adapt the economy. Actual people shouldn't have to feel guilty about their own carbon emissions or second guess the science with their own opinion, but should vote on the policies that they like the best, knowing fully what the consequences will be.
That would be nice anyway. Instead just about every part of that chain tries to fuck with the other parts for money and power.
You also don't need the government if you want to enact change. We have an AI revolution because science and money got together to make it happen, and then consumers jumped on it. Not because the government passed a law to make it happen.
So did the scientists and engineers with mountains of research ever figure out a solution for the rest of us to get behind?
Saying that, governments have made policy and it has had an effect. Emissions in Europe and the US are on a steady downward trend.
1. There's too much money directly opposing the goals of fighting climate change
2. Humans aren't big on alignment. FFS, we still don't have good UX/GUI for Linux and it's mainly been stagnant* and divided into Gnome and KDE for 20+ years.
* despite the impressive accomplishments, it's essentially true
2. Your example isn't something life or death. Humanity has aligned on numerous things and changed significantly amd uniformly during the past 30 years without even trying. Why is it so hard to come up with a list of demands and reforms for everyone to agree on and march behind to save the world?
Climate change has been a mainstream issue since the mid-90s. From then until now we've had massive material and ideological changes across the globe, none of which required the support or awareness of humanity or the voting public.
The internet, cell phones, social media, fracking, AI, multiple wars, changes in attitudes towards family, sexuality, and marijuana usage have all occurred during this time period. Why then has a slight, gradual reduction in greenhouse gas reduction been so hard?
Changing that cost money—and people resent having to pay more for change that they don't perceive will make much difference to their lives.
Whether they're right or wrong doesn't alter that.
Governments have been unwilling to push those changes because they are unpopular and expensive. Governments have also been unwilling to impose hardship on their people if other countries aren't going to do anything. A lot of people, in this thread, don't think it will be bad, or that it will happen after they are dead.
In terms of making a plan, what is the point of making detailed plan if nobody is going to follow it? Also, there are lots of things that we don't know how to do yet, and can only plan to investigate.
There has been a consistent attempt at getting everyone to consider the risks in a reasonable way. It has failed.
The UN and EU regularly publish evidence-based reports with multi-pronged recommendations. That seems to me as "unified" as you can get, in terms of multinational cooperation and holism in recommendations. But to have any concrete change you need political will, and that is obviously lacking.
To get political will in democratic societies you need to convince people to elect their leaders on this and not taxes or pet special interests, which is why you have been hearing about this fight all your life.
Second, I don't see why political will is necessary. Most of the big changes that have happened in our lives over the past decades have had nothing to do with laws being passed or voters voting for anything. On the contrary private interests basically do what they want and the government getting involvement is seen as a hindrance not a help.
I disagree with other commenters that the opinion of common people matters. Most Western political projects are tied to capital, not people.
> Most of the big changes that have happened in our lives over the past decades have had nothing to do with laws being passed or voters voting for anything.
I can agree with the latter without agreeing with the former. But political will and oil go hand-in-hand. Governments have been destroyed by foreign interests in oil. Governments hostile to their people have been maintained by foreign interests in oil. Governments giving great security to its people have been built from sovereign oil.
Writing this response made me realize that you are right. Considering the means and methods of countervailing interests, democratic persuasion does not seem anywhere near sufficient, even though these are the methods being used by advocates. A surer path might involve highly militant and capable states willing to perform espionage, terrorism, and regime change to pursue environmental goals.
Zooming out, one could argue that we are on a roller coaster and our complex brains give us the impression that there is a little steering wheel in front of us and that we get to decide the fate of humanity. Life can be viewed as a parasite, it invades every area on the surface and the oceans of this world, doing so with fractal depth. And over longer periods it is prone to mass extinction events, there have been five big ones so far. Who knows, maybe the sixth one isn't a 72 teratonnes impact event or giant volcanic eruptions, but rather this time it's an all habitat outcompeting population explosion by one species.
What are you basing this on? More land gets arable when the world is warmer, the earth is more lifeless today than at almost any point before due to the cold and lack of CO2 making plants not grow very quickly.
Biodiversity will go down from this event, but temperate areas will be fine and earth will likely be able to support more people in 1000 years than it can today thanks to global warming.
What people are afraid of are short term disruptions to current systems, but the long term livability of earth is going to be fine. The people who argue otherwise just hasn't looked at what earth was like when there were many times more CO2 than there is here now, that wasn't that many million years ago.
> What are you basing this on?
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2023/09/can-modernity-last/ worth a read, goes into much more detail than I can.
Your comment implies that one can simply disconnect the factors that affect human livability and other life livability. As you predict yourself biodiversity will - is - going down. Extinction rates are at more than 1000x the baseline. Humans are part of the complex systems that makes up the community of life. What do you base your claim on that we can simply define us into another category and avoid the myriad causes that makes life miserable to the point of extinction for countless other species?
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2022/12/these-countries-achi...
I said "we live in a world..." not "we live in a country.."
That is certainly news for North Koreans or Cubans.
>> This has been true for centuries.
Soviet Union would like a word with you. What they did to their environment hasn't happened in any capitalist country.
Pressure from capitalism eventually lead to the USSR's collapse.
Think about it like someone with extreme immune issues who has to take multiple shots every day to avoid a certain disease. Your argument is that because they don't actually carry the disease it's not a dominant factor in their lives.
But certainly back to my original point, because I'm really not sure what you're seeing in it. I said we live in a world driven my capitalism, not by logic. I certainly didn't say anything about adopting communism as a solution, and I actually didn't suggest or imply anything about communism at all. You've wasted both our time on an imaginary argument.
Wouldn't it be more profitable to exaggerate the issue so you can milk it?
Stonewalling against saving the planet seems like the least profitable course of action, especially since morals are irrelevant.
Profitable for what entity? You need to find an entity that agrees with itself enough to have a notion of revenue that is hurt by deteriorating climate, and that has the means to "solve the issue" in an economical way.
The case against is obvious: the energy industry has a clear notion of revenue that is hurt by climate actions, and it has the means to combat it by political capture; whole countries are created and destroyed for oil.
Not in the short to medium timeframes we're talking about, no. Certainly it doesn't make sense in a long-term perspective to make investments that will immediately pay great and continue to do so for a century and then collapse society itself. But one's lifespan is shorter than a century, so it makes more sense to do that than to make investments which won't start paying out until you're retired or dying. Especially when it's not so much your personal choice as it is the choice of shareholders looking at year on year reports.
But if you believe otherwise then I certainly encourage you to start investing.
This includes the fact that whatever we do now the impact of what's already done will be felt for thousands of years.