David Suzuki

0:00Well, Dr. David Suzuki, thank you very much. My pleasure. Well, we're in your house. Let's talk about the house actually first. I'm assuming there's a lot of carbon neutral stuff and solar panels and different eco-friendly things here. We had it checked out for solar heating. I thought we'd at least, you know, one of the biggest users of energy is your hot water tank. So we thought if we could cut down on that by solar heating the water, just isn't economic, unfortunately. Really? Yeah, yeah. We're shaded by trees here. We had very, very little sunlight. So then the question is there are, I've been offered a local windmill for, that would work for the house, but here you go run up against city bylaws and just say you can't put up a windmill anywhere you want in the middle of the city.

0:45So that makes it difficult. The ideal thing here would be geothermal and that could involve either putting a pipe out into the ocean. So geothermal depends on a temperature difference between the ambient air and the ground or the water. And it's possible to do a heat exchange. But again, you run into all kinds of city bylaws. You can't just run a pipe out into the ocean. So then it would mean, so what I'm saying is it's very hard to have this thing bringing in energy from either wind, solar or geothermal. But what we have got done is insulated, of course, as much as we can. The thing that I feel very strongly about is it's a small house, but my wife's mom and

1:30dad have lived upstairs with us for 35 years. So this is an extended family. Socially, it's been great. My daughters have had grandma and granddad living upstairs their entire lives. And I think people forget, we're now in a time of nuclear families and we forget that there are huge benefits at being in an extended family. For one thing, before we go shopping, we call up to grandma and granddad and say anything you want so we can buy stuff in bulk. So you're not buying little packages of stuff. And a great deal of sharing of things that mean you don't have to run cars all over the place. But socially, it's been wonderful for the kids to have grandparents right here. What do you drive? I'm curious. Is it like a smart car?

2:16I bought a first-prey sold in Canada. And still have it. And it's been a wonderful car. I'm sad to see Toyota having problems right now. I suspect that if they are having real problems, it's because they're trying to increase the profit line and kind of deviate it. I've had the succession of Toyota's which are very, very well, they're dependable cars. But I love the Prius. It's been fine. What do you think you'll ever go to an electric car? Do you think we're going to have them soon enough? We have to go to electric. That's either electric or hydrogen fuel cells. But the fuel cells are being pushed into the future. Mercedes said back in the 1990s, oh, yeah, we'll have one by 1997.

3:02Then it was all while 2002 and 2012, now it's 2020. So I don't know what the problem is with hydrogen technology. But the exciting thing about electric cars is if we are going towards a future where all of our electricity is from renewable energy, wind, solar, geothermal. The problem is the wind doesn't blow 24 hours a day. The sun only shines a limited number. What do you do when the sun's not shining and the wind's not blowing? Where do you get your energy? And that's why in Ontario they keep having, we've got to expand nuclear because you need backup in case blah, blah, blah. But what the Germans have done is said every car has to be run by batteries.

3:49Now you won't have to plug them in. You know what induction is? If you have wires this way and you put a coil above it, you can draw a current off that wire, even though you're not touching it. That's called induction. So what happens then is all of the electric cars will park and immediately begin to draw electricity off the grid. But if the demand, say it's at nighttime, the demand is greater than there is electricity. Every parked car, their battery stores that energy. Every parked car will give energy back to the grid. So this is a beautiful way then of storing energy when you've got too much and giving it back when you don't have enough.

4:35The big challenge is how do you get the software so that you know whether a car is giving more electricity or taking more electricity. But I'm sure that can be solved. And this is what Al Gore is proposing for the United States. And do you see that being full-fledged? I think Al Gore is called for 100% renewable electricity in 10 years. So he thinks that it can be achieved in 10 years. You've got to make the commitment. This I think is the big thing. You know we've had a federal government now. Harper has said well long before he was Prime Minister he didn't believe in Kyoto or any of that stuff. And he said well we can't do anything because it will destroy the economy. And I think Canadians better realize that this is a lie first of all. If Mr. Harper is pro-road parliament because he wants to focus on the economy.

5:23If you want to focus on the economy Sir Nicholas Stern an economist from originally from the World Bank says if you want to do something to keep climate change from just catastrophic runaway temperature rise it will cost 2 to 3% of GDP. That is a shitload of money. That's a lot of money. And so I can see you know everybody is going holy cow we can't afford that. But if we don't do anything and allow the emissions to rise as Canada has been doing it will destroy the global economy. It will cost more than World War I and World War II put together just to deal with the consequences of that temperature rise. So anybody that says they care about the economy damn well better look at climate change it's central to where we're going.

6:09The other thing is Harper has said for years if we do anything about meeting Kyoto it will our economy will go belly up we're a northern country we need energy. Well guess what Sweden is even more northern than Canada. Here's this little country Sweden has got a third of our population they've got their own automobile for God's sake Canada doesn't have one and they imposed a carbon tax in the 1990s. They now pay a hundred and twenty dollars a ton to put carbon in the atmosphere. What do we pay? Well in British Columbia we had a huge kerfuffle over ten dollars a ton. It's now fifteen dollars a ton. Anyway in Sweden they have reduced greenhouse gas emissions to eight percent below 1990 levels. In other words they're already passed the Kyoto target and during that time the economy has

6:59grown by forty four percent. So what is this bullshit that we're getting from our prime minister who claims that to do anything that he cares about the economy and yet he uses the economy as he excused not to do anything and not doing anything will destroy the economy. This is not leadership this is not taking an issue seriously. Now we had the leader of the major opposition party in the last election basing his entire campaign on a carbon tax. So here you have a leader of a major party putting all of his emphasis on what economists agree is the most effective tool to get people to change behavior a carbon tax. And what did the prime minister say in the election?

7:45That's crazy. And the media allowed him to get away with this. That was it as far as the discussion goes on the most powerful tool we have available to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We allowed the prime minister to dismiss it as that's crazy and nobody went after him and demanded that he start giving some evidence why that's crazy. That's what you're here for. I'm not a politician. Do you think a left government would actually change anything though? I don't think the issue is a left or right government but I think the problem we saw the catastrophic failure at Copenhagen and I think the problem is twofold. Human beings draw lines around their property, around their cities, their provinces, their

8:34countries. And man do we take those borders seriously. We'll go to war. You know in the United States you're allowed to kill somebody if they come onto your property and you don't like it right? Like we take these borders seriously and at Copenhagen you had 192 countries all arguing about what I'm going to do in terms of atmosphere. Wait a minute now. The atmosphere doesn't care about human borders. You think the air says, oh I'm Canadian air or I'm my Alberta air? Of course not. This is why the tar sands in Alberta are critical to everybody and not only in Canada but in the world because air is shared by everybody and yet we take those borders seriously. You think a migrating fish or a bird or an insect gives a damn about human borders?

9:22They just go where they have to go. And here we are dealing with water and soil blows all the way across the oceans. These things are parts of nature and we've got to start realizing nature should be setting the limits, not us. Nature's telling us they don't care about our borders. We've got to deal with this as a single species. Now I've always been struck if you see a science fiction movie in which an alien from outer space comes down to earth and starts killing people indiscriminately. What's the first thing that happens? The President of the United States is calling up the Prime Minister of England and calling up the Chinese and the Russians because then we've got a common enemy and we deal with it

10:10as a species. We don't give a shit about borders. Hey listen what do we do about this? And that's what we should be doing about climate change. It's an international issue and we've got to deal with it as a single species. Now the other problem is humans create entities. We call them free enterprise, capitalism, socialism, markets, currency, economies. These are human inventions. Nature doesn't give a shit about human inventions. And yet every time we have an economic crisis what do we do? We make nature pay the price. In British Columbia we have laws that say you can't export raw logs. You've got to process the logs in BC. The minute there's an economic downturn what's the first thing the government says to the

10:57forest company? Okay you can cut more trees and you can ship raw logs. Or we say the fishermen you can catch more fish and go beyond the limits. We always act as if nature can be shoehorned into human priorities. The economy doesn't make any sense to nature. Nature should be allowed to set the limits and then we try to fit our economy into what nature dictates. But we don't do that. That's sad. Well we're a species, you know one of the destructive things that you see is I don't know if you've ever heard of the triple bottom line. We've got to work to the triple bottom line. That's the economy, the environment and society. And you usually see that each one being depicted by a circle.

11:44So you have intersecting circles of equal size. And this is the triple bottom line. We've got to do whatever we can to benefit all three of these. Well this is the biggest crock of nonsense. Like the big circle is the biosphere. That's the zone of air, water and land where all living organisms exist. And then within that biosphere are 30 million little circles. Those are 30 million species that live within the biosphere. Many of them intersect and interact. But we now become this bloated thing. We think no we're this should be the same size as the biosphere. And then what it should be is within that big circle are 30 million circles. Ours is a big one.

12:31And that society. And within that should be a tiny one. That's the economy. I mean that's the reality, right? And yet we've got it all backwards. We think the economy is the most important thing. And it's of equal size to these other things. I had the Minister of the Environment in Alberta. Tell me, listen you environmentalists better understand. We can't afford to protect the environment if we don't have a strong growing economy. Now I said to, I thought you were the Minister of the environment. Not the Minister. I thought your job is to protect the environment. Yet even the environment Minister thinks the economy is the most important thing. What are you talking about if you don't have air for more than two or three minutes you're dead? Surely the goodness that ought to count more than the economy.

13:19And yet the economy says use air as a garbage can. Don't whatever shit you want into the air. And somehow it's not going to affect us. I've got a young grandson. When I take him out on the streets. And all the cars go by. I might as well put a pipe on the exhaust pipe of that of every car and pump it straight into the body of my grandson. Because what is he doing? He is in the growth phase, the biggest growth phase of his life other than when he was in his mother's body. And he's sucking in all the air, drinking the water and eating the food with chemicals in it. He is so vulnerable to what's going on in terms of the environment. And yet we act as if air well. We dump it in there. It doesn't matter. This is crazy. You mentioned your grandson and made me think about eating organic.

14:07I know this is off topic a little bit. But for a young child, I've heard from many people that eating organic at least at someone my age or your age doesn't really make a difference. Because you already have the toxins in you and you're immune to them. Holy. And you're immune to them? Well, you've grown up with them so your body is used to having the pesticides and what not? Nonsense. That's absolute nonsense. Why do we think? You know, we've got now 15% of Canadian kids. The minute they're born, run the risk of having asthma. When I was a boy, asthma was almost unheard of. When you look at the cancer for the first time in history has become the number one killer. It's always been heart attacks and strokes. Now it's cancer. Do you not think this is related to the fact that we're using air, water and food? Not only do we spray toxic chemicals onto the food, we actually inject it into the animals

14:56that we're going to eat. I mean, what that? And we think, oh, well, it's too late. I mean, the kids born, so don't bother giving them organic food. I mean, this is nuts. So what do we do to protect ourselves from that? We've got to stop using the earth as a garbage can. We've got to stop thinking that we're so smart. We can invent chemicals that are going to lead us into the future. My God, we've learned enough now to realize there are all kinds of unexpected side effects of things. When people started using DDT in the 1930s and 40s. No one knew that ultimate, you know, it seemed like a miracle chemical. The guy that discovered it kills insects won a Nobel Prize in 1948. We thought this was great. Nobody knew about bio-magnification.

15:41You spray in parts per million. They're consumed by microorganisms and you concentrate it. They're eaten by bigger organisms and in each level up the food chain, you concentrate it. By the time you get to the fatty tissue and the breasts of women or the shell glands of birds, you've concentrated it hundreds of thousands of times. By the 1960s, mother's milk in North America was considered toxic for babies. Why we didn't know that when we started using chemicals for pesticides. Why? We only discovered this phenomenon called bio-magnification up the food chain when eagles in the United States began to disappear and people said, what the hell is going on? They tracked it down and sure enough it was because DDT was building up in the shell glands

16:29of eagles. They were laying eggs that were much thinner shell than they'd break. We think we're so smart. We go for this very powerful chemical and we end up realizing, oh my God, we don't know enough to manage it. We've just done on the nature of things a four-part series called One Ocean, all about the oceans of the world. The oceans cover 70% of the earth's surface. It's a vast area. We know almost nothing about it. A few years ago, New Zealanders discovered a fish in the deep sea around New Zealand called orange ruffy. You ever heard of an orange ruffy? No. You haven't. No. You don't eat much fish. Orange ruffy 10 years ago just became all the rates of beautiful.

17:16I loved orange ruffy. Firm flesh freezes well. White flesh absorbs the flavor of whatever you mix it in. It was a great fish. So, the Zealanders began to drag way down in the ocean and pull up huge quantities of orange ruffy. We have a shot in the film where they caught so many. They couldn't sell them all and they're dumping them by the ton into garbage dumps. Then they discover orange ruffy off Africa and off South America and they just start taking them in huge quantities and they thought, oh well, we can manage this because they're probably 30 years old and so they become sexually mature at three years and so we'll just manage them.

18:01Start devastating the stocks and then realize, oh my God, they lived till they're over 100. They don't even become mature, sexually, until they're 30. When we think we're so bloody smart, we're going to go in. We don't know anything about the animal and we devastated. Guess what? You can't go to the market now and buy orange ruffy. Why? We wiped them out. In a matter of 10 years, we wiped them out. We're going to do the same thing with Chilean sea bass. Every time we find a new organism, we think, whoa, make a lot of money. But we don't think, hmm, is it sustainable? How many are there? We're just, we're going to become very powerful and very short-sighted. Greedy. Greedy. Hmm. The DDT thing got you into this whole thing.

18:48Well it was Rachel Carson who published a book called Silent Spring in 1962 and it was all about the effects of pesticides. And that for the world was the wake-up call because up until then, we'd come through the depression. We'd come through World War II and it was just, whoa, you know, the war is over and now onwards and upwards and we started to build suburbs like the things that you're building all around Calgary and, you know, it was just a big car in every garage and more and bigger and that's the way it was. We just thought science was terrific and technology was great. 1962, suddenly we thought, oh my God, there's a cost to all of this. And really Rachel Carson's book was the trigger for the modern environmental movement.

19:39So I was caught up like millions of people in that issue. Why are people skeptical of climate change? How is that even possible? Fossil fuel industry has been very, very successful. Simple as that. And we in the media have fostered that the confusion on the part of the public because a fossil fuel industry has spent tens of millions of dollars, primarily led by Exxon Mobile, spent tens of millions of dollars to support a handful of people saying, no, no, no, no, this isn't real. It's sunspots or it's got nothing to do with people. And guys like Fred Singer, who's a scientist from the States, guess what? He used to get paid by the tobacco industry to say smoking wasn't harmful. Now he's saying climate change isn't real.

20:24They've been very, very successful. They create a confusion on the part of the public. The vast majority of scientists have said, look, this is a serious issue. We've got to act on it. And yet now people go, oh, yeah, who believes of scientists? There's such a high anti-science thing now. And then you get this so-called climate gate where a crime was performed. People broke into people's websites or internet sites and actually stole letters, private letters. And nobody's saying, hey, who's put the money into this? Who broke in? Everybody's saying out of thousands and thousands of emails, they pulled little things out and said, oh, yeah, you see there's a cover up going on. This is bullshit.

21:09It's terrible what's going on now. And as a scientist, I'm humiliated by the position people are taking on the science because all of the climate denial is basically a slap in the face of the scientific community. As a scientist and as a broadcaster too, you got to be kind of not objective or a B objective rather. And you seem to be taking a side. What's the point of doing science if you can't see it in a bigger context? Science is just a way of describing the world. But if we don't have science to guide us and what are we going to do? George Bush believed in the Bible. He had a direct line to God. Is that what we're going to do? No, seriously, you have the most powerful nation on earth. And the leader of the most powerful nation believing that God and the Bible are guiding

21:56his actions in the year 2010. I mean, this is crazy. And yet scientists have are being treated as if they're pariahs in our society, as if they're covering up and they have hidden agendas. What other way do we have to describe the state of the world then through science? What can we all do? Well, I think people have got to become more informed about this issue. And I think this is the problem is there's so much information coming out now. And the vast bulk of it is garbage. It's being sponsored either to sell you stuff or it's about sex or it's an agenda driven by the corporations. So the challenge for people is what's credible?

22:48That's a very, very difficult thing is that people don't know because the reality is if you want to be lazy and not change your mind, you can find anything you want to support whatever you want to believe in. If you don't want to believe in climate change, only read the national post. You'll never have to read anything else. And there are dozens of websites saying climate change is bullshit. So my simple rule is to say, where's the money coming from? These guys are saying it's baloney, but where's the money coming from? And guess what? All the trails lead right back to the fossil fuel industry, the auto sector. They're putting money into committing what I believe is a criminal act. This is an intergenerational crime. In the name of profit, the fossil fuel industry is creating confusion even though their own documents

23:39since the 1990s have said, look, guys, it's real. And what they have gone on is exactly what the tobacco industry did. Knowing full well the science indicated these are dangerous things. They went ahead anyway and confused and lied in order to make more money. It's an inter... I don't think it's right for a generation to create a problem and then say, oh, sorry, it's your problem, kids, but that's what we're doing. We are leaving them with the problems we created and we're not doing a bloody thing about it. Well, can we do though? Well, we can elect... Because people are lazy for the most part. We can start thinking about our children. Half the books I've written have been for children.

24:25Not because I believe we've got time to wait for them to grow up and replace us. I don't think we've got time. But because I'm saying to children, look, if you care about these things, you've got to talk to the two most important people on the planet, mom and dad. And you ask them to become equal warriors on your behalf. If mom and dad don't love you enough to fight for your future, then we don't deserve to survive as a species. And I believe love and our children have got to be the driving force now. And people have got to stop just thinking about their next paycheck and the next little thing they can buy at Walmart or Home Depot. They got to start thinking, what about my kids? What kind of a future do we have for them? You know, my daughters grew up in this house all their lives.

25:13My oldest daughter is 30. They have never known that there used to be a salmon derby out here. Right here, hundreds of thousands of dollars in prizes given to the biggest salmon that were caught out here. Why? Because they canceled the bank of their son's salmon derby years and years ago because there are no salmon left. So for my daughters, they have no idea of the changes that have gone on. But I remember and it hurts me that my kids and my grandchildren will not understand. The oceans used to be filled with stuff. That should have been their right to experience that too. But we wiped it out in the name of greed. That's sad. What are your predictions? The next five, ten years? I'm, I'm, people need to know what's coming.

25:59I started to be scared. The David Suzuki Foundation in 1990 because the World Watch Institute in the United States said this has got to be the turnaround decade. If we don't turn society around in the next ten years, we're toast. That's 20 years later. And we're still fighting the same things, but the situation has got infinitely worse. So the question is, are we going to pull out? In 1990, when we started the foundation, you could still go out in the different parts around here in Catchfish, though, the oceans were still compared to now relatively rich. The oceans have been trashed. They're in terrible shape. So the, the signs are everywhere. If you flew here over Stanley Park and look at the northwest corner, it's been devastating.

26:47Why we had a freak storm that wiped out, I don't know, 5,000 trees. Never happened before. If you fly over northern BC, the forest is turned red. Why? Because the mountain pine beetle is no longer killed in the winter because it doesn't get cold enough. And they've devastated 65 billion dollars worth of pine trees. And guess what? They've now been blown over the Rockies into Alberta. Alberta is now fighting against the mountain pine beetle, which you've never had to do. If they get into the boreal, it's right across the country now. And you know, it's because the winters are not getting cold enough to kill these animals. You had forest fires in Kelowna, devastating. People were killed, millions of dollars of property lost.

27:33Guess what? This is all then. And look at the Olympics. When Vancouver got the Olympics, I went, oh my God, do you guys, at Turin, they had to import snow because they didn't have enough snow. Well, they were doing that here? Exactly. Well, I mean, you know, winter sports are a really chancy thing. The evidence is all around us. You know, I wanted to do an ad for TV. Wayne Gretzky, everybody knows he started playing hockey because his dad would make a skating rink in the backyard. Alright, Brandford, guess what? You can't make a skating rink in Brandford anymore. You know, what's Canada without Wayne Gretzky's and hockey? Or polar bears for God's sake. It's clear that we have the longest marine coastline of any country in the world.

28:19When water gets warmer, it expands. Sea level rise will affect Canada more than any other country. And yet we have a prime minister for four years who has not even said the word climate change has never indicated that it's real and has done nothing to reduce emissions in our country. That's not leadership. And I think Canadians ought to think about that. It's every year that goes by, the problems become that much more difficult and more expensive.