Is Suzuki right that it's 'too late'? We are in an era of simultaneous wins and losses

[The following piece was originally published by Canada’s National Observer here.]

I didn’t mean for it to happen.

I was watching a Disney show on my laptop with my 10-year-old son. But when the show ended and I closed the tab, the next open tab filled my screen. It was an article from iPolitics with the neck-throttling headline: “‘It’s too late’: David Suzuki says the fight against climate change is lost.”

“What?” cried my son. “David Suzuki said that!”

I was caught off-guard. “It’s complicated,” I stammered, that last refuge of scoundrels. “He is wrestling with some despair after trying for so many years.”

He’s in good company. Truth is, the article caught many of us off-guard, if my social network is any indication. Some of its readers concur, while others were angry.

“I’m really annoyed about that Suzuki thing. It’s irresponsible,” a colleague texted me.

“He is saying out loud the private thoughts that many of us have all the time,” wrote Devika Shah, executive director of Environment Funders Canada on LinkedIn. “It was a tough read, but we humans are where we are. For my fellow climate peeps who think he is wrong to say this – please recognize that he's earned the right.”

While we all know Suzuki as a communicator, he is firstly a scientist and is speaking some basic scientific truths. He’s also trying to sound an alarm and rouse us out of a collective stupor, and he’s not wrong to want to do that – while polling indicates Canadians are worried about climate change, we are clearly not as scared as we should be.

The scientific community as a whole is worried. The situation is grim – temperature increases are happening faster than predicted, extreme weather events are escalating, planetary boundaries are being breached. The assaults on the people and places we love aren’t a distant threat somewhere else, sometime in the future – they are here and now.

Governments throw in the towel

I too am losing faith. All of us who work on climate have long walked a razor’s edge between hope and despair, and the last few months (or years) have made it near impossible to keep one’s balance. We are all wrestling with the jarring and growing disconnect between climate events and our politics.

President Trump’s brutal roll-back of climate actions south of the border is throwing us all for a loop. But even in our own country, our federal and provincial governments are acting like a bunch of surrender monkeys, walking away from their climate commitments. Our official climate plans are in a shambles and riddled with incoherence, as governments continue to approve new fossil fuel infrastructure while abandoning carbon pricing, emission caps and, potentially, vehicle mandates. The defeatism is hard to take.

The complicated psychology of now

All that said, I would put the current predicament differently than saying it’s “too late.” More accurately, it both is and isn’t too late.

Those of us trying to move the public to action must hold with care the collective psychology of the moment, and engage in responsible truth-telling. For example, the leaders we most remember from the Second World War were outstanding communicators who managed to walk a difficult line – they were forthright with the public about the severity of the threat, while still managing to impart hope. That’s what this moment requires. We are motivated by a complicated and highly personal mix of hope and fear, love and anger. All of which needs to be tapped to win this fight.

There is no place for false optimism. But as the climate scientist Kate Marvel says, this battle for our lives doesn’t need optimists, it needs heroes — people of courage, which she defines as “the resolve to do well without the assurance of a happy ending.”

Ten years ago, the countries of the world signed the Paris Agreement and committed to do what they could to keep global temperature rise below 1.5 degrees Celsius. Sadly, on that score, it is indeed too late. Admitting this defeat is not something that should be done nonchalantly; it is a brutal indictment of us all. In Paris, the rallying cry of Pacific Island nations and others from the Global South was “1.5 to stay alive.” That threshold is indeed existential for them, and we have failed them.

But the climate fight is not something we either win or lose. As the saying goes, it functions as a “matter of degrees.” Each incremental increase in temperature comes with devastating losses to the people and places we love. But it is also the case that each incremental increase we prevent saves millions. While we are already witnessing the death and destruction that comes with 1.5 degrees, a 2-degree world – which can still be prevented – will be that much worse, while a 3-degree world is unimaginable, and a 4-degree world is not one any of us would want our children and grandchildren to inhabit. To not continue to do everything we can to avoid that next incremental increase is obscene. 

The awkwardness of the current period is that, for the next many years, we are going to experience both losses and wins simultaneously.

Yes, we need to be eyes wide open to the devastating extreme events now underway. But we also need be alive to the hopeful trends: China looks to have peaked its GHG emissions, years ahead of schedule; Europe is driving down emissions much faster than is Canada; in Norway, 97 per cent of new vehicle sales are now zero-emission; in the UK, emissions are now lower than at any time since the start of the industrial revolution in the late 1800’s; and around the world, the adoption of renewable energy is exploding.

The point being, the struggle to tackle the climate emergency is a steep climb down, not a cliff.

This September, the global climate movement will be trying to recapture some of the lost momentum of recent post-pandemic years. At rallies across Canada and around the world, under the banner “Draw the Line,” people are being invited to shake off their feelings of isolation and join this call:

“Floods, droughts, storms and heatwaves are getting worse. Food and energy costs are going up while a few billionaires profit and prop up the industries that harm people and pollute our lands, air and waters. Indigenous leaders from the Amazon to the Pacific have spoken out: our future is at stake. To solve this crisis, the answer is us – the people. … This September we will come together to draw the line against injustice, pollution, and violence – and for a future built on peace, clean energy and fairness. This world is ours. This is our line to draw.”

The Canadian Day of Action is set for September 20. I’m still down for the fight, and I hope you are too. See you there.

[You can hear Seth talking about the ideas in this piece on CBC Radio’s Early Edition here.]