Australian Agenda
17
th
October
David Suzuki
Sky News
Australian Agenda
David Suzuki
17th
October, 2010
Interview with David Suzuki, Environmentalist
Australian Agenda program, 17th
October, 2010
Peter Van Onselen: Welcome back. You’re watching Australian Agenda. He’s in Australia now
to promote his new book, Legacy, which is a compilation of some of his thoughts over the years
over 40 books about the environment and science, Canadian academic, David Suzuki. He’s
joining us out of Melbourne. Thanks very much for your time, professor.
David Suzuki: It’s good to be here.
Peter Van Onselen: Can I ask you, we’ve got a debate in this country about whether or not we
should be a big Australia. There’s the argument that we need larger population growth, coming
particularly from business, to stimulate economic growth as well. There’s also the issue of
combating ageing, which is something that is talked about in a lot of countries around the world
as a reason for higher fertility rates. That’s quite contrary to your position, isn’t it?
David Suzuki: Absolutely. There are far too many of us in the world, but especially in the
industrialised world where our consumption per person means that we have a reach that goes
far beyond the confines of Australia. So I just came back from Japan, where they have a
population of, what, 120 million I think. I said, look, you guys should be down around 30 million.
They’re all worried, should we use immigration to bring people in and keep the economy going
by expanding our population? Every country seems to be concerned now, the industrialised
world, about an ageing population, a decreasing labour force and the need to keep the economy
growing by having more and more people being productive. It can’t go on! We just don’t have
the resources, the nation can’t support that. We’ve got to adapt in a different way, it seems to
me, to that reality. You can’t keep using immigration to prime the economic pump.
Paul Kelly: Just on that particular point, David Suzuki, you’ve argued this is an urgent problem,
there are far too many people in the world. How do we address this in an urgent sense? How
on earth do we stop the growth rate and get numbers down?
David Suzuki: We know that what the best contraceptive is, that is you empower women, you
educate them and give them a bit of economic security, and birth rates drop. We in countries
like Canada and Australia love to say, well the problem is the brown, black and yellow people
are breeding like flies and that’s a problem. But wait a minute. It’s true, that’s where the
population growth is going on, but you have to take into account more than just numbers of
humans. It’s how much do we use per person. So if you want to compare us to India or China,
you still have to multiply by 20 or 40 to get Chinese or Indian equivalents of your population.
You want to compare us to Bangladesh or Somalia, you’ve got to multiply by 60 or 80. There
it’s very clear, we in the rich countries are exploiting the vast bulk of the planet’s resources, and
putting out the vast bulk of its waste and toxic emissions. So the challenge is the
Australian Agenda
17
th
October
David Suzuki
hyperconsumption of the industrialised countries. Here is the challenge. Most of our
economies now are built on serving consumption. So if I say that we are hyperconsumers and
we have to begin to reduce our consumption, the business people have a very tough time with
that concept.
Peter Van Onselen: Professor Suzuki, you were an early comer to climate change and the
need for action on it. In this country here in Australia, it’s a really divisive debate, internally of
parties as well as between major parties. My question for you is, how do you think you actually
break through the political realities of just how difficult this is, to achieve the kind of consensus
that can make any kind of action of the like you might want?
David Suzuki: That’s a really tough one. But I’ll tell you. In 1988, that’s the year I first came to
Australia, and it was Australian scientists, I was invited to meet with the Commission for the
Future. I don’t know if this organisation exists anymore, but they showed me the information.
That was the first time for me, I mean I’d known about climate change long before ’88, but I
never took it seriously as an immediate, urgent issue until I came to Australia. Around the
world, concern was very strong. A group of atmosphere scientists meeting in North America
said, we are causing global warming and we’ve got to reduce emissions by 20% in 15 years.
Now we did nothing about that. Why? The reality is the fossil fuel industry and a few extreme
right wing people like the Koch brothers in the United States began to pour tens of millions of
dollars into a campaign of confusion. So they began to create phoney baloney environmental
sounding groups, Coalition for Green Industries, and they began to set up blog sites and
support a few sceptics to say this is junk science, it’s not really happening. They’ve been
unbelievably successful at creating this sense that those scientists really aren’t telling the truth,
that they’re spinning it for all kinds of other reasons. The public is beginning to say, hey we
can’t trust those scientists, and the problem isn’t real. So for a group of politicians to try to act in
the way that is needed is a very risky thing in light of this powerful lobbying block by the fossil
fuel industry. I personally think that what we need to do is charge people in the fossil fuel
industry with an intergenerational crime. They’ve known for decades now that global warming
caused by burning fossil fuels is real, and that it’s creating a real problem. In the name of profit,
they have continued to create this climate of deception and confusion. I think that’s criminal.
Paul Kelly: What sort of crime should they be charged with? And would you like to see them
being put in jail?
David Suzuki: There’s a group in Europe now that is looking to see whether or not there is a
legal mechanism for crimes that in fact are committed with implications for future generations.
This is a brand new area, but I think this is something well worth investigating.
Paul Kelly: You don’t think this would be liable to some sort of abuse, do you?
David Suzuki: Well, we need a mechanism to at least point out that there is some kind of
criminal activity. If you read a book like Climate Cover-Up or Merchants of Doubt that show that
the fossil fuel industry has known now for two decades this is real, and that it is being caused by
burning fossil fuels, and then to deliberately campaign- And look at what happened with the
tobacco industry. We now know the tobacco industry knew the evidence was in about the
dangers of smoking, and continued a campaign to downplay the reality of that. What has
happened with them? They have now had to pay tens of billions of dollars for that campaign. I
think the same ought to be done with the fossil fuel industry. In terms of what do we do in
politics, that’s going to take politicians who are concerned with more than just what payoff will
there be before the next election. The problem now is that a politician’s view is determined by
Australian Agenda
17
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October
David Suzuki
that very short horizon of the next election. In Australia, that’s less than three years. So
whatever they do has to have some kind of payoff in order for them to claim the benefits of what
they’ve done. That’s very difficult in an issue like climate change.
Piers Akerman: Dr. Suzuki, you once said that scepticism was the best lesson that science
could teach, and now you’re telling the world that we should not listen to climate sceptics, as
they’ve been branded. You say in your book that man has been responsible for extreme
weather events, but I have yet to see any evidence produced by any climatologist around the
world that a single hurricane, earthquake or tidal wave has been produced by anthropogenic
global warming.
David Suzuki: I think you’re reading into that book what I did not say. All of the evidence from
the standpoint of the climatologists is that as we begin to trap more heat on the planet, and
that’s physical reality, even a sceptic like Bjørn Lomborg admits that that’s a reality, that climate
change from trapping heat is physically a reality. But climatologists are very reluctant to say
that Hurricane Katrina for example was the direct result of the greenhouse gases that have
accumulated, because you can’t make a concrete tie-in of cause and effect. They simply have
to say this is the kind of event that you expect.
Piers Akerman: But you made that claim in your book.
David Suzuki: You show me where I made that claim in the book. I deny that.
Piers Akerman: I don’t have it on the table.
David Suzuki: Right. You’re reading into it what I did not say. Nobody can say that particular
weather or an event is a direct result of the changes that have gone on. We can’t do that. It’s
something that you just have to say is statistical correlation.
Piers Akerman: Inasmuch as you’re totally opposed to fossil fuel energies, are you a supporter
of nuclear energy?
David Suzuki: No. I say that if we’re talking about a sustainable energy future, then by
definition both fossil and nuclear fuels are finite, and they are not sustainable because they’re
going to be exhausted. When burning them or using nuclear and using fossil fuels creates
problems at the end, then it seems to me that it’s crazy to put your emphasis then on a non-
renewable, problem causing fuel. The obvious area to go in, and I’m saying that obviously
we’re going to have to use fossil fuels for a considerable length of time, because so much of our
infrastructure in our society is built on using that. But when I come to a country like Australia
and see what Australia’s got that Canadians would die to get, namely lots of sunlight, and you’re
still bellyaching about the lack of an alternative for nuclear or fossil fuels, it just doesn’t make
any sense to me. This is a huge opportunity for this country, because you’ve got something a
lot of countries like us would love to have. But when I come to a place like Melbourne or
Sydney, I have to still look very hard to see any solar panels anywhere!
Peter Van Onselen: Dr. Suzuki, we are out of time. I’ll give you a chance, perhaps unusually
for Melbourne, to get out of the studio and get into the sunlight and enjoy the Australian
weather. We appreciate you joining us on Australian Agenda. Thanks very much for your
company.
David Suzuki: Thank you.
Australian Agenda
17
th
October
David Suzuki
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