No, David Suzuki hasn't given up on the climate fight — but his battle plan is changing
CBC
Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki made headlines last week when he said in an interview with iPolitics that humanity has lost its fight against climate change.
"We're in deep trouble," Suzuki told the outlet. "I've never said this before to the media, but it's too late."
Though he made it clear that he hasn't entirely given up, Suzuki says that rather than getting caught up in trying to force change through legal, political and economic systems, we now need to focus on community action.
"I look at what the straight science says and that is that we've passed too many boundaries," said Suzuki in an interview with CBC News on Monday.
"It's going to get hotter, there's going to be floods, and all kinds of other things that we can't predict at this point," he said. "As the temperature rises, even half a degree to a degree warmer, the repercussions ecologically are going to be immense."
Suzuki says he goes by Johan Rockström's work with the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research to define nine planetary boundaries, or safe limits for human pressure on certain critical processes.
During an interview with CBC in June about deep-sea mining, Rockström discussed how humanity is approaching tipping points when it comes to climate change.
"We have more and more scientific evidence that we are pushing these systems to the brink of potential collapse," he said.
Suzuki says that we passed the seventh boundary this year and are now in the extreme danger zone, noting that Rockström says we have five years to get out of it.
According to Suzuki, it's not likely we'll be able to pull back on these boundaries within five years.
"It's crystal clear, we're going to overshoot."
For example, the 1.5 C target in global warming set by the 2015 Paris Agreement has now been surpassed.
"And that was the level we were supposed to reach by 2100," said Suzuki, noting that we haven't capped emissions and they continue to climb.
"At some point, you have to say, we're not going to do it."
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