By David Suzuki with Faisal Moola

I’ve heard economists boast that their discipline is based on a fundamental human impulse: selfishness. They claim that we act first out of self-interest. I can agree, depending on how we define self. To some, “self” extends beyond the individual person to include immediate family. Others might include community, an ecosystem, or all other species.

I list ecosystem and other species deliberately because we have become a narcissistic, self-indulgent species. We believe we are at the centre of the world, and everything around us is an “opportunity” or “resource” to exploit. Our needs or demands trump all other possibilities. This is an anthropocentric view of life.

Thus, when faced with a choice of logging or conserving a forest, we focus on the potential economic benefits of logging or not logging. When the economy experiences a downturn, we demand that nature pay for it. We relax pollution standards, increase logging or fishing above sustainable levels, or (as the federal government has decreed) lift the requirement of environmental assessments for new projects.

A fundamentally different perspective on our place in the world is called “biocentrism”. In this view, life’s diversity encompasses all and we humans are a part of it, ultimately deriving everything we need from it. Viewed this way, our well-being, indeed our survival, depends on the health and well-being of the natural world. I believe this view better reflects reality.

The most pernicious aspect of our anthropocentrism has been to elevate economics to the highest priority. We act as if the economy is some kind of natural force that we must all placate or serve in every way possible. But wait! Some things, like gravity, the speed of light, entropy, and the first and second laws of thermodynamics, are forces of nature. There’s nothing we can do about them except live within the boundaries they delimit.

But the economy, the market, currency – we created these entities, and if they don’t work, we should look beyond trying to get them back up and running the way they were. We should fix them or toss them out and replace them.

When economists and politicians met in Bretton Woods, Maine, in 1944, they faced a world where war had devastated countrysides, cities, and economies. So they tried to devise solutions. They pegged currency to the American greenback and looked to the (terrible) twins, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, to get economies going again.

The postwar era saw amazing recovery in Europe and Japan, as well as a roaring U.S. economy based on supplying a cornucopia of consumer goods. But the economic system we’ve created is fundamentally flawed because it is disconnected from the biosphere in which we live. We cannot afford to ignore these flaws any longer.

Flaw 1: Beyond its obvious value as the source of raw materials like fish, lumber, and food, nature performs all kinds of “services” that allow us to survive and flourish. Nature creates topsoil, the thin skin that supports all agriculture. Nature removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and returns oxygen. Nature takes nitrogen from the air and fixes it to enrich soil. Nature filters water as it percolates through soil. Nature transforms sunlight into molecules that we need for energy in our bodies. Nature degrades the carcasses of dead plants and animals and disperses the atoms and molecules back into the biosphere. Nature pollinates flowering plants.

I could go on, but I think you catch my drift. We cannot duplicate what nature does around the clock, but we dismiss those services as “externalities” in our economy.

Flaw 2: To compound the problem, economists believe that because there are no limits to human creativity, there need be no limits to the economy. But the economy depends on having healthy people, and health depends on nature’s services, which are ignored in economic calculations. Our home is the biosphere, the thin layer of air, water, and land where all life exists. And that’s it; it can’t grow. We are witnessing the collision of the economic imperative to grow indefinitely with the finite services that nature performs. It’s time to get our perspective and priorities right. Biocentrism is a good place to start.

It’s time for a Bretton Woods II.

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Dr. David Suzuki is a scientist, broadcaster, author, and chair of the David Suzuki Foundation and Dr. Faisal Moola is the Director of Science at the David Suzuki Foundation.

Take David Suzuki’s Nature Challenge and learn more at www.davidsuzuki.org.

 

By David Suzuki with Faisal Moola

If you’re a Canadian taxpayer, you’re now the proud part owner of a failing automobile company, thanks to the federal and Ontario governments. They’re generously giving General Motors $10.5 billion of your money for an 11.7 per cent share in the company.

Former CIBC World Markets chief economist Jeff Rubin calls it an “investment in obsolescence.” The author of Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization, recently told the Tyee news website, “We should be investing in the future, not the past, making a huge capital investment to build buses and public transit.”

He’s not alone in his thinking. South of the border, where the U.S. government is giving GM a whopping $50 billion for a 60 per cent share of the company, filmmaker Michael Moore wrote, “The only way to save GM is to kill GM.”

He goes onto say that doesn’t mean killing the infrastructure. “If we allow the shutting down and tearing down of our auto plants, we will sorely wish we still had them when we realize that those factories could have built the alternative energy systems we now desperately need,” he writes. “And when we realize that the best way to transport ourselves is on light rail and bullet trains and cleaner buses, how will we do this if we've allowed our industrial capacity and its skilled workforce to disappear?”

How indeed? One thing is certain: We don’t want GM to go back to “business as usual”. This is a company that has fought every progressive move to improve safety and reduce the environmental impact of vehicles, from seat belts and air bags to fuel-efficiency standards. The usual argument has been that any progressive move would drive the price of cars up to the point where the company would go out of business. Well, guess what? Maybe if GM had spent more money on keeping up with the times than on lobbying and court challenges and building SUVS and Hummers, it wouldn’t be facing bankruptcy today.

GM executives have also argued in the past that the markets should dictate their actions and governments should stay out of the way, but they now seem to have made a u-turn when it comes to government involvement!

Well, we now own part of GM. Shouldn’t we have some say in what becomes of it?  Will the U.S. and Canadian governments show some imagination and foresight and turn this crisis into an opportunity?

Mr. Rubin and Mr. Moore are right: Our future is in fuel-efficient cars, buses, and trains, and in green energy. (And even private automobiles may eventually be a thing of the past; the idea of using of a tonne of metal and many litres of fossil fuel to get one person to the grocery store or work is more than a bit absurd.)

We often hear arguments that a major shift in our manufacturing base is not possible – it will be too costly and take too much time. But, as Michael Moore points out, in 1942, GM quickly switched from building cars to producing planes, tanks, and weapons for the war effort. The emergency we face today is no less severe; in fact, it is more so. And we have better technology now.

Likewise, when the Soviet Union launched its first Sputnik satellite in 1957, the U.S. spared no amount of money or effort to get people into space and eventually onto the moon.

And despite arguments that we can’t afford green technologies, governments didn’t have much trouble finding billions – or trillions – of dollars to bail out banks and car companies that were largely the authors of their own problems. Where are our priorities?

The need for a cleaner future is here. The technology is here. The opportunity is here. All that’s required is some will and imagination from governments and corporations. We can no longer rely on diminishing fossil fuel supplies. Our very survival depends on developing more sustainable technologies, transportation, and products that don’t pollute the air, water, and soil.

We don’t need more Cadillacs and Hummers. We need a new way of looking at our world.

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Dr. David Suzuki is a scientist, broadcaster, author, and chair of the David Suzuki Foundation and Dr. Faisal Moola is the Director of Science at the David Suzuki Foundation.

Take David Suzuki’s Nature Challenge and learn more at www.davidsuzuki.org.

I used to love to fly, but it's not as much fun as it used to be. Why? Because I've learned that from an environmental perspective, flying is one of the worst ways to travel. A round trip from my local airport to Toronto (1:45 each way in a small jet) produces about 450 kg of CO2 emissions - nearly half a tonne! (Note: this is the average of 4 sources)

What to do? The BEST solution is to avoid flying altogether by using videoconferencing, teleconferencing and webinars when possible; and vacationing near home.

And when flying is unavoidable, fly light: critically assess every ounce you take with you, because every ounce has a carbon footprint in the air. Plus buy a carbon offset to counterbalance the impact of your flight - a small premium for the health of the planet. For more on this, click here.

 

In the news
Last Wednesday was Ash Wednesday, for Christians the start of 40 days of fasting prior to Easter.A Canadian organization is suggesting a carbon fast (with weekly actions and targets), just as a sobering UN report suggests that global food production may fall 25% by 2050 as a result of climate change and other environmental pressures.

 

By David Suzuki with Faisal Moola

As I approach my 73rd birthday, I’ve been thinking about my children and grandchildren and what lies ahead for them. We trumpet the enormous scientific advances and technological innovations of the 20th century, but is the world a better place than when I was born?

Reflecting on what we leave to our grandchildren, I have to answer with a resounding no! Yes, things have changed a lot in my lifetime, sometimes for the better. When I was born, there were no transoceanic phone lines, organ transplants, jet planes, satellites, television, oral contraceptives, photocopiers, CDs, computers, antibiotics, cellphones… Today we have seasonal fruits and vegetables year-round, 24-hour television channels, and bottled water shipped halfway around the world. And stuff! My god, the stuff we can buy. We can choose from more than 200 brands of breakfast cereals, and last year’s cellphones not only seem old-fashioned, they’re designed to be thrown away. Pills not only offer relief from the horror of erectile dysfunction, but they can now be taken daily to make us ready for action at all times. This is progress?

How quaint my childhood seems today. On hearing me talk about what we didn’t have back then, children stare in amazement that anyone can remember such a primitive way of life. “What did you do?” they ask, struggling to imagine a world without television, computers, or cellphones. Yes, mine was an ancient civilization, now extinct.

It’s not that I don’t appreciate many of the advances. When I was a teenager in the 1950s, I developed pneumonia and was near death when the doctor gave me a shot of penicillin. The next day, I was out of bed running around. It was truly a miracle drug. My first portable computer in the 1980s allowed me to write and send my columns to the Globe and Mail from all over the world. And when my children went away to university in the 1990s, I could stay in touch by email.

Yes, our world now provides a cornucopia of wondrous consumer goods. But at what cost? When I was a child, back doors would open at 5:30 or 6 o’clock as parents called kids for supper. We were out playing in grassy fields, ditches, or creeks. We drank from rivers and lakes and caught and ate fish, all without worrying about what chemicals might be in them. When I was a child, the oceans were still rich with marine life, places like the Amazon and Congo were still unexplored ecosystems, and nuclear weapons and the arms race were still to come.

When I was born in 1936, just over two billion people lived on the Earth. The population has tripled since then. Each of us now carries dozens of toxic chemicals embedded within us, cancer has become the biggest killer, and we have poisoned our air, water, and soil. The human rush to exploit resources or take over territory has devastated terrestrial and marine plants and animals.

Yes, we leave to our children and grandchildren a world of technological marvels and personal hyperconsumption, but at the expense of community, species diversity, and clean air, water, and soil. I don’t remember feeling deprived or bored as a child. My friends were neighbours and our surroundings were rich with biological treasures for us to discover and explore. Almost all of our food was locally grown without the aid of chemicals. And growing up, we were attuned to the impact of weather and climate; we looked forward to the seasons and the changes they brought.

Have I become a grumpy old man who sees only the past as wonderful and decries the modern? I don’t think so, but I mourn the passing of a time when community and neighbours were a vital part of social and economic life, a time when nature was still rich. I know we can’t change the past, but together we can create a brighter future for our children and grandchildren. We know where the problems lie, and science offers many solutions. Now it’s time for action. If I’ve learned one lesson in my 73 years, it’s that everyone, including those in government and business, must pitch in if we want to change things for the better.

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Dr. David Suzuki is a scientist, broadcaster, author, and chair of the David Suzuki Foundation and Dr. Faisal Moola is the Director of Science at the David Suzuki Foundation.

Take David Suzuki’s Nature Challenge and learn more at www.davidsuzuki.org.

 

I'm writing this in response to Karen's comment to a previous blog asking about video-conferencing (VC) as a substitute or supplement to air travel. For me I believe that it is and will increasingly be a supplement to air travel but not a substitute...

Karen,

Thanks for the comments on my previous blog.

 Aviation is an industry that is a critical part of the global community we live in. ATAG - the Air Tranporation Action Group (www.enviro.aero) states that 85% of all air travel is essential (either for business purposes, or to visit disparate family members). As well, air travel directly and indirectly accounts for the generation of 8% of the world Gross Domestic Product (GDP).  (I'll walk through those numbers in more detail in a future blog)

However, VC and teleco's are now a practical alternative to some face-2-face meetings.

At Bombardier we also video-conference and hold innumerable telephone conferences. My own view is that v-c may be good as a substitute for some but not the majority of face-2-face (f2f) meetings. As a rule, I suggest that in the future maybe at most 1 of 3 meetings that might have been accomplished by flying might be replaced by v-c and teleco's. However, there is a time and a need for f2f meetings. For example, I work with the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) on many of their CAEP (Committee on Aviation Environmental Protection) working groups. We have set meetings, alternating between Europe and North America, usually 2 or 4 per year f2f, and in between we do our individual work for the task force and hook up by teleco. So that does reduce costs, but we need to know who we're working with, and spend real time with eachother to build trust and maintain networks. I expect that's true even within an global or x-Canada organization.

Relatedly, when I was working on my PhD more than a decade ago now the researchers and pop'r writing at the time predicted that all we'd be doing a year from now (any now!) would be v-c and teleco's. I'm still waiting for that to happen. I like some of the new technologies but it's still not the same as f2f.

The other comment, getting back to the 8% GDP statistic is just to say that cargo is a large part of the aviation economy, and it either travels by air or it doesn't. Video-conferencing won't make a difference on that segment of the industry. Should we all embrace a shop-locally, eat-locally, 100 mile philosophy, then maybe even the current increasing growth of air-cargo travel will change over time...

In terms of your second query regarding forecasting traffic: it is my sense that there only a few individuals and fewer companies that are cutting back on travel due to concerns about emissions and climate change. However, you are right that they are cutting back because of the cost of travel...In that respect, yes, all aviation forecasts anticipate that air travel in the near term (say 10 years) will be impacted by the rising fuel prices. My forecast, as an example, explicitly anticipates that: the number of older, less fuel-efficient planes in the commercial passenger market will retire at an accelerated rate. It also discusses how, esp. in North America, airlines will 'right size' their fleets, i.e. put appropriate sized aircraft on routes to minimize the number of empty seats. Other options include reducing the frequency of flights on a particular route, reducing weight within the cabin, discouraging passengers from bring "extra" bags along (through fees for 1st and 2nd bags),and making the price of a ticket reflect the actual cost of flying.

Let me know how you find your VC going. I'm interested in others' experience with it. I'd be interested also in knowing how reader's are dealing with increased fuel prices in general, both for business and family travel; are you cutting back, where; are you teleco'ing more, how's that working out?

Steven. 

There is a lot of myth, controversy and confusion about the role of aviation in today’s global environment and the industry’s commitment to environmental sustainability. On both sides of the fence you can find ‘scare-mongering’, and ‘green washing’.

 

Part of what I hope to do during this blog is address many of the issues, controversial and non-controversial, that surround aviation and the environment. The industry itself, to me, is much like Canadians in general; they rarely claim the bragging rights they are due, rather they just keep pushing forward doing their job, assuming that most of us ‘will get it’, or appreciate it.  In terms of the environment, however, it is clear that we ALL need to be better informed on the issues, the accomplishments, the risks of the status-quo.

 

Before I start, you need to know that my bias is that I work for a large Canadian aerospace manufacturing firm. My overall job is macro-economic analysis and strategy relating to the aerospace;  and one component of that job is environmental sustainability and aviation.

 

So here’s a view of the industry from 30,000 feet:

 

The air transport industry generates a total of 32 million jobs globally:

            5.5 million direct jobs in airlines and airport industry

            780,000 jobs in civil aerospace; airplane and engine manufactures, etc.

8.3 million indirect jobs through purchases of goods and services from companies in its supply chain

            2.0 million jobs through spending by industry employees

            17.1 million jobs through air transport’s catalytic impact on tourism.

 

Translating that, this means that the air transport industry alone is bigger than most developing nations and countries in economic terms. It generates some 8% of worldwide gross domestic product or some $3,560 billion US. (Aviation manufacturing impact in Ontario, Canada amounts to some $7 Billion (CAD) annually and more than 25,000 jobs). Globally, the aviation industry transports 2.2 billion people annually AND represents 35% of all freight transported worldwide.

 

These are not insignificant numbers and are used to provide you, the reader, with a sense of the scope and importance of aviation in a global community. Clearly, the industry is not going to disappear. Rather it needs to address environmental issues in a means that is sustainable, in terms of economics and society. 

 

Here’s the current aviation environment environment”

 

            The research from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes that air transportations’ contribution to climate change represents some 2% of the man-made CO₂ emissions worldwide and is expected to grow to 3% by 2050.

 

The amount of passenger traffic in the next 20 years is expected to double and then likely to double again by 2050. The difference between the expected CO_{2 .}growth rate and traffic growth suggests that the industry has already begun addressing aviation environment concerns. For example:

• aircraft entering today’s fleet are 70% more fuel-efficient ago and;
• 20 decibels quieter (i.e. 75% quieter) than 40 years

 

The international aviation community, in the form of IATA (International Air Transportation Association) has committed itself to “working towards” carbon-neutral growth and to no overall increase in carbon emissions in spite of traffic growth, as a first step towards a carbon-free future. Lofty goals, the next few years will demonstrate the nature and extent of the international communities’ commitment in the form of giving form and developing action plans to meet these goals.

 

That’s the big picture, there are more details, and more to talk about moving forward!

 

Please post comments and questions. If you want detailed citations, contact me directly.