🔥 As the world burns, the powerful deny and delay

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By David Suzuki

We could be happier, healthier and more economically secure — if we were to act on the knowledge that many of our problems are related. For example, addressing the climate crisis will also help resolve issues around pollution, health and economic disparity.

But we’re not only up against a “polycrisis,” we’re also facing varying degrees of denial. At its most blatant, the United States president has labelled the clear and overwhelming scientific and observable evidence for human-caused climate disruption as a “hoax” and is promoting polluting, climate-altering fossil fuels over cleaner, more efficient renewable energy.

Denial in Canada may not be as blatant, but it’s still dangerous. Taking a page from former Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s playbook, Prime Minister Mark Carney is arguing that climate policies are “too expensive for Canadians.” His government is scrapping effective measures such as carbon pricing and oil and gas industry pollution caps and is going all in on increased fossil fuel development, including liquefied natural gas projects and bitumen pipelines.

Carney even boasted that Canada is producing more oil than ever, overtaken only by the U.S. and Russia.

It’s absurd. Record high temperatures and humidity are killing hundreds of thousands of people a year worldwide and sending many more to hospitals. Recent heat and storms in Europe have killed thousands. Schools have been closed, productivity hindered, events cancelled and power grids strained. Some European countries have shut down nuclear power plants because river water has warmed too much to cool them.

In India, where soaring temperatures and humidity are killing tens of thousands, entire villages have been abandoned as droughts cause crop failures.

Insanely, many in the corporate class are even denying or downplaying the severity and reality of heat waves!

We’ve seen increasingly intense wildfires destroying entire towns, droughts drying up crops, water shortages causing disease and death, sea level rise threatening major cities. Ocean surface temperatures are higher than ever, bringing “consequences for weather patterns, global climate and marine ecosystems,” the Copernicus Climate Change Service says.

But short-term profit for the sake of constantly growing the economy and gross domestic product outweighs concerns about the enormous costs of accelerating climate change. It’s suicidal.

Even though many effective solutions are being employed throughout the world — creating good jobs, making energy systems more efficient and reducing pollution and related health care costs — many governments, including Canada’s, are focusing on unproven measures that allow the fossil fuel industry to keep on profiting at our expense.

Some, such as carbon capture and storage, are based on misleading industry-sponsored research. A ProPublica investigation reveals that a widely cited 2004 Princeton University study promoting carbon capture and “natural” gas (which is mostly the potent greenhouse gas methane) as climate solutions “was significantly shaped by the British oil giant BP — one of the single global entities most responsible for causing climate change.”

“In 1997, BP abandoned climate change denial,” ProPublica reports. “Instead, the company quietly launched a far-reaching effort to intertwine oil company interests and climate science, in part by using its vast resources to shape the research that major universities undertook.”

Canadian taxpayers are sinking millions into carbon capture projects, subsidizing an obscenely profitable industry. We’re also subsidizing liquefied natural gas developments.

Research by ProPublica and Drilled concludes, however, that carbon capture technology “faces financial and technical hurdles and is unlikely to everwork at the scale needed to avert extreme warming.”

As for LNG, research by the David Suzuki Foundation and others shows that deadly, climate-altering methane emissions are underreported and that, with a predicted glut, major projects could enter an oversupplied market by the time they’re completed.

Meanwhile, the costs of renewable energy and storage technologies are dropping as efficiency improves, making them more cost-effective than fossil fuels.

Why do we stay on this destructive path, which leads to more pollution, extreme weather events, water shortages, health crises and wealth inequality?

It’s about power and profit. Centralized energy systems and the fuels to run them are easy to monopolize and control. Energy from sun and wind is readily available everywhere and advancing energy storage technologies are making it available at any time.

It’s past time to end the enormous power of the destructive fossil fuel industry. The survival of civilization and our species is at stake.

David Suzuki is a scientist, broadcaster, author and co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation. Written with David Suzuki Foundation Senior Writer and Editor Ian Hanington.

Learn more at davidsuzuki.org.

REFERENCES:

Polycrisis:

https://davidsuzuki.org/story/connected-crises-contain-opportunities-for-a-better-world

Former Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s playbook:

https://davidsuzuki.org/story/addressing-global-warming-is-an-economic-necessity

Prime Minister Mark Carney is arguing:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/carney-trudeau-carbon-emissions-climate-change-9.7254619

Carney even boasted:

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/business/politics/2026/06/30/old-emission-plan-would-have-been-opportunity-to-pull-canada-apart-carney

Killing hundreds of thousands of people a year:

https://unsdg.un.org/latest/stories/summer-heatwave-helping-communities-beat-heat