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Author
Ketan Joshi is a writer, analyst, and
communications consultant focusing on clean energy and climate
change.He previously worked in climate and energy for private companies and government agencies, and now writes journalism and commentary from the front lines of climate and energy battles around the world. He is based in Oslo and consults to organisations addressing the climate crisis. |
Veteran environmentalist David Suzuki believes the time has passed us to stop climate change. He’s wrong.
As I recently wrote, “tactical” fatalism is used by fossil-friendly governments (or the fossil fuel industry itself) to culturally enforce a broad sense of helplessness.
Performative fatalism is different. This is where big-name figures and big social media accounts (often specialising in a self-described “doomer” mentality) make a habit of loudly announcing the inevitability of climate change and the pointlessness of mitigation.
These messages go ultra-viral, while their authors claim to be maligned truth-tellers issuing unpopular nuggets of reality. These people are not in league with the fossil fuel industry, but the reward mechanisms of corporate social media sites have resulted in a convergent evolution between their messages and those of coal, oil and gas companies.
A recent statement from a very significant name in the environmental movement has given them new energy.
According to veteran environmentalist David Suzuki, it is “too late” to stop climate change. In an interview with Canadian outlet iPolitics, Suzuki said: “Now, it is too late. I’ve never said this before to the media, but it’s too late … the focus on politics, economics, and law are all destined to fail because they are based around humans.”
While he says he’s not giving up over the “immediate years” and vaguely calls for “revolution”, the core message is clear in the article’s headline: “David Suzuki says the fight against climate change is lost”.
The hyperactive “climate.apocalypse” Instagram account, boasting several hundred thousand followers, describes it this way: “At 89 years old, David Suzuki says it’s too late to stop climate change. The fight is lost. It’s time to hunker down and prepare for what’s coming.” More than 100,000 likes.
These moments of popular helplessness flare up during collective instability and stress. Michael Moore released the profoundly shitty documentary Planet of the Humans right in the middle of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. It packaged the worst tropes of performative fatalism, packed with eco-fascist population-control ideas and reams of disinformation, but it was perfectly timed and had millions of viewers.
The message of climate fatalism is just as wrong as the worst climate deniers. It is absurd to claim that it’s “too late” to stop climate change. We know for sure that it is possible to prevent the release of greenhouse gases. The atmosphere heats in response to the volume of greenhouse gases we pump into it. The less we add, the less the heating.
If you accept the basic science explaining how we make things worse, you must accept the basic science of how we stop making things worse. It is an almost weirdly linear relationship:
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| Source: Figure SPM.10 in IPCC, 2021: Summary for Policymakers in Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change |
We also know that the collective policy, technology and activism efforts of our entire species since the 1990s have resulted in a noticeable reduction in reliance on burning fossil fuels, compared to the parallel universe in which we did nothing at all.
You can see this when you view the world’s carbon emissions compared to the spaghetti spread of scenarios published many years ago. We have avoided both the worst- and best-case scenarios, and have ended up somewhere in the middle:
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| Source: Robbie Andrews, Global Carbon Budget 2024 |
This recent study found implemented policies to date likely reduced global emissions by “several billion tons of [carbon dioxide equivalent] per year compared to a world without mitigation policies”, equivalent to between 4% and 15% of 2020’s total global emissions.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s Working Group Three report dedicates several pages to this, saying, “There is robust evidence with a high level of agreement that mitigation policies have had a discernible impact on emissions.”
A good chunk of this relates specifically to the surprisingly rapid growth of wind and solar, which you can see nicely reflected in the shifting assumptions in the IPCC’s own scenarios, leaning more heavily on renewable energy and electrification and less on fossil fuels, carbon capture and nuclear.
In the electricity sector in particular, supply and demand are precisely matched. If new wind power or solar power is generating something, something else is generating less. In regions of the world with growing demand, renewables are taking the edge off fossil fuel growth, and in areas with stagnant or falling demand, renewables are accelerating the demise of fossil fuels.
Either way, wind and solar are pushing out fossil fuels, and the core task at hand is switching from insufficient progress to sufficient progress. Australia’s power sector is a nice illustration of the simple fact that renewable energy actively reduces the combustion of coal and gas:
Donald Trump’s election feels reminiscent of the first year of COVID-19. A deep blanket of anxiety and instability is impacting the US and countries with close ties. In this haze, fatalists find new purchase. Whatever Suzuki’s intentions, his comments fuel real and serious feelings of helplessness and despair.
There is danger in fatalism that goes well beyond creating dejection and justifying inaction. The broad feelings of helplessness and hopelessness are a boon to both authoritarian, fascist governments and the fossil fuel industry, both of which rely on few realising how brittle their grip on power is.
There are direct links between “doomer” communities and increasingly explicit agreement with eco-fascist elements.
One prominent self-described “doomer” recently described themselves as an “eco-Nazi”: “The one and only solution to the problem — the FINAL solution — is to make Planet Earth a human-free zone.” Gaming social media algorithms to loudly reinforce the physical terror of climate impacts and then insisting there’s nothing we can do to stop those impacts feels pretty sinister to me.
The times are bad. Suzuki’s statement seems inspired more by a gut reaction to Trump than any desire for social fame. But bad times should trigger new strength in understanding our agency. Declaring climate mitigation a dead end does nothing but help those working to make that false statement true.
There is nothing mandatory about coal, oil or gas. We know that the fossil fuel economy bleeds, and it can only survive if we collectively succumb to its constantly repeated message of inevitability.
Yes, there are debates about the deeper systemic, transformational changes required in human societies to accelerate the elimination of dangerous fuels. None of that is relevant to the simple truth that it is not too late to stop fossil fuels, no matter what the doomer-boomer nexus insists.
Links
Three Decades of Climate Mitigation Policy: What Has It Delivered? Ketan Joshi
‘Carbon neutral’ is dead. Here’s what the next greenwashing battleground will look like Ketan Joshi
AI is zombifying our brains. The iNaturalist saga shows we can fight back Ketan Joshi
‘It’s too late’: David Suzuki says the fight against climate change is lost
Forget climate denial, Labor’s tactical fatalism will burn us all
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