Climate Crisis and Capitalism: David Suzuki on Why We Must Rethink Everything

0:00 In 1988, the world's top scientists warned us climate change was our greatest threat. After nuclear war, we heard the alarm, but we hit the snooze button year after year, decade after decade. Meanwhile, emissions climbed, ecosystems crumbled, and tipping points passed quietly. David Suzuki, once hopeful, now sounds a different note. It might be too late. He doesn't blame science. The evidence has been clear all along. He blames the systems politics obsessed with power and economies addicted to endless growth. We choose short-term profits over long-term survival, quarterly gains over planetary health.

0:40 Suzuki says If these systems won't change, then maybe we should stop pretending. Stop pretending we're gonna solve the crisis and start bracing for what's coming because if we keep prioritizing money over nature, giving up might not be a choice. It'll be a consequence. We're gonna react to David Suzuki's controversial comment on a CBC news radio station that he made, and we're gonna talk about. Maybe he regrets a little of it and says that we still should keep fighting. We're gonna talk about all this stuff on this episode of the How to Protect the Ocean Podcast. Let's start the show. Hey everybody. Welcome back to another exciting episode of the How to Protect the Ocean Podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin, and this is the podcast where you find out what's happening with the ocean, how you could speak up for the ocean, and what you can do to live for a better ocean by taking action.

1:29 And on today's episode, we're gonna be talking about something that is very familiar to a lot of conservationists, a lot of ocean scientists, and just wildlife scientists in general. We're gonna be talking about climate change and how we feel at certain times. When we discuss climate change, whether it's in an interview, whether it is with somebody in our family or in our friend group, and how we talk about it, because there's sometimes where we talk very positively. We're very optimistic of the changes that we're seeing maybe behind the scenes or in our work, and we see little changes get bigger and bigger and bigger, and every once in a while we see a huge change, whether it be in policy, a government, what have you, it doesn't matter. We start to see this change and other times we just start to be really realistic.

2:11 And we start to really wonder all these things that are happening over time and are happening recently. Whether we're really serious about protecting the environment and are we serious about protecting the environment over the economy and politics? That seems to have changed what we used to do compared to what we do now and not for the better and not to help climate change. There was a recent interview. That was done by David Suzuki. If you don't know who David Suzuki is, David Suzuki is a renowned Canadian geneticist, environmentalist, author and science broadcaster, best known for his lifelong dedication to promoting environmental awareness and climate action. Born in 1936 in Vancouver, British Columbia.

2:52 He began his career as a geneticist, earning a PhD in zoology from the University of Chicago, and later became a professor at the University of British Columbia. Suzuki rose to prominence as the longtime host of the nature of things, a CBC television program that brought science and environmental issues into Canadian households for over four decades. Think about David Attenborough. That was Canadian. He authored more than 50 books, including The Sacred Balance and a co-founded the David Suzuki Foundation, a nonprofit focused. On the environmental research, education, and advocacy over the years, David Suzuki has become one of the most influential voices in the global environmental movement, known for speaking out on climate change, biodiversity loss, indigenous rights, and the failures of modern political and economic systems to protect.

3:39 The natural world. His work has earned him numerous awards, including the Order of Canada, the UNESCO Coalinga Prize for science communication, and multiple honorary degrees. Despite controversy and criticism from some political and industrial groups, Suzuki remains a fearless advocate for urgent climate action, social justice, and to the protection of Earth's life support systems. That is the basis of it. I grew up watching David Suzuki on the nature of things, a CBC classic, and I don't know if it still continues today, but David Suzuki has been that voice. When I first came out with Speak Up for Blue, I had this list of ocean leaders that I wanted to discuss and I would contact each one of them and say, Hey.

4:20 Can I put your name down on my website as an ocean leader where if they click on your name, it'll go to the website and give a bio. So that one was gonna lead to the David Suzuki Foundation or others that I really admired, and I had a whole list on the website. I don't have that now, but I have to admit, when I contacted David Suzuki Foundation and David Suzuki. This was during a very controversial time in Canada. Anyway, the Prime Minister was Prime Minister Harper. Uh, he was a staunch conservative, very right wing, very pro oil and gas and natural resource exploitation. And David Suzuki and him had a back and forth over the airwaves and not like face to face, but they definitely were critical of each other. In fact, prime Minister Harper wanted almost at one point called them an eco-terrorist, which was incredibly irresponsible of a politician when they don't hear what they want.

5:06 We probably heard that before recently. If they don't hear what they like, they start to criticize and they start to call people terrorists, especially on the ecological level. So it was a very tense time in environmental and political and economical sort of time period, if you really think about it back in the early 2010s to about 2015 until the trio government got in. Now, since then. It's been very interesting to see the progression that we've made towards climate change and changing and reducing climate change, as well as kind of going away from it at the same time here in Canada. Our economy is based on natural resources. Our major natural resource that we export is oil and gas. There are a lot of battles within on the East coast and on the west coast, especially on the East coast for, you know, extracting oil and gas, and of course in Alberta and even Northern Saskatchewan, to be able to take out the natural gas as well as oil, the tar sands, to export more oil and give more profits, not only the province, but also to Canada in general.

6:06 And so when oil prices dip down, our economy dips down. When they go up, we go. And sometimes you can't make two sense of it. I can't make two sense of it a lot of the times, and that just happens every once in a while and we have to deal with it. Unfortunately, as we progress and we continue to see decisions being made for politics and economical reasons and not protection of environment seems to be always third place or even less. We start to see more climate change consequences happening. There was an interview that was done on CBC news that I'm gonna be reacting to in just a moment. I wanna set it up a little bit. David Suzuki is speaking to a CBC host. It's almost looks like CBC radio, but now they're putting all on tv. Of course, YouTube, I'm putting this on YouTube.

6:47 Everything. A talk show can always be in video as well. And you can see throughout the interview that David Suzuki is not happy. He is frustrated. He is just seeing the reality of climate change and the decisions we've made towards reducing climate change or lack thereof. And so he talks about that. You're gonna see a very frustrated person. I want you to remember this guy is a scientist, a world-renowned scientist. He's taught many years. He lives what he preaches and he's a very good science communicator. But you can tell he's older now. He's in his eighties and he's fed up. He's fed up with the decisions and he is been like that since the Harper Administration has been in. And it's just been people started to criticize 'cause he is always negative.

7:29 But to be honest, he's been a realist for a long time and if they don't like what he hears, then they just don't like him. So we're gonna talk a couple of themes that we're gonna do. I don't know if I'll go through the entire video, but we are definitely gonna react to some of it. So let's get into that and let's start reacting to some of it. I'm just gonna play it from the beginning. This is from CBC News. I'll put the link in the show notes so that you can access it, so that you can watch it from YouTube or from wherever. I found this on YouTube. So here, let's just listen in and see what is happening. I think the science has been in now for decades, and yet, uh, look at us. Um, you know, uh, when we had the best environment minister we've ever had in Canada, in Steven Guilbeault.

8:14 Um, you know, I, I told him you can't even tell us the truth how bad it is. There's, uh, we, we haven't taken this as the opportunity to, to really change the way that we behave, get onto a new, uh, energy future. Uh, we've got now a prime Minister who thanks to Mr. Trump, uh, got elected to everyone's surprise. Now I wanna talk a little bit about this part here. As I said, I'm gonna be stopping a couple of times. You know, before this last election where Prime Minister Carney became the official Prime Minister, he was appointed Prime Minister. Once Prime Minister Trudeau resigned, and then he came in, but then he had an election pretty much within like three months after he was appointed because he wanted to make sure that the people wanted him in.

8:59 It was a surprise win for sure, and it was very interesting. The reason why he got in was because, you know, Trump was in power since January of 2025, depending on when you're watching this, and he decided that he was going to attack Canada and the world apparently through terrorists. But he kept talking about how not only was Canada, you know, quote unquote unfair in terms of the trade that we were doing with the United States, which was interesting because, you know, Trump did negotiate the last, you know, north American free trade agreement between Mexico, Canada, and the United States and he's basically saying it was the worst trade deal of all time. Even though he's the one who negotiated, came out of that time, like in his first term and said, Hey, this was the best negotiated trade deal ever.

9:43 You know, it is what it is. This is what Trump does, and I don't want to go into that aspect of it, but it really shaped the election for Canada. We had somebody that was running for Prime Minister, for the liberals who, and for you guys in the United States. It's like the Democrats for Canada, who was a banker. He had a lot of international experience. He had worked with the Great Britain during the Brexit that time. And that transfer over, and they loved him there for the most part, except for one Prime Minister who was a Prime Minister for about 45 days. She didn't like him, but everybody else seemed to like him. He has a pretty good rapport there and reputation. He was the chair of the Bank of Canada at one point, and now he's the Prime Minister. He became the Prime Minister because of the pressure from Trump, because of his international economic experience.

10:28 And that was a confidence vote. For us, the person he was running against, pure poly F did not have that international economic experience. He wasn't a banker. He was more of a lifelong politician. So people are like, Hey, you know what? Even though liberals weren't projected to win before this started, they became the fan favorite because of this type of deal. Now, with that said, Mark Carney as a prime minister is pretty much center left. You know, some can argue center right at times. He's a banker, so he is very conservative in what he moves. He wants to equate everything. He likes to be socially and fiscally responsible, so that's most conservative as well as liberal, even, you know, NDPs type of work and new democratic party. So a little bit more to the left, depending on what he's looking at, which seems fair.

11:11 Canada, well. Apart from the last like 10, 15 years or so, has been usually center left or center right. We don't really fare that far off from the center, but the problem is, is now because of the pressure of Trump, Trump 1.1 Canada to be the 51st state, obviously that got rejected right away. I think what became a joke became kind of serious and the Trump sort of rhetoric of the people were refuting that right away. But it definitely united Canada during this election in making sure that the right people got voted in or what Canada thought was the right people to get voted in. Sure, there's some people who will disagree with that, but regardless, that's what happened. But because of that pressure from the South that Davis Suzuki's talking about here is we had to start to look elsewhere for a oil and gas partner, because the US was going to put 10% tariffs on us that wasn't gonna do so.

11:58 We had finished a pipeline under the Trudeau government that started when he first started, where the pipeline went out to the eastern market. So China and other Asian countries, Japan, and so forth. So that was good for us. And then now there's talk that what was shut down earlier was an Eastern pipeline to go from Alberta all the way out to the east coast across Canada, which is a big place if you don't know. And that would go towards European markets. So the start of talking about building that is happening. And so now we are promoting more fossil fuel extraction, which we were hoping to get away from under the last government. Here's the problem is that we start talking about the economy, and this is where Davis Suzuki starts talking about the economy and politics.

12:41 And he's got a point here, and there's no one that I've met who's, uh, who knows more, uh, about the climate crisis than Mark Carney. I mean, he's written about it, um, before he became a politician. Um, but he's still talking about pipelines. You know, the Secretary General of the United Nations. Antonio Gutierrez said years ago, any further investment in fossil fuel infrastructure is moral and economic madness. What have we been doing? You know, how many billions have we spent on the, uh, the pipeline? The Southern pipeline, the Transmountain pipeline? Yeah. We're talking about more, you know, like.

13:24 One of the things that Antonio Gutierrez is one of the few people up there with prominence saying it like it is. You know, we're digging our own grave. And when you're doing that, the first thing to do is stop digging. Now here's, I wanna talk another point that he makes, which I, I agree. Not only has Canada come out with prioritizing these types of energy projects, so, you know, even though Canada's trying to balance the energy projects with fossil fuels as well as renewables, or they're saying they are, there's definitely more investment right now or some investment into. Oil and gas more than what we anticipated before this election.

14:04 Not surprising because of the pressure from the south and the fact that they're putting tariffs and we need to start relying on other countries and not just US. I think it's like 90 to 95% of our oil is exported to the US so there are main client in that respect. They get a lot of their oil and gas from us, so we wanna make sure that we're not just stuck with that. Our prices are low because of that and because our economy is tied so much to the oil and gas. That makes a big deal. So when we're talking about the future, so now you know, you're starting to see the pressure of more oil and gas talk happening, and again, it comes down to, even though Mark Carney and others are wanting to lower and reduce climate change, how much can we do it? How much can we do?

14:45 We continue to develop oil and gas and not reduce it as that we were told a while ago and under the Paris Agreement, that's what we should be doing. But we continue to do that and there's a lot, this is not an easy thing. It's not just a matter of like, let's cut oil and gas down to like 30% of our energy use because it's easy. You know, it's not easy. There are a lot of jobs that are tied to it. There's a lot of politics tied to it. There's a lot of lobby groups tied to this. And on the other side, there's a lot of environmentalists and conservationists who are trying to reduce that amount because we care about the planet. And you know, others care more about profit. Some people care about their jobs and their livelihoods, and that's where it gets really contested when it comes into this.

15:26 So it's never an easy decision. And for those of you who are gonna comment, this is an easy decision. Either way. It's not an easy decision. It's a very complex problem that Canada's in. It's put themselves in for a long time. Even though a lot of our energy, about 80% of our energy is renewable, we still use and export a lot of fossil fuels, and if we're continuing to develop that to export them more, we're gonna be contributing more towards climate change worldwide because we're exporting and we're developing our market so that we're gonna be producing more oil and gas. That's my understanding of it. If it's a different understanding, please let me know. Love to have you on the show to discuss that. That's what he's talking about here. We're digging our own grave and continuing to do that. So let's continue on with what he had to say. We're still arguing about fossil fuels and the future in our economy and, and tell me about that because here we are, of course, we have this threat of terrorists from the United States.

16:16 We have everyone agreeing that Canada needs to be more self-sufficient, more independent, and and more clear of the United States when it comes to trading and to find better partners. Part of that is we need to exploit the resources that we have in this country. Whether those are mineral resources, whether it's natural gas, or whether it's bitumen, buried in the dirt. Um, and when people, you can see David Suzuki starting to get frustrated by this because this has been the rhetoric for a long time. You know, we have these natural resources. We need to get them out of the ground for our economy to stabilize. So this is gonna be an interesting answer while we're having these conversations. Now it's as though climate change doesn't exist.

16:56 I agree. I agree. And you know, when, uh, um, when this whole 51st State issue came up and, uh, you know, people began to say, buy Canadian. And I said to my wife, okay, you're going shopping for groceries this week. Only get food that is grown and, and, uh, made in Canada. We'll starve then. You know, you look at, we are one of the bread baskets of the world, and we can't even feed our own people with food grown in, in our own country. Why? Because of globalization. Globalization is, is, uh, is a problem now. And, uh, you know, the most powerful, the richest country in the world is elected a man who is a climate denier.

17:41 And, um, you know, we're at this critical point. This happens a lot too. It's not just down south where you know Donald Trump is a climate change denier. This happens in a lot of cases where one party over the other thinks that climate change is not real. The other party thinks it's real, not just in the US, not just in Canada, but you have a lot of other countries who do the same thing. And there governments flip flops every so often, whether it's four years, five years, 10 years, whatever that might be. They flip flop every so often. And the changes in policies you can see are either done or undone. And we saw that with Trump. Every time he comes in, he takes the US out of the Paris Climate Agreement. He reduces a lot of the regulations for the EPA, for NOAA and a number of different environmental organizations within the government.

18:29 Does whatever he can to deregulate. And to make sure that oil and gas and fossil fuel companies can do better and can develop more because they think that's the way to go. That's the old school way of thinking. You know, develop fossil fuels and exploit natural resources and we will be able to do it so well. Now in Canada, we had the federal and Ontario provincial governments both put in policies that actually allow the deregulation of species at risk act for both federal and the Ontario province and allows more development to happen. So in the federal government, it'll be oil and gas projects and pipeline projects. 'cause there's a lot of environmental regulations that you have to go through to make sure that you are not destroying the environment as you're putting in these pipelines every time you cross a water, a river, or a stream or a lake, you have to make sure that you go under the proper process.

19:19 If they're in a species at risk, it slows down the process. And every time it's slow. It's slow. It's slow for a reason to make sure that we're not destroying the habitat of these species, but also to making sure that we're not destroying the environment for our general health. And so a lot of people just see that from the business side, Hey, we're just gonna forget the environment. We want to move faster on this. It's better for the economy, and that's the excuse that they use over and over and over again. And even there's, I think they're both Bill C-5s for the federal government and the Ontario government where they're actually stomping on indigenous rights to take away the decision making for indigenous peoples and to be able to, you know, put that together. So it's a really interesting situation that we're in where we're seeing a lot of environmental regulations get deregulated to allow for this push of fossil fuel industries.

20:09 And you know, David Suzuki's tired of it. A lot of us are tired of it and we kind of saw this coming. I kind of agree that we have to do this, but I hate it. I hate the fact that we have to do this because it's gonna ruin our environment even more. The science has been in for decades in 1988 at a major international conference in Toronto, the delegate, uh, opened by newly elected, uh, prime Minister Brian Mulroney keynote address by the Prime Minister of Norway Gro Harlem Brundtland, Steven Lewis chaired the sessions. At the end of that, in 1988, they said global warming, we called it global warming, back then represents a threat second only to an all out global nuclear war.

20:54 And that was it. They made a call for a 20% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in 15 years. If we had done it, we would've saved billions of dollars and many, many countless lives, and we didn't do anything, you know. That really hit me. I forgot about that because I was a kid when that happened. And if we had been able to, you know, reduce our emissions back then by 20%, maybe we could have been on a better path. But what happened during that time was where the misinformation level increased by fossil fuel companies. That's where you started to see companies like Imperial Oil and others start to shell out these reports that climate change wasn't actually happening.

21:39 Really getting into the political parties and you know, having one political party just deny it. Other political parties are for reducing climate change and to really put a divide politically in how you voted. So if you are a Democrat or a liberal here in Canada, if you weren't gonna vote for conservatives because they were anti-climate, if environment was an anti-climate action. if the environment was important to you, if the economy was important to you, that was going against the environment 'cause that's how the fossil fuel economists saw it. It's like, hey, you're impeding job creation, you're impeding money for Canada. You're impeding money for your country, wherever country you do. This happens all the time. And they were shown to say, yeah, we lied.

22:19 Like we allowed this misinformation to get through. And some of them are paying the price in courts right now as they're getting sued for that misinformation. But they did it for decades and it worked instead of taking those 15 years from 1988 and onwards and reducing our emissions by 20% therein, right? Just solving the problem at that point or getting closer to solving the problem. We would've been in a much better situation than we are now. Now we are seeing the consequences. Now we are seeing the consequences of our lack of action over the last 40, 50, 60 years when climate change was first sort of discovered and ignored throughout that entire time, and now we're starting to see the consequences in. More earthquakes, more volcanoes, tsunami warnings, especially since recent, we're starting to see increased sea surface temperature, coral reef bleaching.

23:08 We're starting to see storm surges are increasing. Sea level rises increasing. Storms are increasing in intensity, and there are happening more frequently. So a thousand year, 100 year, 10 year storms are no longer, you know, relevant at this point. That was how we used it in the past. We are seeing those more than a hundred years since the last a hundred year storm or 10 years. We're seeing those every like 2, 3, 4 or five years, and they're happening more and more often, and they're creating more in damage, which we have to pay the money for. We never really talk about how much money is paid for that and wasted on paying for, you know, cleaning up something that we could have cleaned up before is clean up the consequences of stuff we cleaned up where we wouldn't have seen those consequences. We rarely talk about those. Now, I'm not gonna continue on because this is gonna be a longer video, but David Suzuki does go on and say, Hey, you know what?

23:55 We continue to prioritize politics and economy over the environment. That seems to be what he's saying here. Until we stop doing that, we're not gonna see a change in climate change. We're not gonna be able to go back and be okay. We're in a time now. If we continue on this path, we're just gonna have to adapt. Just suffer the consequences until we can't do anything after that. You know? Only one thing we can do is just accept the consequences after a certain time, because at some point there's a tipping point where we just can't go back and we're getting closer and closer to that tipping point, whether you agree with me or not. That's just the fact is happening and we're seeing it now. We're starting to see all these different consequences that are coming up and coming up, and we're seeing larger and larger scale consequences.

24:39 Case in point, the tsunami that we had recently because of an 8.8 magnitude earthquake, which is pretty rare in the sea at this point. You know, last time it happened was in 2011 where we had a tsunami in Japan that killed hundreds of thousands of people, plus almost caused a nuclear power plant to go on the fritz, which I'm saying that lightly because that's not what we want. Regardless, this is what he continues to say. Now he hid a lot of criticism because of it. You know, people are saying, Hey, you know what? He got a lot of flack for it. Why is he talking about this? He's just an old man. You know, he is just grumpy and this and that. It's because he is been fighting all this time. But because of that flack, there was another video done on CBC, and this is where I find it really interesting, where you see conservationists, activists, and environmentalists start to really go back and forth between reality and pessimism and optimism.

25:30 And it depends on some of these reasons and the personal reasons. So I'm gonna show you another clip. This is on TikTok that I found this. It's with CBC again. It's actually David Suzuki speaking with his daughter, Sarika Cullis-Suzuki, about the comments that he made and him just being like, did I say that? Is that something I said? Oh wow, you have kids. I want their grandkids not to have to go through this. And it scares me every time that I hear about this type of news, so I want you to just kind of see this happening and we're just gonna kinda listen to it as we go through. So here it is. Sometimes I hear you say, what's the point? And then, um, your actions speaks so much louder than your words. You're always on the front lines, you're always saying something.

26:10 You're always making these shows talk about important issues like you haven't given up. No, of course not. Because when you have children and grandchildren, you have no choice. My agony now is that I know there's gonna be a turbulent life ahead for your your children, and I'm not gonna be there to help fight for them. I remember when I told you I was pregnant for the first time and you couldn't even look at me. You were so upset. Is that true? Yes. For the whole, so you, I'm sorry you were, the next day I said to you, I mean, I know you're not gonna be happy about it, but why are you so mad at me? And you said. Sarika, if you believe everything that I have told you during your life, why would you bring another person into this world?

26:57 Wow. Really? Did I say that? Yes. You said that. Oh my God. And I, I understand what you meant because you've devoted your whole life to this fight, and that's why it destroyed me when the twins were born and you we're holding them and you started crying and said, I just realized that these children will not be able to live out their lives. And then I realized that I don't have to think that way, that I can envision a different future. And if I devote my life to fighting for that future, that maybe.

27:41 Maybe there will be a different future for them. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I still have hope. I believe that hope is action. We're affirming hope by doing. If you don't do and you say, well, it's too late. There's nothing I can, you've given up. Mm. Basically. Mm-hmm. Nope, I haven't given up. You can't, I can't. You cannot. You can't give up. That's the crux of it, right, is how do we balance the realism that we see as scientists and as conservationists? And we see these reports come in from the IPCC, from different government organizations, like different government departments all over the world and other nonprofit organizations and think tanks and so forth. That's continue to talk about the consequences of climate change and the inaction that we've taken or the the steps back that we've taken.

28:27 If we've progressed a little bit, there've been some step backs depending on who's in power. We're at a point right now in the world where there are a lot of conservative governments that are in power. They have taken a number of steps back from a lot of different things that are surround climate change. You know, there's eco justice, there's a diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives that help with climate change action and voicing up those actions and listening to different people. There's actually just the defunding of science, the defunding of monitoring systems that will help adapt to these consequences such as tsunamis and storm surges and increased storms in detecting those storms to make sure that we are in a position where we can help and the government as well as other entities can help inform people of when to evacuate, when not to evacuate, and how to prepare for storms.

29:15 These are all at risk. And so when you have people like myself, like David Suzuki, like anybody who is working in this world, even though you have hope and you have to continue to fight, and we all have to continue to fight, there are times where we're just like, what the hell? What is wrong with us? Why do we continue to do this? We are going after short-term gains with long-term consequences coming down the road when the people in power are not gonna pay for those long-term consequences. They are going to put in the people that they want, they are going to make a mockery of climate change. You know, scientists and people who want climate change action, they're gonna deny it. They're gonna pay for misinformation to be put on social media.

29:58 Bots to be put in comments will probably be in my comments here. Or people who are a product of that misinformation who are gonna be in these comments saying that Andrew, you know, like all this is bias and all that kind of stuff. That's what's gonna happen, and we're gonna see that and we're gonna continue to see that. But we have to continue to fight. And at some point there's gonna be times where we're gonna have low points and we're gonna be like, Jesus, what the hell are people thinking? What are we thinking here? You have, you know, people in my province that are in charge, the premier who is helping his billion dollar friends make more billions by encroaching on a green zone area that is not supposed to be touched because it is absolutely crucial to our systems here, just north of Toronto, to put another highway so that they can put in homes in that area to benefit his billionaire friends.

30:45 He doesn't have to put it in this green zone. He doesn't have to. He could put it somewhere else, but they don't own land there, so why would you do that? Right? Because they're benefiting scandals and they're out in the open and nobody's paying for it. Nobody's being held accountable for these decisions, and they're not gonna be held accountable in 10, 15, 20 years down the road. And nobody's gonna remember who they are. They're just gonna be remember how they are dealing with this crap, how they are dealing with the consequences of climate change because of bad political decisions all the way stemming that back to 1988, and even, you can argue further when governments continue to ignore the science that has always been there. You heard David say. It's always been there. It's been right for a long time.

31:25 It's been there for a long time and refuse to do it. So when you get scientists like myself, like David Suzuki, obviously I'm not comparing. We are definitely not the same type of scientist. He is way above my intellect as well as experience. But when you start to see people like himself, David Attenborough, others start to speak out and be like, we are actually very frustrated. We are looking back at our lives and we are seeing how many times governments made the wrong decisions and wrong decisions against the environment to prioritize political power and economic growth. Unlimited economic growth. And this is the frustration that we have, and this is why I'm taking so long to put this video together because it is a pain in the ass to deal with all this time.

32:08 And then, you know, somebody like David Suzuki gets flacked for coming out and saying real stuff. Like he says all the time. You know, he's been labeled an eco terrorist. He's been enabling an enemy of Canada by different political parties and different organizations like in companies who don't like what he says, but to be honest, he's just saying what the science says. And he is trying to navigate ways that we can do better, right? That's really what it comes down to, and he is getting punished for it. And you can even see at times he struggles with hope because hope turns into action. And also the realism that we see based on the decisions that we continue to make. And sometimes they're not easy decisions that these governments are making.

32:49 But we continue to see that the economy and that political power is prioritized over the environmental protection of just our planet. And it's extremely frustrating. So I can understand what David Suzuki is going through. I can understand the controversy, like, you know, when my daughters at some point, they will have, you know, maybe daughters or sons, and I'll have grandchildren and they'll have children and they'll have grandchildren. I want them to enjoy their life. I don't want them to have to worry about floods. I don't want them to have to worry about droughts. I don't want 'em to have to worry about anything that's climate change related. Any natural disasters that are exacerbated by climate change, I don't wanna see that happen. I don't wanna even know that's gonna happen. That doesn't give me hope. That gives me a lot of pessimism.

33:31 You're starting to see people who do not want to have kids because of climate change and the effect that it's gonna have on our planet in the next couple of decades. So that's the reason. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on all this. If you're a scientist or a conservationist or environmentalist in any type of field, do you have this same type of battle between the realism and the optimism as well? I would love to hear from people who are not in the conservation industry or science industry or field. I would love to hear what you think. Do you think all like what David Suzuki is going through is legitimate? Are you go through the same thing? I would love to hear, you know, your thoughts on putting the comments in the YouTube comments down below. Or if you're listening to this on audio, just hit me up on Instagram at How to Protect the Ocean.

34:13 Or you can go to speak up for blue.com/contact and you can contact me there. Just fill out the form. It goes right to my personal email and you wanna take action? Join the Undertow. It's an online community that we are creating. The app is coming, but we are creating this online community to help guide you to do better action, to protect the ocean and the planet. All you have to do is go to speakupforblue.com/jointheundertow. I wanna thank you so much for having the patience to listen to me rant and raving, and go through this video, and just the love that you're giving me on YouTube, as well as on audio, and the fact that you listen to these podcast episodes. You know, whether it's this one, How to Protect the Ocean or Beyond Jaws.

34:53 I really appreciate the fact that you listen all the way through 'cause you have to listen all the way through to hear this. But I really do appreciate you and I'd love to hear from you and engage with you. 'cause that's what forms this community. That's what makes it really great. So I wanna thank you again and this has been another episode of the How to Protect the Ocean Podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin from the True North Strong and Free. Have a great day. We'll talk to you next time and happy conservation.