I wish I could imagine what Canada was like 150 years ago but listening to my
elders in the indigenous community—Wow! Canada was like nothing we can even
imagine today. The oceans filled with whales, with seals—forests everywhere,
fish coming into the streams in numbers so great that you could literally walk
on their backs. They say the sky was darkened because the waterfowl were so
thick. So that must be what it once was. Today there are none of those things and
the kids don't remember the average child in a Canadian city spends less
than 8 minutes a day outside and more than 6 hours a day in front of a screen.
And nature has become alien in our lives and I think this is a problem: what is
our baseline? What do we compare today with we have no idea what it once was?
When the forests and the oceans and streams were filled with animals—we just
don't remember that. Canadians really have a kind of mystical
worship of the Arctic—they all talk about the Arctic as a part of our
identity and who we are but very very few Canadians will ever go up to the
Arctic and experience it. Nevertheless for over 40 years the Inuit, the people
that live there in the Arctic, have been telling us something's going on with
weather and climate. You know they're having thunderstorms or they never saw
such things, the ice is getting strange. So here are people who depend on their
knowledge of ice for their very survival and yet they're saying we don't know how
to go out there anymore. Then we hear shipping companies say
that's great—now the northern passage is going to be free we can ship that way
and we can save a lot of money. And then we have oil companies saying hey or
there's lots of oil and gas up there we can drill up there. That Paris agreement
says at least 80% of the known deposits of oil, coal, and gas have to be left in
the ground. If we don't seriously work to get off fossil fuels, the energy sector
is gonna rush into the Arctic and they're going to develop mad. So in many
ways industry is celebrating, it's only the Inuit are telling us this is going
to have radically disruptive effects on us. That Arctic is also a part of the
climate engine that's responsible for the great currents that shape how heat
is shared around the planet and we don't really know what the consequences are
going to be. Quite frankly for me the Joker in the whole deck is methane. There
are massive amounts of frozen in the Arctic and methane is 20
to 80 times more potent to greenhouse gas in carbon dioxide. We already know
that the methane is melting in Siberia, you can actually light the bubbles
coming out of the oceans. If that trend continues all hell may break loose with
what ecologist called a methane gun. Just a sudden huge release of methane that
will simply overwhelm our climate system. We have to throw everything into
it and win. When the Soviet Union shocked the world in 1957 by launching Sputnik
Americans didn't flinch. They just said we gotta we gotta catch up to the. And
in 1961 Kennedy said we're gonna get astronauts to the moon and back within a
decade. They didn't have a clue how the hell they were gonna do it they just
said we got to do it. There are literally hundreds of spin-offs that have resulted
just from that simple commitment: let's get to the moon first. It's dozens of
technologies that have resulted from the space program—nobody had a clue!—who
would have thought that we'd have 24-hour television networks, who would
have thought we had laptops or ear thermometers or space blankets and I
absolutely guarantee you the same thing will happen once we say the energy of
the future is renewable energy. I've got a backpack that's got a solar panel, when
I walk around I charge my laptop of my cell phone. Why can't we have clothes
where everything is imitating a forest? I think we're at the beginning of a
fundamental revolution. Hi I'm David Suzuki in the future I hope that
renewable energy is Canada. To hear the full length interview this
video was based on check out our podcast at www.patreon.com/thought cafe and be
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