THE ECO TOUR
David Suzuki and Jeff Rubin
Wednesday February 27
John Dutton Theatre Calgary Public Library 7pm
Tickets are $15
Environmentalist David Suzuki and economist Jeff Rubin are bringing their collaborative speaking tour to Calgary tonight. Suzuki says the pairing came about when he read about Rubin’s recent book The End of Growth . He realized Rubin’s ideas on why the economy cannot grow indefinitely were closely related to what he and other scientists have long said about humans and the environment particularly in his latest tome Everything Under the Sun . In their joint book tour the two authors attempt to explain the interdependence of ecology and economy.
“Ever since the Club of Rome in 1972 published Limits to Growth in which they showed very very clearly that you can’t grow forever on the planet because you run out of stuff people like me have been running around saying ‘we’ve got to talk about the end of growth.’ And of course business people and politicians immediately say ‘what the hell do you know? You’re an environmentalist. You don’t know anything about economics.’ When I saw that Jeff’s latest book The End of Growth was coming out I said ‘great now he can say it and they don’t have to listen to me’” says Suzuki.
Suzuki says his Calgary audiences have always been large but businesspeople are not in the majority. People from the business community do come out for Rubin though and he says they are surprised to hear an economist support the idea that economic growth is coming to an end.
“The whole point of their existence is to keep growing the economy so hearing an economist tell them ‘look there are very strong reasons economic reasons why growth is over’ they’re pretty stunned” he says.
“My part of the message is we can’t grow at the rate that we’ve grown in the past and David’s part of the message is you know that [slowed growth is] going to lessen our environmental footprint and that’s going to lessen our carbon footprint and that could potentially be a game-changer” explains Rubin.
Suzuki uses Everything Under the Sun which he co-authored with Ian Hanington to repeat the environmental message the 77-year-old has been trying to get across for decades. He has little reason to change that message since it’s as urgent as ever. Though he admits that when global warming came to the fore in the late-80s he thought it would be such a “slow-motion catastrophe” that he could afford to concentrate on pollution and deforestation. Now he says he realizes the effects are being felt sooner than expected and we must act now in order to prevent ecological collapse. He also says it’s especially important that message is conveyed in Alberta because “if we extract and burn all of the tar sands oil that will take us way beyond the tipping point.”
While Rubin is concerned about the natural environment he is more focused on the ability of humans to continue to continue increased consumption in the face of depleted resources and unaffordable energy prices.
The End of Growth claims the end of conventional oil resources means petroleum will forever remain too expensive to justify its consumption. For example in 2000 the world paid $791 billion for oil. By 2010 we consumed only 14 per cent more oil but paid $2.5 trillion for it — three times as much.
Therefore says Rubin energy consumption won’t decrease because of environmentalists but because of economics.
“People don’t want to hear this message. They want to hear that we can continue to grow because we define our wellbeing in terms of what we consume” Rubin says. “In places like Canada and the United States energy consumption and human progress are synonymous… I think it’s a real psychological challenge to break that link.”
Luckily for Suzuki who says he’s constantly frustrated by climate-change deniers who place the economy’s health above the planet’s his speaking partner says the reality of high prices and resource depletion will force us to shrink whether we want to or not.
“In 2009 US emissions actually fell. That certainly wasn’t because of anything Congress did….The 2009 recession did what Durban Copenhagen [and] Kyoto could not which is actually put a lid on emissions” says Rubin. “The beauty of what I’m saying is maybe we don’t have to do anything.”
