“A renowned environmental activist has a stern warning for politicians and global leaders if they fail to act on climate change. ‘There are going to be pipelines blowing up if our leaders don’t pay attention to what’s going on,’ David Suzuki told CHEK News on Saturday without elaborating further.”
A scary fellow is in the news. “David Suzuki is retiring from The Nature of Things to focus on activism and calling out ‘BS'”, the headline states. “86-year-old TV host fears environmental movement has failed, but he won’t give up.”
That is about the nicest way to describe this Canadian Paul Ehrlich. “After 44 years of hosting CBC’s The Nature of Things,” Jaela Bernstien of CBC News reports:
David Suzuki’s tenure will be coming to an end. While the upcoming season will be his last, that doesn’t necessarily mean the public will see or hear less from the iconic — and sometimes controversial — Canadian environmentalist.”
Controversial? And a lot more. Said one Canadian politician:
As a Senator of the University of Alberta, I am embarrassed for this great institution that David Suzuki was given an honorary degree. I request all current U of A Senators to do the right thing and revoke his degree immediately. He promotes climate change but flies around the world in private jets and has several multiple million ESG emitting homes in Vancouver…clearly a big hypocrite that continues to make millions with his charade on supporting/promoting climate change while privately living a life of excess and privilege!
Ecoterrorist at Heart?
Zoologist David Suzuki, profiled here, is a deep ecologist. He is angry and less than rational, stating, for example: “”What I would challenge you to do is to put a lot of effort into trying to see whether there’s a legal way of throwing our so-called leaders into jail because what they’re doing is a criminal act.”
This one article tells you much: “David Suzuki says pipelines will be ‘blown up’ if leaders don’t act on climate change.” Reported Nicholas Pescod:
A renowned environmental activist has a stern warning for politicians and global leaders if they fail to act on climate change.
“There are going to be pipelines blowing up if our leaders don’t pay attention to what’s going on,” David Suzuki told CHEK News on Saturday without elaborating further.
The prominent environmentalist made the comments during an Extinction Rebellion Vancouver Island protest — called a Funeral for the Future — in downtown Victoria on Saturday afternoon. Suzuki was also at the group’s first event in the United Kingdom in 2018.
Pescod continued:
“I saw the power of civil disobedience,” he said, later adding. “People in Extinction Rebellion are saying we’re headed in a direction of extinction and we’re rebelling against it. That’s why I’m here.”
The event in Victoria saw hundreds march from Centennial Square to the B.C. Legislature, pleading with governments to do something about the ongoing climate emergency.
“It is now the age of consequences. We need action. We need a declaration of a climate emergency by this NDP government and we need them to begin to act with the reality of that emergency. We need changes in policy, no more investment in fossil fuel infrastructure,” said Dr. Don Goodeve, an organizer with Extinction Rebellion Vancouver Island.
Perhaps David Suzuki should take cold showers and sleep heatless this winter to know that it is like to not have affordable, plentiful energy. But he has the money ($25 million eco-warrior?) and resources to live just the way he wants in a high-energy world. Fresh vegetables? Maybe he can do without that too. Reported Pescod:
“We cannot go on having a food chain that is 6,000 or 7,000 miles long,” [Suzuki] said. “We’re a northern country, why the hell are we able to buy fresh tomatoes and lettuce and fresh fruit 12 months a year? We’ve got to start living in a way that reflects the place that we live.”
There is much more about this person and his controversial foundation. That is for another day.
Appendix: Andreas Malm
Suzuki has company on the blow-up-the-pipeline threat. Consider Andreas Malm, author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire (2021):
Damage and destroy new CO2 emitting devices. Put them out of commission, pick them apart, demolish them, burn them, blow them up…. Sabotage, after all, is not incompatible with social distancing.
A book summary states:
The science on climate change has been clear for a very long time now. Yet despite decades of appeals, mass street protests, petition campaigns, and peaceful demonstrations, we are still facing a booming fossil fuel industry…
In this lyrical manifesto, noted climate scholar (and saboteur of SUV tires and coal mines) Andreas Malm makes an impassioned call for the climate movement to escalate its tactics in the face of ecological collapse. We need, he argues, to force fossil fuel extraction to stop–with our actions, with our bodies, and by defusing and destroying its tools. We need, in short, to start blowing up some oil pipelines.
And a quotation from How to Blow Up a Pipeline:
Do we conclude that the only thing left is learning to die – a position already propounded by some – and slide down the side of the crater into three, four, eight degrees of warming? Or is there another phase, beyond peaceful protest?
Crazy is as crazy says and does…. But make it for Halloween only.