Economic denial slows crucial climate progress
Shifting to renewable energy is good for the climate, and it’s creating employment, lowering energy costs, spurring innovation and keeping land, water and air from being polluted.
Campaigns by the coal, oil and gas industries and their supporters have stalled critical climate action for decades. Despite accurate assessments by their own scientists and others, fossil fuel industries have long sought to downplay or deny the evidence that burning their products is rapidly heating the planet to dangerous extremes.
Now the proof for human-caused global heating and its impacts is unequivocal. Beyond the mountains of scientific research on everything from ocean waters to air to land, climate change is unfolding as scientists predicted: accelerating and intensifying extreme weather events, heat domes, floods, droughts, water scarcity, agricultural loss and disease spread, and increasing numbers of people fleeing inhospitable areas…
Because the evidence is so clear, we’re now seeing “a migration from scientific denial to a denial that economic measures against climate change can be good for the economy and for people,” said Brazilian diplomat André Corrêa do Lago, director of the November 2025 COP30 climate summit in Belém, Brazil.
Now the proof for human-caused global heating and its impacts is unequivocal.
As the Guardian reports, “The rise of populist politicians around the world has fuelled a backlash against climate policy, most clearly seen in the presidency of Donald Trump in the US, where he has set about cancelling policies intended to boost renewable energy and cut greenhouse gases, and dismantling all forms of government-sponsored climate-related institutions, including scientific research labs.”
We’re also seeing “economic denial” in Canada, with Alberta and Saskatchewan, especially, prioritizing the outdated fossil fuel industry over renewable energy and other provincial economic drivers.
In a landmark review almost 20 years ago, former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern argued that addressing emissions and climate change would be far cheaper than not acting. This year, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the United Nations Development Programme released a report stating that addressing the climate crisis will increase economic growth.
Yet, people are still using false economic arguments to delay actions necessary to our wellbeing and survival.
Part of the problem with some economic arguments, the Guardian notes, is that “much mainstream thinking on economics does not take the climate crisis into account.”
Yet, people are still using false economic arguments to delay actions necessary to our wellbeing and survival.
“Climate has not been incorporated into economic theory in a satisfactory way yet,” Corrêa do Lago, an economist by training, said. “Because it’s a very disturbing element.”
But it’s more than that. Current economic thinking substantially depends on exploiting and destroying nature and using resources as quickly as possible to derive maximum profits. It fails to account for the critical functioning of interconnected natural systems and instead encourages overconsumption and waste. It’s no accident that two of the most profitable industries in human history are weapons and fossil fuels (both of which require constant destruction and replenishing).
Clearly we need to change our relatively recent, human-invented consumerist economic system. But even under it, progressing to a new era of cleaner energy faster would create enormous economic benefits, good jobs and innovative technological advances while saving on everything from pollution-related health care to replacing infrastructure damaged by extreme weather.
Most economic deniers probably know this, but they want to protect their ability to accumulate and maintain wealth and power through wasteful exploitation and control of outdated, polluting, climate-altering fuels. That they refuse to face reality for the sake of relatively short-term gain is appalling.
Clearly we need to change our relatively recent, human-invented consumerist economic system.
The clean energy transition is unstoppable. Countries that don’t get out in front will be left behind. But we must do it right, with justice and equity in mind. That can be easier to accomplish with renewable sources because those allow for more energy independence and less reliance on monopoly utilities or large corporations. That’s especially true for distributed and community energy systems.
A rapid technological transformation is already underway, with electrification overtaking fossil fuel power generation as costs go down and energy and storage technologies improve. David Suzuki Foundation research shows Canada could have 100 per cent renewable electricity by 2035.
Shifting to renewable energy is good for the climate, and it’s creating employment, lowering energy costs, spurring innovation and keeping land, water and air from being polluted.
There’s no denying it, economically or scientifically: the planet is heating at alarming rates because of our actions, and speeding up current and emerging solutions is necessary for people, the economy and the climate.
David Suzuki
David Suzuki, Co-Founder of the David Suzuki Foundation, is an award-winning scientist, environmentalist and broadcaster. David is renowned for his radio and television programs that explain the complexities of the natural sciences in a compelling, easily understood way.
Education
As a geneticist. David graduated from Amherst College (Massachusetts) in 1958 with an Honours BA in Biology, followed by a Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of Chicago in 1961. He held a research associateship in the Biology Division of Tennessee’s Oak Ridge National Lab (1961 – 62), was an Assistant Professor in Genetics at the University of Alberta (1962 – 63), and since then has been a faculty member of the University of British Columbia. He is now Professor Emeritus at UBC.
Awards
In 1972, he was awarded the E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship for the outstanding research scientist in Canada under the age of 35 and held it for three years. He has won numerous academic awards and holds 25 honourary degrees in Canada, the U.S. and Australia. He was elected to the Royal Society of Canada and is a Companion of the Order of Canada. Dr. Suzuki has written 52 books, including 19 for children. His 1976 textbook An Introduction to Genetic Analysis(with A.J.F. Griffiths), remains the most widely used genetics text book in the U.S.and has been translated into Italian, Spanish, Greek, Indonesian, Arabic, French and German.
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