Jim Hoggan, president of the largest communications and public relations company in western Canada, found our work interesting and worthwhile. He offered his expertise on a voluntary basis. He brought great integrity — he advises his clients that they should never deliberately lie, deceive, or cover up. Jim helped us develop the most effective ways to get our message out, and ever since he joined the board, he has devoted countless hours to our communication effort.
AS THE FOUNDATION BECAME more sophisticated and better equipped to tackle issues, we felt ready to take on some big ones. And of all environmental crises confronting us today, climate change looms as the largest.
Cited by the Canadian parliamentary all-party Standing Committee on the Environment as a threat second only to all-out nuclear war, global warming nonetheless can seem a slow-motion catastrophe that will not kick in for generations, and so it has been difficult to raise public concern about it.
Jim Fulton's political connections paid off when he persuaded Gerry Scott, a longtime strategist in the provincial New Democratic Party, to join us in taking on the foundation's climate change campaign. The challenge was to educate the public about what climate change is, what the scientific evidence is for its cause, and what the solutions are. Most environmental funding agencies were established to finance work on more immediate challenges such as toxic pollution, deforestation, or destructive developments. Global warming has implications on a much more immense scale, and it was extremely difficult to fund the project. I despaired over whether we could find the kind of money we would need to make a difference.
Stephen Bronfman of Montreal had joined our board in the early years. He became convinced that climate change was a serious issue and made a multiyear financial commitment to Gerry's group, becoming the largest individual contributor to the issue in Canada. Assured of this solid base of support, Gerry pulled together a small band of experienced and dedicated people and began to get the matter onto the Canadian public agenda. For such a small team, they carried out a remarkable series of studies and activities.
Gerry invited Ray Anderson, CEO of Interface, the largest flooring company in the world, to join our campaign to get industry leaders to start working to cut emissions and make money doing it. Ray stepped up to the plate and is now on the DSF board.
The group commissioned papers including “A Glimpse of Canada's Future,” “The Role of Government,” “Taking Charge: Personal Initiatives,” “Keeping Canada Competitive,” and “Canadian Solutions.” But by far the most remarkable was “Power Shift,” a study by energy expert Ralph Torrie, showing that with technology already commercially available, Canada could reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent in thirty years.
We brought Dr. Joseph J. Romm to Toronto and Ottawa to talk about his 1999 book Cool Companies, which cited dozens of North American companies that had already reduced their emissions by more than 50 percent and remained highly profitable. Since then, the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation has begun to track “reducers”—companies, cities, regions, provinces and states that are making serious reductions in harmful gas emissions while saving tens of millions of dollars.
When The Nature of Things with David Suzuki broadcast a film by Jim Hamm showing many examples of opportunities to make money by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the DSF put together a series of events in Toronto, Calgary, and Vancouver, with speeches, previews of the film, and exhibitions of energy-saving technologies such as windmills and then-unknown gas-electric hybrid cars. We knew we had to get on with demonstrating that there are alternatives to the polluting ways that are creating climate change, since neither governments nor businesspeople were leading the way.
It was hard work to get media attention until DSF employee Catherine Fitzpatrick had the brilliant idea of looking at the medical implications of burning fossil fuels. She concentrated on the direct effects of air pollution — not the spread of new diseases in a warmer world or starvation from drought and failing crops, but the direct, day-to-day, physical effects of air pollution on people. If we couldn't get attention for climate change as a monumental threat, we could bring attention to the more personal costs of burning fossil fuels.
This strategy worked. Using government data, the doctors and scientists Catherine commissioned produced a report entitled “Taking Our Breath Away.” It found that air pollution, much of it from burning fossil fuels, was prematurely killing sixteen thousand Canadians a year. A plane crash killing all occupants is a great tragedy, but imagine a full jumbo jet crashing in Canada every week: you get an idea of the magnitude of these preventable fossil fuel — induced deaths from pollution.
And every fatality is just the tip of an immense iceberg. For every death, there are many more serious lung problems requiring hospitalization, including surgery. For each hospitalization, there are many more days lost from school or work, then many more with reduced productivity because of low-grade problems of bronchitis and asthma.
“Taking Our Breath Away” was the first DSF report to be translated into Canada's other official language, French, as “À couper le souffle.” Doctors recognized the significance of the report, and English- and French-speaking physicians supported our call to reduce air pollution. Federal and provincial medical societies also signed on to our initiative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions for health reasons.
One of the first people to buy in was Dr. David Swann, chief health officer for the province of Alberta. I was stunned when he was fired for taking this position. This is Canada, yet here was Alberta behaving like some tin-pot government vindictively punishing a public servant for deviating from the government line. Dr. Swann fought back and eventually won reinstatement, but he soon left public service in the province. Taking a stand on climate change in Alberta took courage.
In concert with other organizations, Gerry commissioned papers that looked at the impact of climate change on Canada's national parks. Jay Malcolm, a forestry professor at the University of Toronto, concluded that global warming would dismantle the species balance of our most prized parks: some species could adapt to higher temperatures, but others would have to move to remain within a viable range.
A 2004 DSF study, “Confronting Climate Change in the Great Lakes Region,” looked at the hydrological implications of climate change on lakes Superior, Michigan, Erie, Huron, and Ontario, which constitute the largest area of fresh water on Earth. The report concluded that the effects would be catastrophic.
The Nature of Things with David Suzuki did a series of programs on global warming, including a two-hour special. Polls showed that Canadians were becoming increasingly concerned about climate change, and I like to think that both the David Suzuki Foundation and The Nature of Things played an important part in increasing that awareness and concern.
The evidence of climate change is now overwhelming, and to me nothing is more compelling than the cover story in the conservative National Geographic magazine in September 2004. Presented on a foldout page, the 400,000-year record of carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, teased from the Antarctic ice by researchers, reveals a curve that in about 1990 suddenly soars above the highest level found in all that time. That curve then leaps straight up.