‘No way I’d share stage with Suzuki’: economist
A prominent University of Alberta economist is openly denouncing his employer’s decision to award an honorary degree to activist and broadcaster David Suzuki.
But unlike many Albertans who have denounced the award because of Suzuki’s anti-oilsands politics, Andrew Leach’s issue is with how the former Nature of Things host has spent years defaming economics as “brain damage."
“There’s no way I’d share a stage with David Suzuki … not a chance,” Leach wrote in an extended Twitter thread describing an encounter with the environmentalist roughly 10 years ago.
While at a conference where Suzuki was the keynote speaker, Leach saw Suzuki relate a favourite anecdote in which he claims that economics “teaches that environmental damage is to be ignored.”
It is indeed a popular Suzuki speech topic. In the 2011 documentary Surviving Progress, Suzuki called economics “a form of brain damage” and a “pretend” science.
“The economists say if you clearcut the forest, take the money and put it in the bank you can make six or seven per cent … so who cares whether you keep the forest?” he said.
Suzuki has also continually claimed that economics is directly at odds with environmental protection. A 2013 lecture he gave at Western Washington University was titled Time is Running Out: Ecology or Economics?
The claim is particularly galling for Leach, an environmental economist who served as chair of Alberta’s Climate Change Advisory Panel. As Leach notes, there is “an entire discipline of economics dealing with valuing environmental damage.”
Environmental protection has arguably been present since the earliest days of modern economics. The “tragedy of the commons,” a frequently cited ecological parable, was prominent as originally conceived in 1833 by the British economist William Lloyd.
The “tragedy” refers to how people tend to overexploit common property, leading to environmental disasters such as overfishing or deforestation.
A century later, the economist Arthur Pigou invented the Pigovian tax, a method of charging polluters for the damages they wreak on public health and the environment. These damages were famously dubbed “externalities” by Pigou.
Nevertheless, Suzuki has shown particular disdain for the term “externalities,” claiming that it’s merely an economist’s synonym for “we don’t give a sh--.”
In reality, an economist would use the term to refer to the unintended side-effects of an activity that isn’t reflected in its price.
When a person can’t play softball because of a smog warning, for instance, they are the victim of an externality caused by car pollution.
The idea isn’t to dismiss an externality, but to identify it so that it can be “internalized” with regulation.
A classic example is the carbon tax. Emissions impose environmental costs, so a tax is used to build those costs into the price of fossil fuels and “internalize” the damage.
Leach isn’t the first to point out Suzuki’s stubborn penchant to dismiss economists as apologists for environmental destruction.
In a 2012 op-ed, Ivey Business School economist Mike Moffatt wrote that Suzuki “displays a perplexing lack of understanding of basic economic concepts.”
“Economists … are not advocating resource depletion any more than oncologists are advocating cancer,” he wrote, noting that Suzuki’s own foundation relied heavily on economic modelling in a 2009 report claiming that strong environmental policies would have a negligible effect on Canadian economic growth.
On April 10, the University of Alberta announced that Suzuki would receive one of 13 honorary degrees at the school’s spring convocation, prompting outrage from alumni within the province’s oil industry.
“We understand how important the oil and gas industry is to Alberta,” wrote the school in a response to critics, adding that the degree “is not a signal of institutional agreement with any individual perspective on a controversial issue.”
Given Suzuki’s persistent misrepresentation of economics, however, Leach said the university should question what kind of “message” it is sending about education. “Is that really the type of public education that my university wants to reward with an honorary degree?” he wrote.
WE UNDERSTAND HOW IMPORTANT THE OIL AND GAS INDUSTRY IS TO ALBERTA ... (THE HONORARY DEGREE) IS NOT A SIGNAL OF INSTITUTIONAL AGREEMENT WITH ANY INDIVIDUAL PERSPECTIVE ON A CONTROVERSIAL ISSUE. — UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA