David Suzuki enjoys a level of public esteem that borders on idolatry. His work as an environmental crusader is known worldwide and Canadians rank him just below the legendary Tommy Douglas as the most influential of their native sons. The level of respect he commands spills over into the eponymous foundation he created. The man and the foundation are, in the minds of many, leaders of the environmental movement.

They are also officially apolitical and independent, allegedly too pure to sully themselves by descending into the murk of the political arena, even when politics clearly crosses environmental turf.

But lately it seems the opposite might be true: In mid-January the Foundation decided to descend from Mount Olympus to pontificate on ways to make Vancouver’s 2010 Olympic Winter Games “carbon neutral.”

Since 2002 there have been numerous weird and wonderful events associated with Vancouver’s successful bid for Olympic glory, but none more so than the sight of Suzuki Foundation researchers sharing a podium with the “environmental” folks of the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games (VANOC). It seems that VANOC had gone to the Foundation for advice on how to deal with greenhouse gases associated with hosting the Olympic circus.

Since the 2010 Games are the most intensely political local issue in recent memory, one might naturally have expected the Foundation to refuse VANOC’s overture. After all, the Foundation had refused to lift a finger to help the protesters trying desperately to protect Eagleridge Bluffs, the latter now blown to smithereens.

Perhaps the Coalition to save the Bluffs should have reached into their jeans and come up with some cash, because that’s what VANOC did. For $10,000, the Suzuki Foundation suddenly discovered that the politics of the Olympics, especially Vancouver’s Games, weren’t so awful after all.

Sarah Marchildon, the Suzuki Foundation’s communications director, explained it this way: The Olympics are coming like it or not; hence, how better to instruct the world about helping out on climate change by reducing CO2 than by writing a report with suggestions for how to make the Games carbon neutral? As for the money, well it was only a tiny fraction of what the report really cost to produce. Win-win, right?

The Suzuki Foundation might have asked how much CO2 is produced by the Olympics and what can be done about it. If the Foundation had been purely interested in instructing the world, they might have spent their own money and held a press conference without VANOC in tow to show the world how to deal with such mega events. They didn’t. Instead, they took the cash and sat elbow-to-elbow with the VANOC representatives under a giant picture of the great man himself, virtually enveloped in a warm, fuzzy, holier-than-thou environmental aura that the Foundation projects. For VANOC’s propaganda purposes it was perfect.

How about the science? Did the Foundation’s researchers measure all the CO2 produced by the preparations for and running of the Games? No. They neglected to account for the massive construction projects such as the Canada Line train to the airport, the new convention centre, and the Sea to Sky Highway re-building, all of which were central to winning the bid and which are now listed by VANOC as some of the Games’ “legacies.” The carbon emissions associated with these projects can be calculated in various ways, but the simplest—and most conservative—is to take the total costs and use a Government of Canada formula to convert dollars spent to CO2 emissions. Instead, the Foundation’s researchers only focused primarily on transportation during the Games and the associated carbon dioxide debt of 320,000 tonnes, neatly skirting the more than ten times higher actual amount of almost 3.5 megatonnes. In addition, the report had nothing whatsoever to say about the loss of habitat for endangered species or the tens of thousands of trees destroyed.

Roping the Suzuki Foundation into their scheme was a major coup for VANOC and the IOC, both organizations certain to use the report to promote not only the environmental soundness of the 2010 Games in particular, but the Olympics in general. That nothing could be further from the truth is likely to be lost on those for whom Suzuki is the voice of all things environmentally friendly and sustainable.

Was the Foundation’s curious lack of judgment in regard to VANOC and the Olympics a solitary event, or one that highlights some underlying premises the Foundation holds about environmental sustainability? There is no better place to find out than the Foundation’s own website with its various reports now listed alongside the glossy one paid for by VANOC.

In brief, we learn that we can fly as much as we like as long as we have carbon offset credits to allow companies to build wind turbines or hydro projects for cleaner energy production. Hybrid cars and bio-diesel fuels are other proposed solutions.

The message here is pretty simple and for most quite attractive: We can keep our ever expanding consumer economy, jet off to distant lands, and can keep growing our ecological footprint. All we have to do to keep the good times rolling is to shift the burden somewhere else. As their web site cheerfully advises us, “It's easy to go carbon neutral—all it takes is a few simple steps”.

In this context, the Foundation’s support for the 2010 Olympics now makes sense. A nip and tuck here and there and the whole thing is good to go: If we just buy $5 million in wind turbines, we can host the Olympic party with its overt appeal to ever expanding growth and consumption and have a good time too! Alas, someone forgot to tell the ancient Arbutus forest and red-legged frogs of Eagleridge Bluffs or the grizzlies and thousands of cut-down old growth trees of the Callaghan how good the party was going to be.

The ecological balance of the planet—and with it human civilization—is heading at blinding speed for a tipping point of no return. The Suzuki Foundation—never a radical organization by any measure—now offers us politically correct bromides in place of the urgent action that is so glaringly needed: Unless and until humanity abandons its love affair with an economy built on endless consumption, we won’t save the planet or ourselves. Weaning ourselves off of mindless consumption is never going to be “simple” under the best of circumstances. However, the alternative is to let nature do it for us, an option that is going to be far less simple and not much fun for most of us.

Real leadership involves risk. The Suzuki Foundation, for all its reputation for environmental stewardship, offers us nothing beyond meaningless rearrangements of the deck chairs on the Titanic. It’s time to really lead or get out of the way.