Madam Speaker, I would like to inform you that I will be sharing my time tonight with the member for Winnipeg Centre.
For me, this debate is of critical importance. I could talk about this beyond midnight and into the morning. That is how important this issue is for me personally.
I have two young children, one who is just over two years old and one who is three months old. I also have a 14-year-old who is in high school. One of the issues that genuinely keeps me up at night and that I worry about is what kind of world we are leaving for our children. I mean that directly. Sometimes we say that and we are talking about generations down the road. We are not talking about generations down the road. The member for Saanich—Gulf Islands said it earlier this evening. We are not talking about our kids' kids or our kids' kids' kids. We are talking about our kids here, and the impact we are creating on the world they will live in. They will look to us 50 years from now to judge whether we made the right decisions when addressing climate change. That is why this is such a critical debate to have.
We are here tonight because slightly over a week ago the UN released an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which highlighted a few very important things for us to know.
Number one, the current trend we are on is going to increase our global temperature by 3° by the end of the century. We all know about what happens at 1.5°, let alone at 3°. They are saying it is absolutely critical that we cut our emissions by 45% by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050. That is a monumental task to undertake. That represents a tremendous amount of work that we need to do and on which we need to get moving not only as one country and with our provincial partners, but throughout the world. We need to start taking approaches to this that are going to make dramatic and significant changes.
The scenarios that have been suggested and compiled by the scientists who put together this report bring up a number of consequences that we should be seriously concerned about.
Let us start with heat waves. Scientists have given a high confidence level that a warming of 1.5°C would result in a greater number of severe heat waves on land, especially in the tropics. This is what the report says. The risk of such severe weather would be even greater with a 2° rise. Think about that. We are talking about only an extra half a degree Celsius increase and the scenarios we get are so much worse.
What about our ecosystems and their destruction? A 2° warming will destroy ecosystems on around 13% of the world's land area, increasing the risk of extinction for many insects, plants and animals. Holding warming to just 1.5° would reduce that risk by half.
Let us consider severe precipitation. There are risks from heavy precipitation, which we are seeing now throughout different parts of the world. The projected number of events will be higher with a 2° increase compared to a 1.5° increase in several northern hemisphere regions, including eastern North America. There are impacts on the Arctic. They are talking about ice-free summers.
Certain populations are going to be at a disproportionately higher risk of adverse consequences of global warming at a 1.5° increase and beyond. Disadvantaged and vulnerable populations are going to be the most impacted. I know this has come up a couple of times tonight in discussion. What does this actually mean? What does it mean for us as Canadians? We live in a pretty climate diverse country where we get to experience some of the cold and some of the warm. It is pretty mild where most people are living in Canada.
There is another reason this is so important and should be important for us globally, if not just to be better humans and to think of the humanitarian impacts this will have around the world. We should consider climate refugees and the displacement of people, the way people are going to move and the pressures that will be put on other countries. What will that lead to? Inevitably, if history has taught us anything, that will lead to war. It will lead to more conflict throughout the world, all because of something that we had the power to control early on and that we had the power to do something about.
This brings us to one of the things we have talked about so much tonight, which is a price on pollution. Yes, there are many different ways one can go about tackling reductions in greenhouse gases and pollution. It can be done through the cap and trade model or putting a price on pollution. A price on pollution is the method this government has put forward. It is a method scientists and economists are saying is the right tool to use.
This is one of the things that really blows my mind. My degree is in economics. I can appreciate a lot of those economic arguments put forward by the right and the Conservatives, in particular in the House. The irony is that this model is something that should be lending right into the talking points of the Conservatives. We are talking about putting a price on something to drive innovation.
We heard the minister earlier this evening talk about acid rain. We had a problem in the seventies and eighties with acid rain. What did we do? We believed the scientists and experts and we came from all parties to figure out what the solution would be. I am sure it was a bumpy road, but we made it through. That is what we are good at doing.
For some reason, on this particular issue of climate change, we have such a difficult time of even getting a healthy portion of the population to believe it is actually a problem. I cannot help but wonder why.
The member for Saanich—Gulf Islands said earlier that she wondered about the four-year election cycle and if that was impacting it. However, this is not the first time we have had to solve problems that will span generations and we have effectively been able to do it. Yet, we seem to have hit a roadblock on this particular issue, and it has become a political wedge issue and a pawn in a political game. The reality of the situation is we are putting our children's lives on the line when we do this.
The Minister of Environment and Climate Change said earlier that we were the first generation to feel the impacts of climate change and we would be the last generation that could do anything about it. I really hope we can all genuinely think about that, despite our differences of opinion on how we will address this, despite the fact that some want to do regulation and some want to price pollution, and recognize and agree to the fact that we have to do something immediately as this is an extremely dire situation.