Mr. Speaker, I rise today in adjournment proceedings to pursue a question I originally asked late last year. The question was asked in advance of the Conference of the Parties, which took place in Poland in December. I asked a question of the Prime Minister some time in November in question period. It related to the urgent warnings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its special report on 1.5° Celsius, which was issued on October 8, 2018.
As quite often happens when people refer to this report, it gets called the doomsday report or a serious wake-up call. I want to again lay out why that report is so important.
The report said that the IPCC was asked by the negotiating countries in Paris, at COP21, what the impact would be of allowing the global average temperature to increase by 1.5° and what the impact would be at 2°. The Paris negotiations had landed on 1.5°. The goal is to avoid the global average temperature going above 1.5° Celsius, but there is some secondary language that says, “or at least as far below 2° as possible”. What is the difference between 1.5° and 2° in terms of impact? That is an important question.
Second is a critical question: Can we still hold to 1.5° Celsius? The advice from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was that 2° is far too dangerous. There is no point in speculating. Do we hold to 1.5° or just stay below 2° as best we can? No. We have been told very clearly by science that if we want to survive as a human civilization, if we want our children to have any kind of quality of life at all, and even worse, if we want to avoid those runaway global warming scenarios that lead to extinction, including our own, we have one chance, and it is to hold to 1.5°.
The second part of the report, and why this is not a doomsday report, says that we still can do it, but it will require Herculean efforts, transformative changes that are not transitions over time. They are changes needed now. We are in a climate emergency.
I asked the Prime Minister if we were prepared to improve our targets to show global leadership, because the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report said clearly to us, the community of nations, that greenhouse gas reductions must meet 45% below 2010 levels by 2030 or it will be too late to save ourselves. It was not a gray area. It was now or never.
Although I have begged the government to improve the target we currently have, which is the same target put in place in May 2015 by the Harper Conservatives, to show leadership, and to go to COP24 in Poland with Canada leading the world to a new pathway, unfortunately, the Prime Minister's answer was that we are working hard to meet our 2030 targets. Those are the targets I just mentioned, the ones put in place by Stephen Harper. They are wholly inadequate for us to save ourselves.
When I went to COP24 in Poland, there was no global leadership from industrialized countries. Canada still needs to take up that challenge. All nations on earth must reduce greenhouse gases far more rapidly than is currently planned.