Madam Speaker, as I rise this evening during the Adjournment Proceedings, most of what I want to say about the climate science is that we are running out of time and the hour is late. Both of those things are literally true, as I rise to speak after midnight.
I am raising a question that I put to the Prime Minister on March 22 of this year in question period in response to the most recent and sobering report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This is a large institution that was created by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme. It is not too much to make the proud claim that Canada had a lot to do with setting up the IPCC back in 1988.
Although we talk about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change a lot, it actually does painstaking work that takes years. This is the sixth assessment report, which came out with its final volume on March 20 of this year. We will not see another major review of the science from this eminent scientific body that has been created by governments, which appoint the scientists, for some time. It is a massive peer-review process. We will not see another report until sometime after 2030.
The receipt of this document, and the warnings in it, could not be more urgent. As many said when the report was tabled, this is really the last report when we have a chance to make a difference. What the IPCC says very clearly is that global greenhouse gas emissions must be arrested and begin to fall rapidly before, and this is important, 2025.
While the government has a target that it describes as ambitious, the target the government chose of net zero by 2050 is out of sync with the science. It is out of time with the reality that, in order to control and avoid runaway global warming, we need to act now.
When I asked the question on March 22, Canada was not on fire. We had lived through a lot of extreme weather events across Canada, whether it was hurricane Fiona, the wildfire seasons that have plagued British Columbia year after year or the heat dome over four days in 2021, late June to July 1, in British Columbia, where 619 people died. We have gone through fires, floods and extreme weather events, yet we are still here talking about when we will get serious about climate action.
The answer I had from the Prime Minister was to talk about the concrete actions the government has taken. As ever, the Prime Minister, or his Minister of Environment, talks about monies committed. Some of that money has been committed to things that will not address the climate crisis and may in fact worsen it. These things are disguised subsidies of fossil fuels, such as carbon capture and storage.
The closing line from the Prime Minister was, “As the Minister of Environment and Climate Change said this week, we will be looking very closely at that report.” One does not even have to look at the report closely. If one makes a cursory review of that report, one knows we have not done enough to avoid exceeding 1.5°C, shooting right past 2°C and putting human civilization at risk within the next half-century.
We need to do more, and we need to do it now; that is why I am back here tonight.