Oct 15 2018
Today, after hearing from hundreds of people, Canada’s Speaker of the House approved a request from three Members of Parliament – Elizabeth May, Guy Caron and Nathaniel Erskine-Smith – to hold an emergency debate on last week’s critical Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on limiting climate change to 1.5ºC. Click here to tune in.
I want to say thank you. This happened because of the thousands of people who signed last week’s petition to federal party leaders calling for this debate, and the hundreds of people who picked up the phone today and called the speaker, urging him to allow it.
Now that we have a debate, it’s time to hear what our politicians are going to do.
The IPCC report made it clear, we have 12 years to take drastic action if we hope to constrain global warming to a 1.5ºC limit – the limit that Justin Trudeau and Catherine McKenna both championed at the Paris Climate talks and the limit that Indigenous peoples and communities in the Global South have called an absolute red line for survival.
So, as you watch tonight’s debate, here are four things to look for:
Onwards,
Cam Fenton
It’s simple — if we want a safe climate, coal, oil & gas need to stay in the ground.
The world’s most authoritative voice on climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), released a report on October 8th on what it means to limit global climate change to 1.5°C – the target Canada not only endorsed, but fought for at the 2015 Paris climate summit. The bottomline: any hope for a safe climate hinges on ceasing fossil fuel expansion, immediately.
In Canada, the translation is simple: any expansion of the fossil fuel industry — whether it’s via increasing tar sands extraction in Alberta, fracking LNG in BC, or offshore oil drilling in Nova Scotia — is fundamentally in conflict with securing a safe climate. Equally pressing, as the country’s highest courts have confirmed, Canada’s pursuit of mass fossil fuel expansion is undermining the Trudeau government’s commitments to Indigenous rights and reconciliation.