We face multiple existential threats, and we must confront them all together

Speaker: Ms. May
Time: 03/03/2022 14:00:14
Context: Statements

Ms. Elizabeth May (Saanich—Gulf Islands, GP): Madam Speaker, this week’s IPCC report put me in mind of something Al Gore said years ago that if we did not act on the climate crisis, it would be like taking a nature walk through the Book of Revelations. The four horsemen of the apocalypse are all saddled up. We have pestilence, we have plague; we have famine. Now, we have war and we have the threat of nuclear war.

How do we confront these existential threats, which we must, not separately, not sequentially but by recognizing that they are connected, the threat of war, the threat of dictatorships; the climate crisis? We must address them together and fight as if our lives depended upon it, because they do. We must fight for democracy. We must fight against all wars and end nuclear weapons. We must work harder for a livable planet.

I close with these words from the head scientist from Ukraine, heading the Ukraine delegation to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Svitlana Krakovska said that climate change and the war have the same root cause, fossil fuels and our dependance upon them.