This week, leading climate…

This week, leading climate scientists at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change highlighted the urgency of current action to keep our planet’s temperature increase within a range that has a reasonable chance of preventing the worst impacts of climate change. Without serious action to reduce emissions, we be condemning our children and grandchildren to live in a world of climate catastrophe and bear the cost more and frequent natural disasters, greatly increased insurance premiums, mass species extinction, climate refugees, agricultural failure and increased global conflict, just because someone wanted to save 10 cents a litre on gas. This is no longer a question of scientific debate it is a simple moral question: do we make our children and those in the poorer parts of the world pay for our greed. Ontario must do its part in reduce its emissions, which are among the highest in the world. Mechanisms such as carbon pricing have been proven to reduce emissions in other jurisdictions, and while they will certainly be improved upon in the future, it is an important step to ensuring we have an economy that can survive without high levels of emissions. The Conservative Party’s proposals will put us behind in the green energy race, and when the world wakes up to need for increased efficiency and renewable power, we will have to buy it from Europe, Japan, and California instead of having made-in-Ontario solutions.