Conservatives should withdraw from the Paris Agreement
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
203.52698
Summary
Andrew Scheer finally unveiled his long-awaited climate change plan, and it was a moment that many had been waiting for. But is it enough? Is it enough, and what are the real solutions to climate change?
Transcript
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so the other day Andrew Scheer finally unveiled his long-awaited climate change plan now I say
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long-awaited because Catherine McKenna and Justin Trudeau were saying Andrew Scheer has no plan
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what's his plan when are we going to hear his plan that was coming from them from liberal
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cabinet members liberal voters liberal social media bots people who are not going to vote for
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Andrew Scheer anyway who don't support him at all was it coming from conservative voters conservative
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party members was it coming from swing voters I guess some of the information up a conservative
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HQ led them to believe yes we do need a credible climate change plan and so they announced one but
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you can't help but feel that a large part of them announcing this plan was just to neutralize these
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attacks from Justin Trudeau and Catherine McKenna and in the plan they call for some very different
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things they say we're going to axe the carbon tax and they are defiant about it well good for them
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and the way they're going to get there is a putting a cap on major emitters and also coming up with a
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plan to export various different endeavors such that they will work towards reducing global emissions in
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other countries that are bigger offenders like China and India and so forth okay fair enough but
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should they be endorsing the Paris deal in the first place that would be a great way for Andrew
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Scheer to clearly differentiate himself from Justin Trudeau on this issue now we see a whole lot of
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polls out there show Canadians say yes they are concerned with the environment to some degree they
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hear all of these headlines about how there's an oncoming catastrophe 12 years from now things will
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be immolated they hear that we now have to use the phrase climate emergency when we talk about all of
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this so no wonder that when regular folks who are mostly busy working their jobs and looking after
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their families are asked do you care about the environment and climate issues they're going to
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say well yeah sure but then when they're asked the details about it they turn around and say well I
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don't really want to pay a carbon tax I mean yeah sure let's be good stewards to the environment but
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I can't shell out a bunch of money every month on a yearly basis and ever escalating increasing
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amount of money for this I I don't want to do that and I really think that we can also evolve the
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conversation in other ways too so that Canadian respondents who do care about the environment
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will also see that there are other concerns with going along with say a global deal like the Paris
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agreement just for the sake of doing it I mean if we want to do things with the environment shouldn't
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we do them because we want to do them not because we signed on to some deal that other people in
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another bureaucracy are setting all of the different criteria and details for now it's true
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that our actual Paris targets are ones that we came up with ourselves but clearly there's a pressure
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on that oh we have to go along with this because we signed this Paris deal because the UN is pressuring
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us to do it and so forth and there's a whole other element to this Paris deal that we don't talk
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about too much which is the Green Fund Canada has to put hundreds of millions of dollars into this
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thing into a giant pot of money that's going to be used for various green initiatives that happen
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in other countries and we're not going to have much of a say in how that money is spent and also
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how it is monitored there are a lot of concerns with all of this quite frankly I don't think
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leadership is saying what are we going to do to fulfill our Paris obligations I think real leadership
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is stepping out of the pack and challenging this deal do we actually want ourselves to be beholden to
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this UN deal and that so many of these different policy measures we're doing because of course
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dealing with climate issues is not just the carbon tax so many of the things that Justin Trudeau and
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Catherine McKenna announce are all about that they are very focused on that maybe we should look at it
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in a different way quite frankly I think Donald Trump stepping out of the Paris deal is one of the
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best things he's done in his presidency I mean everybody was following the same pack and Trump said
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we're not going to do it now I listened very closely when he gave that speech the other year saying they
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were withdrawing from the Paris climate deal and he said in that speech
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we want to make sure the US is the greenest cleanest country in the world and we will continue
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to pursue all of that they just didn't want to be bound by an international agreement that they
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weren't in full control of and didn't want to put money into the green climate fund pot anymore
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fair enough and you know what the numbers show that the US has gone and done that they are the
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global leader in reducing emissions so if a community out there if a city a province what
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have you wants to go and do various different green initiatives well they can do it if an individual if
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a civic association wants to do things to better their environment they can do it there's no stopping
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you it would be nice to see conservatives have the conversation a bit more about whether or not we