MORE than 120 voters gathered in Peebles Burgh Hall to hear the seven Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale constituency general election candidates field questions.
Despite some initial heckling about the war in Gaza, the two-hour event on a sweltering Monday evening proceeded peacefully.
Welcoming the crowd PCC chairman Peter Maudsley said: “This is a fantastic turnout, if we let our candidates speak without too much interruption we will get more done.”
Each candidate, for the election on July 4, had between one-and-a-half and two minutes to introduce themselves before answering four set questions which were emailed to the organisers.
The second question was about the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty and had three parts.
These were: If elected will you champion this treaty? What will you do to urgently foster cross community action on climate change? What would you like me to tell my children about the actions you took to make sure they have a future?
Scottish Greens’ Dominic Ashmole was first to speak and said: “This needs to be funded by taxation on the super rich, the richest one per cent of society, more taxation on the oil companies and the removal of the enormous subsidies, tax relief, billions of pounds over three years that the oil companies receive.
“According to the experts we have only five years left to avert climate catastrophe.”
Drummond Begg, of the Liberal Democrats, said: “We were born from the Ecology Party in the 1970s.
“You don’t have to be Green to be green, but we share a lot of interests, and many parties do because there is no other choice.
“Fossil fuels are finite, so even if we didn’t have the carbon dioxide and other climate gases, we would be running out anyway.”
The SNP’s Kim Marshall said: “As hard as we have worked in Scotland to build a world leading renewable industry, we are still hamstrung by the limited powers that we have from Westminster.
“I would like to tell your children the same that I would like to tell mine; that we actually tried to do something by making sure that we were diversifying by investing in renewables.
“That we were not granting further licences to coal mines, that we were not going to have any new nuclear power stations in Scotland, contrary to many other parties.”
Daniel Coleman, a Labour representative, said: “Climate change is in our top six first steps. Firstly we are going to set up GB Energy, a publicly owned energy firm that will invest £8.3bn and incentivise the private sector to invest in technologies such as offshore wind, tidal power and new nuclear small modular reactors.
“I would like to tell my children that I got elected as an MP and supported policies to decarbonise the grid, create jobs, get the economy going and deal with climate change all at the same time.”
David Kirkwood, of Reform UK, said: “No, we won’t champion the treaty.
“Carbon dioxide is an indicator of temperature, it is not a driver of a rise in temperature.
“There is no falsifiable theory which would allow us to predict a future temperature on Earth based on a concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.”
Conservative member David Mundell said: “I am very proud that I played a part in bringing COP26 to Glasgow and I argued strongly that it should come here.
“It did provide a great platform for Scottish businesses, campaigners and politicians to set out our stall but I don’t think there was enough community engagement, it ended up a bit like a circus came to town.
“But it played an important part in raising awareness.”
The Scottish Family Party’s Gareth Kirk said: “This is the single biggest threat, however, it is not for Scotland because the single biggest threat we have is our birth rate at 1.22, the lowest globally tied with Thailand.
“We are not going to have the generations left to actually suffer the consequences, if it reaches 1.0 every next generation will halve.
“If the UK got to net zero tomorrow we would still have huge global issues. We are a drop in the ocean compared to what is happening in China.”
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