Yes, thank you. I just want to make a quick comment about Canada's energy footprint and pick up on that.
While we have a large energy consumption and output for a small population, when you consider the size of our country and the actual factors, I don't know why we apologize for the fact that we are big energy consumers. On a per capita basis, that is the nature of our country. We're just a large country, huge. So we have transportation concerns. Members of Parliaments here have these concerns, just coming to our Parliament, unlike most of our colleagues around the world. The U.S. of course has challenges that way, but other parts of the world are not travelling multiple time zones just to come to Parliament. So we have the huge transportation concerns in Canada. Also, we have a cold climate in the winter and warm in the summer.
So by nature of who and where we are, we are large consumers. Having said that, I think we need to be perhaps a little less apologetic for the fact that it's part of our life—not that we can't be responsible and still recognize that the world is changing.
Coming around to the question of the models with climate change, I want to ask you this thing. With anything with a scientific background around it, and when you're dealing with models and you don't have all the information, models are always only as good as the assumptions. I'm sure in the business world they have to consider assumptions all the time. It's a challenge making economic forecasts today.
It's just an issue we want to throw out there. Recent information has come out on underwater sub-Arctic volcanos, for example, that wasn't considered when these models were established in the international committees that were discussing these things. A huge range of volcanos in the Gakkel Ridge there, reported recently in December 2008 in Nature magazine—a 17-kilometre range and eruptions going up two kilometres under the Arctic ice, scattering shards of rocks for kilometres around there—could affect huge volumes of carbon dioxide associated with that, starting with eruptions in 1999, coincidentally when Arctic ice had accelerated melt.