Mr. Chairman, I know exactly what you're getting at. I have to tell you, as my colleagues will confirm, you have no idea the number of hours we spent, going way back into the early 1990s, debating the issue of the science. At issue there was this idea that we don't know. There are scientists on both sides. In fact, we kept a ledger of who said what, who was for, who was against, who could prove, who could not. While we know that a lot of people played fast and loose with the numbers and the credibility of those numbers, the conclusion we finally came to was that, while I personally find it intellectually stimulating, to continue to debate the science would really hold us up from doing a lot of things we should be doing anyway.
We've adopted, collectively as an organization, 150 CEOs who collectively administer $3.5 trillion in assets and are responsible for the vast majority of GDP.... The conclusion we came to is that we should be prudential on the science. In other words, we don't know for sure, but we do see evidence that increasingly is disturbing. So what did we conclude? We said, “Look, instead of dissipating energy in these huge debates about whether it is real or not, why don't we do things we should be doing anyway?” Why don't we invest in smart technologies? Why don't we invest in environmental innovations? Even though you're right that we're a big cold country with huge spaces—God, we've lived through these winters when we would pray for global warming sometimes—and also demographics that are working in our favour to increase C02 emissions, we came to this conclusion. Why not adopt the new technologies and new sciences, which is in the direction we should be moving in anyway, in order to make us less reliant on petroleum-based resources?
Once we got out of the corral of that debate, then whether it was coal, or ethanol, or nuclear, or oil and gas, or oil sands, or hydroelectric power, or biomass, we all said, All of these sources of energy are relevant. I don't want anybody in this room, one CEO arguing with another one....” You would not believe the degree of saying, “Listen, I'm in oil sands, so I'm okay; you're in coal, so you're not.” And we said, “None of that, because we all have to contribute to the energy needs of the planet in one way or another, but let's try to do it in the smartest way we possibly can.”
That way we left the science debate behind. It's not that we don't read it still. It's not that whenever there's a new study we don't pay attention to it. That's what we've chosen to do. It's what I call the prudential approach, which in the final analysis will make us all more responsible, more effective citizens applying and using the best of technologies.
Here is the last point. We recognized this in a major study we did in 1990 with Professor Michael Porter. The quicker we adopt environmental sustainable technologies, the quicker we do that, the more competitive we're going to be into the 21st century, we argued, and that's the way we feel now. I don't think we've done nearly enough, but we can and should be doing more.