Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk to this committee.
Obviously air pollution is a serious problem in Canada. Smog has important health impacts. Everyone has seen the studies of thousands of Canadians who have died prematurely from smog in Canada. One of the primary ways we can address smog and air pollution and the health problems that come from that is to actually address climate change.
Fossil fuels are the major source of much of Canada's air pollution, and they are also the source of our greenhouse gases. When you address climate change, you automatically reduce the amount of fossil fuels you burn, either through efficiency or through moving toward cleaner forms of energy. Of course, this means you end up with less air pollution as well.
One of the three ingredients in smog is heat. The other important factor is that if we allow the globe to continue to warm and we allow our cities to continue to warm, we will have more smog. We've seen that already in certain places, most particularly southern Ontario, but other places in Canada as well, such as Montreal and the Lower Mainland.
This brings me to my first proposed amendment for Bill C-30, which is to include in the preamble a reference to the ultimate objective of the United Nations framework convention on climate change. That objective is to prevent dangerous anthropocentric interference with the climate system. Canada signed on to this in 1992. We ratified it, and of course we ratified the protocol that came from it, in 1997.
The second amendment goes to the first one, which is that in order to prevent dangerous climate change we need to include short-, medium-, and long-term greenhouse gas emission reduction targets as part of Bill C-30. They have to be written into the bill to ensure there is continuity with the objective of both dealing with climate change and addressing our urban air pollution problems.
These cannot be intensity targets. The only way to address climate change is to reduce absolute emissions. Using an intensity target basically takes away the transparency of what we're trying to do. We are trying to measure and reduce our greenhouse gases. By turning it into a ratio that has to do with economic activity, it essentially muddies the waters and does not allow us to focus on what the objective should be.
We talk about short-, medium-, and long-term targets. We already have a short-term target, which is the Kyoto Protocol.
All this discussion—should we or shouldn't we, can we or can't we—on the Kyoto Protocol, is actually absolutely inappropriate. Kyoto is international law. Canada is bound by it. We should be achieving those targets and those objectives. It is also an unnecessary distraction, because all the evidence shows that Canada can still meet its Kyoto targets. Absolutely. We need to get on with it. We need to stop this debate.
The people who have resisted the science of climate change have now moved on. They are now talking about how Kyoto is not achievable. This is not an accident. To overcome that we need to move toward reducing emissions and doing it now.
Kyoto is not the final destination, of course. Kyoto is one point along the path to addressing climate change in a meaningful way.
In order to avoid dangerous climate change, which is again the ultimate objective of the UNFCCC, the science is very clear that we have to start reducing. We have to stabilize concentrations in the atmosphere very quickly and reduce them by approximately 80% by 2050. Globally, it is in the range of 50% to 55%.
For Canada to take its fair share of that responsibility, given that our emissions per capita are much higher than those of the vast majority of the world—in fact we're close to the bottom in terms of our pollution per person—our emission targets should be 80% by 2050. Of course, working backwards from that, we get to a 25% reduction by 2020.
The EU has actually committed, pledged to reduce its emissions by 20% by 2020. It is starting at a spot where it uses half the energy we do, and it emits way fewer greenhouse gases per person. The EU is not only saying that it will do 20%, but that if it has partners—if it has Canada and others joining it—it is willing to go to 30% by 2020. That's the kind of leadership we need to follow. I'm not even asking for us to be leaders; I'm asking us to follow the leaders and not be laggards.
That brings me, of course, to my third amendment. In order to get to short-, medium-, and long-term targets, the Governor in Council needs to introduce limits on greenhouse gas emissions from industry. Industry makes up 50% of Canada's greenhouse gas emissions, and therefore it should take on 50% of the responsibility for reducing those emissions.
We need a cap and trade system that ensures that, in essence, industry meets its Kyoto targets: 6% below 1990 levels. What does this work out to? If you do the math, you look at the emissions from industry in 1990 and subtract 6%, and you compare them to the business-as-usual projections that we have for 2010, it amounts to 127 megatonnes per year for industry. That's the target that industry should be asked to take on, in order for it to share the responsibility for addressing climate change in Canada.
We use 1990 as the base year because that's the fairest way to do it. This gives credit for early action to those companies and those industries that have actually acted to reduce their emissions between 1990 and now. There are industries that have done it and there are companies that have done it.
Here is just one example of how it would be possible for industry to actually meet this target. The largest burden of that would be on the oil and gas sector, because its emissions have grown the most since 1990. An industry association, Petroleum Technology Alliance Canada, put out a report a couple of years ago that said that the oil and gas industry could actually reduce its emissions by 29 megatonnes per year every year, at no net cost. Every dollar invested in becoming more efficient would come back to them in the form of energy savings. That's close to half of the target for the oil and gas sector. There would be zero cost for reducing half of its emissions. This is absolutely doable. When you break it down by oil and gas, electricity, and manufacturing sector, the numbers are absolutely doable. And this is the biggest chunk of meeting Kyoto. Of course, we saw last night in the House that we now have a law that gives further evidence—it was already international law and supposedly Canadian law—that Parliament wants to get on with it, and Canadians want us to get on with it.
Canada will have to buy international credits to do that. We've unfortunately waited way too long to be able to do it all domestically. International credits have unfortunately all been painted as hot air, which is completely ridiculous. The clean development mechanism and the joint implementation are projects that produce certified emission reductions. They're third-party verified, and they're verified to be additional to what would have happened in a business-as-usual case. In other words, they are emission reductions. And of course we know that emissions anywhere contribute to climate change everywhere. So emission reductions anywhere else in the world will help to combat climate change.
There are also huge economic opportunities for doing this, of course. Canadian industries can export their clean energy through these mechanisms. Others are doing it. The EU is very engaged in this. Japan is engaged in this. As is the case for the other action on climate change, Canada is being left behind. Action on climate change, including international credits, is an opportunity that we are missing out on.
Getting back to the health aspects for our citizens and our ecosystems—and when we talk about air pollution, that is of course the concern—if we do care about the long-term health of Canadians and if we want to take global responsibility for the pollution we've created, then we need to tackle climate change head-on. That will have a huge impact on air pollution in our cities and on the health of Canadian citizens.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.