First of all, I have to acknowledge that my expertise is certainly not in the technologies by which greenhouse gases are controlled, although I share a building at the University of Regina with some of Canada's experts in that field. They tell me, as Mr. Cleland said, that this technology has advanced significantly in recent years such that it's probably worthy and it's probably necessary that we at least attempt to achieve the targets that are specified under Kyoto. We'll never know if those targets are achievable unless we try.
I appreciate the constraints that Mr. Cleland identified. We are in fact currently working with the energy sector in the Prairies to identify options for adaptation and mitigation. Our experience has been that industry is showing a lot of leadership. In fact, in my opinion, industry is quite a way ahead of government in terms of taking action on climate change, and ultimately it's their responsibility.
I can't honestly say from a scientific perspective whether the Kyoto targets can or cannot be achieved, but we'll never know unless we try. Certainly, the targets the government is currently speaking about or proposing are disturbing.
Once again, Mr. Cleland referred to targets for the 2050s. If other countries took the same approach, if we took greenhouse gas concentrations for the 2050s and put them in a climate model, the climate becomes catastrophically warm. The impacts are so extreme that the cost of the damage of climate change well exceeds the cost of mitigating and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
I'm sure the committee is well aware of the recent report that came out of the U.K. by the economist Dr. Stern. He indicated that under a business-as-usual scenario, the cost of the impacts of climate change will be in the tens of trillions of dollars and will greatly exceed the cost of mitigating climate change in attempting to achieve as much greenhouse gas reduction as possible in the short term.