Thank you so much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to each of the witnesses for being here.
I did read the Pembina Institute handout, and I didn't see anything surprising there. Thank you for that. It was what I was expecting.
I want to correct one comment made by Mr. Bramley on CDMs. In fact, it is in the regulatory framework. CDMs are part of that.
I want to bring something to the committee's attention, and I'm sure you're all aware of it. Last Thursday we had panellists here from the IPCC. It was one of my colleagues, I believe it was Mr. Watson, who asked if the United States and Canada were to totally shut down, no more greenhouse gases coming from Canada, everything totally stopped, what would happen to greenhouse gas emissions globally; would they stabilize or would they continue to grow? The IPCC panellist said they would continue to grow. That highlighted to me the importance of having all major emitters as part of the solution.
They went on to say that this is why Canada and the United States need to create the technologies that will enable the rest of the world to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. That was encouraging.
Through the strong leadership of the Prime Minister and the Minister of the Environment at G-8, at APEC--and I would disagree with my Liberal colleagues who called it a sideshow--we need to find a way of getting all these major polluters involved in the solution. The metaphor the minister uses is that we are all rowing in the same direction.
My question is to Ms. Donnelly. There have been comments about the per capita greenhouse gas emissions. I was in Berlin at the G-8 plus 5. There were numerous countries represented there. We talked about deforestation. There were very complex issues. For example, a parliamentarian from India shared that there are 1,000 villages in India that do not have electricity yet. They're looking for the easiest and quickest way of providing electricity, so they're looking at burning coal in a generating plant. Now you have greenhouse gas emissions that are projected to increase in India, along with a lot of dangerous pollutants. But they need the electricity.
There were a lot of options that were discussed. But the EU was quite proud that they had lowered their greenhouse gas emissions per capita.
Could you and Mr. Drexhage share with us--we'll start with Ms. Donnelly--how Europe reduced their greenhouse gas emissions per capita.