Sure. Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Thanks for taking the time to chat with us.
Climate change is of enormous concern to Canada's forest industry. As you probably know, we are the world's largest exporting nation in forest products. The impact of the changed climate and also the impact of a changed economic marketplace because of climate change are of deep concern to us.
The changes we have already witnessed in the climate—the lack of cold winters—has had an impact on the forest industry. The pine beetle, which normally would have been killed off because of cold winters, has multiplied and multiplied. Now 25,000 Canadian families have lost their livelihood. They have had to leave their communities because of a lack of wood to feed the industry. We don't think of climate change as a future or an abstract threat; we think of it as an immediate threat to people's capacity to earn a living and feed their families.
As a result of this, we've probably been sensitized to the need to act on climate change a little earlier than some other industries. In our mills we've reduced our use of fossil fuels dramatically. We're at 60% reduction of greenhouse gases compared to the Kyoto base year of 1990. If you do this on an intensity basis, the number is actually a little better; I think it's 62% or 63%. Any way you look at it, we've made a very dramatic turnaround in our greenhouse gas performance.
We've done this by a deep retooling of our industrial processes, switching from fossil fuels to waste-based renewable fuels. What used to go to landfill and come out as methane now is going into the boilers and creating green energy. It's quite a dramatic turnaround.
Our customers have been asking us whether it is possible to produce carbon-neutral products. To do that, we had to go beyond the regulatory world view and look, cradle-to-grave, at our production. We are examining what we're doing in the forest. It's important to realize the impact of forestry on carbon stored in the forest, and of course to be certain that for every tree that is harvested, the carbon stored in that tree is replaced with a growing tree. We've also looked all the way through the value chain to the end-of-life cycle to make certain that our products don't end up in landfills and come back as methane.
We've taken a cradle-to-grave approach, or a cradle-to-recradle, and we've committed to being carbon neutral by 2015 without purchasing offsets from outside, which I think is quite a unique and ambitious target. We'd like to go from 60% renewable fuel to 100%. We think we can do that faster than 2015, but of course with economic circumstances capital renewal has slowed down.
Whereas this started as an environmental issue, it is quickly becoming an economic issue. The forest industry is fundamentally the carbon industry. A tree is carbon in long chains, and you transform a tree into pulp and paper and wood by adding extra energy.
Our competitors in Europe have long since had government policies to support the integration of bioenergy and bioproducts into the forest industry. In the United States, we see very massive subsidies, perhaps less policy-driven than we see in Europe, but nonetheless there are very massive subsidies around the issue of bioenergy. We would like to suggest to the committee that in addition to the need for muscular, aggressive regulation on the reduction of greenhouse gases, we also need a robust policy framework for the production of green energy and a robust investment regime for the production of green energy within the forest industry.
We recently completed a study in partnership with the Department of Natural Resources and the provinces, asking where this green energy is going to go. Interestingly, from a perspective of an environmental footprint, social footprint, a return on capital employed, the future for energy from biomass in the forest is integrating it into the existing industry infrastructure.
So we actually see a path forward, and we're looking for both policies and investments that will support it.
I think I'll stop there and wait for questions.
Thank you.