I'm from the Transition Accelerator, which is a national non-profit organization focused on building transition pathways in regions and sectors across Canada.
We issued a recent report called “Pathways to net zero: a decision support tool”, which we will send to the committee. I would urge you to look at. It goes into quite a lot of detail about concrete steps in various sectors to move toward net zero.
I'm going to talk about a few of the high-level findings of this report. I'm not proposing particular amendments to this piece of legislation; I'm sure members have a whole series of propositions before you. Really, my comments are focused more on the background and on how we should understand net zero.
The first thing I want to say is that net zero, from our point of view, changes everything. Once it is formally adopted as a goal, it changes the way the climate problem is framed. Net zero means balancing any residual emissions with removals, and since most of the negative emissions technologies are highly uncertain as to their outcome, permanence and cost, what that really means is driving down emissions towards actual zero in all sectors of the economy.
Why does it change everything? Essentially it's because it means that the climate issue is no longer about reducing emissions by a certain percentage before a certain point, but simply about stopping producing greenhouse gases; that's to say, absolutely squeezing them out of the economy.
For years our argument has been about how we find low-cost emissions to get to x percent. Forget that. What we need are new systems that simply don't emit greenhouse gases. The only way to get rid of these GHGs is for the large social systems of provisioning—transport, the way we move goods, the way we move people, the way the agri-food system works—have to go towards net zero. This means large-scale changes to those systems. Those systems, however, are already changing in response to all sorts of disruptive currents. Think about autonomous cars, which are pushing the boundaries of what transport systems will look like.
The task, then, is not to get rid of some emissions from the ways we're doing things now, but to engineer new systems that will be better in many respects and also be low carbon. This means the electricity system, the way we build buildings, transport and agri-food have to go through major changes.
One implication of thinking about it this way is that the focus should be on sectors and regions. Why? It's because the problems in agri-food are not the same as those with buildings or transport, and one policy instrument cannot drive these changes. There are different obstacles and different enabling factors. The same is true when we think about Canada's regional identity and differing regional political economies. Pathways will thus be regional and sectoral.
We also need to think about what the system will look like when we get to net zero and planning function of that. This will allow us to avoid some dead-end pathways.
An example I'll give you is blending ethanol with gasoline, which Canada has proudly been doing for more than a decade and which is not advancing us toward net zero, even though it may secure some incremental reductions, because the world is headed toward an electrified personal vehicle transport system. Industry has already opted that way, and there's not enough land anyway to create biofuels everywhere.
What we need is an analysis that looks at what these pathways to net zero are at the system level, not at sets of policies that encourage incremental emissions where they look fanciful, or where they look promising, if you like, because we will waste enormous amounts of investment building infrastructure that turns out to be useless a decade later because it isn't actually on a pathway to zero.
The last thing I would say is that t's great that Canada is moving toward a net-zero understanding of the climate problem, but what we really need is a strategic vision now about what the pathways are to get us there.
For a long time, the tendency has been to do a little bit of everything, to finance this and finance that. There are a few big things that make a difference, and we should be putting as much investment into these as possible: electrifying personal transport, decarbonizing buildings and driving the remaining carbon out of the electricity system. These things are big. We have the technologies. We know how to do them now.
Many other things like aircraft emissions are important and will have to be done, but they are not the priority now. There we need R and D, and we need experiments to identify solutions that can be rolled out at scale.
Thank you.