As a starting position, a price on carbon is absolutely essential. Valuing carbon is the starting point for all the discussions, so that fossil fuels, renewables, cement, steel, power, and fertilizer...We all compete to solve the emissions problems by knowing precisely what the value is for avoiding that carbon emission. That's absolutely essential.
Carbon price must not be subject to political change. In other words, the biggest challenge we're facing right now, when we speak to institutional investors like pension funds, is that people don't believe the federal carbon tax is durable up to $170 a tonne, and that it will ultimately be changed through the political process. Having contractual guarantees, or some sort of assurance, that the value of an avoided emission remains in place is absolutely critical.
The problem, generally, is if the government is picking winners or losers, or the market forces are not functioning. In Germany, for example, the Germans shut down effectively their nuclear industry on the advice of environmentalists perhaps who suggested that renewables would be able to replace that baseload energy. In fact, the result has been an increase in the use of coal, and an ability for Russia to weaponize energy supply to Germany. Taking away reliable baseload energy on the basis of perhaps an ideology is something we absolutely have to avoid.
Carbon capture is an overall solution. I deeply believe that it plays a pragmatic role, because I start from the basic proposition that the growth in the human population, how the modern world works, is based on fossil fuels. This idea that we're just going to simply eliminate fossil fuels, I don't accept that. I start from, what are we actually going to do about this problem, given what the reality is today? What can I do when I wake up tomorrow?
We've committed ourselves to advancing carbon capture and storage, because we genuinely see a pathway to using our skills in a subsurface, our engineering skills, our financial structuring skills, to deploy capital, and have projects come to fruition that begin to reduce emissions.