Thank you very much. I appreciate it.
My name is Zsombor Burany, and I'm coming to you as a patriotic Canadian who has had no other choice but to accept very large funding from American and European sources. I'm currently working on a very large carbon removal project and the de-acidification of the oceans. I've exhausted all funding avenues in Canada, whereas foreign investors were very eager to proceed.
BioSphere Recovery Technologies' intention is to remove vast amounts of carbon from the environment through the intentional development of algae blooms in the ocean. This is not an initiative that we are taking lightly. We have a very large research facility planned that will be going through a detailed scientific review of all the processes involved over the next half a decade.
The processes are well understood and tested at scale, but have never been deployed at a commercial level. Our project involves thousands of people, dozens of large development and research vessels, and the co-operation of leading universities from around the world.
Unfortunately, BioSphere Recovery Technologies is no longer a Canadian company. We will still engage as many Canadian participants as possible, but we have effectively lost ownership and control of what would have been a top 50 Canadian business, ranked somewhere between Hydro One and Magna.
Very few carbon projects have the potential to scale and make a significant dent in climate change. Even large numbers of small initiatives barely move the needle. Large projects that typically get funded are preventative in nature, which means they deal with carbon capture at the source, not with removing carbon already in the environment.
Unfortunately, CO2 levels are now so high that preventative solutions only slow global warming but do not reverse it. Overall, we have virtually no impact on climate change. The funds being spent today are literally negated by global feedback loops. In plain language, most of the projects we are planning have no benefit to the globe, even though they may have a temporary positive local impact.
Canada has an economic opportunity to set legislation and practices that would allow Canadians to manage the global carbon economy. This economy is still the Wild West, and soon there will be many active players involved who will and must eventually come into conflict with each other. There are several proven remedies to these problems that we could implement, which would effectively put us in a leadership or control position.
No one oversees carbon recovery on a global scale, and we are perfectly positioned to fill the gap. Canada has all the support infrastructure needed already in place to build a dominant carbon economy, but it is unable to bring it into play. Well-meaning but misguided policies prevent the Infrastructure Bank and other programs from enabling—