Professional engineers certainly have a role to play in the public arena. Indeed, the reason I wanted to get elected was to make that voice heard.
We have addressed a number of different topics in this Committee, especially the government's environmental policy. We are seeing a whole mix of things in this area. They talk about preventing smog, on the one hand, and climate change, on the other. And yet, these are two separate things.
Witnesses have come before this Committee to say that by reducing smog, we could reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, I think it's actually the reverse, and I would like to hear the opinion of engineers on this. It is possible to use fossil fuels, to filter the particles before release and, in so doing, resolve the smog problem, since no pollutant is actually released into the atmosphere. However, CO2 does pass through these filters and ends up in the atmosphere.
So, we have resolved only one of the two problems. However, if we proceed in the reverse manner -- in other words, reduce the consumption of fossil fuels to a minimum -- CO2 will never be released and it won't need to be recovered. The same applies to pollutants.
Do you think that is a realistic analysis from a scientific perspective, or is this just one opinion among many, as some say?