Thank you for your question.
Absolutely. When I gave my earlier presentation, I talked about a number of policy objectives by governments provincially and federally. COP21 is certainly one. As somebody who is now spending a lot of time in the High Arctic, I can tell you that when you speak to people who have lived there on the land all their lives, global warming is real. Its impact in the north is greater than anywhere in the south. There's no question about that. Where they used to have three months of winter roads, they now have seven or eight weeks to get the material in to get their stuff for the winter.
You're absolutely right. I just did some numbers. We think there's probably about 500 megawatts of diesel being burned in these communities. That's the generation capacity. Each megawatt of diesel generates 2,500 tonnes per year of greenhouse gases. If I look at this, it tells me in total what we think the megawatts out there are: it's 25,500,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases that are going into a very pristine, fragile environment in our northern communities. It has way more impact there than it does down here in Halifax, or in Ottawa. I can absolutely tell you that.
The other imperative to try to move away from this is on the environmental front. I will say there's a federal/provincial task force on diesel reduction that's been working for over a year, and there are a number of interprovincial committees, but the time for action is right now. The indigenous communities in Canada are no longer content to have utilities and governments tell them what's going to be okay on their land, including extractive industries or whatever. They now say they have control of it, and we must agree.
In every community I go into, not one wants diesel. I go into Quebec. I go into the Makivik region up in Nunavik. There are 14 diesel-dependent communities on that land base. Every one of them wants to move, but it is a complex move. Dollars are important. That's why the federal government needs to be a coordinator here. The federal government has a constitutional responsibility to Canada's indigenous people.
I think for far too long they've found it too complicated to deal with the provincial or territorial government, the federal government, or a utility. The federal government needs to lead on this. For no other reason than for climate change, they definitely need to lead.