First, I'm not a scientist, so my answers need to be taken with an understanding that this is not my expertise.
Black carbon and Arctic haze are particulates, very fine particles, produced through the burning of fossil fuels. Black carbon is specifically in developed countries mostly from diesel generators and diesel trucks. It can cause respiratory problems. The Government of Canada has dealt with that in southern places.
As a consequence, because these particulates are heavier than air, they actually fall onto snow and ice. They don't stay in the atmosphere, like carbon dioxide. And because they're black, they absorb most of the solar energy that strikes them. The ice and the snow reflect 90% of the solar energy; the particulates absorb 90%. Therefore, they cause a warming and a melting of the ice and snow on which they sit. There are scientists who say that upwards of 40% or 50% of the snow and ice melt in the Arctic is the result of these particulates. So it's augmenting the climate change caused by warming air temperature.
The response here is simply to adopt available modern technologies to reduce the particulate production, with scrubbers on diesel generators, for instance. We don't need to invent any new technology here, but it's a question of recognizing that, for instance, in many of these northern communities—and Mr. Bevington knows all about this—sometimes quite aged diesel generators are used to power whole communities. That's producing black carbon, which is then having an impact on the snow and ice for tens and hundreds of kilometres around.
It's the same thing for Arctic shipping. As I understand it, there's consideration about putting world-class scrubbing technology on the coast guard icebreaker Diefenbaker, which the government plans to build as a recognition of this problem. If you're going to have a heavy icebreaker operating in the Arctic, it should not be contributing to the black carbon issue.