Mr. Chair, now that I've heard him, I am going to do something quite different from what David has done. I want to start by standing back a bit and dealing with some of the very fundamental issues.
Often there is confusion in people's thinking about the role of energy in climate change. I think it is very important to understand that it is not the energy we use that gets us into trouble, it is the material byproducts of the conversion processes that we use to put energy into forms useful for ourselves.
If you run the numbers, mankind could use 150 times as much energy as mankind uses today, and if it all became heat—which is a pretty good assumption anyway—150 times today's use would only raise the temperature of the surface of the planet by 1° Celsius. The energy does nothing.
We're in trouble because we haven't paid attention to the byproducts of our processes and because somebody discovered three millennia ago that if you got a lump of coal hot, it would burn in air, and subsequently oil and gas and so on. We've been doing it for millennia, and we think it's our God-given right and privilege just to do this in air.
We weren't doing very much until fairly recently. We're now doing a lot, and there's not another industry in this country that expects, with impugnity, to dump the material byproducts of its conversion processes freely into the atmosphere. If you go back thirty years, the paper industry knew it couldn't keep doing it.
So be very clear. The object is not to figure out how to use materially less energy. It is taking charge of the byproducts and working on the technologies that can change what the byproducts are. We do nothing with energy in extraction, in development, in processing, in refining, in using, that does not involve technology.
People will say I'm just one of these people who says the solution is always with technology. In energy, you have nothing if you have no technology. Every step is a technology, so it is important, if you want to change the system, that you make investments in good minds that can be innovative, that will help us understand science and changes in the technologies that will deal with the issue that is central for all of us, and that is the unfettered dumping of our byproducts into the atmosphere.
Let me say something about the tar sands. I think one of the most important things that came out of our panel discussions and thinking was the observation that we could take real steps forward if we began looking at those components of our energy systems in a systematic way. In other words, you don't simply look at one bit here and see how we optimize this or how it works best in today's economy. You have to look at a broad system.
I'm going to talk about one system. That's a geological system and it's called the western Canada sedimentary basin. We have an extraordinary layer cake, and the trick is whether we can have it and eat it too. That layer cake is unique to Canada. Nobody else in the world has the same overlying layers of coal, bitumen, heavy oils, conventional oil, liquid gases, and gas. We have them all together.
Historically we had an oil industry. It wanted conventional crude and light sweet crude. You pumped it and you put it down their system. Then a gas industry grew up. They had their own system and their own infrastructure. We can go through all the stages.
Today we have an oil sands industry. They're hardly connected. One might be a market for another, but we have never sat back and said that we have a unique opportunity in this country in the western Canadian sedimentary basin; if we are really smart about how we manage this basin, with the optimum use of the resources available to us, and recognize that for all practical purposes we can also store safely in that basin an infinite amount of carbon dioxide in terms of Canadian production, a thousand years of Canadian production at the present rate, and we take the constraint and make it clear that we have to change what we're doing to the environment, and we look at what we have in that basin--nobody else in the world is going to do that for us--then that's a Canadian opportunity.
A lot of people will say that we've gone so far now, how can we possibly change? But listen, when we've done the mining that we're committed to today, and are building today, and are thinking about building in the next few years, we will have dealt with only about 20% of the resource in place.
Now, how do Canadians realize the maximum value of this extraordinary resource? It will only ever happen if we stand back and start getting very bright minds looking at how we can optimally use these resources to yield the products that we need and want, and at the same time take responsibility for the byproducts that we simply cannot continue to dump freely into the atmosphere.
Mr. Chairman, that's only meant to challenge and perhaps engender some discussion. I'm going to stop right there. Obviously I'll deal with questions in time.