First of all, what you're trying to do with the policies I'm talking about is influence incremental investments without wrecking your economy.
For example, if we put a carbon tax in tomorrow—I'm just focusing on the electricity sector—and if it were a large enough carbon tax that in the next project in Alberta it made economic sense, even regarding the risk of carbon capture and storage, for them to go ahead and try incrementally a coal plant with carbon capture and storage, the kind of carbon tax you'd need in place for that initially could be quite substantial. That could mean a real effect on electricity prices for Alberta consumers.
So what are your options there? One option is that you could still put in that carbon tax. I've done a lot of work looking at how you can give the carbon tax money right back to the same consumers. The generators get the incentive to try to go with a cheaper supply option in future that would not be emitting greenhouse gases while you burn coal. It could be using coal still, with carbon capture and storage, or it could be some other: renewable, or nuclear, or whatever.
Then what you do is take the revenue and allocate it right back to Alberta consumers as a function of what their consumption was in some base year, say 2005. Electric utilities do some of these kinds of things, and have done them for years, when they have different kinds of tariff structures.
I chaired the British Columbia Utilities Commission for five years in the 1990s, and some of the policy designs I've worked on with greenhouse gas taxes or carbon taxes have some of those elements in them.
At least, though, even if you're unwilling to make your carbon tax really big initially, you could have a system whose schedule to grow over time was such that someone looking at a long-lived investment—again in Alberta—would look at it and say: we're building this plant and we hope it'll be finished by 2012; it's going to be operating for 40 or 50 years after that, and when we look at the price schedule, we think this tax is high enough to do something.
You can also do this by various kinds of regulations, as in the example I mentioned earlier, for example—British Columbia putting on a very specific kind of regulation.
But let me just get to your point about subsidies. What do I think about subsidies? Perhaps electricity is a little easier, but in general the subsidy approach is not going to get you there, and that's for the reasons I mentioned before.
I'll just go to the evidence of Mr. Campbell. He talked about 45¢ a kilowatt hour, I believe, for the renewable that he wants to emphasize. I'm not saying that's what it would have to be for all renewables, of course. It's much lower for wind, obviously, although you have to be talking about wind with storage.
The costs of these technologies compared with those involving fossil fuels would involve huge commitments of federal government money in subsidies, if you were to try to convert your whole economy over to a zero-emission system with those investments in the timeframe you're talking about, 2012-2020, which is why I'm not enamoured of the subsidy approach.