Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to you, Hans, and your colleagues. I must say, bringing all these organizations together under one roof is very energy efficient, and I congratulate you.
I wanted to dialogue a bit with Murray on a presentation I was just at with John Ritch, the director general of the World Nuclear Association. I am not going to have time to, but he made a very compelling argument for why nuclear should be in the mix and what can be done with the waste.
I wanted to go to Mr. Maynard because I was looking forward to the trip to Calgary and to Fort McMurray. I may have to go there sooner than next fall, because it's an area that is very important and one that I'd like to learn more about.
If we're going to deal with climate change and greenhouse gas emissions, it seems to me we have to all get together, all citizens, the manufacturing sector, oil and gas, transportation, you name it--if we're going to be serious about this.
I don't want to pick on the oil sands, but we talked about certain private interests and public goods. In the context of the oil sands, it seems to me that greenhouse gas emissions are a public policy question. Protecting our water resources is a public good. And there are some of the social problems, which I've just heard about tangentially. I wanted to go up there to have a look. They are perhaps more provincial in scope, but they are a public good and we need to be concerned about them.
I was wondering, in terms of the private interests of your member companies, if you've ever looked.... And I don't understand the economies of the oil sands. There are presumably economies of scale when you ramp up, let's say, quadrupling the volume from today. Are there not also some “dis-economies” of scale in the sense of cost pressures and just a shortage of labour, etc.? I'm wondering if your industry would be prepared to have a discussion, a dialogue, on the horrible thought of slowing the development of the oil sands down.
Let me come back to another public good issue, and that is the use of technology. We've heard some of this discussion today. I've been around long enough to know that technology in the head is one thing and getting it working on the ground is another. In terms of carbon dioxide capture and sequestration, in terms of water recycling, there might be a case to be made to say let's slow this thing down to deal with these public interest issues.
We talked about the demand for energy. Yes, but a lot of it is being exported into the U.S., where, I think you could argue, they don't have a really strong ethic in terms of conservation and energy efficiency. Maybe that's changing, but I just put that on the table.
Has your industry ever looked at it from the point of view of your own private interest, let alone the public good that I've mentioned?