Okay.
Before I start, I'll just take 30 seconds to tell you that I purposely included that photo because it was a full-page ad in The New York Times--I'm responding to the previous questioner--and I find it reprehensible, but it seems to be acceptable tactics by certain organizations to attack the industry in Canada. I included it because of its reprehensible nature and to show that it seems to be acceptable if it's for a good cause but not acceptable if it's not for a good cause. I find it very distasteful, and that's why I show it, but it was a full page in The New York Times, and they found nothing wrong with it. I'm glad it was noted.
In terms of the question on ethanol, I think too often governments want to spend money and get results right away, without coming up with a plan or studying what the best way is. The little bit I know on producing biofuels tells me corn is not a good investment of energy for the amount of energy one gets out of it, and we need to look at other sources.
There are two reasons I think corn is probably not the way to go. One is that we should be looking at using waste to generate energy, not creating alternative uses for food products. Because waste currently has very little value, to me it makes sense that we look at it as a way of producing fuel, as opposed to using something that has value.
We're seeing global inflation on food right now, and one of the reasons is the push to get fuel to produce fuel. It's creating hardship--tremendous hardship--in developing countries. In China we've seen the price of meat go up 30% or 40% in the last year, and the government's had to put price controls on food.
So I would agree with you completely, and I would say that rather than jumping in and saying wood's the answer, we need to do the research to find the most viable answers for Canada on a broad scale in terms of biofuels, and not just focus on one area. Then we can start spending the money in that area, and we should base it on how many units of energy it takes to convert it to a unit of energy. If it's one and a half to one, it's not a good investment; if it's 0.1 units of energy to produce a whole unit of energy, that's a good investment.
I think wood would probably come out fairly high on that, but I don't know that much about it; probably someone like Jack might know a little more, but that would be my response.