First of all, let me give you a few numbers, and then let me answer your more strategic questions.
On a well-to-wheels basis--that is, counting both the emissions at the source and at the use phase, when people burn the oil in their tanks--the oil sands carbon emissions are perhaps 20% in round numbers. There's lots of uncertainty in conventional oil. Again, it depends which conventional oil you're talking about.
I think I would answer the strategic question as follows. We cannot keep taking carbon out of the ground and putting it into the atmosphere for this century without really dramatic climate change that will be truly dangerous. We have to have a clear-eyed policy to stop doing that.
There is nothing you can do in the long run about cleaning up the oil sands production that solves that problem, because the product is the problem. Even if there were no emissions at all from the oil sands operations, the main problem is still the product. The main problem is taking the carbon out of the ground and putting it into the atmosphere. So in the long run, if we want a stable climate--and we will, and we do, and our grandkids will--we have to stop, period. There's no technological fix.
But the climate problem gives us some time. It's not a panic. We don't have to do this in five years. This is a half-century problem, but a half-century problem demands, if we're serious about technological change and about doing this with minimum disruption to our way of life, that we start to get serious now about what technologies and what innovations we're going to put in place to allow us to wring the carbon out of the energy system and to deliver more energy services, including delivering energy services to a billion people on this planet who currently have no access to modern energy and who deserve it. They deserve the ability to access it through their own hard work. We need to figure out how to do that with zero carbon emissions, and we need to do that over the space of a bunch of decades--four, five, you name it.
That means we need a serious conversation in Canada that doesn't get locked up on nonsense about dead ducks but focuses on a clear path that agrees on when we are going to peak oil sands emissions and when we are going to tail them off and that thinks hard about how to use all the engineering and managerial talent we have in this town and elsewhere to do things that can supply us with energy in ways that don't put carbon into the atmosphere.