We will do this not, I think, by using less energy, and not by consumer choice. We will do this by switching our primary energy supply to supplies that don't use carbon.
It's important to think about the enormous success we've had in the rich world since the Second World War in cleaning up the environment. On mercury, on lead and gasoline, on air pollution, our water--on all those things we made huge, enormous progress. The places we made progress best were when government set clear targets and industry innovated to find ways to meet those targets.
That could be done here too. There are lots of ways that we can produce abundant energy without carbon emissions, from large-scale nuclear power—which is one of the things I think we must take most seriously—to large-scale wind power, or solar in some places. But we have to be clear-eyed about making that transition. And in Canada, we have to be clear-eyed about making investments in innovation, at both a university level and a corporate level, that allow us to win in a carbon-constrained world.
Currently the amount of energy innovation in Canada, the amount of money, is tiny by many measures of global standards. And it's completely unfocused. Money is dribbled across almost every imaginable energy technology, from tidal to whatnot, with no sense of strategy or focus.
I served with Angus Bruneau on the Bruneau commission a couple of years ago, which tried to make this very clear. I think the central challenge we face is to, first of all, be serious about the long-run challenge of reducing carbon emissions, but also to think about how to do that in a way that provides jobs, and high-quality jobs, for Canadians. That means thinking hard about a limited number of strategic choices we make about clean energy.
So for example, government after government has failed to deal with what we're actually going to do with AECL, and I don't see any sense that people understand the actual way the nuclear industry is working and the actual strategic choices we face. The same is true for many other technologies. We have a focus on bringing small amounts of wind power into Canada, but no understanding of the industrial implications of who actually owns and controls the major wind power industry. Some much more clear-headed thinking about the intersection of industrial policy and the need to decarbonize is needed.