A price on carbon. I think a price on carbon is totally unnecessary. As I told Dr. Suzuki in our “travails” across the country, I'll take a global recession over a thousand Kyoto agreements.
You see, we're not going to emit, I don't think, half of the carbon that the IPCC says. All they're doing is extrapolating China's coal consumption, which is up around 3.5 billion tonnes a year, and just growing that at the same rate that it has grown in the last 10 years. But as you notice, China's not growing at the same rate that it was before, and neither is anybody else. What drives economic growth is oil and coal. They're the two major energy sources of the global economy. When the global economy doesn't grow, guess what: you don't combust as much oil and coal, and when you don't combust as much oil and coal, you don't emit. I think there would be an urgent need for carbon taxes if the global economy was continuing to grow at the rate that it has in the last 40 years.
But I've argued, particularly in my most recent book, that that's not the case. More importantly, if you look around the world, I think the evidence is overwhelming. I think the silver lining here.... The reason I went with David Suzuki is he's the only guy who thinks the end of growth is a bullish story. It's a bullish story only in the sense of its implications for our combustion of hydrocarbons, and the carbon trail that comes through that.