Canada has certainly made significant strides in trying to understand how to extract, refine, and use hydrocarbon products more responsibly and more effectively over the years. Professor Plourde highlighted that in his remarks, and I will amplify the fact that we have made great strides in trying to understand what those are and trying to put a price on them. Most economists like me tend to favour a carbon tax to reflect some of the impacts or the potential externalities of using some of these fuels. We've got a start, we've got a framework, and it did start here. As a matter of fact, it started in a solid enough way that I think we can hold it up and say, this is a place where you can depart from and start to fine-tune some of those charges and make them more focused on consumer behaviour.
In terms of what we have developed, I think we have an opportunity to make a few more strides by using a hydrocarbon base—it doesn't matter whether it comes from Oklahoma, from Indonesia, or from here—in such a way that when we burn it at the end of the cycle, we generate air emissions and toxic compounds that have to be dealt with in some way.
There are a lot of other industries that generate toxic compounds that we can be a part of solving. Let me name only one, and that is the source of CO2 and methane gases that come from the construction of cement foundations, or cement bridges, or roadways. Basically, the amount of CO2 generated from transforming Portland cement as a rock into a useful compound simply dwarfs what we generate in oil sands operations.
On the other end, if you look at what has happened and the tragedy that we have in the northern Alberta region today, what's coming out of the burned forests and the transformation of cement products—which will have to be destroyed because they don't have integrity any more—will in turn exacerbate the problem that we have.
What I'd like to suggest is that we're sitting on top of an innovation opportunity here that we don't yet know how to use. But these hydrocarbon products can be the basis of a new way to generate or develop structural products that we can use in building. We can provide a substitute that's lower in carbon intensity than cement ever has been in the past. We can begin to go back to an old way of paving roads. I'm simply saying that there are ways to use our processes more effectively.