Natural Resources Committee on March 23rd, 2022

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

I want to bring in the international situation, because you're on the other side of the pond and a little closer to Russia, and more dependent on Russian oil and gas, which I think we all would like to turn off so that we can turn off Putin's war machine.

Yaroslav Demchenkov, the deputy minister of energy of Ukraine, has just sent out an international appeal saying not to give up on decarbonization goals. He's begging the international community not to get sucked into this oil race but to turn off Putin's machine by moving forward with the decarbonization goals. That's coming from the Ukrainian government.

How possible is it in a European context to make a dramatic shift so that we can deal with cutting off Putin's war machine but also meet our decarbonization objectives?

[Kevin Anderson]

In my view, if we are serious about this, we would be looking at demand management. This is a rationing issue. However we play it, a carbon budget is, by definition, a rationing issue, but what we have not done is to cut back on people driving their very large cars or flying first class or business class. We have had no rationing in this at all.

In the U.K., we have people now who have the choice between eating or heating their homes, because the people who use the lion's share of the emissions—the 10%, 20% or 30% of the population in the wealthy parts of the world—are carrying on business as usual.

If we are serious about trying to constrain Russian imports, we need to be looking at demand management immediately. That's much quicker than looking for renewables or looking for more oil. Then we also need to be putting in renewables as well.

A combination of those two is a policy framework that has some intellectual backing to it, rather than just locking ourselves into yet more fossil fuels.

[The Chair, Liberal, John Aldag]

With that, we're out of time, with apologies.

I would like to thank each of our witnesses. Many of you today are joining us with a challenging time zone difference, so we appreciate the efforts you have made to join us. Thank you so much.

I would also like to invite you, if you do have any additional thoughts, insights or information you would like to send to us, to submit a written brief of up to 10 additional pages. That can be sent to the clerk, whom I believe each of you were dealing with to get set up for today. Any further thoughts from today's conversation you would like to put forward would be more than welcome by our committee.

With that, we're going to sign out of the public session, take moment to clear the room and get people back into the closed session where we will be looking at the draft report that we have done previously.

Thank you so much.

[Proceedings continue in camera]