Yes. There's a big taboo to talk in negative terms about wind and solar technology. This is not punching down. Of global electricity spending, it's about $800 billion. Wind and solar are using about $300 billion of that investment. This is a critical issue.
I'm not paid by the industry. I'm a physician giving up shifts so I can come to Ottawa and give this testimony. I do this out of a sense of civic duty. I'm the father of a three-and-a-half-year-old. I think we have a really divergent path forward in terms of what this country is going to look like. We desperately need to reshore industry and to do that, we need reliable energy to drive that.
If you look at what's going on with the Russian aggression in Ukraine right now, the EU is completely handicapped in terms of stopping this. They are funding that aggression to the tune of $700 million euros every single day, because they created a wind and solar dominant energy transition backed by natural gas. That's the problem as you were saying of this unreliability and intermittency. There are lots of fairy tales about grid scale batteries and other solutions, but the richest industrialized country in Europe who have embarked the most on this and spent $550 billion on this process relied on coal for the dominant source of electricity in 2021 and Russian gas now.
Canada could find itself in the same situation with the supply chains I was talking about. What happens if China takes Taiwan? How do we respond effectively to that? We cannot set ourselves up in that way for reasons again of effective deep decarbonization, of a just recovery, and a just transition, and matters of vital national security and energy security. Nuclear absolutely needs to be centred by this government.