Madam Speaker, today I rise in the House in support of the private member's motion to increase support for Canada's renewable energy sector and to enlist Canada as a full member of the International Renewable Energy Agency, or IRENA.
Leading entrepreneurs, scientists and thinkers identify the greatest challenges facing humanity over the next 50 years as producing renewable energy, reprogramming genes to prevent disease, and reversing the signs of aging.
They describe sunshine as a tantalizing source of environmentally friendly power, bathing the Earth with more energy each hour than the planet's population consumes in a year, and they identify the challenge, namely capturing one part in 10,000 of the sunlight that falls on the Earth to meet 100% of our energy needs, converting it into something useful and then storing it.
Solving the clean energy challenge will change the world but it will not be met without economic and political will, as cheap, polluting technologies are often preferred over more expensive, renewable technologies, despite environmental regulations.
Humanity is, however, up to this challenge, as shown by financial and political investment, for example, in President Kennedy's tremendous vision in 1961. He said:
[T]his nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.... But in a very real sense, it will not be one man going to the moon--if we make this judgment affirmatively, it will be an entire nation.
Closer to home the channel tunnel, or Chunnel, first proposed in 1802, cost $15 billion, took seven years and 13,000 workers to link England and France in 1994. The CN Tower, which dominates Toronto's skyline, was constructed over 40 months to improve telecommunications problems resulting from a construction boom in the 1960s.
Today we need new vision, or in the words of James Collins, a “big, hairy, audacious goal”, a renewable energy goal that stimulates progress and leads to continuous improvement, innovation and renewal. We need tangible targets such as Amazon's “every book, ever printed in any language, all available in less than 60 seconds.” We must economically and politically invest in renewable energy, as climate change is our most pressing environmental problem.
It is no longer a choice between saving our economy and saving our environment. Today it is a choice between prosperity and decline. It is a choice between being a principal producer and consumer in the old economy or a leader in the new economy of renewable energy.
We must remember that the country that leads the world in creating new energy sources will be the nation that leads the 21st century global economy.
Failure to limit climate change to 2°C above pre-industrial levels will make it impossible to avoid potentially irreversible changes to the Earth's ability to sustain human development. We have a five-in-six chance of maintaining the 2°C limit if worldwide greenhouse gas emissions are reduced by 80% by 2050, relative to 1990.
In light of this science, there were 17 sessions on climate change under the theme, “The Shifting Power Equation”, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this year. A total of 2,400 global leaders, including 800 CEOs, attended sessions on economics of climate change, making green pay, and the legal landscape around climate change, culminating with a plenary session entitled, “Climate Change: A Call to Action”.
Clearly, global business leaders recognize that climate change is a serious economic and social challenge and that delaying mitigation will make future action more costly. They recognize that addressing climate change requires clear and honest communication regarding the challenge we face, that rich countries should take the lead in cutting greenhouse gas emissions, and that all countries must in fact take action.
Business leaders are therefore committed to addressing climate change and are already undertaking emission reduction strategies in their companies. More important, they support the Bali Action Plan and its work program to negotiate an international climate policy framework to succeed the Kyoto protocol and are ready to work with governments to help this happen.
There are numerous opportunities to mitigate and to adapt to climate change, from carbon capture and storage to cleaner diesel, to combined heat and power, to fossil fuel switching, to hybrid vehicles, to renewable energy, to name but a few mitigation technologies.
Different countries will pursue different combinations of policies and technologies to cut emissions. Canada, with its abundant supply of biomass, water and wind, must expand with government's help its renewable energy sector and commercialization of products and technologies over the coming years.
Industry Canada reports that it supports the development and demonstration of renewable energy technologies. It also conducts research to assess the economic opportunities that renewables create for Canada, as well as investment opportunities and the domestic manufacturing capacity to support the renewable energy industry.
Unprecedented multi-stakeholder collaboration is needed to link the climate and economic agendas. We need private-public collaboration of civil society, climate scientists, environmental economists and trade experts, all working with government.
In concrete terms, Canada needs to be part of the International Renewable Energy Agency, or IRENA, the first group, including 78 countries as of January 2009, designed to ensure the fast-emerging sector has a clear voice at next year's UN climate change negotiations.
The agency's goals include working with its members to improve the policy environment for the use of renewable energy, to engage in technology transfer, and to support capacity-building for renewable energy, goals very similar to those of Industry Canada.
Germany's environment minister argues that IRENA will help to promote the emerging sector at a time when the global economic downturn has caused fear that some capital-intensive alternative energy projects may find it difficult to attract funding.
In closing, our most daunting challenges are the global economic crisis and climate change. Humanity needs a climate change solution that is scientifically credible, economically viable and equable, and Canada needs a plan that builds on its abundance of renewable energy sources with the support of IRENA.
Finally, we must heed the words of 12-year-old Severn Suzuki at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, who was fighting for her future and who challenged us to fight for all future generations. She read:
Do not forget why you are attending...who you are doing this for. We are your own children. You are deciding what kind of world we are growing up in.
Parents should be able to comfort their children by saying “Everything's going to be all right. It's not the end of the world. And we're doing the best we can.” But I don't think you can say that to us anymore.