Madam Speaker, the collective western history of wealth creation has largely followed the history of energy densification. What do I mean? First, we cooked our food and kept ourselves warm with wood and then charcoal, followed by coal, fossil fuels. We now have today's options of nuclear and there are tomorrow's possibilities of hydrogen, etc. Each progressive fuel is denser and has less of an environmental impact.
The current government's focus on punishing our oil and gas production sector, coupled with a punitive carbon tax on consumers, is misplaced and bad environmental policy. Do members know what year the world consumed the most coal? It was last year, and this year we will break that record.
LNG has half the GHG emissions of coal, and the world wants cleaner-burning, affordable Canadian LNG. Instead of using the wealth generated by clean LNG to fund our own energy transition, the government has given Canadians a carbon tax, which makes us all poorer, and it has virtually no impact on the world's GHG emissions. We would axe the tax and sell the world cleaner fuels that would lower global—