Environment committee  The energy balance question is the easiest one to answer in the sense that if you use data and farming methodologies from the late 1970s and ethanol technology from the late 1970s you would get a negative energy balance. If you're using today's technology and today's agricultural practices, you'd get a positive energy balance on a life cycle basis.

Environment committee  Industry will be there if there's clarity in terms of how it's going to be taxed, how it's going to be regulated. Right now we're operating in a vacuum and we're being told that everything is going to change, but we don't know what it's going to change to. It will come where there is clarity.

Environment committee  I'll give you one really quick example. The mountain pine beetle is often pointed to as a wholly negative force in terms of what it's going to do to the forestry industry. It's also creating an opportunity to make ethanol out of wood waste, which wasn't there before. So even in the darkest rain clouds, there are some silver linings.

Environment committee  I would agree with the 50-year number. I think it's at least that amount of time. The challenge for policy-makers is that there's not enough money both to fund that technology development and transition your economy and to spend money on foreign credits. There are just not enough resources to do both.

Environment committee  No further comment.

Environment committee  I said I have no comment different from that. I don't think we had any conception, at the time we signed Kyoto, of what it meant. In terms of trying to meet it now, I think the only way to do it is by buying foreign credits, and I don't see government revenues being large enough both to fund this technological investment and transition and also to export billions of dollars a year to buy foreign credits.

Environment committee  No.

Environment committee  I think it's addressing a different issue. Insofar as the government has targets that are long term, stable, and viable both environmentally and economically, I think that's a positive piece of the puzzle. I would agree with those who are saying this is one component of what needs to be a broader strategy.

Environment committee  You're seeing some investments that were in late-stage development to fill demand and to meet the requirement in Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Ontario have proceeded since that time. However, new investments are really waiting to see what the federal policy looks like—

Environment committee  From the government side, we've been in a very extensive period of consultation followed by, in the last couple of months, a period of waiting. The timelines originally laid out have been missed in terms of having a second interprovincial meeting in the fall and some announcement in terms of what the regulation and the financial package would look like.

Environment committee  With respect to a carbon tax, we followed the proposal in Quebec with some interest. The concern I raise with any dedicated tax is that revenues go into general revenues, and our experience with dedicated taxes in the past hasn't been very encouraging. The road tax doesn't go to roads, the GST doesn't go to the debt, the health care tax in Ontario is not related to health care funding, and it's unlikely that a carbon tax in the long term is going to actually change the amount of revenue governments put in to deal with these issues.

Environment committee  Thank you very much for inviting me to join you today. I'm with the Canadian Renewable Fuels Association. We're the industry association for ethanol and biodiesel in Canada, as well as for other renewable technologies. Our industry is really going through an unprecedented global growth spurt right now that is being driven in part by rising energy prices as well as by improvements in technology for producing renewable fuels.

Finance committee  I guess it depends what outcome you want. In terms of creating a market for the fuels, that's quite easy to do in terms of passing a regulation requiring renewable fuel content, as the government has proposed. We have more renewable fuel production today than we did a few years ago.

Finance committee  Yes.

Finance committee  Yes, but will the supply be made in Canada? That is the question. These are NAFTA products and they'll travel freely across the Canada-U.S. border. The fact remains that if you pay less tax, less than half the tax to produce that fuel in the United States than you do in Canada, you're going to make a lot more money producing it in the U.S. and shipping it to Canada than by producing it in Canada.