Bill C-30 (39th Parliament, 1st Session) committee  The crucial thing is that we act and be seen to be acting and be seen to be part of the framework convention process, and that will make other countries listen to us and hopefully incent other countries to do things. I'm happy to see some international credits go, but I think if

Bill C-30 (39th Parliament, 1st Session) committee  There are two answers, similar to what I said before. One is that we have knowledge from natural systems that CO2 is stored underground for time scales of, say, 100 million years, and there are many such deposits. Both that and the finding of oil and gas indicates that there are

Bill C-30 (39th Parliament, 1st Session) committee  First of all, I think all responsible experts will agree that there's risk of leakage and local risk—health hazards—for humans. There's no question. That's true of essentially any large-scale energy technology. The comment about regulation is that a well-regulated system can ha

Bill C-30 (39th Parliament, 1st Session) committee  Absolutely. The overarching agreement is the Framework Convention on Climate Change, not Kyoto. That entered into force and was ratified essentially globally. Kyoto is a particular protocol that sets out a particular numerical target under the framework convention. I think Canad

Bill C-30 (39th Parliament, 1st Session) committee  There are many technologies used for reducing CO2 emissions—efficiency improvements, wind power, and what have you—but on CO2 storage I want to add two things. One is that it is in principle—and there are some facilities moving towards this in the world—possible to capture CO2 fr

Bill C-30 (39th Parliament, 1st Session) committee  That's a great question, and I wish I had a really great answer. I think if you'd asked me a few years ago, I would have stuck to the idea that you just have to put in a price or a regulatory cap and trade. I have no big opinion between them. I think the reality in a relatively

Bill C-30 (39th Parliament, 1st Session) committee  It's tempting. There has been a lot of talk about capture-ready in the last five years. But after our first few years of being excited, when you really talk to the leading industry consultants there is less there than meets the eye. Capture-ready is pretty fuzzy when you get down

Bill C-30 (39th Parliament, 1st Session) committee  I think the crucial thing, and the lesson from other regulatory regimes, is you need a regulation simple enough that it gets through to the engineers in a company, not the lawyers—and no offence to lawyers, as I love them. But the advantage of something that sets a clear carbon p

Bill C-30 (39th Parliament, 1st Session) committee  Yes. People are now building coal-fired power plants in Europe, and some recently in China, that are exceeding 42% to 43% efficiency, which is much better than the fleet average in North America. But if you ask about the cost-effectiveness of pushing beyond that number, it's very

Bill C-30 (39th Parliament, 1st Session) committee  A lot of that depends on the real details of administration, but the overall evidence from the previous experience in the electric power sector is that regulation is the most important tool to make private money do research. When we regulated sulphur emissions in the U.S. electri

Bill C-30 (39th Parliament, 1st Session) committee  The economy didn't collapse. And that wasn't mostly to do with any technology fund; it was just that we passed a law that said you must have the right number of permits at the end of the year or we lock your plant.

Bill C-30 (39th Parliament, 1st Session) committee  This is going to sound very evasive and academic—

Bill C-30 (39th Parliament, 1st Session) committee  But the answer is that the devil really is in the details. You could design an intensity-based system that achieved real reductions and did the job. The issue is where you set the intensity knob. So if you set a very long-run, clear target and really ground intensity down, you co

Bill C-30 (39th Parliament, 1st Session) committee  That's why a tax is so simple. Intensity gives governments a lot of room to hide, because they can overestimate the current emissions, and it gives industries some room to hide. That's what happened in Europe; people overestimated. But a cap and trade too. The reason the European

Bill C-30 (39th Parliament, 1st Session) committee  The problem is, the people in the business are the ones who know the real costs.