Natural Resources committee  Again, a lot of these are leading-edge communities. These are prototypes. I agree, the first time you build something it's fairly common that you get those kinds of cost increases. Just consider this. What if the new standard for building were this new way of doing things? It b

Natural Resources committee  I think you want an urban planning expert here, to be honest, to answer that. I'm an energy economist. I can see the benefits when you run your models--what happens to personal kilometres travelled in transportation, what happens to energy burn in buildings. But running good ci

Natural Resources committee  Roughly speaking, but again that's subject to check.

Natural Resources committee  I'm not a social.... I'm an economist. I'm an energy economist by trade. That's what I'm trained to do. But I just look at the examples. Depending on how you build your city, you can have New York, you can have Geneva, or you can have São Paulo. It depends on how you govern your

Natural Resources committee  There are two elements there too. In some of the modelling we've done, when we talk about $200 a tonne, you often see sometimes complete electrification or drastically reduced emissions. You may not be paying a carbon tax at all, simply because your building is not powered with s

Natural Resources committee  It can be done either way. That's a policy choice.

Natural Resources committee  There are wrinkles to it, but functionally on a graph scale they're equivalent. It depends on what happens with the permits with the cap and trade system, if you fully auction versus grandfathering versus allocation and what have you. But in terms of sending the price signal out

Natural Resources committee  It depends on how you recycle the revenue.

Natural Resources committee  My understanding was--and I'd have to sit here for five minutes to calculate it exactly--that the U.K. compared to Canada, in terms of the average person's petrol prices, was something on the order of a $170 tonne carbon tax already. The difference they pay at the pump versus wha

Natural Resources committee  It's interesting; you say you need a filter and an assessment of action by action. But the most effective filter is an effective carbon price and the private market operating within the bounds of the carbon price. They will allocate funds and investment in the direction in which

Natural Resources committee  No, no. The first and most important thing is full coverage. There's been a lot of discussion of covering our large final emitters, but there's been very little discussion of actually covering our entire economy, which includes our urban consumption in our urban systems. So you

Natural Resources committee  Another thing, too, is that you mentioned that since the 1950s and 1960s our cities have been growing. It is going to take us that long, if not longer, to come back down. So what we need is steady, consistent, fair policy that does not overly penalize any one group. If someone h

Natural Resources committee  Absolutely central.

Natural Resources committee  That's a planning question and a policy question. It is generally recognized among urban planners that in a lot of ways we've been going the wrong way in the last 30 to 40 years, in terms of really expensive infrastructure that can't support itself because there's simply not enou

Natural Resources committee  Just to begin, the depth of our targets is such that we need to do absolutely everything. We're going to need CCS. We're going to have to decarbonize our energy supply system. But we also need to address the consumption side of the economy. Now, if you have $1 billion, you obvio