Industry committee  Well, let's clarify. [Technical difficulty--Editor] hedge funds with private equity, which is a different category of private money. Hedge funds have a notorious role because they hedge investments, so to speak. For most innovation, obviously there's a role for government. This

Industry committee  It's a pretty easy, generic one, but it's a very tough one to implement. It's the same point. Mine sites, if you assume no regulations, still take a very long time to establish. They're physically demanding pieces of engineering. Everything we do to delay that makes it riskier,

Industry committee  Traditionally, it has been the United States and Canada. This has been the epicentre of new business development. New small business formation has been in North America, not in Europe. In fact, whatever measure you use to look at new companies, new formation of companies, North A

Industry committee  He didn't make the comparable pledge. He should also pledge to stop using the Internet. The global Internet uses twice as much electricity as the country of Japan and is necessarily fuelled—at the same ratio as the rest of the planet—with hydrocarbons. Forty per cent of the globa

Industry committee  The short answer is yes, unavoidably, because we don't have the capacity outside of China for either the mining, or, as the IEA pointed out, the refining. Thirty years ago, North America—the United States and Canada together—produced 80% of the world's rare earth elements. Those

Industry committee  It just takes time to.... Even if tomorrow in Canada, which as I've said before is friendlier with the United States, with the new mines—

Industry committee  —I think you've already experienced the challenge in northern Quebec—

Industry committee  —and in neighbouring Greenland. That is what it takes to open a new rare earth mine.

Industry committee  Really, the honest scientific answer is, “We don't know.” The slogan “reduces emissions” is actually not knowable. However, we do know, when we look at the points you raised, that it can be the case, depending on the exact source of the minerals, that an EV driven in Canada emits

Industry committee  Absolutely. It's profoundly counterproductive.

Industry committee  It's a very important question to sort out the policy framework to accelerate whatever technology it is. When one wants less expensive technology, it's always the case that technologies have a learning curve. They get cheaper in time. The unfortunate thing is that what most gover

Industry committee  You know, as a former physicist, when I used to practice as one, I would tell people that this was really arithmetic, not physics. We can look at the energy storage capacity of the batteries that are being planned and proposed for the world or Canada or the United States and comp

Industry committee  That's a very good point. The use of hydrogen in many respects is far more significant than the use of lithium batteries as an energy storage mechanism. I think it's important—and I'm sure you know this—that hydrogen is largely unavailable on planet earth. It left a long time ag

Industry committee  Well, I think the question of realism is that you put it in a calculation and an estimate, as opposed to what we know could happen. Again, I would refer to the just-released 280-page report by the International Energy Agency, which is the pre-eminent source of information for g

Industry committee  The short answer is the transition will take many decades to effect, given the magnitude of the materials involved just in the electric car supply chain—never mind the other green machines. It's just the electric car side. Any serious analysis sees this as taking many decades—not