Natural Resources committee  I think countries that are taking action and are decarbonizing are increasingly looking at border tax adjustments, as they're called, tariffs that are designed to ensure that their industries are not put at a competitive disadvantage from countries that are not taking action. I would certainly hope that Canada and the United States would be together and taking action maybe jointly, if there are other countries outside of North America that aren't taking action.

Natural Resources committee  Thank you for that question and for reading my article. This is an “all hands on deck” moment. While in the United States in previous administrations there was no leadership from the federal government so all of the action was at the state and local level, we now have the federal government leading, but it really needs to be in partnership with continued action in the states.

Natural Resources committee  Thank you for the invitation. It's absolutely essential. I think we were playing catch-up. We were behind, and I think we've leapfrogged a bit. We're hoping that everyone else will join the race to the top. As you say, it didn't achieve everything we wanted. There were some important provisions, such as a clean electricity standard, that were dropped in the legislative process.

Natural Resources committee  Yes, I'm familiar with that report. Also, the World Resources Institute has a systems change lab that's tracking 40 indicators of the transformation. None of them are going fast enough. Everything needs to accelerate.

Natural Resources committee  Natural gas is a fossil fuel. It has both carbon dioxide emissions and very significant leakage of methane. We need to phase it out as quickly as possible, along with other fossil fuels. It will play a role in balancing the electricity grid over the next decade or so because it is flexible, but we will need to replace natural gas with other clean firm generation sources that can serve that purpose in order to achieve 100% clean electricity by 2035.

Natural Resources committee  Sure. Thank you. I think it's incredibly successful so far. It's only a year in, but as I said, it's over $200 billion of investment in a 12-month period from July 2022 to July 2023, so we're seeing a rapid acceleration. There are some hiccups. Wind has been mentioned. There has been a slowdown in wind.

Natural Resources committee  In pillar five, I'm really talking about carbon removal, so that would involve carbon sequestration underground after carbon that's already in the atmosphere is removed, for example, through direct air capture. I do want to emphasize that I agree that this should be a secondary strategy, that at least 80% to 90% of the effort to decarbonize needs to be emissions reductions from sources.

Natural Resources committee  Yes. Thank you for the question. I think there are large resources that are left over when crops are used for food—things like corn stover and wheat straw—that should be looked at as feedstock for biofuels, but there's a finite amount of land in the world and we really need farmers to, first and foremost, feed people.

Natural Resources committee  Thank you, Chair and members of the committee. It's an honour to participate in your important work. The devastating impacts of climate change seen in Canada, the United States and around the world in the last year underscore the critical need to meet the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to no more than 1.5°C.