NRGO Committee Meeting

STANDING COMMITTEE ON NATURAL RESOURCES AND GOVERNMENT OPERATIONS

COMITÉ PERMANENT DES RESSOURCES NATURELLES ET DES OPÉRATIONS GOUVERNEMENTALES

EVIDENCE

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Tuesday, November 4, 1997

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[English]

The Chairman (Mr. Brent St. Denis (Algoma—Manitoulin, Lib.)): Order.

Welcome, colleagues, as we call to order another stimulating meeting of the natural resources and government operations committee.

Today's order of business: our first session on global climate change.

Mr. Jerry Pickard (Kent—Essex, Lib.): I am really disappointed that you have this meeting starting late. I thought that you're a great chairman, you never start things late.

The Chairman: I know. I was just about to say that we're going to undertake measures to see that this won't happen again. The chair of the previous committee apologized to me profusely and promised me that it wouldn't happen again. I think the best bet is to... We had the library committee before us.

Mr. Jerry Pickard: It might prove otherwise.

Mr. Darrel Stinson (Okanagan—Shuswap, Ref.): Mr. Chair, before we get started here, I'd like some clarification on what happened to our joint committee recommendations.

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The Chairman: With your indulgence, Darrel, I could take time now, but I had planned to talk at the end of this meeting about the schedule of meetings. Could we do that?

Mr. Darrel Stinson: Sure.

The Chairman: One of our witnesses has a plane to catch. It won't change today's meeting, but I had planned to talk to all members about the schedule. I had to do some juggling because of schedules over the next several meetings.

So, without any further ado, I'd like to welcome to our meeting today Jim Bruce and Jeff Passmore. Both gentlemen come to us with distinguished careers.

Mr. Bruce, having spent some time with the federal government from 1986 to 1989, served as director of technical co-operation and acting deputy secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva, where he assisted in the establishment of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He is recognized as an expert in this field, and he is also an officer of the Order of Canada.

Is that right, Mr. Bruce?

Mr. Jim Bruce (Member, Working Group No. 3, United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change): Yes.

The Chairman: Mr. Passmore, in his own right as a specialist in energy technology, is head of a firm called Passmore Associates International. He at present sits on the National Advisory Board on Energy, Science and Technology and is also on the Non-Government Advisory Group on International Climate Change Negotiations.

I thought it would be very appropriate that these two gentlemen start us off today. If we are wanting to get a good background on the issue from a science and technology point of view as we prepare for further witnesses, including departmental officials, it seems very reasonable to have these gentlemen in.

I'm going to start with Mr. Bruce.

We have an overhead projector in place, Mr. Bruce, if you wish to use it.

Colleagues, with your indulgence, I'm going to give our witnesses a few extra minutes each this morning. There will be lots of time for questions, but I think you will find that in both these cases, the extra time for our witnesses' presentations will be well worth it.

Mr. Bruce, please proceed.

Mr. Jim Bruce: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, for the opportunity of meeting with you.

I was asked to speak about the science of climate change, but since in the last four years I have been chairing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's working group dealing with the science of economics and social sciences dealing with climate change, I'll introduce a bit of that flavour into my presentation as well.

I apologize in advance that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change slides are all in English, because the international agreement was that we would work entirely in English, but I have a few slides from Canada that are in French. So I hope you'll permit me to switch back and forth. Thank you.

The greenhouse effect is a well-known, well-established scientific effect. Energy coming in from the sun to warm the earth is mostly transparent and gets through the atmosphere quite easily, because the atmosphere is transparent to energy from the sun. But the atmosphere isn't transparent to the energy going back out to space from earth, because there are so-called greenhouse gases in the atmosphere—water vapour, carbon dioxide, methane, and some others—which are present naturally and which prevent some of the energy that would otherwise go back into space from doing that. And it's a good thing too, because otherwise the earth would be something like 33°C colder than it is.

So the natural greenhouse effect keeps the earth habitable. What we've been doing, however, to that nice blanket that keeps us reasonably warm on earth is we've been adding another blanket—a human-induced greenhouse effect, or an enhanced greenhouse effect—by increasing the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

This graph shows the changes in carbon dioxide concentration in the earth's atmosphere from about 900 AD up to the present time. You can see that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was about 280 parts per million for this thousand years or so. If you go back into the ice cores, you find that the CO₂ concentrations in the atmosphere have never, in the last 160,000 years, been above about 280 parts per million.

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But, human ingenuity being what it is, we have managed through human activities—first of all, the destruction of much of the forests in the world and, more recently, the burning of fossil fuels—to increase the concentrations of CO₂ in the atmosphere very markedly, by at least 30%.

The inset shows the increase in CO₂ concentrations in the atmosphere plotted against the increased use of fossil fuels.

Now, it's not just CO₂ that has increased; it's other greenhouse gases as well. Methane is up more than double because of human activities. We have added some gases to the atmosphere that weren't there naturally, which are also greenhouse gases.

This graph shows sort of the balance of the factors that affect climate. There are some factors that warm the climate, shown on the positive side of the zero line, and there are some factors that cool the climate, which are shown on the negative side. The factors that warm the climate are primarily the direct greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and the halocarbons, which also help destroy the ozone layer.

The thinning of the ozone layer has caused a slight cooling of the earth's surface. That cooling in the upper part of the atmosphere is characteristic of climate change, even though the Globe and Mail doesn't recognize that. That stratospheric cooling actually causes additional warming at the earth's surface.

Tropospheric ozone, what we find in urban smog and regional smogs around our cities, has increased markedly in the world, and it adds to the greenhouse gas direct effect.

The biggest negative effect comes from aerosols, little particles in the atmosphere; sulphate aerosols particularly, from burning of fossil fuels in power plants. They have both direct and possibly indirect effects on cloud formation. This is where the biggest uncertainty is, in forcing of the climate by changes in the radiation balance at the earth's surface.

We have a slight increase in solar energy over the hundred years or so that this graph depicts.

You can see that by far the dominant factor is the increase in greenhouse gases.

The other thing is that many of those greenhouse gases are in the atmosphere for 150 years, once you put them there, whereas the aerosols fall out in about one week. Sulphur-dioxide-caused aerosols cause acid rain, so they're being cut back in order to curb acid rain.

So the dominant factor by far is the long-term greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

What's that likely to do, if we allow that to continue as we have in the past decade or so?

This is an outcome of a model of the climate system. The climate system is very complex: it's got feedbacks from the clouds and from the ice surfaces. You need a complex model to understand all the interactions. If we could take the projected increase in greenhouse gases, business as usual if we do nothing to curb them, and the projected increase in aerosols, if we do little to cool them, and combine the two of them and ask what that will do to the future climate, this is the kind of map that almost all the models—there are about a dozen modelling groups around the world—produce.

This is the one from Canada, the Canada climate model, which is from Environment Canada and the University of Victoria. It shows that with a doubled CO₂ in the atmosphere, which is what would happen between 1910 and 2040, you'd get about a 3°C to 5°C temperature rise over most of Canada. But notice this little blue area, cooling area, to the northeast of Labrador. Because the change in climate changes the ocean's circulation, you get a change that actually results in a cooling off the northeast coast of Labrador. Some people think that may have been partly responsible for the failure of cod stocks to recover in that area after the overfishing did them in.

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Try to remember the pattern of warming over the continent and a little cooling off here and let's see what's actually happened in the past 30 years. Do we see anything like that in the actual temperature pattern? This is what we find. On a Canada-centred hemispheric chart you can see that the temperature has risen most notably in the northern prairies and the Northwest Territories, but also along the border, by about 0.5°C per decade. That's 1.5°C over this period, which is quite a lot. But you'll also notice we have this cooling northeast of Labrador, which the models say should have happened with the greenhouse gas forcing we've seen. The patterns are not identical, but they're very similar.

If we try to look at the global mean temperature—you take all of the observations from around the globe, from over the oceans and over the land, and plot them—you get, from 1900 to 1996 or so, a curve like this black one. That's the actual observed change in temperature around the earth averaged over the year.

There are two other lines here. The first one is the line of what the natural climate variability is, both historically from the record and projected using the models without forcing, without any change in greenhouse gases or aerosols. You would get these peaks and valleys of natural variations in the climate system, but they would go out like this. If you put greenhouse gases and aerosols into the model, you get a curve that looks like the red one. You can see, especially in the last few decades, that is very closely parallel to the observed curve. If we keep on with business as usual, this model suggests we'll be 4.5°C warmer globally, on average, than in 1900. Some models give slightly lower values.

That may not sound like much to non-climatologists, but the difference between the last ice age and now is about 6°C, so you can see this is an enormous change in the global climate.

Let me make one other point about this graph. What you see here now is that both the projected and the observed temperatures are really beginning to pull away from the natural variability of the climate. You can see we are beginning to see something above the natural variations in the earth's mean temperature.

Because of both the increasingly close correspondence between the regional patterns of climate change and the projected regional patterns of climate change with greenhouse forcing, and because we now see this rising temperature curve for the global mean temperature emerging above the natural variations of climate, the intergovernmental panel of climate change scientists—2,000 scientists from around the world—has agreed that the balance of evidence—this is a very cautious scientific statement—now suggests a discernible human influence on global climate. In other words, they're saying “We can now see the signal emerging from the natural variability”.

A warming earth results in a rise in sea level. The sea level went up between 10 centimetres and 25 centimetres on average over the world in the last century. The projection for the next century, with business as usual, would see the sea level rise about 0.5 metres. The first line assumes aerosols are kept at present levels in order to control acid rain. The black line is if you think aerosols are going to continue to increase in the atmosphere. That depresses the warming a bit. It depresses the sea level rise a bit. But the medium projection is for about a half-metre rise by 2100.

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That may not sound like much, either, but if you apply a 20-centimetre sea level rise to a region that is less than a metre above sea level—and this includes 80% of the Maldives, most of the Nile delta, and many other deltas and small islands around the world—you'll find that floods change from occurring every 10 years in those countries to twice a year. So it is very significant to the small-island developing states. In fact, they're fighting for their lives on this climate change issue.

I don't think we're going to see climate change primarily through a gradual rise in temperature in the world. What we'll feel mostly is the change in extreme events. With a warming globe we end up with a more rapid turnover of the hydrologic cycle, the water cycle. That means more heavy rains and therefore more floods.

This graph is from an Australian model that illustrates this. Their model says that with a double-CO*2in world, less of our rain will occur in small amounts and very much more in large amounts, greater than 25 millimetres, or 1 inch.

Has this been seen anywhere? Yes. Over North America we find that there's a 20% increase in heavy rains greater than 2 inches per day, or 50 millimetres a day, over all of the United States and southern parts of Canada. We've seen this kind of change in the frequency of extreme events, which of course affects flooding, especially in small watersheds.

Steve Lambert at the University of Victoria produced a graph on the frequency of intense winter storms. We're seeing a very sharp increase in the frequency of very intense winter storms in the northern hemisphere from about 1970 on. So we're going to see this climate change mainly through increased frequency of extreme events.

The El Nino phenomenon is getting more intense each time. The warm El Ninos are getting warmer, and the cold El Ninos are getting colder. The last very serious warm El Nino, before the one we're now experiencing, did $13 billion in damage around the world in droughts, floods, and storms.

Let me turn to the science of economics—if you're prepared to admit that it's a science. This is a perspective on what it would cost to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, to try to deal with the issue of climate change. This is a schematic. It says that if you plot the cost estimates against the emission reduction increases along this way, you get gradually an increase in costs as you reduce emissions more.

There are two major ideas represented here. The one you hear most, especially from the oil and coal industry, shows the results of models that give you a curve like A, where the total economic cost, usually through applying a carbon tax, goes up fairly rapidly as the emissions reduction goes up. But those models assume, first of all, that there are no market imperfections—that is, there are no barriers to overcome in introducing new technologies for energy efficiency or alternative energy.

I think Jeff will talk about some of the barriers to introducing some of these measures.

So there are barriers there, but this assumes no market imperfection. It also assumes that you just collect that tax and don't do anything special with it to reduce more distortionary taxes.

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If you take a different view and say that with energy efficiency measures we can reduce fuel costs and that in many cases those energy efficiency measures will pay back in one to three years—I heard about one today that paid back in six months—a short period of time, and say that whatever we collect by putting out permits or by taxes to reduce CO₂ emissions we would put back into reducing more distortional taxes like payroll taxes, then you end up with net economic benefits to the country. You can get quite a long way out here in the emission reduction line, according to this second curve, with little cost or in fact with net benefits to the national economy.

In addition, neither of these concepts take into account the secondary environmental benefits. In some cases, we might think they're primary. If you reduce the burning of fossil fuel, you not only reduce carbon dioxide, you reduce very markedly all of these other important pollutants: sulphur oxide particulates, which are a serious health problem; sulphur oxides, which cause acid rain; the nitrogen oxides and hydrocarbons, which cause urban smog; lead, which has been fortunately somewhat reduced since 1989; and lastly, toxic mercury. All of these contaminants are reduced markedly when you reduce use of fossil fuels, so there are these major secondary benefits that we have to take into account.

There are job creation benefits too in the use of alternative energy technologies.

Energy efficiency potential in Germany was analysed this way and this is partly why Germans are moving forward with a very active energy efficiency program. They found that the technical potential of energy efficiency measures is about 45% of primary energy. The cost-effective potential is about 30%, so it's not the full...that extra 15% would cost some money to the economy in net, but look at the employment effects. They estimate that half a million jobs, net, would be created by going for the 45% energy efficiency measures.

There are a lot of reasons for thinking that we can achieve quite a lot at little or no cost to the economy as a whole. There will be sectoral costs of course, especially to the coal and oil industry, but there will be benefits in other sectors.

Twenty-eight hundred economists, including a group of Nobel prizewinners from the U.S. and Canada, made this statement:

As economists, we believe that global climate change carries with it significant environmental, economic, social, and geopolitical risks, and that preventive steps are justified.

Economic studies have found that there are many potential policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, for which the total benefits outweight the total costs.

I'd like to conclude with a remark made by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, which I thought was a very wise and sensible statement. CAPP's full-page ad recently in the newspaper said:

Together we can control emissions and help clear the air. Without slowing the economy. It takes imagination and determination. Here in Canada, we've got a lot of both.

The Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Bruce. That was very nicely done.

We're going to give Jeff Passmore the stage for his presentation. Jeff is more involved with the energy efficiency side, so I thought we would have a nice balance between the science and the energy efficiency and then have a chance for some really good questions.

Jeff, the floor is yours.

Mr. Jeff Passmore (President, Passmore Associates International): Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Good morning, committee members. Thank you for the opportunity to appear.

Here with me this morning is Sharilyn Cyr, whom I'll describe as a renewable energy apprentice species, which is far too rare in Canada these days. She's here to experience a committee hearing, just like, I understand, a number of your members, who are actually here for one of their first committee hearings.

You should all have copies of a kit folder with “Renewable Energy” on the cover.

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Actually, Mr. Chairman, my expertise is renewable energy, as opposed to energy efficiency, although I'm happy to comment on energy efficiency.

In that package you'll find a cover sheet with a number of attachments. It's my intention in the time available to us today to walk you through as many of these attachments as we can without going into great detail, and then perhaps at a future time, either during question period or at some future hearing, we'll be able to get into a bit broader a scope.

The Chairman: I apologize to our francophone colleagues. We just received this today, so I don't think we have this in French.

Mr. Jeff Passmore: No, I just—

Mr. Yvon Godin (Acadie—Bathurst, NDP): I'm getting used to that.

The Chairman: Jeff, please proceed.

Mr. Jeff Passmore: My first point there is focused not on the costs but on the opportunity. I put “lost” in brackets because the opportunities for new energy source technologies are considerable and to date have been pretty much lost or overlooked in Canada, and will continue to be lost if we don't pursue them.

In the attachments I've included there are some figures, depending on who you talk to and where the information is coming from, on wind energy, somewhere between 6,400 and 10,000 megawatts of potential in Canada; small hydro, landfill gas, photovoltaics. I draw your particular attention to natural gas co-generation, 10,000 megawatts in Ontario alone; and bio-energy—and again, I draw your particular attention to cellulose ethanol; 8% of Canada's current agricultural land could replace 100% of Canada's current gasoline consumption, which would reduce CO₂ emissions by 90%, according to a U.S. DOE study. That's basically an overview of what the opportunities are.

Attachment 2 is this document called “Independent Power in Canada”. All I want to draw your attention to there is that there are descriptions of the various technologies on the inside of that brochure: small hydro, biomass, and so on. Actually, if you look at wind energy, the picture in the upper right-hand corner is the only wind farm in Canada, which happens to be in Alberta, at the Cowley Ridge site in southwestern Alberta near Pincher Creek. That describes a number of the technologies and has some information for you on potential.

On attachment 3, I want to draw your attention to the item on the back of that document about the U.S. DOE report, which highlights the potential of cellulose ethanol to reduce CO₂ emissions by 90%. I'll draw your attention to one particular paragraph:

In terms of future greenhouse-gas credits available to those with mountains of wood-waste, “Yes, I would agree they're sitting on a gold mine...

Canada has a real bio-advantage in the amount of wood waste and wood products we have available to us.

My second point is that the federal government could take the lead on environment. Attachment 4 is Renewable Energy in Canada: Industry Views on Achieving the Opportunity”. I ask you to flip that open so it's fully opened. You'll see the little panel on who should take primary responsibility for environmental protection. You can see there that 23 of the 36 industry leaders in renewable energy asked that question said the federal government should take responsibility for leadership on the environment.

While you're taking leadership on the environment, I want you to consider concepts such as value as well as cost. We hear a lot about cost today. Use of the environment is not free. I'm not suggesting we know how to value the environment, but we probably have concluded the value is greater than zero. Actually, a very complicated debate goes on about externalities and valuation of externalities. Nevertheless, we know the use of the environment is not free.

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My third point is that the question is often raised, what levers does the federal government have at its disposal, then, to encourage these heretofore lost opportunities? I have identified three here.

Level the tax-playing field. Attachment 5 is the attachment relevant to this bullet. Our main point there is that we should be working towards equitable tax treatment of competing energy options. There's a little diagram on the outside of this that shows an oil well, wind, geothermal, and hydro. Tax policy can become fairly arcane fairly quickly, but the main point is that in the last couple of budgets we have made some success in working towards a level playing field, but there are still areas where the renewable energy sector is disadvantaged from a point of view of tax policy vis-à-vis the oil and gas sector.

The second sheet on that attachment 5 shows you that for project financing we can go to energy companies, mining companies, and manufacturing and processing companies, but we cannot go to what we call other investors—typically, passive investors that the oil and gas sector has available for flow-through shares, for example.

Then we show two cycles, the reinvestment cycle for the petroleum industry and the reinvestment cycle for the renewable energy industry. You can see that with the adjustments that were made in the 1995 budget, the creation of this new Canadian renewable and conservation expense class, it permits us to flow through shares up until the time when we actually have to build the project. But once it's time to build the project and go out for project finance, we have available to us only those manufacturing and processing companies, those mining and those energy companies, many of whom are not interested in anything more than one project in renewables. So we have to sell the project so there's minor cash reinvested.

The bottom line of what I'm saying is that it's not really yet a recipe for the creation of a renewable energy sector in Canada.

The second lever that the federal government has that is available... I'm suggesting that we become an aggressive green consumer. Attachment 6 has in it an announcement by former Natural Resources Canada Minister Anne McLellan saying that the federal government, through two departments, Natural Resources Canada and Environment Canada, was going to consume a small amount of green power in the electricity it consumes. This is a good example. Much more could be done. It wouldn't be just in electricity; it could be, for example, in transportation fuels.

Behind that one-page article on the initiative for green power procurement in Alberta is a copy of a newsletter called WindSite, and you'll see the first article, “Vision Quest to Install Two 600-Kilowatt Turbines”. Those two 600-kilowatt turbines will be supplying part of the green kilowatt-hours to the federal government under that arrangement announced by former Minister Anne McLellan. But there's much more opportunity for all departments and for beyond the electricity sector.

Finally, my other bullet is, invest in technology. The federal government obviously has research development and demonstration opportunities available to it. Part of the U.S. strategy for meeting its greenhouse gas emission reduction targets by 2012 is to invest in technology. I believe the figure announced by Clinton was something like $5 billion. We have minuscule amounts of money invested in technology in this country. Just as an example, the Natural Resources Canada budget for wind is under $600,000 a year. So you get to the point where you wonder whether it's worth pursuing at that level.

My fourth bullet... There's a lot of discussion about who's going to be hurt by climate change, and I've called this “Alberta - Boom or Bust on Climate Change? Adopt a Diverse Portfolio Approach”. You'll notice I mentioned earlier the 10,000 megawatts potential for high efficiency natural gas co-generation in Ontario. Guess who will benefit from that? Alberta. The wind farm, the picture I showed you, was in southwestern Alberta, in Pincher Creek. One of the best wind regimes in all of Canada is southwestern Alberta and southwestern Saskatchewan, because of the chinooks that come out of the Rockies. So there's a real opportunity for a diverse portfolio mix.

No one is suggesting that we're going to close down the small and medium cap oil and gas industry in this country. This is a transition to a renewable energy future, and it's one that we need to get going on sooner rather than later or we'll miss an opportunity. Contrary to the claims of BCNI and Thomas d'Aquino, the sky is not falling, nor will it fall.

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Fifth, the economic impacts of reducing greenhouse gas emissions have not been fully assessed but are likely to be neutral at worst. I just heard Jim Bruce say there might be opportunities for them to be positive.

I understand you're going to have the Conference Board of Canada and the Al Howatson document appear before the committee. You'll see in there some wonderful summaries of various reports that have been done. I'll just mention one to you that substantiates my claim that they're likely to be neutral.

In the models done by Informetrica on macro-economic analysis here in Ottawa, the authors conclude that the overall size of the Canadian economy and its growth are unlikely to be significantly changed by initiatives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, since increased costs are matched by increased savings from reductions in energy use. Again, you're going to have that witness appear before you.

One thing I didn't have noted here is that the insurance industry and the Insurance Bureau of Canada are becoming increasingly concerned by the number of claims being made against the insurance industry because of climate-related activities. They also find that the economic penalty for not doing anything about climate change is continuing to mount.

On my claim that we will be economically disadvantaged if we do not pursue 21st century technologies and go forward not backward, there's an example of this in attachment 7, which simply takes wind as an example and looks at world wind energy capacity to 1996. You'll see there are 6,104 megawatts of wind installed as of 1996, and Canada has 21 megawatts installed of that 6,104. That is primarily made up of the 19-megawatt wind farm in Cowley Ridge in southwestern Alberta.

On the next page is a photograph of a wind farm in the United Kingdom.

The next photograph is of a wind farm off the coast of Denmark. The offshore wind farms are becoming the newest way to trap the wind in Europe. That gets rid of the variability of winds you have when you're on land. Denmark is not a big country, but in the 12-month period from June 1996 to June 1997 it sold 1,683 wind turbine machines. Denmark has created 8,000 jobs in Denmark and 4,000 jobs outside Denmark through its activities in wind alone.

The emission reduction targets are achievable. Attachment 8 simply shows you a comparison of the CO₂ emissions from gasoline versus ethanol from biomass. That's where you get the 90% reduction. Those numbers are from the U.S. DOE report.

My sixth point is that the future is renewable energy and Canada needs to get with it. The Shell International attachment 9 shows energy market share projected back to 1860 projected forward to 2060. You can see the traditional biomass of coal, oil, natural gas, and so on, with identified renewables crossing over and being a larger contributor than either coal or oil and gas by 2030. Unidentified renewables is that small white line.

Another way of looking at it is the sustained growth scenario, also from Shell International. It shows that even with 2% per annum growth—it also has another more “sustainable” as opposed to “sustained” scenario that would be closer to 1% per annum—we see that wind biomass, solar, geothermal, and any new technologies, which they call surprise, will comprise over half the energy supplied in the world by 2060.

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Finally, wind is the world's fastest-growing energy source, and it is forecast to supply 10% of the European Union's electricity by 2030. In Brazil, as another example, 32% of automobiles run on 100% ethanol, and the remainder run on 22% ethanol.

Finally, it would probably be of some use to the committee if they invited a presentation by an industry panel, to have representatives here who are not generalists like me, but people who work in the industry—small hydro, co-gen, ethanol, and biomass—to make a presentation before the committee, if that would be helpful.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Passmore.

We'll proceed to questions.

Questions, colleagues, can be to either of our guests, as you wish.

Mr. Stinson.

Mr. Darrel Stinson: I'd like to start with a couple of questions to Mr. Bruce, if I may.

Mr. Bruce, what do you see as the exact link between increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere on the one hand and the global climate change on the other? Also, what are the greatest scientific uncertainties and also the areas of greatest disagreement among scientists in regard to global warming?

Mr. Jim Bruce: Perhaps I'll start with the second one first.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established to try to come to some consensus within the scientific community. About 2,000 scientists from around the world participated and another 600 or 800 economists and social scientists. They considered all the views of a few so-called dissenting scientists and produced their report in a way that took into account those views where they were soundly based in scientific observations and theory.

So the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which I used for my presentation, basically is a consensus view of the scientific community. There are still a few people who will argue about a few of the things, but not many.

Second, what's the link between carbon dioxide and climate? Carbon dioxide, along with some other greenhouse gases, traps some of the energy that would otherwise go back out to space from earth; it keeps that energy down near the ground and warms the surface layers of the atmosphere.

The theory has been well known for 150 years and is well proven. What we have done, though, is increased the natural amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere through human activities, notably cutting down trees and burning fossil fuels.

That linkage is an extremely well-established scientific linkage. I don't think anybody would argue about that.

As for the uncertainties, two of the biggest ones are on the question of aerosols, which I tried to elaborate on a bit earlier. Aerosols tend to reflect sunlight, so they have a slight cooling effect. They are, however, regional in character, because you have a large amount of aerosols, say, in the Ohio Valley and southern Ontario, but not much in the rest of Canada.

Also, aerosols are very short-lived in the atmosphere—they stay around for about a week—whereas the greenhouse gases stay hundreds of years. So they have an accumulative effect. The aerosols, once you shut them off to control acid rain, no longer have this slight damping effect on the climate system.

The extent of that damping and the interaction between the aerosols and clouds is an area where we need more research and more confidence in the outcome. The role of clouds is another thing that is not as well understood as we would like it to be, because some clouds will warm the climate and some clouds will cool the climate. How these clouds interact with the warming climate system is something that has some uncertainties about it.

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However, I think you have to take a look at how well our present understanding, built into the models of the climate system, reproduces the observed climate. They reproduce it really rather well; therefore, we have a lot of confidence in our interpretation of these uncertainties. It will probably be improved, but it's not too bad and it gives us the right order of magnitude of the changes that we can expect if we do nothing about greenhouse gas emissions.

The Chairman: Mr. Stinson, do you have a follow-up?

Mr. Darrel Stinson: Yes, one question, Mr. Bruce. With regard to the technology used today, we know it's well advanced over what it was 20 years ago. I have heard some arguments put forward that the better our technology gets in order to measure exactly what's happening in the atmosphere, the more problems we're liable to find. A natural question then is, could our advanced technology account for showing a higher level of what was there? If we'd had the same technology 30 years ago, would we have the same amount of advancement as we have today?

Mr. Jim Bruce: Do you mean warming of the climate or changes in the climate system?

Mr. Darrel Stinson: All of it combined. With the technology advancement that we have today in order to measure the changes that are taking place, how do we know it's not advanced knowledge through the equipment we're using today compared with what we were using 20 or 30 years ago for the same process that has created a lot of this concern?

Mr. Jim Bruce: I think that's a very good question. It is particularly important in connection with things like tropical cyclones. Some people have claimed that tropical cyclones are getting more frequent. Most of the studies I would trust suggest that it's apparent rather than real. Probably tropical cyclones aren't becoming more frequent; it's that we're detecting them better with the satellite images we have.

However, that's not true for many of the other things we see. The temperature changes we've seen, the precipitation changes, the increased frequency of very heavy rainfalls, are not affected by changes in technology for observation. My answer is that it depends on what part of the climate system you're looking at. For some parts of it, certainly, the technology has changed and we observe it better now than we used to and this causes changes in our perception. But for many other parts—and the parts to which I spoke earlier are things in which we can see the changes. They're made by the same kind of observational techniques we've been using for hundreds of years, and the changes are real.

The Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Stinson.

Mr. Passmore, did you want to comment on any of those questions before we move to Mr. Asselin?

Mr. Jeff Passmore: No, that's fine.

[Translation]

Mr. Asselin.

Mr. Gérard Asselin (Charlevoix, BQ): I would like to make a comment before asking my question. Here, in Canada, we have the impression that the more things change the more they stay the same. Why? It's because even when we change governments, even when we change ministers, we still have the same Ministries. The will of the government is the result of several years of reflection. We do analyses, we do studies, we search through libraries. All this was done by the government: Mackenzie Basin Impact Study: Summary of Results; Canada's Second National Report on Climate Change: Actions To Meet Commitments Under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Here, you have the State of the Environment Report and Understanding Atmospheric Change. Here, you have Energy Efficiency Trends in Canada 1990 to 1995 - Influencing Energy Consumption in Canada, etc.

These are all products we have available here, within the government, and on which civil servants have worked. They have done enough studies and analyses. All we need now is to go from analyses and studies to action.

We have been studying the question long enough. We have to go to Kyoto in a couple of weeks with some baggage, with our briefcases full, to visually show that we have the material to prove that we have carried out efficient studies and analyses.

• 1205

But we don't have any results. I have here a document on climatic changes from 1975 to 2001, which is just around the corner. It won't be long until we're there! We see the missing curves. We also have from 1900 to 2100: another increase. We have all those graphs.

I think, and I don't know if you agree with me, that it's time to stop setting goals, targets to achieve, timetables. It is much more important that we look for ways to reduce greenhouse effect gases. Why? Because we say we are worried not only about our own lives but also about the lives of our children.

Look at the situation today: a decrease in agriculture because of acid rain, the extinction of fish species in the waters of the St. Lawrence River and Gulf, our sugar bushes affected by acid rain. The question I am asking our two witnesses is this: If you were government advisors, if you were paid and had access to all those studies, what would be the first emergency measures you would take to make a change by the year 2000 or even the year 2010? I'm not asking all that much. Let's take a bit of time to see the effects that might have on the planet and especially on Canada.

I say that we shouldn't wait until we're like South Korea, in Seoul, in Mexico, where people have to go out in the morning with a mask over their mouth. I believe that here in Canada, we are relatively well off compared with other countries. If I compare our situation with the situation in Seoul and in South Korea, we're doing OK. If I compare it with Mexico, I still find we're OK. But, if I compare it with other countries... It is often said that we console ourselves with comparisons, but that depends on who you compare yourself with. We can also make ourselves feel pretty bad.

So, if you were ministry or government advisors, what actions would you take immediately to change things very fast?

[English]

The Chairman: Mr. Passmore, do you want to go first, then Mr. Bruce?

Mr. Jeff Passmore: If I could leave the committee with one message in terms of what would be something you could do between now and the year 2000 to make the most significant change, it would be one lever; it would be the tax policy lever.

The reason I say that is because there's a lot of money out there right now looking for good investment opportunities. The barriers to technology development are not that the technology is unproven or that the Canadian public doesn't want this technology or that we're at the research and development stage and these are technologies for the 21st century. The barriers are basically institutional. The main institutional barrier is that the money doesn't flow to less attractive areas when more attractive areas are available.

First, we're talking about climate change. We're basically talking about the energy sector. Energy is a big contributor. So the first item of business is to level the playing field. Now, if you really want to get serious—and in some sectors this is almost heresy—you don't just level the playing field, you don't just treat competing energy options equally from a tax point of view, you favour those energy options that you want to encourage. You tilt the playing field in favour of... If you want to achieve sustainable development, you tilt the playing field in favour of energy efficiency and new energy source technologies.

Our first priority is levelling the playing field. If you were to tilt it, the investment dollars would flow because they're going to go where the financial return is. We do not have flow-through shares the same way the oil and gas sector has. That would be the first step.

• 1210

Mr. Jim Bruce: I look at Canada's second national report on climate change that Mr. Asselin has already referred to and I see that half of our emissions, or a little under half of our emissions now, are from the transportation sector, end-use emissions, and that will be growing the most rapidly of all the sectors. By 2020 it will be more than half of a much larger set of end-use energy emissions of greenhouse gases. So my view would be that the first sector you have to tackle is the transportation sector. Fortunately, that could be done quite easily.

There are technologies readily available right now that could reduce the fuel consumption of automobiles and light trucks by somewhere between 20% and 50%. Both Honda and Toyota next year will be marketing hybrid small-engine with plus-battery cars that will meet everybody's need for comfort, safety, and size. The big three, unfortunately, have not been moving very rapidly in that direction. We have the Ballard fuel cell development in Vancouver that Mercedes is picking up. They say they will be selling fuel-cell cars by the year 2004.

Even if you didn't do one of these more radical things, improvements in energy efficiency in the automobile can be very great. Right now, do you know what percentage of the fuel you use to drive your car to work or somewhere else is used to transport the driver? About 1%. So there's enormous capability here for improved fuel efficiency or increased reduction in fuel consumption in automobiles per kilometre driven.

A study of the Canadian Automobile Association members says that's the way they would like to see the government go; 96% of them said bring back fuel efficiency standards for vehicles if you want to reduce pollution from the automobile. So Natural Resources Canada does have the authority to do that.

There's been some argument that we should do it in lock-step with the Americans. But we're more than 10% of the automobile market. That's bigger than California, or about the same size as California. If we wanted to do it, we could do it. That would achieve stabilization of emissions from the whole transportation sector.

If we went to a reasonable kind of fuel efficiency standard that's readily achievable by the industry, it could achieve stabilization from the transportation sector by 2010 and 2020. This has to be one of our major targets.

Another thing I would suggest is that we find ways of using much more of that Alberta and east coast natural gas in co-generation and in electricity generation right across the country, and phase out the use of coal and oil. Natural gas has about half the CO₂ emissions per unit of energy produced, as does coal, and it's about a third less than oil. You can make a lot of mileage by substituting the natural gas that we have in abundance in the west and in the east for coal and oil.

Those are the two things I would recommend, Mr. Asselin, if anybody was listening.

The Chairman: Is that okay for now, Gérard?

[Translation]

Mr. Gérard Asselin: One small question. What is hard to understand is the stability that seems to have existed in the last century, from 1800 to 1900. However, at that time, cars were not no-lead. Municipalities had incinerators where they burned tires, oil and everything else. Moreover, the advent of electricity must have brought about some reduction in emissions compared to coal- fired boilers. Firewood was replaced by electricity. Many technological changes should have caused a reduction in these emissions but, in fact, they are increasing. I think they are increasing because the number of cars has increased. Cars replaced horses and that had an impact on the amount of CO₂.

• 1215

There is still one thing, and that is that we can't eliminate our vehicles, unless they become... I am prepared to do my part, but will there be a real collective effort. Should we increase the price of gas to 70 cents a litre so that people will save more and travel less because of the high cost of gas?

That wouldn't keep the United States from sending their rockets into space. Think of all the CO₂ that represents, sending a rocket into space. That represents quite a few little Hondas here in Quebec. Moreover, those emissions travel through time. I think that the smoke found in underdeveloped countries... There are some underdeveloped countries where nothing counts but making money; they'll worry about the environment later.

When I say that, I mean countries like South Korea. Money and competition are what count; they don't worry in the least about the environment. I believe it's important, at the Kyoto meeting, to say that Canada is able to evaluate and get a grasp on what had been done in the United States and in Canada and in developing and underdeveloped countries. In fact, if the developing countries start polluting like we do, we'll be no further ahead. But then we could say that the environment is not our problem; it's somebody else's.

[English]

The Chairman: Mr. Bruce, and then Mr. Passmore.

Mr. Jim Bruce: The automobile is an interesting case. In the late 1970s and during the 1980s, Canada and the U.S. both imposed fuel efficiency standards on the new fleet, and we had a significant drop in the number of litres per kilometre driven. We had much less fuel consumption in the transportation sector until about 1983, but then, since the price shock had gone away, we got tired of doing that. Canada and the U.S. then relaxed in terms of forcing more fuel consumption reductions on the new fleet. What has happened since then is that all of the wonderful ingenuity of the automotive engineers has gone into increased power and heavier vehicles. Since the car companies make more money on those, those are the ones they push.

What I'm suggesting is that if we bring back some standards to reduce the fuel consumption per kilometre driven for automobiles and light trucks, we would return to that period from the early 1980s, when we saw that curve driving down the fuel consumption by automobiles. Not all of the ingenuity would be going into heavier cars and more power.

Mr. Jeff Passmore: I just want to add that you're absolutely right that we're not going to get rid of the automobile.

You asked a question about whether Canada is going to have to do something that nobody else is doing. In the U.S., Ford has committed to produce 250,000 E85s—85% ethanol vehicles—in the next five years. Ford already makes the Taurus as an E85 vehicle and in 1998 it is going to bring out the Ranger truck as an E85 vehicle. At some point in the future the company is bringing out its Windstar van as an E85 vehicle. So Canada is doing nothing in this area, but the Americans are making five billion litres of ethanol a year now in the U.S. Chrysler has indicated that its minivan is going to be an E85 vehicle in the next couple of years. It's going to be made in St. Louis, and the company is hoping to also make it in Windsor.

But there's no use making an E85 vehicle if you can't then have the tanks at the gas stations in order to get the fuel into people's tanks. We have to put the infrastructure in place in Canada, the same as they are doing in the U.S., in order to be able to feed this fuel into what are being called multi-fuel or flexible fuel vehicles.

The Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Passmore.

Mr. Jackson.

• 1220

Mr. Ovid Jackson (Bruce—Grey, Lib.): Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

I appreciate the fact that we're all trying to find a solution here. I guess the solution borders around a lot of stuff. For instance, because they burn gasoline, the way in which they improved the fuel efficiency for cars was to reduce the weight of the cars, by making the cars more aerodynamic, and of course by using technology.

In the old days somebody used acetone, I think it was. After that there was a big rumour about how far a car could go. It was said that one gallon of gasoline should take a car maybe 460 miles. The problem is that in the internal combustion engine, as the fuel gets into a cylinder and is set on fire, the time for setting it on fire is very short. The faster the engine goes, the less time it has to burn.

Through the use of technology, they have now oxygen sensors, manifold absolute pressure sensors, and things like that. They have rectified things and have suddenly brought the standard to one whereby if we were to have later model cars and got rid of the older model cars, that alone would reduce the emissions coming out of the tailpipe.

Of course, there was the use of the catalytic converter, which uses a catalyst as a device to simply change the other substances without changing itself. Of course, if you use lead, the lead coats the pellets and makes them ineffective. But they've used all kinds of different things like that, whether it was in reducing oxygen, adding oxygen, or removing oxygen to improve their combustion process.

I don't know how much further we can go on the cars, but we always try to say there's an easier way. For instance, somebody said we should use more ethanol. I wonder what would happen if we started producing corn but had a climate change that brought a reduction in corn production some year. Somebody else, for instance, said we should use electric vehicles. With electric vehicles, I think you have to produce more electricity. As far as I know, electricity actually produces more sulphur dioxide and things like that. The more electric cars you have, the more you have to plug into the utilities, and the more electricity you're going to be using. I'm not sure how far along the battery technology has gone in terms of the capacity of the battery to work in cold conditions and so on.

I know the manufacturers are bringing out these multi-fuel vehicles, so we'll have some gas-powered, some battery-powered, and some automotive-powered. I don't think that kind of hybrid is a bad idea, but I don't think it's a panacea to say that you can have all electric cars. The old automotive engine, given the power in the way it moves, generates its own power. It's a bad way of using energy, but it's still one of the best things we have. So there aren't any easy solutions.

You guys are presenting these types of things here in terms of ethanol or in terms of electric vehicles. When we bring along these electric vehicles, number one, they're not going to perform well, depending on the climate and depending upon the topography; and number two, you're going to have to produce more electricity, which in turn is going to create more problems in terms of pollutants. How do you deal with those questions?

Mr. Jeff Passmore: First of all, I agree with you that if you're talking about electric vehicles you have to ask yourself where the electricity is coming from and what is being used to generate the electric power. I'm not a big proponent of electric vehicles, but what I am a proponent of is making things as easy as possible for the consumer. I don't think we're going to get there through asking Canadians or citizens of the world to greatly change their behaviour. I'm now looking at technology and I'm asking what it can do to help us.

You say we have the internal combustion engine and we're stuck with it. As a first point, I would say we should get ethanol to be, at the very least, 10% of the fuel we consume in that internal combustion engine.

Let me make something else absolutely clear to the committee. I am not a proponent of ethanol from corn. The ethanol that I've been talking about here and that we've been discussing in this U.S. DOE report, for example, is ethanol from cellulose. There is not enough corn around to produce the amounts of fuel required. Canada currently consumes about 33 billion litres of gasoline a year. We're not talking about replacing that with corn. It's too expensive and there isn't enough of it. But what we can do is replace it with ethanol from cellulose.

What is cellulose? We used to think it had to be fast-growing poplars, but it doesn't have to be trees or wood chips. It can be wood waste, it can be straw, it can be hay, or it can be a multitude of various grasses. It can even be the oat hulls that are left over after Quaker Oats has taken the oats out, has the hulls left over, and is wondering what to do with them. Anything like that can be turned into sugar, can be fermented, and can be turned into ethanol.

• 1225

First, let's get 10% penetration all the way across Canada in the existing internal combustion engine. Second, let's work towards that 90%, the E90, that we could have from ethanol from cellulose.

As far as the internal combustion engine is concerned, you're probably going to have to improve the compression ratios and fuel efficiencies a little bit, but that's the kind of technological improvement that Jim is talking about. I think it is doable.

The Chairman: Jim.

Mr. Jim Bruce: I would agree entirely that the electric car has a long way to go. I think the hybrid vehicles, the fuel-cell cars, and straight engineering efficiency can get us to very much reduced fuel consumption. I think the problem is that if the North American manufacturers don't do that, we're going to be hung out to dry in the world market. Manufacturers in Japan and Europe are moving in that direction very rapidly. We're going to find ourselves without an export market and without the jobs that we now associate with the automobile industry, unless there's a strong move towards reduced fuel consumption in the vehicles made in North America.

The Chairman: Thank you.

We'll go to Mr. Godin, followed by Carmen and Darrel.

[Translation]

Mr. Yvon Godin: I would like to welcome you here.

I have to agree with Mr. Asselin when he says that governments change, but certain public servants do not so it might be said that nothing changes.

You might remember that, in 1992, Mr. Martin criticized Jean Charest, saying that he wasn't doing enough for the environment. Now that his party is in power, we can't see any change. I am worried because the Canadian Government will go to the Kyoto Conference without having adopted a clear and explicit position and without knowing where it's going. I'm particularly worried, after having heard Mr. Bruce's comments on the greenhouse effect and all its consequences, including that of the Northern cod in Newfoundland. If that's the case in Newfoundland, it must be the same for us, because in the Atlantic, there is no net preventing the cod from coming to us. We don't have Northern cod, but other kinds of cod come to us.

When we talk about job creation, there is always this battle between natural resources and the environment; you would think that they can't understand each other any more. It's time we paid attention to our environment and thought about the future, even if that costs more jobs tomorrow than we are trying to preserve today.

Earlier, we were talking about gases and such. In what direction are we going? On the road, we see a train with three locomotives, on the one hand, 100 boxcars, and on the other hand, 100 diesel trucks spewing gases into the atmosphere.

In my opinion, we could make significant improvements if the government would take the lead. It's that government leadership that is missing. As I said earlier, there are places where we could make real changes.

Before letting Mr. Passmore speak, I would like to talk about something else that interests me - natural gas. Talking about leadership, it has been proposed that we pipe natural gas from Sable Island to Moncton before it goes to Saint John, without linking it to the national line that goes to Bernier. I think we're missing the boat again. In Quebec, there are still electricity generating plants that burn coal. It would be useful to make an investment, not only to save money, but also to counter the greenhouse effect. We don't know what the future will bring. We risk waiting until it's too late. Because of what we have done, cod doesn't come to Newfoundland and 40,000 people are out of work. Now those are real jobs.

• 1230

I would like to ask Mr. Bruce is he knows any ways of creating jobs while saving the environment. Some experts say that by saving the environment, we could even create more jobs.

[English]

Mr. Jim Bruce: On that point, the international studies we reviewed in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the studies that have been done in Canada suggest that to do the kind of thing Jeff has been talking about, to put in place renewable energy technologies, and to put in place all the energy efficiency measures for which technology is available, would use three to four times as many jobs as they would displace in the coal and possibly oil sector.

In net, then, moving in this direction is very much a job creator. But I think we have to keep in mind that there are communities in this country that are very dependent on coal mining and on oil. So any policy that the government adopts, in my view, has to recognize that. It has to provide for a transition for those people who are now dependent on especially coal mining for existence, and put in those areas the industries that will produce renewable technologies and energy efficiency technologies that, as I say, in the long run in, all the studies suggest, will create many more jobs than we get from digging oil and coal out of the ground.

Mr. Jeff Passmore: Do you want me to say a couple of quick things about that? I have some figures for you.

I mentioned in my presentation that within the country of Denmark there are 8,000 people now working in the wind energy sector. They have also created, through exports of their technology, 4,000 jobs in other countries. That's from the export of Danish technology.

Globally the wind industry is now a $1-billion-a-year industry. It's estimated that it has created approximately 20,000 jobs globally. That's about $50,000 a job. For ethanol the estimate is that if we went to this E90, it would create about 200,000 jobs over the next 20 years.

At any rate, those are some of the numbers the industry is working with.

[Translation]

Mr. Yvon Godin: Mr. Passmore, perhaps you could explain to me in more detail Attachment No. 7 of your paper. You mentioned that in some places, the winds are strong enough that their energy could be used. You named places in Alberta where there is a corridor between the mountains.

Have studies on wind been done on a national scale? For example, in New Brunswick, on Miscou Island, the winds are fairly strong. Have studies been made on a large scale or just in one place?

[English]

Mr. Jeff Passmore: There is no national wind energy map for Canada, but there have been various site-specific areas—Saskatchewan, Alberta, parts of Ontario, parts of the maritimes. Cape Breton, for example, is a good area. I realize that's not New Brunswick, but...

Mr. Yvon Godin: I went there in my wig and I lost it.

Some hon. members: Oh, oh.

Mr. Jim Passmore: Something you need to understand about wind, however, is that even given a national wind energy inventory map, with the big contours that show...it would not be adequate for what you're asking for. Wind is very site specific.

Everybody says, boy, it's really windy here; I should put up a wind machine. It might indeed be windy, but you want to put up an anemometer to monitor that site for about a year. Then you take that 12-months' data and correlate it to the nearest airport data, back 20 years, so you can see whether or not the one year that you monitored was an average year, a good year or a poor year. You correlate it to the airport data, which gives you the wind regime for that area or at least an idea of what it would have been over the last 20 years and whether it could support wind machines in the next 20 years.

• 1235

If you just go with the large contours...for example, the big wind farms you find now in California in the Altamont Pass and the various passes near San Francisco and Los Angeles. Those sites would not have been identified with normal wind contours. It's through micro-siting that you find the best wind sites.

[Translation]

Mr. Yvon Godin: I'm worried about coal mines. We wouldn't want people living in Cape Breton to be any poorer. If there's one place where there's poverty, it's in Cape Breton. Those people live mostly off the coal mines.

Have studies been made on technologies that would allow us to use our coal while eliminating the gas effects? I remember that when they built the electricity generating station at Belledune, they didn't want to install a gas eliminator at the top of the chimney, which they finally did, preferring that white smoke rather than black come out. Has any research been done in that area like the Japanese did with their little Toyota cars and all those other little cars? Perhaps we could use the energy produced by coal but find ways of eliminating the gases it gives off.

[English]

Mr. Jim Bruce: There has been a lot of good work done in that direction in Canada by companies like TransAlta and so on. It's easier to reduce things like sulphur dioxide from coal burning than it is to reduce carbon dioxide to greenhouse gas. It's a more difficult and costly thing to do from coal burning.

But there are ways of using coal far more efficiently than we now do. That, of course, should be an initial step in the coal economy, but in the long run, I suspect, we're going to have to give up on coal. Changes in the climate system will force us to do that.

So I think we have to very carefully plan a transition for those communities who are dependent on coal, over a period of time, to replace coal mining with other industries in those regions.

Mr. Yvon Godin: I hope they do better than in the maritimes with the fish.

The Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Godin.

Mr. Provenzano and then Mr. Stinson.

Mr. Carmen Provenzano (Sault Ste. Marie, Lib.): Thank you.

I think it's important, Mr. Bruce, for committee members to have a perspective on the submission you're making. Obviously you're a proponent of the theory that at least some climate change is due to greenhouse gas emissions. On the other hand, I think you would readily acknowledge that there's a fair amount of disagreement and controversy about that theory.

I wonder—and I hope this is a fair question—if you could indicate to the committee what areas of controversy and disagreement are most pronounced in this whole area of climate change in relation to greenhouse gas emissions.

Mr. Jim Bruce: Certainly the vast majority of climate scientists accept both that climate has begun changing due to human intervention in the climate system and that climate changes naturally as well. So the human impact is only part of the story—and I tried to explain that there are other effects on the climate system beyond the human impact—but if we allow continued increase in greenhouse gases we will see very major changes in the climate in the coming century.

There are a few scientists who still argue about those points, but the vast majority of climate scientists and people who have published in the peer-reviewed literature accept what I have just said.

• 1240

On the question of which are the uncertainties that cause the most debate, and they are the two I spoke of earlier—the question of the role of the aerosols and how big their effect might be, especially if we continue to pump aerosols into the atmosphere, and, secondly, the balance of heating versus cooling associated with perhaps an increased cloudiness, with the speeding up of the hydrologic cycle with the initial warming of the oceans and the atmosphere—those are the two areas where we need to know more, where we are not as certain as we would like to be about the climate change issue.

Mr. Carmen Provenzano: Just a follow-up question to Mr. Bruce. Correct me if I'm wrong in this statement, but it seems that a great many basic assumptions are being made by the proponents of the theory that you espouse.

How would you rate the level of knowledge in that area? Would you, for example, indicate to the committee that it's in its infancy stage or that it's at a sophisticated level? Where are we here in terms of the level of knowledge that we have that allows you to expound a theory such as you have to the committee? That's important for us to know.

Mr. Jim Bruce: I think you'll get subjective answers from people. That's a question of judgment.

I've been involved in environmental issues for 35 years, starting with the pollution of the Great Lakes through acid rain, through the ozone layer problem. My personal view is that the basic science and theory of greenhouse gas forcing climate change is sounder than the science we had in any of those previous issues. The details of how intensive the effect might be in the future is not as certain. The basic understanding of what's going on is very certain.

The likely future rate of climate change and the likely way in which it will be manifest in the globe still has some real uncertainties. I think you have to think of it in this way. We are performing, we're in the midst of, an unintended, unprecedented experiment on the atmosphere of planet earth. We can now see only partially the likely effects of that. I would say that the chances of those effects being much more severe than I outlined are just as likely as the chances of the effects being less severe.

Mr. Carmen Provenzano: Given that level of knowledge, and understanding the comments you just made, what do you think would be the effect of, say, the international community at this stage not taking firm measures to control greenhouse gas emissions?

Mr. Jim Bruce: Let me say something about the lag times in the system. When we put greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, some of them, especially CO₂, take a long time to have their effect on the climate. What we're seeing now are the effects of emissions of perhaps 20 years ago, because the oceans are very slow to warm up. It's a huge flywheel effect. The oceans take a long time to warm up—some people think somewhere between 20 and 30 years. So what we're putting into the atmosphere now will not have its full effect for another 20 to 30 years.

The second thing is that it will take a long time for human activities to change significantly and for the energy system to change significantly to reduce greenhouse gases—perhaps a decade, maybe two decades.

So given those long lag times in the system, and the fact that we've already banked a huge amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, my feeling is that it's not too early to act, but it may possibly be too late.

• 1245

The Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Provenzano.

Mr. Stinson.

Mr. Darrel Stinson: Thank you. I have a couple of questions.

Mr. Passmore, I've had the opportunity to travel in California since I was very young, and I've seen the growth of the wind industry down there between Los Angeles and Palm Desert. I believe there are around 101 pumps. I believe wind is an answer to some of our problems.

This question is for either gentleman. We know that we are going into this meeting in Kyoto in regard to the greenhouse gases and the climate change. Everybody seems to think that pollution begins and stops at the borders of their own country. We all know that's not a fact. We also know that we can do all we want, but as long as other countries are not on board to do the same things, nothing's going to change here, except that it might put some of our industries and some of our people behind the eight ball when it comes to competition, which is a big worry out there.

So when we sit here and talk about this, we know there are a least 132 developing nations that will not sign this. We also know that China—which in about 50 years will all of a sudden jump to being the biggest polluter—will not sign it. I have great difficulty with going to too great a length until we see what the other countries are doing.

Also, we don't seem to understand—or maybe we overlook it—the size of Canada. When we talk about the size of vehicles in shipping, we know that most of our goods have to be shipped by road. We know that it takes power to do that. We know it also takes energy. There's nothing in an electric process that can even touch hauling some of the loads we're talking about.

We also know that we have a very drastic climate change between summer and winter in Canada. It takes heat in order for us to survive here.

I have a great concern that maybe we're trying to compete with small industrialized countries that do not have the scope of our country or the climate changes of our country. We could be putting ourselves behind the eight ball here too.

I'd like either of the gentlemen to address those questions, please.

Mr. Jeff Passmore: Just to start off, it's here on my sheet but I forgot to mention it when I said, please, no more of this “Canada is a big, cold country stuff”. Canada is no bigger geographically and no colder climatically than we were in 1990, and what we're talking about doing is getting emissions down to 1990 levels.

Now it's true that we do have more people—

Mr. Darrel Stinson: Yes.

Mr. Jeff Passmore: But the big, cold country...the way it's usually phrased it's not a per capita argument; it's usually that we're a big country so we have large transportation distances and we're a cold country and have homes that have to be heated. We're no bigger and we're no colder than we were in 1990—

Mr. Darrel Stinson: But we are expanding in the north.

Mr. Jeff Passmore: If you want to make a per capita argument, that's fine. We've had population growth, but there are enormous opportunities for efficiency on a per capita basis.

With respect to losing our competitive advantage, as a Canadian I wish we could take more of a leadership role, similar to what Mr. Godin suggested. I don't necessarily mean that we have to be aggressive leaders, but it would be nice to be a little bit out in front rather than constantly looking over our shoulders and wondering what the Americans are doing.

I'm not too concerned about losing our competitive advantage vis-à-vis developing countries, but there has been a lot of concern expressed vis-à-vis our competitive advantage within the OECD countries.

The Americans have decided that climate change is real and that they're going to do something about it through technological solutions and the establishment of a tradable emissions scheme. Let me just say something about that. I don't know if it helps the previous questioner. It's really only in Canada that we're arguing any more about whether climate change is real. Everybody else has decided it's real and is getting on with finding the solutions while we're wasting our time arguing—because of various vested political interests—whether or not we should do anything and whether this is a real problem. The Europeans have decided it's real. Canada is going to lose its competitive advantage because we're wasting our time. We're not keeping up to speed.

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What can we do about some of the emissions that are going to be felt from developing countries? First we have to develop a domestic tradable emissions scheme before we decide to go international, because we'll just get cremated. We don't know how it works yet, but the idea is that you say Canada will cap its emissions at x. Then companies or provinces or various parts of the country—and this might help some of our coal producers, for example, which can't quickly adjust...if the cap is established, certain companies then can't necessarily become as efficient and retrofit as quickly as others. Those that can, reduce their emissions below what is required and trade their permits to those who can't reduce their emissions in the short term below what is required and are allowed to exceed. But the overall cap for the nation has to be achieved.

Now, that cap is no good if it's set too high. It has to be set fairly low and it has to be constantly ratcheted down over a period of years. Once we have some experience with that, there's talk about then developing international trading schemes, where we would be able to trade with developing countries.

But in Kyoto, you're right, there will be a number of nations that are not going to sign. We have to show some leadership and we have to get the developing countries basically to agree to the process: okay, maybe this is something we should be seriously looking at, we won't sign on today, but we hope to be able to buy in and sign on at some future date. Jim probably knows more about that than I do.

Mr. Jim Bruce: Historically, more than three-quarters of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have been due to the industrialized countries. At present about two-thirds of the greenhouse gases going into the atmosphere are from the industrialized countries. The developing countries will probably catch up to the industrialized countries by 2020 or 2030, but they say, quite rightly, we are being impacted more severely than you by climate change. In fact, all the studies suggest that the economic impact of climate change on developing countries is at least twice, and in some cases, for small island states, three times what it would be for us, because they don't have the capability to adapt. So they are saying, you're the guys who caused the problem, you still are causing the problem; you act first, and we'll try to come along at a later date; but you have to show you're willing to act first.

I think we have to think about the Kyoto negotiations as the first of a long stream of negotiations. It will be just the first step in a series of steps to address the issue of greenhouse gases and climate change. If we can get even a little recognition from the developing countries that eventually they are going to have to cut back as well as the developed countries at Kyoto, then I think we're doing very well. We're the ones who can make the big difference right now, and we ought to do it.

The Chairman: Mr. Stinson, are you finished with that?

Mr. Darrel Stinson: Yes. It would be too long and complicated for here.

My understanding is that we produce about 2% of the effect here, so are we going about this the wrong way? What I'm hearing from you basically is a band-aid solution that is not going to address this problem say 30 years down the road.

Mr. Jim Bruce: Yes, we have 0.5% of the world population and we produce about 2% of the emissions. The U.S. produces about a quarter of the emissions. But if every country said that and used that as a reason for doing nothing we would not achieve anything in the way of reducing greenhouse gases. We each have to do our own share.

On the question of Canada being a cold country, my friends in Texas point out that they use more energy for air conditioning than we do for heating.

On the question of distances, if you look at where we drive—

Mr. Darrel Stinson: Let me answer that.

Mr. Jim Bruce: —more than 90% of the driving that's done is done driving around our cities, not driving from Halifax to Vancouver.

Mr. Darrel Stinson: My answer to your friend in Texas is it's pretty tough using stove wood to run an air conditioner. When he figures that out, he can let us know here in Canada. We would appreciate it.

Mr. Jim Bruce: Good point.

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Mr. Jeff Passmore: I want to make a quick comment, because I was disappointed in Mr. Stinson's comment about seeing these as band-aid solutions.

For example, in transportation I mentioned 90% reductions in CO₂ emissions if you wanted to go to 100% ethanol from cellulose. Now, you're not going to do that tomorrow, but we can put in place the infrastructure to do it. That's not a band-aid; that's a solution to 2020, 2030. That's one transportation solution, in conjunction with the efficiencies Mr. Bruce is talking about.

In the electricity, never mind small hydro and high efficiency co-generation; wind alone can supply 10% of Canada's electricity and reduce the emissions from associated coal- and oil-generated electricity.

So I hope it's more than a band-aid, and I'd be more than happy to spend more time with you telling you about that.

Mr. Yvon Godin: This is a comment that I'd like to make, and I want to make it from experience, even if I am very young.

I don't accept that because other people do things we should not do things in the right way. It happens in the fishery, and I want to give that just as an experience. Because a fisherman was fishing too much, the other fishermen were saying, “We have to do the same thing”, and everybody was doing the same.

That's why I said in my first comment that we should show leadership, because our country is probably—and everybody says this—one of the most beautiful and best countries in the whole world. I think the world could look at Canada, because Canada receives immigrants from all across the world and I think they love Canada. When Canada shows leadership and an example, it reflects around the world. I still say very strongly that we have to show leadership in this.

The Chairman: Well put, Yvon. In fact, I won't add anything to that, except to say thank you very much to our two witnesses.

You've helped us get off to a very informed start to this series of meetings, which will be only a few meetings before the Kyoto conference. But we will certainly be coming back at this after the New Year.

On behalf of all of us, thank you, and maybe some day we can have you back.

Mr. Jim Bruce: Thank you very much for the stimulating questions.

Mr. Jeff Passmore: Thank you very much.

The Chairman: Colleagues, please stand by for a moment. We'll discuss future business.

Maybe we can go in camera for a moment, if that's okay with everybody. We won't be long; a couple of minutes will probably do it.

[Editor's Note: Proceedings continue in camera]