Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Energy, the Environment and Natural Resources
Issue 10 - Evidence - October 29, 2009
OTTAWA, Thursday, October 29, 2009
The Standing Senate Committee on Energy, the Environment and Natural Resources met this day at 8 :14 a.m. to examine and report on the current state and future of Canada's energy sector (including alternative energy).
Senator W. David Angus (Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Chair: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, members of the committee, our television audience on the CPAC network and viewers on the World Wide Web. This is the third session in our study to deal with energy issues in Canada generally, and with a view to developing a national strategy in this field at a time when it is badly needed. The issues of energy security in Canada and North America are clearly intertwined with issues raised by climate change.
We are privileged this morning to have a number of people joining us, senators who are substituting for other senators. Senator Tommy Banks is out of town this morning. It is unfortunate because he was responsible for us having this special witness. I will introduce you in a moment, sir. I want to welcome Senator Cowan, the Leader of the Opposition in the Senate. Senator Cowan is filling in for Senator Banks. Welcome. We also have the famous senator from Vancouver, Senator Larry Campbell. We are pleased to have Senator Campbell with us to see how a real committee operates this morning. A lady who needs no introduction, Senator Nancy Greene, is also filling in for one of our absent senators, Senator Richard Neufeld. We have the only elected senator, Senator Bert Brown from Alberta. My esteemed deputy chair is Senator Grant Mitchell from Alberta. Our researchers from the Parliamentary Library are Marc LeBlanc and Sam Banks. Senator Pana Merchant is from Saskatchewan. Senator Nick Sibbeston is from the Northwest Territories. Senator Judith Seidman is our newest senator from Quebec. Senator Dan Lang is from the great territory of Yukon. I am David Angus. I am from Montreal, Quebec. I have the honour of chairing this committee.
Honourable senators, we were originally to have either the Minister of Natural Resources this morning or some of her senior officials. At their request on Tuesday, we agreed to a change to next Tuesday. That left us with no witness. Senator Banks suggested that we are in the ABCs of our study, the elementary stage, on energy and climate change. He said he knew a professor, Professor John Stone, and let us give him a call.
Sir, welcome to our committee. You welcomed the call warmly and graciously and have come here at this ungodly hour to share your wisdom with us.
Our focus today will be on the climate change aspects of the energy field. Professor John Stone is an Adjunct Research Professor in Geography and Environmental Studies at Carleton University. I believe he has already testified on Parliament Hill in the other place on some of these matters. Professor Stone graduated with a BSc in chemistry, special honours in 1966 and a PhD in molecular spectroscopy in 1969, both from the University of Reading in the U.K. He came to Canada as a post-doctoral researcher in 1969 to work at the National Research Council.
I say parenthetically, professor, my son went to the University of Reading. I know it is a tremendous place based on what they produced out of him. It is magic.
Following the National Research Council, Professor Stone returned to Prague for a year in the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences before returning to Canada to continue his research interests at the University of Sherbrooke. In 1972, the professor joined the Public Service of Canada and assumed increasing responsibilities in a variety of portfolios. During the last 15 years of his career, he directed research programs on climate and atmospheric sciences, as well as developing policy on a range of environmental issues.
He has considerable experience in international science and has served Canada through his affiliation with the science committee of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, NATO, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, the UN Economic Commission for Europe, UNECE, senior advisors on science and technology, UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Scientific Steering Committee for the Global Change System for Analysis, Research and Training, START, program, as co-chair for the Canada-Germany Science and Technology Agreement, and with the bureau of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC.
I did not introduce our able clerk, Lynn Gordon, who put together these notes for me.
Thank you professor for appearing. You have distributed a small deck of slides outlining your remarks. You will present for half an hour to 40 minutes. We will then open the floor to questions.
John M.R. Stone, Adjunct Research Professor, Geography and Environmental Studies, Carleton University: Honourable senators, thank you very much indeed.
I want to speak about this issue of climate change, what I refer to as the threat of climate change. Climate change was framed initially as an environmental issue. It certainly is an environmental issue, but we can frame it in many other ways, including as an energy security issue.
As your chair noted, I am a scientist. I have been involved, in one way or another, with the issue of climate change for at least 20 years, if not more. For me, this issue is not new.
Climate change is an issue that has generated a considerable amount of political and media interest, lots of sound and sometimes fury, but not always signifying much. It is an issue with an almost continuous round of international meetings and great promises, but as yet, no real action. It is an issue that, despite significant scientific progress and clear indications that climate change is accelerating, is still not being addressed with the necessary urgency.
It is an issue that can be understood simply, but yet represents possibly one of the greatest scientific challenges of our time. It is an issue of morality, where actions today in any one country will benefit people on other shores and future generations, whom we might never meet, and which sometimes defies simple economic accounting. It is an issue that presents a new kind of challenge, uncertain in its form and extent, insidious rather than, as yet, directly confrontational, and long-term rather than immediate. It is an issue where, unfortunately, we have tended to ignore the evidence, but I am afraid it is an issue that will not go away.
I distributed power point slides to the committee. I will go through them and explain as I go. The first slide is entitled, The Beginning of the Story. A useful way to illustrate the development of the science and how it influenced policy is illustrated by this graph. It shows the results from careful observations of the concentrations in the atmosphere of carbon dioxide, which is a major greenhouse gas. The first point to note is that these measurements were begun several years before climate change had become a concern, in about 1957. Over time, those concentrations have increased steadily. It was obvious in the early 1970s that carbon dioxide concentrations were rising above pre-industrial levels. By 1979, a U.S. National Academy of Sciences report concluded that it is highly credible that the doubling of carbon dioxide concentrations will bring a global warming of between one and a half to four and a half degrees Celsius.
However, it was not until about the 1980s that scientists started to become more vocal and raised warnings that if the level of carbon dioxide were to continue to rise, there could be significant impacts on society and the environment. In 1988, two important events happened. First, Canada hosted a conference on the changing atmosphere. This conference was not intended to focus only on climate change but it occurred during a heat wave and droughts in the United States so climate change became the focus. As a result of that conference, which involved many governments and scientists, a resolution recommended the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions by 20 per cent from 1988 levels by the year 2000. That resolution was the first aspirational commitment that we made and the first one that we missed. Second, because of the attention given to this issue, the United Nations created the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC was created to provide a balanced and accessible assessment of the state of knowledge of climate change to governments. I had the honour of being on the Bureau of the IPCC for both its third and fourth comprehensive assessments.
The IPCC completed its first assessment in 1990, and presented its results at the second World Climate Conference held in Geneva in November of that year. That conference led to a call to the United Nations to begin negotiations on something that became known as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which was signed by over 150 governments at the United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. The IPCC completed its second complete assessment in 1995. It was in that year that negotiations were launched to enhance the UN Framework Convention, which led eventually to the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. However, it was not until 2005 that the Kyoto Protocol came into being.
As you can see, despite all these meetings, the concentrations continued to climb. If you are curious about the wiggles in that curve on the slide, they simply represent the Earth breathing. In the summer when trees grow and the grass becomes greener, a lot of carbon dioxide is brought down into the biosphere, so every summer the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reduces and, in winter, the reverse happens. Essentially, that is what you see on the slide.
The next slide is crucial to the whole issue because it shows the results taken from an ice core drilled out of the ice sheet in Antarctica. It is three kilometres long. Every year that the ice and snow form in Antarctica, they hold within their structure some of the ambient atmosphere around them. Every year that atmosphere is captured in those grains of ice and buried deeper and deeper. That record is kept there. If we drill down three kilometres into the ice, we retrieve that record, year by year, of the ambient atmosphere at the time that the snow and ice were laid down.
The bottom-most black curve on the slide represents a proxy for temperature. The graph goes back about 650,000 years and you can see that the curve goes up and down every now and then. A peak occurs during an interglacial period and a valley represents an ice age. This graph goes back six or seven ice age periods. The red curve on the slide represents atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and also has a similar structure. The curve goes up and down and is highest during an interglacial period and lowest during an ice age. The key point derived from this graph is that over this period of 650,000 years, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has never gone below about 200 parts per million and has never gone above 280 parts per million. That concentration is to be compared with today's concentration, which is in the order of 390 parts per million and still increasing. Clearly, we have taken the atmosphere into uncharted temperate territories. We have brought the concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to levels that we have not seen for close to one million years.
The next slide shows the results for the last 1,000 years to the era before and during the Industrial Revolution. For most of that time, the concentrations remained at about 280 parts per million, but since the Industrial Revolution, when we began to replace muscle power of humans and animals with mechanical power, such as the use of the steam engine, the concentrations began to rise. Careful measurements using isotope ratios indicate clearly that this increase in concentrations has been largely due to emissions resulting from our burning of fossil fuels for energy.
The next slide focuses on emissions of greenhouse gases, in particular carbon dioxide. The graph shows the increase of global emissions over the last two decades, which have been growing relentlessly. Currently, emissions are increasing at about 3 per cent per year. In running climate models, we used to assume an average increase of about 0.5 per cent per year. What we are seeing now is much larger than we had previously thought.
The coloured lines represent estimates of future emissions. They are taken from studies that the IPCC completed in about 2000 on plausible future emission scenarios. What you can see is that the dots for 2005 to 2008 are all on, or slightly above, the worst-case scenario that the IPCC envisaged only as little ago as the year 2000. That most extreme scenario projects carbon dioxide concentrations of nearly 900 parts per million by the end of this century, and a globally averaged temperature of around 4 degrees Celsius. In my opinion, we do not want to go there; the results could be catastrophic.
The next slide shows that not only have emissions continued to rise and to rise faster than before, and not only have concentrations of greenhouse gases continued to rise and rise faster than before, but temperatures have increased. In the words of the fourth IPCC assessment, the warming of the climate system is unequivocal. Global average temperatures are outside the range observed over the past 1,300 years. The last time the polar regions were significantly warmer than present for any extended period, which is about 120,000 years ago, reductions in polar ice volume led to a four- to six-metre rise in sea level.
If you look at this graph, the black dots are observations and the light blue-grey shading represents the uncertainty with those observations. If you try to draw a straight line through the observations for the last 150 years, that is the red curve. If you try to draw it for only the last hundred years, you have the purple curve; for the last 50 years, you have the orange curve; and for the last 25 years, you have the yellow curve.
The Chair: Professor, if I can interrupt you for one second, you mentioned the black dots all over that particular chart going well before 1860. Did I understand you to you say, those were actual scientific data that were observed?
Mr. Stone: That is right.
The Chair: As early as 1860?
Mr. Stone: That is right.
The Chair: Thank you.
Mr. Stone: What is troubling is that this linear warming trend over the last 50 years is nearly twice what it was for the last 100 years. In other words, the closer one comes to the present, the rate of increase of global temperatures increases, which is one illustration that climate change may be closer than we think.
The IPCC in its fourth assessment report stepped back from making the conclusion that climate change may be accelerating because scientists are, in general, conservative people, but there seems to be plenty of evidence in the underlying chapters that indeed, this may well be the case.
The next slide shows the recent warming in the Arctic. It allows us to put these temperature increases into some sort of perspective. This record goes back 2,000 years, and it has been obtained from temperatures recorded by thermometers and also by ice cores and the like. You can see that there has been a slow decline in temperature for most of those 2,000 years, until we reach the present time when the temperature record starts to go up. The slow decline is well understood. It is as a result of the Earth's progression around the sun, and it determines summertime solar radiation. On average, the region cooled until about 1900, but then it has warmed by about 1.2 degrees Celsius, which is twice the global average.
You can see such things as the medieval warm period, a period of about a thousand years ago when historical records suggest that the Vikings colonized Greenland and we were growing grapes in Newfoundland. You can also see the Little Ice Age around the sixteenth and seventeenth century when the River Thames and the canals of Europe were frozen over. The temperatures we have seen over the last 100 years or more are warmer than they have been in the Arctic for the last 2,000 years.
The next curve illustrates something regarding the attribution of those temperature increases. What I have described up to now regards the detection of climate change; in other words, that current temperatures are far outside the range of natural climate variability that we have seen in the past. Attributing climate change is difficult, and it requires the use not only of good data and good statistics but climate models as well. Confidence in climate models has been increasing; we can use them now to reproduce the climate of the last century quite well. Climate models are forced by such things as solar variability and volcanoes but, most importantly, greenhouse gas concentrations.
If we take those climate models and we force them only with natural causes such as the changes of solar variability, volcanoes and the like, then we have the blue curve on the lower half of that diagram. That blue curve is the result of running many climate models by many groups around the world, and some of the models several times. We have significant confidence in that graph.
You can see that for the first half of the last century, the observations, which form the black line, match well with the model results. It is only in the second half of the century, then, that the observations diverge increasingly from the results we would achieve with only natural forcings.
If we then add forcings due to greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere and run the models again, then we have the orange curves in the top half. You can see that the match between the model results and the observations, the black line, becomes much better. In fact, we cannot reproduce the observed changes of temperatures that we have seen over the last 100 to 150 years without invoking the concentrations of greenhouse gases, GHG, in the atmosphere.
As was concluded by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in its fourth assessment report:
Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid- 20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG concentrations.
When the IPCC uses a term like "very likely," it is carefully calibrated and it means we have confidence of more than 90 per cent. In science, if we have a result that is more than 90 per cent confident, we are doing as well as anyone can.
Let me now turn to the story of climate change in Canada, and refer you to the next slide, which indicates emissions in Canada of greenhouse gases from 1990 to the present. It shows that the emissions have continued to increase. Negotiations on the Kyoto Protocol, which I mentioned earlier and which was regarded as the first step in tackling climate change, were completed in 1997 and the Kyoto Protocol came into effect in the year 2000 with the ratification by Russia.
In the negotiations of the Kyoto Protocol, Canada offered to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 6 per cent below 1990 levels. This was a voluntarily chosen, if not well-informed, target. Since 1997, and despite many made-in- Canada plans, our emissions have continued to rise, and greenhouse gas concentrations are now projected to be some 829 megatons of CO2 equivalent by the year 2010.
Reducing or reaching our reduction target of 6 per cent implies an enormous drop in emissions — some 270 megatons of carbon dioxide equivalent, which is equivalent to 10 tons for each Canadian. This target is a challenge and shows you that simply ratifying the Kyoto Protocol does not, by itself, solve the problem.
Scientists now believe that unless we take action soon, the situation will only become worse. Unfortunately, we have not had up to now a well-informed national debate in this country on the threat of climate change. I do not mean a debate on the science, because that debate is properly carried out in the scientific community through peer-reviewed papers and conferences. Determining what is scientifically valid is based on reproducible observations and tested hypotheses. It is not a beauty competition, nor is it determined by public polling. In my view, the purpose of a national debate is to explain the threat that is climate change; to achieve an acceptance that we are very much part of the problem; and to develop a consensus and engagement involving all sectors of society to address climate change. Today, I see, according to the front page of The Globe and Mail, that we have taken a significant first step in having such a national debate with a report that has been produced by the Pembina Institute and the David Suzuki Foundation.
The next slide shows the composition of Canada's own greenhouse gas emissions. This slide is courtesy of the Pembina Institute. It shows that a good 50 per cent of the emissions are related to heavy industry, energy generation, energy production and transmission and other heavy energy-using industries.
I will say a little about the IPCC and some of its broader results. The IPCC was set up to provide accessible and balanced information to governments. It has now been in existence for 20 years. Its role is not to undertake scientific studies but to assess science on the basis of published literature produced by scientists. The neat thing about the IPCC is that it engages governments. It is an intergovernmental panel, and it has been a successful marriage of the scientific and policy-making communities.
The slide shows how the confidence of the IPCC conclusions has increased. In the first assessment in 1990, the conclusion was yes, we have seen an increase of globally average temperatures, but that increase could be caused as much by natural variability as by human causes. By 1995, we were able to say for the first time that the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on climate. By the third assessment in 2001, we have been able to make that point more strongly, until we come to the conclusions of the fourth assessment report, which I have already mentioned. Essentially, in my view, we have drawn a line under the science.
Despite the science becoming stronger, the obvious observations of concentrations continuing to grow and temperatures still increasing, unfortunately, emissions keep on growing. Clearly, the science, while it has been essential, is not sufficient.
Where are we today, 20 years after the IPCC was established? Let me make four observations and then stop.
The first is that the science is now well established. We have to find the problem, and then we must focus on the solutions.
The second is that the political engagement is much stronger. Twenty years ago, only a few leaders, such as Margaret Thatcher, recognized the threat of climate change, and it was only with the second IPCC assessment that the nations of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, OPEC, realized the implications of climate change for their own economies. Now, climate change features in almost all international summit meetings.
The third observation is that climate change is more than an environmental issue. It is now seen equally as a development issue, a security issue, a technological issue and so forth. Indeed, I believe that the more ways in which we can frame climate change, the broader will be the coalition of interests ready to tackle it.
The fourth observation is that the IPCC no longer has the stage to itself. One of the more significant additions was the report on the economics of climate change written by Lord Stern for the United Kingdom government a few years ago. There now seems to be an endless stream of reports from governments, non-governmental organizations and international bodies. IPCC clearly has done its job in assessing the state of knowledge. However, given the lack of action, that assessment is obviously not sufficient.
The Chair: Professor Stone, that is a wonderful presentation, encapsulating centuries of natural evolution and ultimate human intervention. The earlier charts show the regular ebb and flow over hundreds of thousands of years, from a warming period, then a thawing period and an ice age or a mini ice age, then a warming period and so forth. Now we are in a warming period one way or another.
We have the amorphous group who call themselves the deniers. It is fair to say that most of us here are believers. Many of the scientists you have referred to, including Dr. Stern, come to one or another iteration of this committee. We are now embarked on what to do about climate change and how we deal with energy security in a way that will not aggravate the problem and will be sustainable and renewable. Can you summarize what the deniers base their premises on? There are still people in Australia, the U.K. and everywhere I travel who debunk what, as you say, good science is reporting. Can you put their argument on the record?
Mr. Stone: Yes, thank you very much. You used the term "deniers." That term is probably more accurate than skeptics, because skepticism is an extraordinarily important part of the scientific process. Science only advances when other scientists are skeptical of their colleagues' results and the like. Without true skepticism and questioning, we would have no real confidence in scientific results.
The deniers have been remarkably successful. Their ploy, in my estimation, has been to delay action on climate change. Their argument for doing that is to sow doubt that the science is still in question. They have been successful and have a wonderfully well-orchestrated machine, which is well-connected globally.
They do not conduct research by and large. Many of them are not scientists. Only a few of them, if they are scientists, have any long-term experience or have published in the area of atmospheric or climate sciences. They promulgate uncertainties and have been successful in that activity.
I have been party to several meetings with them where they bring along a scientist who represents the majority consensus. Those in the denier camp, of course, leave the audience with a feeling that the science still has questions. They typically look at the exceptions to the science. If you look at any of those slides, you will not see a smooth straight line. There is natural variability that is in the system itself. There will always be periods in which temperatures will stay the same or decline. There will always be periods in which the concentrations go up more than in other years. There will always be parts of the globe where you can find exceptions.
The IPCC has tried to paint a global comprehensive picture. I think it is now clear that climate change is real and it is happening now.
The Chair: Again, to conclude on the deniers, they are there and there are people who listen to them and observe what they are doing. What is the motivation? Is there an economic subversive element or is this activity something else, such as voodoo?
Mr. Stone: Magazine and newspaper articles and books have tried to uncover how they operate. The most recent one is called Climate Cover-up by James Hoggan, who is from Vancouver. There is written evidence that some of these people have received funding from oil, energy and coal companies and the like.
That is on the record now. It is interesting to look at some of the people involved. These same people were involved in the controversy linking tobacco and cancer some time ago. What drives them? It is difficult to say. In part, if you are one of those small numbers of people on the denier side, up to now, you have received a larger portion of media attention than if you joined the majority of scientists. I think some of them like that media attention.
I have spent a lot of time mingling with them, talking to them, trying to understand them and trying to convince them. However, in the end, I do not understand what drives them.
The Chair: It is not my custom to ask questions from the chair. I wanted only to underline, as we are on the threshold of United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, with 192 nations coming together to move this debate forward, that the timing could not be better. You are helping us to bring this issue into perspective.
Senator Mitchell: This presentation is compelling. You have done us a great service. You have addressed a number of questions that have emerged amongst members of the committee as we wrestle with this issue and try to lay the foundation for our study.
Senator Angus has asked the core question for me: How do you deal with the deniers? What they have done is corrosive, and they are technically skilled in the way they have done it.
We met with members of the British High Commission recently. They emphasized your point that Margaret Thatcher was one of the first major international politicians to speak about the dangers of climate change in 1988. Today, Britain is on track for 30 per cent reductions from 1990 by 2008, as you know, when their Kyoto objective was 12.5 per cent. Britain is way ahead.
One of the reasons is that they started to move before the deniers began to have a bite. The deniers began to emerge later. Britain was not inhibited by that group. Much in North America and elsewhere has been inhibited by the deniers because we came to the issue later.
I think that people generally, even if they have doubts or want to have doubts about climate change, are afraid to say it is not occurring because obviously, it is occuring. Deniers still distract the discussion by saying climate change is due to sunspots, a different kind of carbon dioxide and there is not much of that or it is natural cycles: You have heard it all.
If one believes it is natural cycles, we are in real trouble. If we are not causing climate change, we cannot fix it. In some senses, once we observe that it is occurring, let us hope we are responsible. Then, at least, we have a chance to fix it.
One argument people use is in your chart on recent Arctic warming and the medieval warm period. People sometimes jump to the idea that it was warm back then and we did not have carbon so why did it happen then? It was not 150,000 years ago; it was only 1,000 years ago. How do you answer that question? Why did that warming occur in what seems to be an abrupt way?
Mr. Stone: There are two or three points to make. If you look at this graph carefully and the temperatures 100 years ago —
The Chair: Is that graph headed "Recent Arctic Warming," and described on page 7 of your narrative?
Mr. Stone: Yes; if you look at the temperatures 100 years ago, they were not any warmer than during the last 2,000 years or so. It is in the last 100 years when you see that the temperatures are outside the range we have seen over the last 2,000 years or more.
Climate is naturally variable over many different time frames — years, decades, centuries or even much longer. We know that ourselves. Most of the longer time variability is due to the orbit of the Earth around the Sun. It is usually measured in thousands or tens of thousands of years. We have seen a warming that has occurred over the last 100 or 150 years at a much faster rate than anything else. It is taking us to levels that we have not seen over the last 2,000 years or more.
However, we cannot explain exactly, a lot of that natural variability. The reason is, in part, because the climate system is a complex system with all sorts of feedbacks. It has some noise within itself. Things like the medieval warm period are part of that natural variability. That natural variability will be on top of the temperature increase that we see as a result of human causes.
For example, deniers have said that temperatures have not increased much over the last decade. That is true, although temperatures over the last decade are amongst the warmest we have had over the last thousand years or so. That is all part of natural climate variability.
There were periods in the 1940s when temperatures went down a little bit. At times, a natural variability will bring temperatures down, which cancels out human forces that bring temperatures up, creating a climate plateau. However, during some periods, the natural variability will bring temperatures up. That increase combined with human forces that raise temperatures will cause it to be much larger. You have to take into account both tendencies. I hope that answers your question.
Senator Mitchell: A great deal has been written about the costs of trying to come to grips with climate change. The article in this morning's paper on a study is encouraging because it seems that it will not cost the economy much overall. Are you aware of any credible studies that have looked at the costs of not dealing with climate change?
Mr. Stone: Yes, in its assessment report, the IPCC tried to estimate the costs. These were also looked at by Nicholas Stern in his report. The costs will grow as climate change increases. Some impacts might be irreversible, for example, if we lose certain species because we continue to increase our emissions and our concentrations.
The Chair: What species do you refer to?
Mr. Stone: To date, we have lost some species of amphibians. I will not go into whether humans will become extinct; that could be made humour of although it is a deadly serious thought. All the studies I have read, and the point is made strongly by Nicholas Stern, suggest that we cannot afford not to act and that the costs of the impacts are most likely to be larger than the costs of taking action.
Senator Lang: I do not think I totally agree with my good friend, the senator from Alberta, that we will fix all the problems facing us as far as climate change is concerned. Mr. Stone, you talked about the natural variability and said that even without human contributions, changes in climate take place naturally. I agree that humans compound those changes significantly with CO2 emissions and what we do or not do in that regard.
Canadians look at the world and compare our emissions to those of other countries. A couple of weeks ago it was reported that the number of vehicles sold in China in one month increased by 78 per cent. I do not know what the total number of vehicles is in China but the emissions would be a significant contribution to CO2 levels, even in that one month. I am concerned by that report. We wonder what we can do and what the rest of the world can do to resolve this problem.
Your research tells us that there is a significant problem and that we are contributing to it. Do we have an economic model that shows what it will do to the general economy if we were to meet these targets of 20 per cent or 30 per cent?
I am talking about Joe Lunch Bucket. Will he have a job? Will we see significant unemployment? It is fine for us to sit here and make these statements but, at the end of the day, how will it affect the men and women trying to earn a living? From a general point of view, how will our lives change if we try to meet these emission goals?
Mr. Stone: The first point I will make is that climate change is a global problem because greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide stay in the atmosphere for 100 years to 1,000 years. During that time, they are well mixed so it does not matter where the emissions originate. Given that the problem is a global one, it will require a global solution. All countries will have to take action.
Developing countries continue to make a point on historical responsibilities because the carbon dioxide previously emitted by developed countries is still in the atmosphere and is a large cause of some of the climate change we have seen to date, as well as some of the climate change that is in the pipeline. The argument of developing countries is that developed countries have a historic responsibility to show leadership and to take the first steps in reducing emissions. Basically, that argument has been agreed to internationally and that is why, under the Kyoto Protocol, only developed industrialized countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, OECD, took on quantified emission reduction targets.
A lot has been made of China. You are absolutely right. The Chinese economy has grown remarkably over the last decade and continues to grow, bringing many of its people into the middle class. They are starting to own and drive automobiles, and they are starting to eat much more meat. As a result, China's emissions are growing and are as great as those of the United States, which was the world's largest emitter. My observations are that China is taking this issue seriously. When I was on the IPCC Bureau, the vice-chair of one of the working groups was a man who was the head of the Chinese Meteorological Service. He was an extraordinarily well-informed Arctic and Antarctic scientist who understood well the threat of climate change. He had a ministerial level appointment and represented the science to the Chinese.
The Chinese have seen the ancillary effects of their energy patterns with the health concerns as a result of poor air quality. If you have been outside Beijing or in Beijing, you will know what I am talking about. They have seen as well the impacts of climate change on their water supply. The Chinese have said that climate change is a serious issue that must be taken seriously, and they have begun to make changes. At the climate change summit held by the UN Secretary-General a couple of weeks ago, the Chinese premier made strong commitments on behalf of China. China has accomplished amazing things. For example, I was surprised to learn that China is the second largest producer and user of solar panels. We could have developed this technology in Canada. If I want to put a solar panel on my roof, I do not want to go to Wal-Mart to buy one that was made in China when it could have been made in Canada.
Canada has to play a part internationally; all countries have to play a part, in particular those with the large emissions. I believe that if we are smart about what we do, we will not wreck the economy or employment.
There is a future where we can see a restructured Canadian economy, new technologies and different lifestyles — not poorer but different. Industrial opportunities are available to us that could lead to Joe Lunch Pail having a different job, using his or her skills, but they will be different. There are opportunities, and if we do not take advantage of those opportunities, we may see Canada on the wrong side of history.
Senator Lang: I do not disagree with what you have said, in part, but I still go back to where we are in Canada and how the economy will change in 10 or 20 years so that we ensure we keep a standard of living and keep our economy moving in conjunction with the rest of the world.
I know that China is taken seriously, but what about the rebound effect? In China, yes, they are developing state-of- the-art coal generation for their energy requirements. My understanding is that every week, one new plant comes into production. The reality is that, all of a sudden, we have 30 coal-generating plants as opposed to two, so subsequently we have that much more CO2 because of the numbers of generating plants, although they are using the top technology. How do we deal with the question of the rebound effect where we have the energy efficient programs and various other things, and use technology but we are using four times the amount of energy and we have doubled our CO2 emissions? How do we confront that question?
Mr. Stone: I read only the newspaper reports on this study done by the Pembina Institute and the David Suzuki Foundation. One conclusion is that even meeting some of these more stringent targets results in continued growth in Canada and continued high employment. We will see a different economy, but one which is not necessarily poorer and which not necessarily will have more unemployment. Some of the biggest gains to be made are through energy efficiency, and that will save us money. It has already saved me a lot of money in my electricity bill, and it saved big companies like British Petroleum huge amounts of money, which has resulted in the book value of their companies increasing significantly.
My sense is that we are going into a new era, an era where there will be a price on carbon. We are going into an era of what you might call a carbon revolution. The countries that will win are those that take that revolution seriously and start to move their economies to ones that take carbon into account and develop the technologies and industries for the future and not for the past. It is possible to develop those technologies and industries. We only have to be smart. The longer we delay, the more opportunity we will miss, unfortunately.
The Chair: Senator Lang, we have an hour left, and we have a long list. Before I go to Senator Merchant, I observe, with tongue in cheek a bit, that inasmuch as I outlined for the professor before this session that we are a non-partisan committee and we are proud of it, we also we are proud and nationalistic Canadians. For that reason, when you mentioned Maggie Thatcher, it made me think of how many times she met with Prime Minister Mulroney, our greenest Prime Minister. They both played a big role in the Rio conference.
Having said that, I turn to Senator Merchant.
Senator Merchant: Thank you very much, professor. I come from the province of Saskatchewan where we are extremely interested in this issue. You said that this issue is a morality issue as well. I think that means that each one of us, each Canadian, has to become engaged. A few years ago, when I was on this committee, we worked with something called the One-Tonne Challenge. I think you said we are producing four tonnes of CO2 per person?
Mr. Stone: I said that if we are to meet our Kyoto commitment, it means a reduction of 10 tonnes per Canadian.
The Chair: By when?
Mr. Stone: 2010.
Senator Merchant: How would you engage Canadians? We have to look at the things we do every day. You said you have made changes that have saved you money. How do we convince everyone to become engaged in this issue?
Mr. Stone: That is the crux of the matter. I do not know. The human ability for denial, despite what is clearly presented to them, continues to baffle me. You are absolutely right. If we are to tackle this issue, it will require efforts of all Canadians, all sectors of our economy and all levels of government.
Science has been successful in putting this issue on the public policy agenda. It has been successful in raising awareness. You can talk to many people and say, have you heard of climate change and global warming, and they will have some sense of what it is. However, they will then ignore it and deny it. To some extent, you can see that and understand that. For most of Canada, at the moment, the impacts are marginal, but not if you live in the North and see the Arctic Sea ice declining at a faster rate than even our models projected, and impacting the livelihood of people in the North and certainly the wildlife.
This issue is insidious. It creeps up on you. Because of the science, it is an issue that we can now foresee. That has not always been the case with the crises we have faced in the past. We now have the science to look into the future, not to predict it exactly, but to know that we have a threat.
How do you convince ordinary Canadians to become engaged when it means changing their lifestyles? There are several things. It is a matter of how you frame the issue. If you frame it simply as an environmental issue, you will have, as we have seen, only limited take-up. If you frame it as an issue of technologies, energy security, lifestyles, health, food security, water availability and the like, then I think you have more buy-in if you can explain it that way, and I think you can. The more different ways you can frame it, the broader will be that consensus.
It is also a matter of imagination. A special issue of The Economist from June of last year said something in its opening article that I have been saying to my students: one of the greatest barriers to tackling climate change is a lack of imagination.
For example, sometimes the students I talk to about climate change will say: "I buy it, but I do not want to change my lifestyle." I have to bite my tongue, because the lifestyle they have today is different from the lifestyle I had when I was their age. The lifestyle I had was just as much fun and as fulfilling. It was simply different. What is to say that they cannot have a different lifestyle than they have today, which will be as fun and fulfilling? Where did today's lifestyle come? They did not invent it; it was sold to them by their peers, what they see on television and in the shops. Therefore, they need to move ahead of the curve. Who is better to do that than young people?
That is a partial answer.
Senator Merchant: Maybe I do not have much imagination. We read things that say maybe we can reflect this heat back into the atmosphere. Perhaps, some of the measures we take on the industrial side are not the only solutions. Provinces like Saskatchewan have not really developed their resources. We guarded ourselves for many years. We were holding onto our resources and we were looking at Alberta with a jaundiced eye. We have now changed and want to develop our resources. We look at this, perhaps, as not the only solution.
Are there other things we can do to help beyond what we are imposing on provinces like Saskatchewan, for instance?
Mr. Stone: Part of what you have raised is what some people call "geo- engineering" — putting aerosols into the atmosphere. We have to be careful because we do not know the consequences. It is a way to avoid tackling the root cause of the issue. We should look at it carefully so that when we make decisions, they are well-informed decisions.
Saskatchewan is a province rich in resources — resources we will continue to need. As the once Saudi Arabian Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources said: The Stone Age did not end because we ran out of stones. We will continue to need lots of your resources.
Much of our future lifestyles will be driven by different technologies — some of which we have now and some we can only imagine. Those technologies require significant investments in research everywhere and anywhere.
Saskatchewan has good universities. The province has the first pilot project to capture carbon dioxide and store it underground. These are the new technologies that, if we develop them first, the world will beat a path to our door.
We can look to those sorts of things.
The Chair: You were able to have Weyburn mentioned without even suggesting it to the kindly professor.
Senator Sibbeston: I come from the northern part of Canada where it is cold and —
The Chair: Less cold.
Senator Sibbeston: It is still cold. I live in Fort Simpson and there is snow on the ground. There is much snow in the Arctic; it is cold up north. Generally, the Inuit people say they like it cold. We do not like this global warming; all the weather variation and so forth.
When I go north, I always ask people if they have noticed any changes through global warming. They say they have because of erratic weather in the winter — unusual mild spells — and ice goes away faster in the spring. There are definite indications.
I had the good fortune this summer to go on an icebreaker from Resolute Bay to Coppermine. It was a great experience. The scientists on board conducting the studies confirm there is less ice, more open water and the ice is becoming thinner. They have satellites to observe the situation in the Arctic. NASA sits in California and is able to observe the ice conditions in the North. There is definitely less ice.
I am reminded about the early missionaries — the Catholics and Anglicans — that went north. They began talking to people about heaven and hell. If people were bad, they would end up in hell. Hell was described as a place where there is a big fire. People began to think maybe it was not that bad. They are constantly fighting to ward off cold. They want warmth.
The North is made up of ice and snow. There is a lot of ice on the oceans, but a lot of rock and permafrost on land. There will be definite changes. It is not as if the North will be a place where you can farm like the Prairies.
What are the changes likely to occur in the North from global warming? Is there any upside like possible warmer spells where it will be more comfortable and less cold?
Mr. Stone: When asked about impacts of climate change in Canada, I respond that there are two that concern me more than others. First is the Arctic and the second has to do with water, particularly in the Prairies.
As far as the Arctic is concerned, you mentioned the decline of sea ice. It has been only in the era of satellites that we have been able to obtain a comprehensive picture. The extent of sea ice has been decreasing during that period, from the mid-1970s. It went beyond all expectations from what we have ever seen before in 2007. It has never really grown back.
The decline is larger than our models have been projecting. There is some suggestion that we could see an ice-free Arctic in the summer within the next couple of decades. You are well aware of the consequences of that suggestion for the people who live in the North: for their traditional ways of life on the land, for the way they move around and for their environment. For example, seals and polar bears rely on sea ice to hunt and to breed.
What are the likely impacts? We are already seeing some impacts now. As far as people in the Arctic are concerned, climate change has already reached a dangerous level. It is not only sea ice. You mentioned permafrost. A lot of infrastructure in the North is built on frozen mud, permafrost. It is warming and melting. That has an effect on airports, roads, houses and lots of other infrastructure.
We can expect greater freeze-thaw cycles, which again will put strains on infrastructure. We will see more snow than we have seen in the past. Snow and ice loads will put huge strains on buildings and the like.
Are there some upsides: yes, to some extent. Some heating bills likely will be slightly lower, but it will still be cold. People will still need heating. We will see changes in ecosystems to some extent. We have seen changes such as mosses to grasses and the like.
We will not have agriculture on the Canadian Shield because it is a lot of rock with no soil. We might see positive improvements to health because there will not be such cold weather. However, with warming temperatures, we are seeing mosquitoes in the Arctic, which never happened before. There are upsides but I think the balance of evidence suggests that the impacts are more likely to be negative.
I will talk about water when someone asks the question.
Senator Mitchell: Professor Stone, several weeks ago Senator Sibbeston asked me a most interesting question that might be on the minds of many Canadians: What does a tonne of carbon emission look like? I was once told that it would fill an average two-storey suburban home. Senator Sibbeston asked how that would compare to a pile of rocks that weigh a tonne. It seems so conceptually different. People do not know what a tonne of carbon is. Can you give us some insight?
Mr. Stone: I am sorry but I cannot offer much insight because I do not carry those numbers in my head. However, I can say that North Americans typically use twice as much energy and, hence, produce twice as many emissions as typical Europeans use and produce. That is about ten times as much as the typical Indian uses and produces. We are prolific users of energy. I cannot answer the question directly but I should find the information because I need to carry it in my head.
The Chair: It is a conceptual thing.
Senator Brown: If you were to put a tonne of carbon emissions into a container, with no pressure on it, it would fill a large space. If you put a thousand pounds of pressure on carbon emissions in a sealed container, it would hold a number of tonnes of carbon emissions because they are a gas.
Mr. Stone, do you know where most of the temperature readings in North America are taken to come to the conclusion that we have an increase of eight tenths of one degree in temperature over the last decade or two. I refer to your graph on the slide, Temperatures Continue to Increase. Do you know where most of those recording instruments are?
Mr. Stone: Yes, most of the data come from thousands of weather stations around North America, although not many are in the Arctic for obvious reasons. The Meteorological Service of Canada and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the United States have extensive records that date back a long time. The data are used to produce the averages that I have presented.
Senator Brown: I point out that the Heartland Institute in Chicago claimed that the most accurate readings were in the United States. They conducted a survey of the locations of all temperature gauges and took infrared pictures of their location. I do not have them with me but I can bring them to committee any time as they are in my office. I did not know this subject was coming up this morning.
Temperature gauges have to be isolated from any other influence, and some 87 per cent of them have been located in areas where infrared pictures show that they are close to elements that might influence the readings, such as exhaust stacks of buildings or surfaces that reflect sunlight, et cetera. This information is from the Heartland Institute, which is not a denier.
I point out too that The Deniers is not a group of people but a book by Lawrence Solomon. At the beginning of each chapter of the book, the name and curriculum vitae of the scientist is provided to show what degrees the scientists hold, whether they have worked on climate change in the last 40 years to 50 years and what their conclusions were. Many of them were the ones who raised the issue of human influence on the climate.
The Chair: Do you have a question or are you writing a chapter for the book?
Senator Brown: First, why are the charts organized such that they appear to show dramatic changes in everything? Yet, when I calculate the change in the numbers beginning in 1860 up to 2000, the change is only 0.8 degrees. When I go to the other side of the chart and calculate the change in mean temperature from 13.2 degrees Celsius to 14.4 degrees Celsius, the temperature change is still 0.8 degrees Celsius. That change over a period of 150 years seems to be small. Are we basing our science on this change of 0.8 degrees Celsius to determine that we are experiencing global warming?
Mr. Stone: No, I have referred to climate change as a threat because of what we have done to change the composition of the atmosphere, primarily through the burning of fossil fuels. We have increased the concentrations in the atmosphere by about 40 per cent since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to 390 parts per million. That concentration is higher than we have seen in close to 1 million years.
Carbon dioxide, for example, is a greenhouse gas. We have known for 200 years in well-established physics that greenhouse gases affect the climate. If it were not for such greenhouse gases, this planet would be much colder than it is. We know from simple physics that having increased the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, we will affect the climate. To know how, where and when it will change and what the impacts will be, we have to rely on models. I cannot tell you that the models will be exactly correct. However, I can tell you that because of the science we know that climate will change in ways that we have not experienced before as a result of our change in the composition of the atmosphere. It is my view that change is what presents as a threat.
You can try to put that in the context of the changes that we have seen to date, such as a warming of 0.7 degrees Celsius over the last 150 years or so. That change has not been smooth and it is been only the last 50 years really that those temperature increases have occurred, as the graph shows, and have become worrying. The concern or the threat of climate change results more from what could happen than what has already happened.
Senator Brown: I want to make a case. I agree completely, Mr. Stone, but I think we need to focus on pollution. The carbon we are talking about comes from a lot of automobiles and electrical energy generated by coal. The biggest polluters in the world are coal-fired generation plants in China and the United States. Over the last 40 years, I have seen pollution overcome in Los Angeles. It became so bad that people were not able to read the stop signs on the other side of the street on a sunny day. I have seen pollution in Las Vegas, where the only building that could be seen was the top of the Stratosphere. The only industry they have in Vegas is gambling, so automobile pollution causes it. Coal-fired pollution causes a lot of our climate problems in many large cities. The city I am closest to is Calgary, and every time there is a temperature inversion, we see what looks like mustard gas over the city. Then the wind blows and it ends up 30 or 40 miles away.
The Chair: Senator Brown, I remind you that you are at all of our meetings, and you can even testify if you want, but now we are questioning Mr. Stone. We have only another half hour. If you have a question, please ask it. I still have five senators on the list.
Senator Brown: Do you think the way to address this issue and have people thinking seriously about it is not to focus on whether the temperature is going up but on whether we are polluting this planet? We are a consumer society, and we have been throwing things away that we do not need to throw away. We need to focus on shutting down consumption. We need to blame the people who consume and make them pay for it, rather than worrying about the temperature rising or not rising. A scientist from Germany who has contributed to your institute, IPCC, now claims that we are in a cooling period that will go on for another 20 or 30 years. I do not think we can afford to wait 20 or 30 years to cut down on pollution.
Mr. Stone: When people think about pollution, they think about damaging the environment in one way or another; poisoning the environment in the way that people looked at acid rain as a pollutant, because it damaged trees and growth. People look at mercury as a pollutant because it impairs brain functions and things like that. It is difficult to look at CO2 as a pollutant in the same way because, in the first instance, it does not necessarily damage the environment. It is what CO2 does to the climate that produces the impacts.
I agree with you. One should not focus only on temperature. As I mentioned earlier, and maybe I will use this occasion to explain the point, we will see water stress. The dry places will become dryer, and the wet places will become wetter. That change will have huge effects in places like Africa, but it will also likely have huge impacts in the West on the Prairies. As you know, a lot of the Prairie agriculture growing season relies on flows from rivers out of the Rockies in the summer. In the future, because of temperature changes, a lot of that precipitation will fall not as snow but as rain. We will not have that snowpack to melt in the summer and produce the water. Many glaciers are declining. The river will not flow out of the Rockies to provide for agriculture production on the Prairies the way it used to. Water availability can be particularly important in the Prairies. We will see higher temperatures, so there will be more evaporation during the summer, and this evaporation will happen during the growing period. You are right that climate change is not only about temperature and that we should look at other things as well.
Senator Seidman: Thank you, Professor Stone, for coming to discuss this important issue with us today. I will start with your conclusions. We can take as a given that the science is indeed well established, as you state, and that climate change is more than an environmental issue. It is also, among other things, an economic issue. You talk about changing lifestyles for Canadians. If we believe we can accomplish something here in Canada, where we represent probably 2 per cent or so of the world's greenhouse emissions, do you think Canada currently has in place the technologies needed to reduce emissions on the scale required by what you referred to as an emergency in a cost effective and timely manner? If so, what measures do you recommend we take almost immediately?
Mr. Stone: Again, this question goes beyond my scientific background, but I will try to provide an answer.
A study by Professor Robert Sokolov from Princeton three or four years ago suggested that we already have the technologies today to keep our emissions at today's levels until the middle of the century. The problem is those technologies are not being used. They are not being employed at the rate at which we need to employ them. These technologies will help us improve our energy efficiency, and will produce new sources of renewable fuels from solar to wind to biomass and the like. Some of those technologies still need more research to bring them to commercialization. As I said before, research is important.
However, we need the right economic environment that persuades companies and individuals to take up the technologies. There are various ways in which we can create that environment. One is through regulations, of course. We put a regulation on fuel efficiency of cars, and it is not difficult to imagine doubling fuel efficiency of automobiles. We can also create the environment by putting a price on carbon, because costs affect people's pocket books directly. We can create that environment by putting a tax on carbon, a cap on carbon emissions or the like. Government will need to show leadership to put in place the environment that will allow and encourage people to take up these new technologies.
One example strikes me as rather simple and potentially effective. I am not sure if I have the details correct, but the idea is that whenever one buys or sells a house, one should have an energy audit. That idea is straightforward. An energy audit is a miniscule part of the cost of a house.
However, an energy audit might have an enormous multiplier effect. People say: I should put in a new furnace; I should put in new insulation; or I could put a solar panel on my roof. Those little things can have a huge multiplier effect and not break the bank or lead to more unemployment. In fact, they can have the opposite effect, if we are smart.
The Chair: That question was excellent. Senator Merchant referred to the "One-Tonne Challenge" that was in vogue three or four years ago. Canadians did not get it, yet the brochures and papers produced by the thousands laid out what we could do in our homes. I gave the brochures to everyone in our extended family for Christmas. On New Year's Eve, I saw them in the wastebasket and it bothered me very much.
Senator Cowan: The exchanges between other senators and Professor Stone covered the ground I wanted to cover. I think Senator Lang put together the points that people have difficulty grasping and, perhaps, the reason why we have not made the progress that we all agree we should make. People ask why we should take measures in Canada when developing countries are pouring increasingly more emissions into the atmosphere. There is also the sense that measures we take will damage our economy.
I think the evidence is clear, and you have alluded to it, that there are economic opportunities for us. That point led to the question that Senator Merchant asked about how to engage Canadians. You suggested that we need to expand the tent. If we simply portray climate change as an environmental issue, it appeals only to a small segment of society. When we can show it is an energy issue, a security issue and an economic issue that offers economic opportunities, that portrayal engages the attention of more Canadians.
I wanted to make those points. I invite you to respond if there is anything else you want to add along those lines. I am interested in your comments.
Mr. Stone: I have two points. First, a significant number of studies, including those reported by the IPCC and Nicholas Stern, have tried to estimate impacts on the economy. All these calculations depend on what assumptions they make and how they interpret results. The ones I have read suggest that to reach the levels of reductions that scientists suggest, it would mean essentially that by 2050 we would have lost what otherwise would have been one year of economic growth. If we average that year over the time span, it is 0.1 per cent to 0.2 per cent per year. Most economic models do not have that degree of accuracy. Most suggest that the reductions can be achieved economically.
Second, the science I read, listen to and have been part of suggests that we are seriously running out of time to address this issue. The longer we delay, the more difficult, the riskier and the more expensive it will become to fix it. I tried to demonstrate in some of the diagrams I presented that all the curves are going up faster than we had anticipated. From a pure science point of view, evidence suggests that we are running out of time.
There is also evidence from a sovereignty point of view. The longer we put off taking decisions and promoting technologies, the more likely others will do it. There is no reason that Denmark had to be the country to move to wind power. Canada had an energy division at the National Research Council that was developing windmills and the like in the 1970s. We closed that research down. There is no reason that China is the second largest producer of solar cells. We had that silicon technology here in Canada through Nortel and others.
If we do not take these actions and promote those technologies, others will do it. Canada may find itself on the wrong side of history, as I said.
Senator Cowan: We will miss tremendous economic opportunities as well.
What is missing is collective political leadership. The scientific evidence is clear and unequivocal. It is not that science cannot do more, but science has done its part. On Senator Merchant's point, all of us engaged in the political process at every level, not only at the federal level, have a responsibility to lead the charge on this issue. Perhaps, that leadership is what has been missing.
The Chair: Arising from your comment on missing the boat on wind power, we had six witnesses on Tuesday evening from the Ocean Renewable Energy Group. They gave us fascinating indications of the power potential from waves, tides and rivers. They discussed how Canada missed the boat with wind. Currently, there is a great economic opportunity. I think Senator Cowan wrote us a letter or an email about that same group.
We are starting to develop a broader perspective in our study of the potential in Canada for things we can do.
Senator Campbell: Thank you Mr. Stone for giving us this excellent information.
When we talk about people who are deniers — I do not know if that is the correct term — versus the people who produce these documents before us, is there any sense that these documents are peer-reviewed vis-à-vis the documents from the deniers. When I read material from people who say climate change is not happening, and that efforts to challenge it will affect our lifestyle, it seems they deal in minutiae and "the big lie" rather than facts that can be peer reviewed. I agree that scepticism is healthy.
Is there any sense that the scientific documents we have are peer reviewed vis-à-vis documents from the deniers?
Mr. Stone: You refer to the assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, that you have before you. By and large, those documents are based on open and available peer-reviewed literature from around the world — not only in North America or Europe. The IPCC goes a couple of steps further. In writing its assessments, it brings together the brightest and best scientists from around the world to write the assessments. They look at this already peer-reviewed literature again and balance the level of confidence they have in the literature. It goes through the process of a second peer review.
I also mentioned that this review involves governments. Governments have a chance to review the reports, not only what is said, but how it is said. When these assessment reports are finished, they are owned not only by the scientific community, but by the governments behind them. I think that process is powerful.
As I intimated, many vocal climate change deniers are not engaged in research. Typically, they do not publish in peer-reviewed literature or turn up at international scientific conferences. We have tried to bring them into the IPCC process because some of them are well-qualified scientists and it is important to listen to and understand their views and their interpretations of the science. We do not shut them out; if they have published and were part of the scientific process, then they would be brought into the IPCC process.
Senator Campbell: I read a fascinating study on pollution from freighters. The article said that freighters are one of the biggest polluters in the world, and some of the worst pollutants are found in our Great Lakes because all the ships use old technology, such as the worst bunker fuel. In your chart from the Pembina Institute, do freighters fall under "Other transportation?" I see aviation — domestic and freight truck transportation but not freighters. According to the article I read, freighters outweigh anything on land in terms of creating pollution.
Mr. Stone: First, I think "Other transportantion" is where the freighters come into that graph. However, one has to be careful of how comparisons are made. Is it emissions per tonne carried, emissions per person carried or emissions per kilometre travelled? Individual freighters use highly polluting bunker oil that contains a great deal of sulphur. This is likely as much of a problem in the Great Lakes area as the carbon dioxide they are also responsible for.
Senator Raine: I find the subject matter fascinating, and the questions have been good. I ask you to turn to the graph on slide, "Canada's Lost Decade." Mr. Stone, in 1995 our angle of ascent changed, which was good. We want it to continue to improve. What did Canada do in 1997 that caused our rate of increase to decline?
Mr. Stone: I am sorry, I cannot answer that question because I do not know.
Senator Raine: That decline is significant. Presumably we did something. If you look at this graph, we were ascending and then we changed the slope.
Mr. Stone: It is like looking at temperature records. One should not overemphasize one point only because it is important to look at the general trend.
I can tell you a couple of stories to illustrate what you might be getting at. In the 1970s, we had an energy crisis, as you might remember. At that time, we saw the beginning of the Japanese auto industry making big inroads into the North American market. Fuel efficiencies, then, improved remarkably and emissions declined. They stayed that way for a long time until the last decade or so when we started to drive more vehicles, and bigger and heavier vehicles such as vans, sport utility vehicles and trucks; then, emissions started to go up again. It only goes to show you that it has been possible, through some of the technology, to reduce the emissions.
The domestic refrigerator is another interesting case. Over the last two or three decades, fuel efficiency of most domestic refrigerators has improved about threefold. The cost has also gone down about threefold, although their size has gone up threefold. Using these technologies unwisely can have the wrong results in the end.
We have to be careful of interpreting these inflections on this graph. I am not sure whether it is possible to show a cause and effect for what we did, and why the emissions rate changed.
Senator Raine: That makes a lot of sense.
I have noticed that we have smaller families these days with bigger and bigger houses that we fill with more and more stuff that comes from China. Having recently built a geothermal house, I find it kind of nice.
I have heard that Internet servers are big users of electricity. Is our increased use of more and more computers in our daily lives creating an unintended consequence of greater CO2 production by these servers?
Mr. Stone: I have also seen statistics to suggest that is the case. However, there will be technologies to make computers more energy efficient. As you know, the power and cost of computing have changed enormously. It might be a facetious point but if you use Internet potentials to have teleconferences instead of travelling to a conference on an airplane, emissions will be reduced.
Senator Raine: There are always unintended consequences for some of the things we do. For instance, when we change to the use of fluorescent light bulbs, which are more energy efficient, we are not dealing with the disposal of those bulbs, which have mercury in them. We have to be careful and we need a good plan for how we use technology, but there is no doubt we have to make changes. My personal philosophy is to think globally and act locally. It is too bad that Canadians, for the most part, are not taking this issue seriously.
Mr. Stone: I heard something the other evening that struck me as being potentially important. The discussion focused on consumption. We must get off this consumption track. The gentlemen said: We are human beings, not human "havings." We should not define ourselves by what we have but by what we are.
Senator Raine: Yet, people tell us to go out and consume because it is good for the economy.
The Chair: Consumer confidence is a huge barometer.
Senator Lang: I like to think that all of us around this table have to be somewhat skeptical in order to take a common sense approach to dealing with a real problem. It is too easy to jump on the bandwagon when these things appear on the front page of the local "astonisher" and say, I agree because, obviously, many people do.
It is our job to sit here and have expert witnesses like the professor evaluate where we are. I do not think there is any question that CO2 is a problem.
I want to follow up on the question from my good friend, Senator Raine. A book I have read that I think might have credence to the general overall political, economic and social discussion in Canada, and maybe in the world, is the book written by Jeff Rubin, Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller. I wonder if the witness has read that book and if he has any comments.
Mr. Stone: No, I have not read it, but I have met Jeff Rubin, and I have listened to Jeff Rubin. He has a good track record and one should listen to him.
My feeling is that we are putting ourselves at risk if we do not take action. We buy insurance when we think our house might be burgled, burnt or whatever, and we need to make a similar sort of calculation in dealing with this issue.
Senator Lang: If I can conclude, I agree there is an issue, but we also have to look at the broader context, too. The reality is that the population of the world is increasing substantially, and that increase further contributes to the situation and the dilemma as it compounds itself down the road. What are we doing in respect to that situation? There are many issues here. We cannot compartmentalize them and said that will solve all our problems. There are broader issues here as well.
Mr. Stone: Let me add a final thing. I said in my remarks that we need a national debate. I do not think we have had a national debate yet. I do not mean one that is based on opinion polls but a well-informed national debate. Science has contributed and done its part but, in the end, what we do depends very much on what we value. The question is one of values. Scientists do not have any particular privileged position on that question. A debate has to involve us all through a political process involving you, ladies and gentlemen, and others. We should take advantage of that political process to arrive at a balance representing the values of Canadians so that we can take necessary and appropriate action. It is a value decision in the end, not purely science.
Senator Greene: You talked about being careful of geo-engineering. Is carbon sequestration considered geo- engineering, or is that different?
Mr. Stone: Yes, it is, by some. It depends on one's definitions, and there could be unforeseen consequences. However, as we are doing in Weyburn, we conduct the experiments and the measurements and find out whether it is possible and what the consequences might be, so yes, you can include carbon sequestration as part of that.
Senator Raine: I have never understood how a cap-and-trade system fixes the problem. We are only fiddling with the problem and opening up all kinds of crazy markets. We are not really changing.
Mr. Stone: I am not an economist, but let me share with you how I understand it. If we are to tackle climate change, there will have to be constraints on our emissions. There will have to be constraints on carbon. We say to a particular company or plant: You can only emit so much carbon dioxide. We will find that some companies can meet that target easily and some will have difficulty. Those who meet it easily may have emission credits that they do not need, and they can then sell those credits to companies that are having great difficulty. By that, we set up a market. When we set up a market, we start to set a price for carbon. That is how a cap-and-trade system works, in my simple way. Because of the constraints, we end up creating a market and setting a price on carbon. The market, as we have seen with the European emission trading system, can work in unexpected ways, but it is only through trying this system and conducting the experiments that we will learn how to do it. The idea is that, with a cap-and-trade system, we effectively set the emission targets, and we let the market set the price, whereas with a carbon tax, we set the price, and the market then sets how much emissions we achieve. Effectively, they are similar.
The Chair: Professor, on behalf of all the members of this committee, we are most grateful to you, not only for making yourself available on short notice but for the thought-provoking and interesting presentation you have made. You can see that we are interested in playing at least our small part in the national debate you advocate. We have a long-range mandate. The study is not one of these two-month jobs. We are setting aside two or more years to go into the matter fully.
For Senator Raine's interest, cap-and-trade is part of the work that we have done, and we have heard witnesses on that subject. We met with people in Washington a few weeks ago. We are watching carefully what they are doing south of the border and here to see if the system to deal with this matter will be separate or integrated.
You mentioned the ocean thing. We are into it, professor. It is refreshing to know you are nearby, and perhaps we can call on you again to guide us.
(The committee adjourned.)