:
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and thank you, ladies and gentlemen.
I am joined here in the room by a couple of colleagues: David McGovern, whom I think you know, the assistant deputy minister, international, at Environment Canada; and Keith Christie, who is the director general, environment, energy, and sustainable development at Foreign Affairs.
If I can, I'll just give you a very quick overview in terms of what I think are the salient points, the results achieved by Canada and by the G8 community at Heiligendamm, which is the place where the summit took place, and then I'd be most happy to take any questions.
This year at Heiligendamm the G8 achieved consensus on a way forward on the challenge of climate change. Leaders emphasized the importance of engaging all major emitters of greenhouse gases in discussions to tackle climate change, including their commitment to participate in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change conference in December 2007 in Indonesia, with their view to achieving a comprehensive agreement to succeed the Kyoto Protocol when it expires in 2012.
Leaders recognized that climate change is a global problem that requires a global response and that we share a long-term vision of the need to accelerate our action to achieve deep reductions of greenhouse gas emissions. Notably, G8 leaders recognized Canada's plan to reduce emissions by 60% to 70% by 2050 over 2006 levels, as set out in our new domestic plan of action on climate change.
[Translation]
The G8 achieved consensus on a way forward to combat climate change. G8 countries emphasized the importance of engaging all major emitters in the fight against climate change, including their commitment to participate in the UN Convention...
:
...including their commitment to participate in the UN Convention on Climate Change conference in December 2007 in Indonesia, with a view to achieving a comprehensive agreement to succeed the Kyoto Protocol when it expires in 2012.
The G8 recognized in the clearest terms that climate change is a global problem that requires a global response and that we share the long-term goal of curbing it significantly.
[English]
In other words, we achieved consensus, the countries of the G8, through the leaders in their discussions in Heiligendamm. An agreement on combatting climate change was one of the key deliverables and one of the key topic areas of G8 leaders.
It was notable for a number of things: first of all, the idea that (a) the G8 leaders could come together on a forward-looking plan, and (b) that the plan included, implicitly, the notion of accepting global targets—as specifically pointed to in the communiqué from the leaders—of the nature established by the EU in its plan, by Japan in its plan, and by Canada in its plan.
I think two other things are noteworthy vis-à-vis the agreement reached by leaders. One was the willingness to engage major emitters, the notion that in order to make real progress on climate change we absolutely need to have at the table countries like the United States, China, India, and others who account for a significant proportion of greenhouse gas emissions. This is something that has eluded us to date. Finally, I think you will find in the statement confirmation of the centrality of the UN process in this. This process begins again in Bali in December.
These are outcomes that were very much in line with Canada's objectives and Canada's plan. I think they represent one of the most noteworthy and positive outcomes of a successful summit in Heiligendamm.
I'll stop there.
:
Thank you, Mr. Godfrey.
First of all, what was explicit from the leaders was the acceptance of targets themselves.
For the first time--and this is notable in the G8--you had the Americans speaking about the importance of setting and committing to a target. What they said--and this is a rational consideration from their perspective--is that they first want to have the process, the dialogue with the major emitters. They are not prepared to set their target until they've had that discussion. We, the EU, and Japan have already set targets, but we accept the willingness of the Americans to engage in a process that will lead them to establish a target in very short order.
The convening of the major emitters that would happen this year is a significant step forward. They're not at all vague about where they think the targets should end up. What you see in the text is explicit reference to the plans established by the EU, Canada, and Japan, all of which have the goal of halving emissions by 2050. I think there's a clear way forward and real progress in terms of where the Americans have been up until now.
The two-degree issue was not on the table when the leaders met. It was not discussed.
Previously two degrees had been raised under a number of headings. Two degrees was a kind of place holder for a reference to what the global science was telling us. Two degrees was also held out--although this was recognized as unsatisfactory--as some kind of target by some in the G8. It was realized, though, that it's fundamentally a target that is unmeasurable. What happened was, one, in the final statement there was more explicit reference to the global science itself without selecting one element from that, and two, the target reference was made more explicit and measurable by referring to the halving of global emissions by 2050. That is present and explicit in the plans of the three: the EU, Canada, and Japan.
:
The most important thing that came out of the G8 summit in Heiligendamm is the declaration of intent from countries like the United States. There is also the invitation that was extended to countries like China, India and the other major emitters to participate in a binding process that would tie in with the one being undertaken by the United Nations. So the difference is in the presence of countries that are not already signatories of the Kyoto Protocol.
[English]
The significance of what happened in Heiligendamm is that for the first time you have the agreement of the United States, first of all, in an agreement that includes the United States, the EU, Japan, Canada, and Russia in a single accord, speaking the same language, and the willingness, as I've said, of the United States to say they are willing to adopt real targets for climate change and that they want to do it by following a process that involves the major emitters.
You also have the engagement of the G8 with the key major emitters. If you look at the G8 plus what they call the Outreach Five, the other five countries that were invited--China, India, South Africa, Brazil and Mexico--that accounts for over 70% of greenhouse emissions, so it's a pretty important group of countries to be engaging. You have a process with the G8 leaders meeting with those countries and saying they need to work together with a view to bringing the major emitters together, agreeing on a framework for greenhouse gas reductions, and having this feed into the process that will begin in Bali in December of this year.
Experience teaches us that it would be very difficult to predict success for a process like that--we've been there before--if we don't have some indication that we can bring the major emitters on board. What the G8 leaders are saying is that they have, very usefully, a guide as they try to set a wider objective, and that they should look at what the Europeans, the Japanese, and Canada have done as a guide to what they might collectively aspire to.
Does that mean we declare victory and that all the work is done? Not at all. A great deal of hard work remains. There will be hard work in terms of the engagement of the Outreach Five. There will be hard work to do on the ground in Bali, but we have turned a corner and we're much further ahead than we were pre-Heiligendamm.
:
I think there are a number of things.
First, the G8 summit was preceded by the Canada-EU summit, which happened in Berlin on the Monday. Climate change was also on the agenda for that, and we ended up with an agreement with the EU that in effect recognized the commonality of our approach, the notion that Canada and the EU underline the need to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by at least half by 2050.
So there was, I think, a significant meeting of the minds following the Prime Minister's meeting with the German Chancellor and with President Barroso of the EU. He also, of course, met with President Sarkozy and Premier Fillon of France in Paris on Tuesday.
And finally, at the G8 itself, I think he was credible and effective in terms of explaining to all in the room why we in Canada have accepted and are moving towards measurable targets, and why it's significant to aspire to an agreement that includes everybody around the G8 table, including the United States, and that reaches out to the major partner economies, the major industrial developing economies like India and China.
I would say, in those discussions, he and Prime Minister Blair were particularly effective in recapping for the other G8 leaders what essentially was on the table and why it was important to aspire to seize that opportunity and to continue to challenge one another to move forward. There were a number of times when he intervened just to remind people of what was in reach and that it really meant something; that it meant we would hold ourselves to targets, that we would work together to ensure that we were achieving something and that our partners in the developing world were achieving something.
He held out a level of ambition and commitment acknowledging that Canada had come a long way and that we had significant issues that we had to address and were addressing—so with real credibility—but I think he was very persuasive in making that presentation.
Hello, everyone. I'll keep it quite short so we can better have time for questions, and I'll also try to be very brief in my answers to questions.
I released a report with the C.D. Howe Institute, as I think everyone's aware, a week or so ago. That was something I had been working on since the government released its final set of climate change policies. There are actually three different sets of policies that we talk about since the government came to power. So we wanted to have all of this together.
The media contacted me in April, when the government came out with its policies, to ask what their effect would be, and I declined to answer, because as I'll explain in a minute, we really need careful analysis and modelling using computer models that have, yes, uncertainty associated with them, but they're the best tools that we human beings have to try to estimate the effect of our policies. We have learned a lot in 20 years of policies that have not been very successful, and that's sort of what I'm going to address right now.
The question I'm obsessed with as an analyst is how I can help policy-makers establish policies that will actually achieve their targets. I do find that when I hear lengthy discussions about targets, and even a little bit with your previous speaker, I get this very strong urge to keep shouting out, “What's the policy link to the target?”
In fairness to you politicians, there is a lot of political pressure on you to make strong statements about strong targets, and yet at the same time, there's a lot of political pressure on you not to match those statements with effective policies, because unlike what many people will have told you--and even, unfortunately, many of my environmentalist friends--reducing greenhouse gases involves policies that change costs for people. Some people will react negatively to those, and you'll have to do a lot of work to get the media understanding that that's actually the only path to get there. That's where I believe we are dropping the ball over and over again, when I look historically. Unfortunately, I feel we are still dropping the ball looking forward.
While my current comments are, yes, critical of the current government's policies, because those are the particular ones I'm focused on, I think you're all well aware that I've been critical of the policies of the previous Liberal government and even of what I've seen in the policy proposals of other federal parties. I guess I'm not going to be making a lot of friends here, but I really think that in the interests of our moving from two decades of discussions about targets to actually making changes, people like me are going to have to try to move the discussion in that direction. That's also why it was interesting to listen to the previous speaker talk about--
:
I'm almost finished here.
What I would say, with respect to the G8 discussion and the previous speaker and other discussions, is that what I'm hearing is that this is a first in the sense of having the United States and other major countries agree that we need a global agreement and that all countries need to be involved. This is not a first. I've been around this for two decades, and in the 1990s we had.... I'd need to go back to look at the records of G7 and G8 meetings, but I am quite convinced that we had governments standing up as a whole in G7 and G8 saying we needed global targets and efforts from greenhouse gas reductions. But I'll drop that.
If I'm to think of how countries—the G8, whoever—are setting targets and then ask, with the area of my expertise, which is how they would achieve those targets, I would point out to your committee, to you, that when you're designing policies to achieve your targets, the atmosphere must have a value. There are three reasons why. One is that fossil fuels are still, and in many cases will remain, a relatively low-cost energy source--and that's likely for at least a century--compared to renewables and nuclear. Second, it's cheaper to use fossil fuels without capturing the carbon dioxide. Therefore, thirdly, in a free market economy, innovations and new products and services will look to burn these fuels and use the atmosphere as a repository for the CO2 unless you have policies that explicitly prevent that. The policies to prevent that have to put a charge or a regulated cap on emissions into the atmosphere.
So the second part is a policy lesson when you're trying to hit these targets—G8 or otherwise—and that is that subsidies are not nearly as effective as they appear. It looks like you're giving someone $50 for an efficient fridge and that therefore energy use from fridges will fall in that particular household. The evidence that we now know from two decades of analysis contradicts that. It says that we measure efficiency by per cubic metre of the fridge, for example, and yet fridges are getting larger. The service of refrigeration involves the innovation of new products such as desktop fridges, wine coolers, water coolers, a basement fridge, and so on. So these kinds of subsidy policies without a price on the atmosphere cannot get you there.
The only final point I want to make is that I work in this area and have worked here for two decades. The world energy assessment, which is developed by the International Energy Agency, the World Energy Council, and various programs of the United Nations, came out in the year 2000 with a significant section on policy. The new global energy assessment will come out in 2010. In the last year I was appointed as the head person for policy analysis in that process, and so I'm assembling a team of the top people internationally on policy design. Quite frankly, the message I just gave you about policy use and policy failures is held universally by these leading independent experts. These are academics who advise governments or leading industry people who are in the research end of this.
So what I did just recently—and I'll close now—is simulate the policies in Canada to see if they would achieve the targets we were looking at, and the results are there for anyone to see. I did not find that they did.
So I'll complete my comments there and stand open for questions.
:
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I will focus my comments on how Canada's current climate change efforts and commitments fit into the evolving international global climate change regime.
I think one of the first things that struck me in looking at the summit declaration...and I would urge all members to not just look at the climate change section part. I think this is one of the big mistakes we often fall into, where we see climate change as some kind of discrete environmental issue out there. We really have to see it in the context of overall economic development and investment patterns.
I was quite struck by the title of the summit declaration, Growth and Responsibility in the World Economy. It's a well-chosen title. It captures the central challenge that faces us over this century.
On the one hand, there is no doubt that economic growth will continue to be a critical factor in helping alleviate the circumstances of the world's poor, who, at last count, still number more than two billion people. On the other hand, we are coming face to face with the fact that development has its limits, and that first through climate change, but only first, are we directly experiencing the global limits of unrequited growth.
Unfortunately, the declaration doesn't explicitly address that central tension. In fact, if anything, it papers it over, implying that somehow the two goals of economic growth and environmental protection are naturally complementary. In fact, as we all know, they are not, and to make them complementary calls for hard, innovative thinking, of which we are only beginning to scratch the surface.
Successfully addressing climate change requires a serious rethinking of how we approach policy development and implementation towards more integrated, adaptive models. In that respect—and again I ask members that they take a look at the entire statement—it was disappointing to see that the G8 section on investment spent so little attention on the implications of investment on climate change.
One of the critical instruments in setting a sustainable future is through global investment patterns. Legend has it that when Chairman Mao was asked if the French Revolution was a success or failure, he replied that it was too early to tell. I would suggest the same thing in regard to evaluating the Kyoto Protocol. Its success should not be so much judged according to how many countries actually met their specific targets, but more as to how effectively it served as a platform for launching a radical redirection of foreign direct investment in clean energy globally.
I'm in complete agreement with Dr. Jaccard. The major achievement of Kyoto was setting an international value on carbon. The challenge that faces us for post-2012 is setting a price high enough and broad enough to seriously influence investment decisions by the private sector.
One thing I would definitely commend the authors of the G8 summit and the agreement on, and Germany for originating it, was for integrating the issues of climate change, energy efficiency, and energy security. I'm afraid to say that Canada is far from achieving such an integrated national response. We have been for the last 30 years...and I would argue that it is probably more incumbent on Canada than almost any other major G8 country. given that we continue to rely so extensively on fossil fuel exports for our economic prosperity and we continue to plan to do so over the next half of this century. Yet Canadians also want their governments to be global leaders in addressing climate change, and politicians of all stripes and jurisdictions insist on Canada becoming a global clean energy leader.
I'm not saying there aren't solutions out there. There are, but they need careful development and management on a national scale. In that respect, I would strongly and humbly urge the to convene a federal, provincial, and territorial meeting of energy ministers to launch a national dialogue on Canada's sustainable energy future that will actively engage industry and civil society. We must not allow the energy policies, misguided or otherwise, of a government of 35 years ago now to determine a lack of direction on so critical an issue today.
I certainly commend the summit declaration's focus on energy efficiency, and the same can be said on energy security. I do, however, caution that we be careful when we're trying to find complementarity between energy security and climate change.
I was, in particular, a lead author with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change specifically looking at the issue of energy security and climate change, and it is clear that the literature shows that while there may be some similarities and some aligned interest between the two issues, this is far from assured. For example, energy security issues in the U.S. vis-à-vis not relying on Middle East oil are not only working to increase investments in renewables; they are also, of course, working to increase reliance on non-conventional fossil fuel sources, such as the oil sands and gasified coal.
Now to the issue that probably is foremost in everyone's mind, and that's the issue of the long-term targets identified in the G8 summit declaration and Canada's place in that discussion. The question that needs answering on emission targets is twofold: what will it achieve environmentally, and what will be the impact to the economy of such measures?
There is growing pressure originating in Europe, but building around the globe, that anything greater than a 2° centigrade change from pre-industrial levels would represent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the global climate system. This would require global emissions levelling off within the next 15 years and 50% reductions in global emissions by 2050.
In that respect, the long-term global target supported by Canada is 50% reductions by 2050, seemingly consistent with both the EU and Japan. However, is it? Remember that the declaration also reconfirms very explicitly the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and capabilities among all countries. This principle in reality then implies to much of the outside world, particularly in the EU, that in order to reach a 50% global reduction, developed countries, including Canada, would need to reduce their emissions at a much higher level than 50% by 2050. Many estimate a level as high as 80% to 90% for OECD nations.
Is such a target achievable, let alone feasible, for Canada? In my estimation, yes, but it will require at least two strong policy initiatives. First of all, there must be a nationwide commitment to clean energy initiatives, including energy efficiency, carbon capture and storage, and a clean east-west energy grid. And setting a value on carbon is the first mechanism to make that happen.
Secondly, at that rate of reduction, it is simply unrealistic to expect Canada to reach such reduction targets through domestic measures alone. The Canadian private sector must become an active player in the global carbon market, and the Government of Canada needs to provide much clearer signals and incentives for Canadian industry to do so.
In that respect, I was very pleasantly surprised at the prominence of carbon markets in the declaration. Ironically enough, it was Canada and the United States, along with Australia and New Zealand, that were the original champions of emissions trading. Hopefully we will soon see them come fully aboard again. Let's not forget the message of the Stern report, that a global carbon market is absolutely crucial in ensuring that the transition to a clean energy future is as cost-effective as possible.
During my travels over the last few years to Europe, Asia, and Africa, I heard a couple of common messages regarding climate change in Canada. On the negative side, there was a growing concern with Canada's credibility gap. We talk the talk, but we have a very difficult time walking the walk. However, on the opportunities side, there is also a keen awareness that Canada is not too dissimilar from rapidly growing major economies in developing countries, and that it is precisely countries like Canada that must be amongst the first to show that one can break the link between greenhouse gas emissions and economic growth. If Canada, with its relatively mature economic and social support networks in place, can't pull it off, how in heaven's name can we expect China or India to deliver?
Mr. Chairman, I have a final comment on the overall tone of the post-Kyoto negotiations. On the one hand, I am heartened by the joint statement of the G8+5, and in particular its recognition of the seriousness and urgency of the issue, and I'm quite relieved to see a major recommitment to the UN process, including by the U.S. in its offer to host a meeting of major emitters later this fall. Still, we are a long way off from any sort of rapprochement. Major developing countries are still resistant to any reduction commitments, and small wonder if you look at it from their perspective. I remind the members that the UNFCC reported that only six industrialized countries are actually on track in meeting their Kyoto reduction commitments, and so we could hardly say at this point that we're showing tremendous leadership.
While we in the developed world can certainly do much more, we also need to keep in mind that we live in a very different world from that of the framework convention of 1992 or even the protocol of 1997. So while we still have prevalent poverty in countries like China and India, there is no doubt they are also becoming our major economic competitors, and how we address that situation is going to be extremely critical.
I have one last thought on the dynamics of this particular G8 summit. One of the more striking things was the fact that those leaders among the most active in supporting strong actions and targets to address climate change, leaders such as Angela Merkel of Germany and Nicolas Sarkozy of France, hailed from conservative parties. In the U.K. the Conservative opposition leader is, if anything, more proactive on climate change than his Labour counterpart. In the United States it is Republican governors, not only in California but also in New York, and Republican leaders in the U.S. Senate, such as Senator McCain of Arizona, who are leading the charge in addressing climate change.
I think there is an important lesson here for the Canadian political process. Climate change is rapidly evolving into an issue beyond partisan politics in most OECD countries, and frankly, I think it is high time in this country that we took to heart some lessons from that policy maturation experience.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.