This day, on which the government is giving money to electricity consumers, has been marked with quite a controversy of late. What's the beef with it? Are you, too, in the controversy because you've paid the carbon tax? >> AUDIENCE: Yeah. >> Dr. ELLEN JAMES: Yeah. This is going on. I can't help you much, but anyway, this is the point. The government's given a carbon tax and let people who generate carbon pay it in the scheme. And people who, the consumers, are paying the price that's actually tied to emissions as well. How much are you paying? The most extreme case I found was in Nova Scotia. And so Nova Scotia, this province, was paying $583,000 per year per person. Why? Because Nova Scotia produces lots of carbon. And so, in that case, they were buying the carbon credits that actually caused the carbon emissions, and so they have to do it. So there's another aspect of carbon. It is actually a price, and we'll see what the market does with that. And we'll also see what consumer demand is going to do with the price being placed on carbon. So today we're going to talk about the effects that this is having and how it may manifest itself in the future. >> If I can ask, what about when you think of this, carbon trading, like you said, that can go on with this, there's a lot of people now are calling that double-dipping. So they're talking about having to charge the carbon tax and also pay for a rebate to be given back. If I have a car, or if I'm in a family, I pay the carbon tax, so it's kind of double-dipping. How is that not double-dipping? >> Dr. ELLEN JAMES: And there's a double dip of all sorts. You know, this gets a little complicated, but I just want to say one thing. The thing that's weird about this is is that the price is carbon. If you don't want to do it you don't have to do it, but if you don't want to do it, then you don't have to do it. So there's a bit of funky stuff there that I can't go into too much, but there are different sort of double-dipping things that we could do with all sorts of taxes. And so double-dipping is a feature of having a carbon price, so, we know that, but it doesn't have to be a double-dip of carbon taxes. They're sort of two different things. So, if you're charging something in one way or another, then the government would give you a rebate. In Newfoundland and Labrador, where I grew up, everybody gets a rebate, and it's not an offset, it's actually a rebate. So it doesn't have to be paid back, but we do want to make sure that people do something about the carbon, and so that's another thing we're focusing on, to help them, and so there's ways of doing that. And so, there's multiple ways of designing things. There's also multiple ways of doing the same thing, so you could say, I want to sell carbon credits, if you do that you need to buy the right stuff in Canada so that you can have the right credits, so there's a complicated set of things you have to do. But the point is that carbon has to be priced somehow. And if you do this, you can make sure that you're actually reducing emissions. And there are all sorts of ways you could do that, and that's, I don't know if it has to be a direct price, or if it can be through tax, or... So in Ontario, they've done this sort of thing. We've seen it before in the United Kingdom. And in Ontario, they made it like a charge for transportation, and so it's a bit complicated, but there are different ways. The issue is the amount of carbon emissions in the United States. The United States produces more than the rest of the world, and you know how much you produce is how you're going to be regulated as a country, so. So the United States has a tremendous amount of pollution, for reasons I won't go into, and so it would be cheaper for them to use, and so the cost per person there is very low, actually. So they don't need to do anything, which is sort of the point. This gets a little bit more complicated, I can see that, so the government in California has said that you can use this carbon trading. So if you're going to use the California exchange, then you get a green card and then you can make a profit by buying carbon credits in one place and selling them in another place, and you get a rebate for doing that. And that's all great, but some companies have already said, we're just going to leave California, if you do that, and then the whole argument, the whole thing gets a bit more complicated. I'll try to tie it up in a nice little bow, there. So, that's how the system works, at the simplest level. So let's look at the numbers because I want to show that. You're the one who's going to get them now. I would have to go and talk to you about it, and a few people down there will explain them. This is a list of the countries that are members of Kyoto. But then you have to take, this goes from the year 1990, so it goes back to the '80s, it doesn't go to the present day. So this is an example of carbon emissions in 1990. I'm just showing it as a sort of way of saying that the United States has a high number of carbon emissions in relation to the rest of the world, and it's because it's all going to be regulated, because the United States has a huge emissions numbers. And if you look at Canada, which you saw just now, this is the chart from Canada. Canada emits almost as much carbon dioxide, about the same, but because it's in the midst of some very serious glaciers, because of a huge amount of ice in northern Canada, there's not so much... There are just big boulders of ice in there, and so that produces less carbon dioxide than we do. But the United States has a huge number. Now, how did we get there? That was in 1990, and then it's projected to continue growing. And I'll talk about it in a minute, the world and so on. But why did it grow so much? The world grew, and the U.S. is not the world. The world grew as well, and when you're developing countries, the amount of carbon you produce goes up by 50% or 60% as your GDP goes up. And so the United States goes through a massive shift in terms of their consumption of material goods, and so they need more energy to produce things. And they're not doing any of the things that will help them reduce their carbon emissions, like, so. But one of the reasons that's happened is that it's much easier to buy goods from Asia than it is from North America. So in this case, it's all consumption that is related to transport, and so what it's sort of doing is the United States has developed, so they've got these big numbers, but they've got lots of other people to help out as well, so that helps out the economies of developing countries, but it helps out as well, as we develop the United States, the development of the United States helps out the development of the rest of the world, so they're going to have a growing carbon emissions, and then they have a very complicated part. >> [Noises] >> Dr. ELLEN JAMES: Yeah, that