Tackling Climate Change with a Modern, Clean Electricity System

The Empire Club Presents

Carol Browner: Tackling Climate Change With A Modern, Clean Electricity System

November 12, 2015

Welcome address by the Dr. Gordon McIvor, Executive Director, National Executive Forum on Public Property

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. From the Royal York Hotel in downtown Toronto, welcome, to the 112th season of the Empire Club of Canada. For those of you just joining us either through our webcast, our podcast or on Rogers Television, welcome, to our meeting. Before our distinguished speaker is introduced today, it gives me great pleasure to introduce our head table guests.

Head Table:

Distinguished Guest Speaker:

Ms. Carol Browner,
Guests:

Ms. Tina Arvanitis, Vice President, Government Relations and Communications, Ontario Energy Association, and Director, Empire Club of Canada

Mr. Noah Farber, Acting President and Chief Executive Officer of the Asthma Society of Canada

Mr. Duncan Hawthorne, President and Chief Executive Officer, Bruce Power

Mr. Don MacKinnon, President of the Power Workers’ Union

Mr. Bob Oliver, Chief Executive Officer, Pollution Probe

Ms. M. J. Perry, Vice President and Owner of Mr. Discount, and Director, Empire Club of Canada

Mr. Scott Travers, President of the Society of Energy Professionals

Ms. Antoinette Tummillo, Executive Vice President, Real Estate Management Services, Colliers International

My name is Gordon McIvor. I am the Executive Director of National Executive Forum on Public Property. Ladies and gentlemen, your head table.

I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge some VIPs in the room as follows:

Members of Provincial Parliament (MPPs), Ontaio

Marie-France Lalonde, the MPP for Ottawa-Orléans

Catherine Fife, the MPP for Kitchener-Waterloo

Eleanor McMahon, our former Minister of Energy and MPP for Burlington and Dwight-Duncan

Member of Parliament (MP), Burlington

Karina Gould, MP

Welcome. Now, it gives me great pleasure to introduce Mr. Duncan Hawthorne, who is going to do the honours of introducing the speaker today.

Introduction by Duncan Hawthorne, President and CEO, Bruce Power

Good afternoon, everyone. I have the great pleasure of introducing Carol Browner to you today. We have spent time with her this morning at several meetings, so I am sure you are going to enjoy hearing her remarks, and I will go quickly through Carol’s very distinguished career. Anyone that knows her background—and I am sure there are a number of you in the room who will know how influential she has been in the environmental field in the U.S.

Carol is a distinguished Senior Fellow at American Progress, Senior Counsel at Albright Stonebridge Group. She also serves on the League of Conservation Voters Board, the Bunge Limited Board of Directors and Global Ocean Commission’s and Opower’s Advisory Boards. She is also a Council Member of Nuclear Matters, which is a U.S.-based organization advocating for their own nuclear plants as part of a balanced electricity supply mix. Who would have thought? Carol most recently served as Assistant to President Barack Obama and Director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy where she oversaw the coordination of environmental energy, climate transport and related policy across the federal government. During her tenure at the White House, she secured the largest investment ever in clean energy and established a national car policy that included both new automobile fuel efficiency standards and the first ever greenhouse gas reductions.

From 1993 to 2001, she served as the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. As Administrator, she adopted the most stringent air pollution standards in U.S. history, set a Clean Air Fine Particle standard for the first time and spearheaded the reauthorization of the Safe Drinking Water Act, as well as a Food Quality Protection Act. She is known for working with both environmentalists and industry to set science-based public health protections while providing businesses with important flexibility on how to meet those standards. She worked across the agency to ensure a focus on protecting the most vulnerable, particularly children. From1991 to 1993, she served as Secretary of the Environmental Regulation in Florida, where she launched the largest ecological restoration project ever attempted in the United States to restore the natural flow of water to the Everglades. Ladies and gentlemen, it is my great pleasure to introduce Carol Browner.

Carol Browner

Thank you, Duncan, for that introduction, and let me thank Bruce Power for the invitation to be with all of you today. It is an impressive list of speakers that have stood before you. I am in awe. I had heard about all the U.S. Presidents who had come. I had heard that the Dalai Lama spoke, but then you told me that Audrey Hepburn spoke, and I thought, “Now, that’s really something!” It is just a lot of fun to be here in Canada today and to be with all of you, and, to the MPPs who join us here, let me thank you for your government service and for your leadership. I know they are sometimes not the easiest jobs in the world, and so the idea that you give of yourself, and you give of your families to help make your community and your country a better place is something for which I thank you.

And to the head table: I have had the opportunity to be with many of you. During the morning, we have had a number of great meetings, and I have to say I have learned an awful lot, so, thank you, for helping to educate me on all of the amazing things that are afoot here in Canada when it comes to the issue very near and dear to me, the issue of climate change, global warming, reducing carbon pollution.

Now, you have heard my résumé, and I have had a lot of interesting titles. You heard that I was, I guess I would say, interesting and easily misunderstood. I was Secretary of the Environment for my home state of Florida. I actually grew up in Miami, Florida. My parents are Irish immigrants who went to Florida, went to Miami, which is not the normal Irish immigrant path in the United States, but they settled in Miami, and so I launched my career in Florida where I served as Secretary for the Environment.

My husband and I were buying a house, and on the loan application you have to put down your job title, so I put down “Secretary” because that was my job title, and then I got to “Income/Salary,” and I was the head of a large government agency, and it was a nice income, so I put that number down, and the woman processing the form looks at it. She looks at me, and she says, “Honey, how did you get a secretary job paying that much? Where do I go?” I tried to explain, but then I moved on and, of course, my next job, as you heard, got me the title of “Administrator”—the Head of the Environmental Protection Agency in the United States is referred to as the “Administrator.” It sounds like you are in charge of the copy machine or whatever. You are certainly not setting pollution standards that affect the entire U.S. economy. There were 15,000 people I got the pleasure of working with and a $5-billion annual budget. “Administrator” did not really capture that.

As you might imagine when you run the Environmental Agency, sometimes people are not happy with the decisions you make, and one day someone was trying to introduce me as the “Former Head of the Environmental Protection Agency,” and they wanted to point out that I was the longest-serving Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency but, instead, they said, “And she is the longest suffering Administrator of the EPA.” It was actually a tremendous honour, and I am so proud to have been able to serve President Clinton as a member of his Cabinet for all eight years of his Presidency.

My last job in government was when I came back after an eight-year break to serve President Obama. He created a new office in the White House, an office on energy and climate change, and I agreed to join him at the beginning of his tenure to help sort of launch the Energy and Climate Change agenda.

I was quickly given the title by the press core of “Energy Czar.” My husband did some quick work and announced to me that there were Czars. They were all men; therefore, I must be a “Czarina,” not a “Czar,” but that I should also be aware that Czarinas did not exist independent of the Czars. All the power was derivative, and so whatever I was doing was derivative of him. One of the more conservative newspapers in our country eventually referred to me as a “Socialist Czarina,” which really made you wonder what they understood about history—apparently, not a lot. Today, the title I guess I have is “Consultant.” This almost got me deported last night. I think when I arrived in Canada. They were curious what the title meant, so I spent some time in a special line. We worked that one through, so I am here. I could have been at the airport.

One of my fellow consultants and business partners, Madeleine Albright, likes to tell a little story about consultants. It is a story about a rancher and a stranger, and one day a stranger drives up to a ranch and says to the rancher, “If I can tell you within fifteen minutes exactly how many head of cattle you have, will you let me take the calf standing right over there?” And the rancher thinks for a minute and says, “Okay. Why not?” The stranger climbs back into this truck, pulls out a laptop, connects to GPS, studies some satellite photos, comes back to the rancher. The stranger says, “You have exactly 1, 149 head of cattle.” The rancher looks at him and says, “That’s right.” The stranger says, “So that means I get the calf,” and proceeds to take the calf. The rancher says, “Wait. Hold on a second. Not so fast. If I can tell you within five seconds what you do for a living, you have to give me the animal back, right? That’s a deal.” And the stranger says, appearing a little puled, “Okay. I guess that’s fair.” Immediately, the rancher declares, “You’re a consultant.” And the stranger is amazed. He says, “How did you figure that out? How did you know?” And the rancher says, “You came here without being asked. You told me what I already know, and then you charged me for it. Could I, please, have my calf back?” The consulting world is—some of you may be consultants, maybe you can relate to that—fun. I enjoy the people I get to work with, the companies I get to work with, the non- profits I get to work with, and one of the things I do in my current role, as you heard, is I work with a group called Nuclear Matters, and let me just briefly tell you what Nuclear Matters is about. It is a group of leaders in the U.S. focused on making sure that we preserve our existing nuclear fleet. Now, suffice it to say, when I stand up in front of some audiences as a life-long, committed environmentalist, they are a little perplexed, and the truth of the matter is I was not always a proponent of nuclear power. Like many environmentalists, I thought we should look at other alternatives, but about 15 years ago, 12 years ago, I was working on a paper about energy security from a global perspective with a number of fellow Democrats. We were not in office at the time—Madeleine Albright and Susan Rice and others—and in the course of writing this paper on global energy security, it occurred to me that it really was not defensible to have my position against nuclear given my position on climate change and global warming and carbon pollution, and so I literally woke up one morning and said, “I need to change my position.”

What is abundantly clear to me is that the biggest problem the world faces today—one that will have many repercussions across all countries and sectors—is the challenge of global warming. And for Nuclear Matters, what is very clear to us, is if you take the base load nuclear power out of the U.S. mix—(it is about 20%), almost 20% of our base load energy supply in the U.S.—you will only make it significantly, if not impossible to achieve, a real and sort of more immediate reduction in greenhouse gas and carbon pollution. And so the way I have come to think about nuclear power is it is a carbon-free source of energy, and we cannot find ourselves in a situation of sort of digging the hole deeper by closing down nuclear while we are trying to actually achieve greater reductions.

Some of the things I have been able to work on focusing in the carbon arena, you heard about the Miles Per Gallon. We worked with California. We worked with the auto industry to set a Miles Per Gallon—(I know this is not going to work for you guys because you do litres)—but 54.5 miles per gallon and the first ever carbon standards, carbon emission standards, for cars and trucks in the United States. There is an interesting little back-story to how we found ourselves doing that at the beginning of the Obama administration. When I was serving in the Clinton administration, one of the very conservative members of our Congress— you may have heard of Tom DeLay. He was not a fan of EPAs. He was a Newt Gingrich—part of his entourage— and he was nicknamed “The Exterminator,” and that tells you a lot right there, and he and I got into a very public fight one day over whether or not in 1993, 1994 EPA was regulating greenhouse gas emissions, carbon pollution. And I became very frustrated, and I said, “We’re not.” And then I went on to say, “I’m not even sure we can under the existing law because the environmental law that we use to regulate air pollution and the Clean Air Act of 1990 doesn’t mention the words ‘carbon’, ‘climate change’, ‘greenhouse gases,’ so I don’t know that we can actually regulate it.” And he said, “Well, why don’t you ask your lawyers?” And so I did. I went, and asked our lawyers, and, being good lawyers, a year later, they had an answer and, basically, it was, “Yes, you can. You have broad authority to regulate pollutants that endanger public health and welfare, and so if you, EPA, makes a determination based on science that carbon pollution endangers public health and welfare, then EPA has to regulate.”

Fast forward: elections happen; parties change; Mr. Obama comes to office; and we begin the job of regulating carbon pollution. Mr. DeLay, the man who asked the question, is no longer in office. He tried a stint—do you guys get the show Dancing with the Stars? He tried a stint on that. It did not go very well. But I am quite convinced he does not understand or know that if he had not asked that question, I would not have asked the lawyers, and there would not have been a Supreme Court decision or there might not have been a Supreme Court decision actually saying that all of the work that Obama is now doing to reduce carbon pollution is, in fact, allowable under the existing law.

I thought I would just spend a few minutes explaining exactly, so we have done cars and trucks in the U.S., and now we are focused on power plants. The President has put forward a plan to reduce carbon pollution from power plants. Some of you are probably not steeped in all the industry power language that we can kind of talk in code. We can have entire meetings in acronyms and understand what each other is saying, but, just very briefly, what the U.S. is going to do or is now doing will require every state to write a carbon reduction plan focused on the electricity sector. They will look at the generating capacity within their states and then what the reductions should be, and then when you aggregate it together, you will have a national reduction.

And there were sort of four factors that they looked at in setting targets for each of the states. One is they looked at the coal fire fleet and, basically, said, “You know what? It can operate a lot more efficiently. So we are not saying you have to make your coal plants more efficient, but we are saying that is an option, and so we will add that into the calculation.”

The second thing is they looked at the natural gas turbines. We make an increasing amount of electricity today from natural gas. Similarly, you can make those more efficient. You can run them more often, less carbon polluting. They looked at renewables. Included in renewables were other clean energy sources, like nuclear power. And then they looked at efficiency, and these were sort of what they called the “building blocks” that then gave you a target for each state based on what it is generating, what is the technology available in each of these sectors —coal, natural gas, renewables for efficiency. Each state is free to write whatever plan it wants. It may write a plan that is all about efficiency—not likely but it could. It could write a plan that is all about natural gas. Again, not likely, but they could. So there is a huge amount of work going on right now in our states developing the first ever statewide utility, energy, electricity sector carbon reduction plans. And because it is the United States, there is also a lot of litigation going on. The lawyers go to court very, very quickly, and we had this interesting dynamic where I think almost two dozen of our states, twenty-four states, had sued saying the Obama administration should not be doing this, but at the same time, they are writing plans just in case.

For those of you who are familiar with some of the work that is going on right here, we met with the Minister earlier today looking at things, like cap and trade using those kinds of market mechanisms to find the most cost effective, carbon reductions. That is likely to happen in the U.S. We are likely to see those kinds of programs utilized, and I know, for example, part of Canada is already working with California, for example, and we may see more and more states working with California and, perhaps, some of your provinces.

So it is a very exciting time. It is a rapidly changing time in the energy sector. We were talking earlier today. I have been involved in various ways in energy production for twenty years, and if five years ago, we had all been sitting in a room, and I or someone in the room had said, “Well, you know, natural gas is just going to take us by storm,” we would have laughed at that person. We were busy completing import facilities, and now in the U.S. we are reconfiguring those to export. So I think it is a dynamic sector. It is hard to really appreciate how quickly it is changing, but we are all, the whole world, is now headed to Paris. Your new prime minister is apparently going with quite a large entourage—which is very good news—headed to Paris to talk about how, as a world we can reduce our global warming, our carbon pollution. And the exciting thing about this is it is the first time.—There has been many, many global meetings on climate change, but this is the first time— where coming into the meeting, countries are making commitments. So China has put a plan on the table. India has put a plan on the table. The U.S. has put a plan on the table because, ultimately, it will take the whole world if we are going to be able to address the challenges of global warming and carbon pollution.

And, you know, one of the questions I am frequently asked is, “Are you optimistic? It seems so daunting.” And it is daunting, but I will say, in closing, that I am optimistic, and I am optimistic because I do not think that our generation, all of us here, want to be the first generation to leave to a subsequent generation problem that cannot be solved. And, you know, I mentioned the wonderful people I got to work with at EPA—a lot of the best engineers in the country for sure—and even as good as they are they are not able to reverse sea level rises, once we start to experience the consequences: salt water intrusion into fresh water, drinking supplies.

And so I think that I am optimistic because I believe we do not want to leave to a subsequent generation a problem that they cannot solve. It will not be easy. It will take a very “can-do” attitude. It will mean, as in my case, rethinking some of the positions I had previously about certain sectors, about potential solutions as I did in the case of existing nuclear, but I think that we can get this one right!

It is an honour to be here today with Bruce Power and to be here with all of you to talk about this incredibly important issue.

Just one last note: We have not had a national debate in the United States on climate change. I think Candidate Obama, Senator Obama—when he was a candidate for president— would have welcomed that, but his opponent, John McCain, sort of took it off the table by saying, “I agree with you. Don’t worry.” But if you have not tuned in to our debates right now in the U.S., one thing you may have missed— and I would be happy to share with you—is, we are about to have a very big debate in the United States on climate change, and it is about time.

So thank you all so much for the opportunity to be here. I am happy to answer any questions.

Questions & Answers

Q: What role do you think that nuclear will play to enable electric transport?

CB: I hope a lot. Okay, electric transport, if we start to drive more and more electric vehicles we are going to need electricity, obviously, to power those vehicles, and I think that you do not want to take—cars, emit carbon pollution and electrify them, but then power them with something that produces carbon pollution. The logic of that does not end up working out, and so I think carbon-free, which nuclear is—obviously wind, solar, others—is an existing carbon-free source of energy, and I think it could play a very, very important part in the electrification of our transportation sector.

Q: What is the status/prospect of nuclear being recognized as a green supply for the purposes of the EPA Clean Power Plan?

CB: EPA did speak to the Clean Power Plan. The target that EPA has set for the 50-states—actually only 49 states have to write plans. I spend half my time in Vermont. We do not have to write a plan in Vermont because Vermont does not actually produce any of its own energy. It is all imported from other places. So in the instructions to the states, EPA did specifically talk about the role of existing nuclear. It talked about the opportunities for new nuclear; and it talked about uprates, which means you get more electricity,—more megawatts, more kilowatts—out of an existing facility because the EPA is very, very mindful given that, as I said before, almost 20% of the U.S. base load— that means the stuff you count on morning, noon, and night—is coming from nuclear. It is almost 60% of our carbon-free energy today. So if you were to start to take nuclear off the table at the very time you are starting to try to reduce your carbon, you would only make, as I said, the job more difficult.

One of the things that EPA did in its final instructions to the states is it allowed states to choose the methodology.—This gets a little complicated. They can either focus on a “rate-based” system or a “mass- based” system, and I think many in the nuclear industry would say the shift towards “mass-based” is a very important step. When you use a “mass-based” system, you look at all of the emissions; you set a cap; and then you work out the best way to meet that. And what a “mass-based” will do is also encourage more cap and trade systems where you either auction or allocate emission credits or different names they use and then find the most cost-effective approach..

Just briefly, the original cap and trade program was actually written into the Clean Air Act in the United States in 1990, which was actually signed by Bush 1. It was very much , I think, sort of a more Republican than a Democratic idea at the time. I had the privilege of really ramping up the implementation when I was running the EPA in the ‘90s, and the interesting thing is just how efficient it turned out to be. It was in the acid rain program, and so there was a cap on SO2, sulphur dioxide emissions, and then there were credits that could be traded back. So, if you owned a facility and you were above the cap, you had the choice of buying credits for that differential or perhaps installing technology coming below the cap, and then you could actually sell some credits to offset some of your compliance costs. It ended up really driving down the cost of compliance, and the way we measure that in places, like EPA, is a dollar-per-ton of emission reduction. So in the case of acid rain, it is how much did it cost for every ton of acid rain taken out of the environment. Long before I was at EPA, in the ‘80s while this was being debated, the electric utility industry did a study that suggested it was going to cost almost $1000 per ton of SO2 reduction. EPA did a study also before I was there that suggested it would be in the order of $600 per ton. The credits have traded as low as under $200 a ton. It is proven using this market mechanism, so you do not have to install scrubbers on every single facility but you figure out the ones that really have a life left in them, that warrants this capital investment and then allow companies to sort of work across their fleets or work across a state.

This is what we tried to do under President Obama’s leadership in getting the climate change legislation. We tried very hard to get a cap and trade program building on Bush 1’s success. Only in politics, right? The party that brought cap and trade to the table ended up turning cap and trade, so we were not successful, but this is the long way of saying that part of what EPA has done now in setting these state-by-state targets is giving states sort of an option, if you will, under the “mass-based” approach which is, I think, preferred by many in the nuclear industry to set up cap and trade. And I think the power generation in the U.S., just like here, has changed dramatically. I grew up, as I said, in Miami, and when I was growing up, there was a company called Florida Power and Light. They made the electricity. They distributed it. They transmitted it. They sent us a bill, and that is how it worked. Today, Florida Power and Light is now next era, and they have facilities in 25 states, yes, 25 states. I do not think they do any distribution or transmission anymore. They just make it. And so, if I am running a company like that, and I am now facing requirements to reduce my carbon pollution, I would like to look at my entire company portfolio and figure out the most cost effective place to get those reductions, as opposed to having to do it by facility by facility or state by state. So I think we are going to see a move towards,—which may mean there can be some cap and trade programs that go across the border. That is not impossible. Already, Toronto is working with California, and that may create some other opportunities.

So, this is a long way of saying to you that these kind of market mechanisms can be quite effective in finding what I would call the common sense, cost effective solution to pressing solution problems.

Q: This is in regards to your comment on carbon emissions being considered a pollutant to be regulated. So this person asks, “What about methane and natural gas releases being tracked as a pollutant, and what is the impact of that on natural gas extraction?

CB: The answer is “yes.” No, okay. So methane, for those of you who do not follow the intricacies of natural gas or shale gas extraction, when you bring this up, you also get methane. Methane is a very potent greenhouse gas. There are actually six—well, I am sure the scientists would correct me—but there are a number of greenhouse gases, carbon being one that stays in the environment a very long time methane being a very intense one. So regulating methane emissions makes a lot of sense, and, in fact, the United States is starting to look at how you could actually regulate methane because, again, you do not want to be reducing one climate change, greenhouse gas pollutant and ignoring another and, particularly, since we now in the United States, make more and more electricity from natural gas, that means we are generating more methane pollution. It is important. It is not just in the extraction., it is in the transportation. It is in the use of it.

I learned a long time ago, working in the environmental arena, that all of this stuff is just complicated. Taking things out of the ground is just complicated. Burning things has consequences. It does not mean you do not do them, but it means you think about those consequences, and you figure out how to do it in a thoughtful, non-impactive manner. One thing I will say about the nuclear industry is that I give them a huge amount of credit for all of the stuff they have done to ensure safety and the way they work together across the industry around the world to problem solve. I wish there was a perfectly safe way to do all of this. There is not. What that means is we have to have the right government regulations. Most companies are good actors, but occasionally there is a bad actor, so you need a program in place. You need to enforce that program. It is really unfair to a business who is spending money to reduce pollution and be in compliance with environmental law if their competitor is not doing likewise. And so, not only do you need the regulations, but you need the enforcement, and then you need to recognize that industry frequently knows the best way to get there. It is not a situation where the government should dictate the path to be followed. The government should set science-based standards or legal-based standards and then work with industry and the environmental community to find the smartest way to meet those standards.

When we were doing the work on setting the car fuel efficiency standards under President Obama at the beginning of his term, we had everyone at the table. We had the environmental community. We had the unions. We had the car companies. We had state governments- California. Everyone was at the table, and one of the things that the car companies kept saying to us is, “We’re about to be in a situation where the U.S. Department of Transportation has one set of requirements for fuel efficiency; EPA has another set for carbon emissions. For the State of California—and with all of these different requirements, it is going to be very, very costly, and it is, ultimately, not going to benefit the consumer.” I talked to the environmentalists, and they would say, “You know what? These are really dangerous pollutants. You need to do more.” And so what we were finally able to figure out—and I had learned this during my tenure at EPA—is you need to kind of figure out what each party at the negotiation needs. They do not each need the same thing. Try and give them each a little, so you can find the common ground and move forward. The end of the story is we gave the car companies one set of rules, not three different rules that were going to bump into each other, in exchange for which we got more environmental benefit. They got certainty and predictability. The consumer got a car that goes further on a gallon of gas than it did previously, and we all got cleaner air to breathe, and that is sort of the, I think, the sweet spot of how you manage government regulations. In that particular case, nobody sued. But that is unusual.

Q: This one is not from the floor. It is actually from me, but we do not want to let you go without commenting on the biggest energy announcement to come out of the United States in the last week or so as far as Canada’s concerned, and that is Keystone. And a lot of people listened to President Obama’s declaration as to why he was turning it down, why the United States was not going to accept it. But then in the background, we heard a lot about the economics of it, and that it increasingly did not make a lot of sense economically for the United States to be importing that type of oil which is more expensive than other types of which there is a glut now. Do you have a position on that?

CB: Well, I think, again, the energy sector is fast changing, and what economically might have made sense five years ago, may or may not make sense today, and I am not an economist, so I do not think it would be appropriate for me to comment on that.

Look, I think the Secretary of State, John Kerry, who had authority over this— and the President,—have thought about this very, very carefully, and I think they had to meet all the legal requirements. I think the President, when he said in the announcement that while we work to reduce our carbon pollution, bringing more carbon into the atmosphere is not where he wants to be, I assume it was a hard decision for some here in Canada, but I think it was a very carefully thought through decision on behalf of the President and Secretary Kerry.

I would hope that our two countries and our governments, as we go forward, can find ways to work together on clean energy because I think there are incredible, incredible opportunities, and it is—obvious you have just had an election. I guess that, perhaps, surprised some people in terms of where it ended. As you are well aware, we are about to have an election, but we take a long time in getting there, so we will be debating for a year who should be our next president, but my strong hope for both of our countries is that we can find ways to work together to create a better future.

Thank you all very much.

Note of Appreciation by Bob Oliver, CEO, Pollution Probe

Thank you very much. I want to thank the Empire Club for hosting this event, and I want to thank the sponsors, Bruce Power, the Asthma Society of Canada, the Society of Energy Professionals and the Power Workers’ Union for sponsoring and making it all possible. It has afforded me the opportunity to meet Ms. Browner in person, and I followed your career for quite some time. I got into the environmental business about ten years ago, and one of the first things I started working on were fuel efficiency standards for vehicles, and greenhouse gas emission standards as what they eventually evolved into. And Environment Canada—(I was working closely with them)—were working closely with the EPA; and that is how I came to know what a policy-making powerhouse the U.S. EPA is. And when we talked about your presiding over the implementation of the most stringent North American air quality standards, frankly, they were the world’s most stringent air quality standards, and they still stand that way.

So I think it is good that you are here in Canada because I think it is this type of cross-border collaboration, this North American approach to climate change and clean energy strategy that is going to serve us much better.— I think perhaps the Keystone example is a good warning of how things can go off the tracks if we do not take the time to really ensure we have got principled dialogue and a good relationship to anchor those discussions going forward.

A couple of remarks I wanted to make on your words: First of all, your anecdote about being referred to as a “secretary”. Obviously, in government, a “secretary,” “administrator”—these are high-powered titles, and, of course, the inverse is true in most people’s work lives, and that can lead to some interesting confusion. I just wanted to share maybe a similar anecdote: Our former prime minister, Joe Clark, who we refer to as the “Right Honorable Joe Clark.” He was explaining to me once that he kept on getting this series of confusing phone calls from a telemarketer, who kept on looking for “Mr. R.T. Hon.” “Is R.T. Hon there?” R.T.: Right. Hon.: Honorable. Anyways, I think it was years before I think he figured that one out, but that is why we need to be talking.

I am going to have a difficult time. —You are going to have to give me a little bit of time to get to the point where I can actually congratulate Tom DeLay for the Greenhouse Gas Emissions Regulations. I will get there. I will get there because I am going to follow the evidence. If the evidence says he did, I am good with that. And that is one of the things I did find most poignant about your remarks, Ms. Browner: When we commit to science-based and evidence-based policy-making, that is a courageous step because what you described in terms of your transformation is a triumph of science over ideology. We always come with our biases and our ideologies to these issues, but we have to be willing to confront the realities and see where that leads us. It is not always comfortable, but I think we have to believe that evidence-based policy at the end of the day is where we want to go, and I think your work with the EPA and your transformation of that department into a very strong and sound science- and legal-based institution is not only serving the U.S. very well, but it serves Canada tremendously well, and I hope that, notwithstanding your reference to being a consultant, that we can continue to consult with you in years to come. The state-by-state, climate change, approach to creating a national climate change strategy is also something that I believe our current federal government is committed to in terms of working with each of the provinces to develop a comprehensive strategy. So I am certain there is much we can learn from you as I have learned over the years, and I will look forward to the next visit you have up here. Thank you very much.

Concluding Remarks by Dr. Gordon McIvor

Thank you, Bob. Thanks again to our speaker. Absolutely wonderful speech and quite something to have our second President Obama advisor in this season already. It is amazing. Thank you again to our generous sponsors today. As Bob mentioned, the Asthma Society of Canada, Bruce Power, Pollution Probe, Power Workers’ Union and the Society of Engineer Professionals. I would also like to point out that—and I am sorry I forgot her before but—Karina Gould, the MP for Burlington is in the room. So glad you could join us today.

We would also like to thank the National Post, which is our national print media sponsor and Rogers Television, our television broadcaster. Also a big thank you to Mediaevents.ca, Canada’s online event space, for live web- casting today’s event at the global level. Follow us on Twitter at @Empire_Club, and also look us up on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

You will find that we have a lot of very interesting programs over the coming weeks. We hope you will join us. Next week, we are welcoming our third Canadian premier this season, Premier Brad Wall, premier of Saskatchewan, who will be at the Arcadian Court. Following that we have got the head of CBC Television coming to talk about what is next for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. That is Heather Conway, who will be with us on November 20th also at the Arcadian Court. The Governor of the Bank of Canada will be here on December the 8th at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre talking about Canada’s economic outlook for the next year, and that will be followed at the beginning of the next year, our very first event in 2016, with our financial outlook lunch on January 5th, right here at the Royal York Hotel. Finally, we just booked Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin for next June 3rd who will be talking to us about the relationship between the Supreme Court and the Government of Canada. I imagine her speech has been recently changing.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for your attendance today. This meeting is now adjourned. Thank you.