Okay. I will try to be quick.
First of all, we don't have a formal position on Kyoto. We are doing some work to try to bring together some views on climate change and Kyoto. Each of the respective associations have their own positions on Kyoto.
The point we're trying to make here is that we have talked a lot and have done relatively little effectively. We think there are strategies that make a lot of sense in terms of the longer term, dealing with real emissions from real projects. When we looked at some of the challenges facing us in terms of the Kyoto timeframe, and being able to reduce absolute emissions from existing projects, we ended up with a clear recognition that the only way we could meet the targets would be to buy our way to compliance, i.e. to buy offsets in order to comply with our obligations.
The electricity industry, and I'll speak for that, tends to have infrastructure that operates for 40 years or beyond. We can't turn it on or off overnight. I think the good news is to look at the technologies on the horizon. In terms of electricity, we're almost 75% non-emitting, so we're looking at a distinct slice of our fuel mix, largely based on coal but some natural gas, that we have to deal with.
There are technologies we can see available to deal with those, but they will take 15 to 20 years to prove commercially viable and deploy. If you look at the electricity system of the far distant future, you will see a world in which our emissions will be extremely low. There is potential to deal with this as climate change in a climate change sense of timeline. Within Kyoto, we would have to buy our way to compliance. I'll let others respond for their sectors.
Your second question was about conservation costs lower than supply. There certainly are conservation or energy efficiency opportunities that are lower than some supply costs, but you can't make a blanket statement about it. It's a curve like supply curves and demand curves. They are all pretty much one and the same.
Our view, and why we call it a strategic opportunity, is to harvest the lower ends of the curves and move up as the price of energy resources move up. If we're sensible about it, we optimize the system and we optimize the purchase strategies of consumers in ways that minimize price shock to these folks. I think we have to create an integrated approach to demand side and supply side opportunities.
On the third, energy and environmental groups, and why aren't we the Energy “and Environmental” Dialogue Group, it is because we came together under energy ministers. As a mechanism we came together originally as the voice of the energy industry, whereby instead of 19 talking heads, they got one. That was greatly appreciated at the time, but we have been reaching out to environmental groups. We sit down on a regular basis with our colleagues in environmental groups and talk about what we're doing, they talk about what they're doing, and we look for areas of common opportunity. And we will continue to do that.
In terms of metrics and energy intensities, I must admit I don't have much of an answer for you. We depend, in electricity, at any rate--and I'll let others speak for their data sources--to a considerable extent on government sources for the raw input. We do studies, such as the one I cited to you. I have not seen anything that we've done recently on energy intensities per se, beyond the trend lines I displayed to you. There probably is work done by member companies in terms of technologies at the consuming end, and work with customers in terms of driving energy efficiency from the bottom up, as it were, but gathering all of that input and refining it into some usable numbers, we have not done that to date.
I would open the floor to others on those questions.