Let me just echo Dan's comments with respect to the credit for early action. That's a point we have continuously made, because we have been committed to energy efficiency since the 1970s, as an industry, and we have set long-term targets of 1% per annum improvement in our energy efficiencies. Those, of course, set the stage for us, in actual fact, to start measuring our greenhouse gas reductions that went with that energy efficiency improvement and to then move to more absolute reduction targets. So although we want credit for early action—and I think that's a very elegant point, that you can set different starting points as to when the base year is—we do find it frustrating that the government never seemed to want to make a distinction between those who had engaged in early action and the laggards. And consequently, it had one system to apply to all, which really was a penalty for those who had moved early and a reward for those who had done nothing.
That being said, there are ways to deal with this. It's not that we don't want targets. We remain committed to targets. We will continue to improve our processes going forward. And we want reasonable targets in that process. The bigger ones are going to have to come through process change, and that's going to take long-term investment, so things like the investment fund aspect become extremely important.
Let me say, with respect to the trading system, that a thoughtful approach, from our point of view, would be that we need a design for an emissions trading mechanism, because there is a risk of creating market distortions or of allocating improper caps to specific sectors and facilities. That process has to be done extremely well. A mechanism would require a sufficiently large market, a measurement and verification process, consistency of application, and a low administrative burden. The design of a domestic greenhouse gas emissions trading mechanism needs to be capable of eventually linking to international markets. Regional markets for air pollutants may be feasible in some regions. We can think of SO2. You don't necessarily need to stop at greenhouse gas in terms of cap and trade systems or emissions trading systems, and so on.
We do think that if the government wants to restrict itself in the first instance, we would have concerns about the liquidity of that market and the size of that market. But starting there, at some point, as Dan has also indicated, you have to link to the international trading system to get a big enough pool to operate in.