It's really about choices we want to make. If you look at the auto sector between 1975 and 1985, after the oil shocks and with the fuel economy standards, the vehicle fuel efficiency doubled in ten years' time. We could have doubled it again by today with the technology improvements, but we chose to put those into heavier vehicles, more powerful vehicles, faster vehicles, more luxurious vehicles, and so on.
So these are choices we can make. These are illustrations, and we can go much further than that with technology. It's really a question of what choices we want to make, where we deploy these technologies, and what the business case is for industry to put these in motion.
I'm on the board of Sustainable Development Technology Canada. There are some marvellous technologies coming through there, but the question always is what it takes to get somebody to deploy these. If you're in business, you need a high level of certainty that you're going to get a return on your investment.
There are waves and waves of technology. It's not a total solution to everything. There are some areas like carbon sequestration with uncertainties that need to be resolved. We do have many pathways--not just one--to get to the kinds of deep reductions we're talking about by 2050. Doing that by 2008 would be a problem, but we can be on the pathway.
The technologies are not really the issue at the end of the day, and there will be new technologies coming out in the future. There are some great developments that will happen, I'm sure, twenty years out.