I would say, first of all, that it's one of the most difficult aspects of the entire complex nature of dealing with climate change. It's something where people have different understandings of what exactly it means. Are we talking about weather? Are we talking about long-term changes? There's a lot of spotty or incomplete information in the general public to begin with.
One thing we've discovered since I wrote that book in 2007 is that there's a feedback mechanism. An example I've used recently is this. You think about how easy it was and how quickly we convinced people that plastic straws represent, to some degree, some sort of public risk or negative aspect in public. People understood viscerally that this stuff winding up in the oceans and causing harm to marine environments is inherently bad. If I don't use the straw, the problem begins to go away and I've improved it.
Climate change, because it's so diffuse over time and space, doesn't offer those kinds of immediate feedback mechanisms. If I stop driving my car and start to take the LRT to work, nothing immediately changes in my environment except that I'm getting to work a different way.
Engaging the broad public in it has proven extraordinarily difficult. People don't rally in the streets in favour of a price on carbon. These are not things that make it really easy to score a political win. Certainly one of the things we tried to do on the Generation Energy Council was to think about it in terms of what the Canadian home looks like if it's closer to zero emissions, and talk in very specific ways about your daily life and the changes, which are largely positive, that would come from that.
I think that part of the conversation gets left out when we're talking about cutting emissions and putting prices on them. We never get to the part where, actually, some of this stuff is really great. The idea that you have a car that doesn't need to be fuelled for $60 a tank at the gas pump is a net positive if it's presented as such. A house that uses way less energy yet is actually more sophisticated in terms of using the energy that it does, that is a net positive if we can talk about it that way. Those two things don't get matched up as much as they need to.