As I mentioned earlier, I certainly believe that codes and standards are the way to drive substantial step-wise change into consuming products.
Lighting is an area that our industry has made a key focus. The previous witnesses testified to the lighting initiative that the federal government, together with the provinces, territories, and industry are working aggressively to move forward on. Particularly in areas such as public lighting and commercial lighting, there are tremendous opportunities that respond pretty quickly to the economics.
The residential lighting, I have to tell you, is a bit more of a challenge. It's partly because customer choice is there. People are used to buying those cheap little incandescent light bulbs and putting them in their lamps. The lamp shades fit, and it's all very simple, so it's sometimes tough to get people to change.
In Australia, they have made it a policy to outlaw incandescent lights. I don't recall the exact date, but they've set a certain date in the future when you won't be able to buy them on the market. That is one way to go about it, but that's a political decision. If you decide to do it, there's no problem from our end, and we can deal with it, but whether you want to do it or not, I don't know.
On the broader topic of bold initiatives, I would caution about wishful thinking. There have been many people, from Amory Lovins on, who have talked about how easy it is to get 50%, 60%, or 70% reductions from energy efficiency, and in theory it's all true. It can be done in specific settings, using specific technologies, but driving it through society is a far more complex business, and we've been at it a long time.
We have found all sorts of surprising barriers that you have to overcome, beginning with how houses are sold. If you work with builders and you say “Upgrade to the highest level of insulation and energy stock”, at times they will come back to us and say it puts another $15,000 or $10,000 or whatever on the house. We'll say “That doesn't sound like an awful lot, given that the house is $150,000 or $200,000.” They'll say, “You're not buying the house; it's my customers. When they come in the door and they look at the guy who has the housing tract next to me and it's $20,000 cheaper over there, they're buying his house, not my house.”
We worked for years to build the brand recognition of what an energy efficient house can do for you if you buy it, and it is getting traction. Today an energy efficient product has far more traction than it had 10 years ago. But my point is simply that we think the numbers you saw referenced in the study by me and the previous individuals represent a very accurate reality. We have a challenge in front of us to drive energy efficiency forward, and if we could get anywhere close to that 50% of growth being offset by energy efficiency, that in my view would be a terrific result—not a low-bar result; it would be a very good result.
I'll leave it at that, and maybe my colleague has a comment.