I think you have several questions there, and I'll try to address some of them.
It's clear that Europe uses less energy per person and per unit of GDP than do the United States or Canada. It's also clear that the price of energy, especially fuel, is much higher in Europe, and that has influenced the choice of vehicle. There are some other trends that you certainly could have observed in Europe.
But I want to address another question, about whether we're lagging. I'm going to tell two stories. First of all, Canada has had minimum energy efficiency standards for appliances for, I think, at least 15 years. I can tell you that in Europe they have only now introduced them, except for a couple of appliances that came in earlier. Only now has Europe created a legal framework for these efficiency standards that Canada has had in place for years.
Now, it's true that the lifestyles are very different. I'll jump to the question of whether we can reduce our electricity consumption. I'd like to illustrate my answer to that--which is yes--by pointing out that the city of Juneau, Alaska, which is north of most of Canada, recently had an interruption of its cheap hydro because of an avalanche. It switched to diesel fuel for its electricity, so the price of electricity went up tenfold overnight.
In the space of about six weeks, we managed to engineer a 30% reduction in electricity use for the entire city of Juneau, and that happened without anybody having a blackout. The economy continued without any interruption. And how did they do it? They actually became aware of their electricity consumption. And that was without any technology. That was just a behavioural change. Now, imagine what would happen if we put in new technologies.
So you can see that there are actually great opportunities to reduce electricity consumption. Even without changing behaviour, you can get some. With changing the way we treat energy, we can get even more.