I guess the two go together, right? Where should government be, and do you collaborate with the private sector?
I think the opportunities for collaboration are greater now, in that most of the big oil and gas companies now agree on this vision for their future. You're not necessarily trying to pull them in a direction that they don't want to go. In some ways, they're actually ahead of the government, or they have been. They've been pulling the government in recent years to try to get in this direction. I think that's a good opportunity for collaboration.
Where should government be? We've talked a little bit about it. It's obviously a much deeper conversation. You need to pull innovation across that whole spectrum that we talked about. Professor Moore talked about building some of these research laboratories and linking into the U.S. capacity.
At the far end, we've said that if you don't have a price, you don't have a demand for clean innovation. That's the basics of it. You need either flexible regulatory standards or a price that creates a demand for it, and the government has to step in and play some role of supplementing investment, particularly in those early stages where private capital just never does. It's called the valley of death for a reason. Industry has jumped up in a way that it never has before. I think there's a real will to get there.
The other part we didn't talk about, and this goes to the cost part, is that this all has to be done in a way that also helps them not raise their costs and ideally drives them down a bit too.
Part of the innovation will do that, but again—environmentalists probably wouldn't like me saying this—one of the things we also need to look for are ways of creating more regulatory efficiency. Are there costly, cumbersome regulations in the approval system that we could find a way to make more efficient and lower the costs, so that they could invest more of the money in the green solutions that we want and less of them in the regulatory costs that don't necessarily achieve outcomes? That's just looking through the pipeline of approvals that they need and where you can find some efficiencies that buy cost savings for them.
Three years ago, I wouldn't have been very optimistic. I think there's a fighting chance that we really can put the industry on a trajectory to having a globally competitive environmental performance. We won't know for five to ten years whether we're there, but at least we're moving in that direction now, which is encouraging.