 It's terrific to be here and much to my surprise, I saw what could be my presentation in the editorial pages of The New York Times yesterday, I believe with graphs and arguments, but be that as it may, let's just say that's extra reading, I actually have a summary slide at the end if we get that far. So I wrote a policy brief for CEPR, that's the first Sanford Institute of Economic Policy Research, back in March, which got a lot of attention, I mean these things, you never know when you start writing things, whether you're going to hit things on the mark or the new cycle will be totally moved on to something else by the time you've finished writing something, but this issue of what is killing the U.S. coal industry has been a big one, and it's been a big one ever since really I think President Obama came into office. As we all know, there was a lot of opposition to President Obama, and I think a lot of people or some people were looking for things to complain about Obama with. And one of those was the war on coal, now it did happen that coal did face tough times over the past 10 years or so, but attributing it to Obama is just oversimplified, although the question I really want to look at is what did happen to coal? Was it Obama, was it somebody else, was it something else? So that's really the theme of today's talk. So let's first of all look a little bit at what has happened to coal. This is just energy consumption since the Revolutionary War, and this is electricity generation since 1950. The big thing to notice here is this drop off in coal in the last really since the Great Recession. You see that magnified over here because the blue is the coal, and coal is really used for electricity generation, so this is everything over here, but this is coal. So starting almost simultaneously with the Great Recession or simultaneously with President Obama coming into office, depending on what your druthers are, coal has taken a slide in the aggregate. But that's just the tip of the iceberg, whoops, wrong direction. So this is coal in jobs because really when Mr. Trump goes railing about coal, he's talking about the miners, he's talking about the jobs that have been killed by coal, at least that's what I would interpret him as saying. So here's what we have is the production of coal in tons per year, and we've got employment over here, so let's focus on this one first. And this is the present, 2016 anyway, and what we see is really a little more nuanced picture. The total U.S. is the red. So coal, since basically 1950, has had some really good times. It's doubled in output in the U.S. It's only recently fallen off a bit, but it's way, way, way up over the way it was in the 50s and 60s. But it's a little bit of a mixed picture. The east is this blue, that east being, we're out here in California, so the east is everything to the east of Nevada, but by east I'm thinking, I'm putting the Midwest in together with Pennsylvania and Appalachia. And the west really is the Rocky Mountains. And you see that really this is a picture of a boom in the west and pretty much stagnation in the east. So when you see these pictures of the coal miners in Ohio at Trump rallies, it's these guys. Their industry has not really gone anywhere positively since World War II. In fact, it's struggling and going down. If you look at jobs, it's even bleaker picture. The national, this is the same time frame around 1950 to the present. This is employment in coal mining. And you see 400,000 miners or something like that back in just after World War II. And declining, a bit of a boom lid in the 70s. There was a mini boom in coal, but a steady decline. This is all eastern coal. The west wouldn't even make any coal, speak of, until after the energy crisis of the mid-70s, early 70s. And this green line here is the number of employees in western coal, half of the US production of coal produced with probably a few more miners than we have people in this room. That's a slight exaggeration. But not many people at all. And lo and behold, the Midwest and the east continuing to struggle as jobs just keep going down. Now this isn't an Obama phenomenon. This bit here is perhaps coincident with his administration. But this is the history of Midwestern and eastern coal going down. So it's really important, I think, to understand the bigger picture, the post-World War II picture. I don't see who wants to clarify. I can't see a hand, but if somebody has a clarifying question, it's great. Yeah. I had a question. Just for a reference, is the east and west kind of broken up by the interconnection, or just kind of like- I'll have a map in a second. I think maybe even on the next slide. Yeah, here we go. So this is where the coal is. And this is really what I mean by the east. But if you want to mince words, these are distinct areas. The east is the Illinois Basin here. You've got Appalachia. You've got Texas. And you've got subdivisions within the east. There's some anthracite. But really what I'm talking about in the east is this stuff here. And this is what I'm talking about in the west. Actually, most of it's right there. That's where the coal comes from. This is where it goes. This is the capacity. The dark states are the greatest amount of coal capacity for electricity production. And the light states are proportionally less. And as many of you happen to know, I think, one of the reasons coal is so important in the climate debate is this simple table of the pounds of CO2 per million BTU, which is about 100 kilowatt hours. Coal, all these fuels are some carbon and some hydrogen. That's why we call them hydrocarbons. The more H's you've got, the less carbon you've got per BTU. And coal, particularly the anthracite, is almost all C. So it's got the greatest amount of carbon dioxide per million BTU. And as you go down the line, natural gas is the CH4 is the best one. And so that explains some of the movement away from coal, at least on the demand side. Okay, so here are some explanations that have been put forward. And I've got a seven other for people who want to add things. One is the environmental regulations, the war on coal. These are people's explanations of the reason for the decline in coal and coal jobs. One, environmental regulations, the war on coal. I'm going to take a look at each of these in a minute. Second, which people don't actually talk about too much, but is the deregulation of the railroads. Coal is heavy. If you're going to ship it, that costs money. And if the price of that comes down, that changes the spatial pattern of coal. The fracking revolution causing cheap natural gas to displace coal, or basically getting cheap natural gas which subsequently displaces coal. Productivity gains in coal have killed jobs. Productivity is sort of the bane of our modern existence and the virtue of our modern existence. It's what lets us individually produce so much and it consequently get paid quite a bit. It also means we don't need so many people to produce what we had. Productivity gains and renewables and other energy have displaced coal. And by productivity gains, I mean it's cheaper. Cheaper, solar and wind are cheaper. And then financial markets have driven expectations. No matter how much Mr. Trump talks up coal, the people that are loaning money for a 30 year coal fired power plant look beyond the current presidency. They look at what's the risk associated with investing in something that the whole world is disinvesting in. And then we can have other things. I don't have any other things, but maybe somebody will think of some other things, yes. What is there, do you think that like, so coal, there's like an issue with the stranded asset. And since you have a lot of upfront costs with purchasing it. I want to just say that till the end because we're going to go through that. Sure. It's a strongly stranded asset if you don't want it anymore. So let's look at the first culprit, which is environmental regulations. This is theoretically Obama's war on coal. Well really it goes back to the 1970 landmark legislation, the Clean Air Act. That's really what governs air pollution in the United States. And the basic approach done for very political reasons is grandfathering. And what that means is that if you don't want the lobbyists to come out in herds and fight your legislation, you got to give the people with a current vested interest some carrots. Not treat them so hard as the people that have yet to show up at the table. So that's what they did. They said that old sources, new sources rather, the ones that were yet to come were subject to strict environmental regulations. They weren't there to lobby at the time. And then the old sources were exempt from regulations to a large extent. It basically was kicked to local air quality administrators to try to figure out something to do and some of those were more cooperative than others. The big issue of when a major overhaul moves a plant from grandfathered has continually for the last 50 years come up. You got an old plant, just like you're driving around a 1962 Falcon. And you're not allowed to repair it. You're going to try to sneak in, it's just a sort of a tune up of the water pump. But you compress that too far and the EPA's big problem is when does it become a new plant? When do you basically replace the engine with a new one and becomes a new plant? That's been a continual battle for a long time. So you could argue that grandfathering caused these old plants to keep on chugging far beyond their normal lifetimes and now we're seeing that come to fruition. Sulphur was a big problem addressed in the 1970s by switching to low sulfur coal, so it's sort of a sort of a band aid for a decade or so. And using super tall smokestacks, which everybody I think has heard of, to move the pollution out of the local area so your local air quality monitors don't get triggered and ends up in some other state. Now in the 1977 law has changed, eliminated tall stacks at least as a way of meeting environmental regulations and also protected areas that were currently dirty and also required scrubbers. Flugrass desulfurization on all new plants. So these tended to deal partially with some of the loopholes in the 1970 act. 1990, acid rain of course was the topic of the 80s and in 1990 we did something about that by cutting over all sulfur emissions in half. Starting about then, the focus tended to be on what can we do about this grandfathering problem. And one of the loopholes, it's not exactly a loophole, but the original Clean Air Act said air toxics, things that are really nasty in the air pollution, you don't have to adopt the grandfathering. You can go after the old sources for those. So the Clinton administration, the Bush administration, the Obama administration tried to limit those mercury emissions. They all failed. The court struck them down until Obama succeeded in 2012 with the mercury and air toxic standards, mats, which are often blamed for closing down a lot of the coal-fired power plants. But really, you really have to look at this as old power plants limping along and eventually something's got to give. 2007, the Supreme Court concluded that greenhouse gases has to be regulated by the EPA under the Clean Air Act. That's what basically the Clean Power Plan is doing. Supreme Court said you've got to control greenhouse gases and the Clean Power Plan was a way to do that. And in 2015, the Clean Power Plan was put out and it was stayed by the Supremes. And then last week, or I guess it was last week, the Pruitt announced that he was going to revise it. So here's the result of that grandfathering. This is the vintage of the different power plants and these brown ones are the coal ones. You can see most of them are built in this period. This is a little more detail on the coal plants. This is the capacity of coal-fired generation in the United States by first year of operation, okay? So 1943, or actually maybe 42, the oldest operating coal-fired power plant in the United States was first put into service. And you see a big bulge in the 70s, real died down and then some new ones in the latter part of the Bush administration. I mean, to plan these things, you have to plan five, ten years ahead of time. So this tells you that most of the retirements that we've been seeing in coal are these old plants. In fact, take a little closer look. The problem really is keeping that 1945 Chevy running. And this is the car that was built at the same time as this power plant was built. And a lot of these in here are this vintage. Some of you guys in here may have driven these things around in high school. And this here doesn't look quite so antiquated, but it's not too new either. That's sort of the oldest of these power plants, with a few exceptions. Excuse me, around 1970. So that really, I think, says what the retirement of coal plants is all about. It's finally having this grandfather and catching up with these really antiquated facilities. Okay, so that was culprit number one, the environmental regulations. And the point I was trying to make was that the environmental regulations have certainly paid a role, but to a large extent, the regulations have served to keep the 45 Chevy running when it would have been in the junkyard back in the 80s or 70s. And finally, as things get piled on and on, all the other things that are going against coal, it's time to retire these things. I mean, to a certain extent, automobile pollution regulation in California is the same way. You've got these old cars that never rust out, and the environmental regulators have to figure out how to get them off the road. Okay, culprit number two, the deregulation of railroads. Just look at this black line here. This is from 1981, which is about when the railroads were deregulated until the present, more or less, 2014. And this is the average railroad coal rate per ton mile. So that's the cost in fractions of ascent. Actually, it's just not normalized. But the cost is about a penny a ton mile back then. This is the cost per ton mile of shipping coal by rail. And it's gone from the index of 100 at deregulation down to about a third of that. It's gone up a bit since then. Well, that changes the picture a lot. And in fact, if you look at these two maps here, these are two mines in the United States. Remember, we produce about a billion tons of coal. This mine produces 100 million. This mine produces about 100 million as well. Actually, one produce is 118, 101. Two mines, 15, 20% of the whole U.S. production. And where does that coal go? That coal goes everywhere. And if I had a map here in 1980, it would go here. Something like that, go to Illinois maybe, not much further. Because it's too expensive to ship it. So one of the results of the deregulation of railroads, which makes coal cheaper, or transportation cheaper, is that the market for western coal has just expanded over the entire country. And it's eaten alive the coal mines in Ohio and other eastern places. In fact, if you look up there, the 2015 mine mouth price, that's the price at the mine for coal, $13 a ton in Wyoming, $48 a ton in Ohio. So you just project that when you're going down the line in a safe way. What that'll do to the market for coal. So deregulation is certainly a major reason for killing the coal industry. Copper number three is cheap natural gas. Now there are lots of cute pictures of fracking and I pulled this one out. I think most people in here know what the approximate physics of fracking is. But the point that's really the important one is the price of gas, the orange line, and the price of coal. These compete with one another. Now the price of gas back in, if those of you remember, just towards the end of the Bush administration, the price of gasoline. This is natural gas. Price of gasoline, remember, hit $4 or $5 a gallon. Things are pretty expensive there just before the recession started. Well, natural gas was doing the same thing. But the fracking revolution kicked in about the same time. And the price of natural gas dropped from $12, almost parity with coal. And if you keep in mind the technology of burning gas for electricity generation versus the technology of handling all that solid fuel. And putting together a power plant to burn coal. Even though the price of gas is more expensive than coal, it's much more competitive with coal. You got your choice. I mean, you can even burn the gas with the coal. In fact, they do that. So it's not quite as crisp a distinction. But gas has really been killing coal, really been killing coal. So there's not a whole lot of question that this is probably the main culprit. Now, let's look at productivity now. I love this picture here. This is productivity of work. I mean, these are people. These are not ten foot people, or there's not two foot people. This is like one of those mines in Wyoming running the coal around. And it's almost free to mine coal in Wyoming. It's got a few feet of what they call overburdened, the dirt on top of the coal. 200 foot seams, it's just, it's cheap. And these machines just got bigger and bigger and bigger. And their productivity gains have really been dramatic. Now this one up here is a long wall miner, which many of you are probably familiar with. I did go in a coal mine once upon a time in McKinley Mine in New Mexico, an underground coal mine. These are underground machines, and it's really impressive. You basically have an auger, whoops, wrong button. You have an auger right here that just keeps grinding away at the coal seam. You have this mechanical roof support with the hydraulic support. And you take a cut along the coal, and then you march this machine forward three feet and let the roof collapse behind you. It's almost as if you're, it's like Pac-Man eating his way through the coal seam. And you don't have to support the roof. The roof is supported by that machine. It just really cuts through the coal seam and really lowers the cost of producing underground. And this is what they use a lot in the Midwest and the East. But both of them, productivity improvements. So here we have the productivity changes in coal over time. This is the labor productivity in coal mining generally. This blue line has gone up quite a bit since 1980. The green line is the productivity in western coal. That's where that big dump truck is. And this is the productivity in eastern coal. They haven't done quite so well, but that's allowed them to hang on to their jobs. But it's also why it costs $50 a ton to produce the coal there. So productivity gains explain that figure at the beginning of the talk. The fact that jobs have really gone downhill in coal, while we're doubling the amount of coal we're producing. And this I think is, this is one of my favorite graphs. It's got nothing to do with coal. This is the manufacturing share of gross domestic product in the United States. All manufacturing that make this thing, so this is probably from Korea. But all manufacturing in the United States has been constant since 1960. It has a 10 to 15% share of our output in the United States. But manufacturing has, employment has gone down dramatically, more than a factor of two. And that's where all the jobs going to Mexico that we hear about, that's what's happening. Productivity is going up, so people that are still working in the Midwest or elsewhere are getting paid more because they're more productive. But they're not so many jobs to make the same output. The same thing happened in coal. Back up so I can see what I got here. Now, culprit number five, productivity gains elsewhere, particularly in solar and wind. And when economists says productivity gains, that's sort of the same thing as costs going down. The costs are a result of how much it costs to produce things. If you're more productive, you produce them at lower costs. So here we have silicon PV cells. How many people have solar cells on the top of their house? You can see if I've done this even 20 years ago, nobody. And this is dramatic. This is really dramatic. I mean it's almost zero down here, cost of solar. Wind has taken a real dive down too. This has created a competitor like natural gas that's really made coal hard to argue for. Culprit six, financial markets. Now this I don't have quite so much evidence on. I know that Wall Street opposed Texas utilities expanding its coal capacity for financial reasons. When a utility needs to raise money for a new power plant, they have to go to Wall Street and sell bonds or stocks. And if Wall Street evaluates them and considers they're risky, well the price goes up, the cost of capital, the interest rate you have to pay. And it just happens that around the world all of the arrows are pointing away from coal for electricity generation. And that's translating into making it a bad financial decision domestically, no matter what the government says. Okay, so the bottom line here is that coal is doing better than coal jobs. Coal jobs are what Americans care most about. And we shouldn't forget that the well-being of coal miners, owners is also deteriorating and they're also the people that have donated big time to certain political causes. The market capitalization, and if Bill Gates is in the audience somewhere that I don't see, he should pay attention. The market capitalization of US coal industry is $4 billion. So if you've got an extra $4 billion, you can go buy the coal industry. And make it into a museum if you want. I mean that's remarkable. Just a couple of years ago is $30 billion. Productivity, I think, is the real culprit here. Progress, that's productivity progress, same sort of thing. Productivity gains in coal mining, fewer jobs. Productivity gains in natural gas production, that's what fracking is. Lowers the cost of producing natural gas. Productivity gains in rail transport, lowers the cost. Productivity gains in solar and wind, lowers the cost. And borough coal still, remember that graph of productivity in eastern coal has been stagnant for 30, 40 years. Also I think a hidden story is inter-regional competition. This is the west, which we all live in, at least what California is. The west really has benefited over the last 50 years in the coal industry. Not California so much, but the Wyoming and Montana particularly. And they've taken market share from the east. It's really two regions competing and the west one. And the east is complaining. They're not complaining about the west, they're complaining about other things that they think have caused it, like Obama's war on coal. But it's really inter-regional competition. Institutional reforms are also responsible. The railroads are deregulated by changing the law. And the deregulation of utilities has made them more cost-conscious. Environmental regulations, I think, are way down the list, personally. They've temporarily benefited coal, keeping it operating. But now it's time to pay the piper. But that was the end of the story three weeks ago. Now it's not the end of the story. So, Trump digs coal, which is metaphoric. EPA had Pruitt, I don't know the dates, but this is one of the last two or three weeks. EPA had Pruitt attempts to cancel the clean power plan. He also attempts to reduce the social cost of carbon to make weaker carbon regulations passed a cost-benefit test. Secretary of Interior loosens federal coal leasing regulations. Problem is that the problem is western coal. And that's where the federal coal is. So if you make it easier to mine western coal, you're gonna take even more jobs away from the Midwest. And we haven't even talked about what President Trump wants to do about natural gas, he wants to make that easier to produce. Well, that's gonna kill coal too. So going against the market is really difficult. Then finally, most recently, it was last Friday or something like that, or maybe a week before. Department of Energy had Perry, who only recently realized that his job wasn't to go around promoting oil and gas. Asks FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, to subsidize coal and nuclear for reliability reasons. So he wants us to keep, or the country to keep, coal and nuclear plants operating. And he wants the federal government to pay them to keep operating. So we've only got four minutes left. But let me go quickly through just four slides on those four actions. Progress towards the goal of the Clean Power Plan. This is the progress towards the goals of the Clean Power Plan. And keep in mind, the Clean Power Plan, it hasn't gone into effect yet. The Supreme Court stated it, and Pruitt's reversing it. But these states are likely to meet the goals of the Clean Power Plan by 2030. These states are close to hitting the targets. These are likely to miss the goals. That's without doing anything at all, mostly because of natural gas. If natural gas prices went up again, this picture would change a little bit. In fact, this rhodium group, which is a good group, but it was Hillary Clinton's analysis group. So I can't vouch for the precision of the analysis. But they basically are saying that this was the target of the Clean Power Plan. This blue river here is their estimate of the baseline without the Clean Power Plan. So Clean Power Plan is one of those things that gets a lot of people worked up. But the market is moving away from carbon, no matter what the plans say. He also proposed cutting the social cost of carbon. That's a little more subtle. The social cost of carbon is the estimate of the damage to the globe from climate change from one more ton of carbon emitted. EPA estimates pre-Trump were about $40 a ton of which only the domestic component, the US component was $3, the rest is other countries. Pruitt wants to only focus on the domestic part, leave out the other. Which would make it much easier for weak carbon regulations to pass a cost-benefit test. Loosening coal leasing, well, I've already talked about that. That's really not going to do anything at all. Then this DOE asking FERC to mandate subsidies for coal and nuclear is a little more complicated. The idea is that if we move to all solar and wind, there's going to be some reliability problems. That's the argument that the DOE's making. And thus we have to keep some of these nukes and coals, coal plants operating on reserve just in case. And plus they want to be subsidized or the proposal is to subsidize them, to keep coal piles ready to go. The problem with that is that reliability has always been an important issue in the country and utilities are mandated to keep their reliability up. I think the loss of loan probabilities is supposed to be something like one in 10,000 at any particular point in time. And they have lots of mechanisms for doing this. They don't necessarily need this to meet that. But some European countries are pursuing a similar strategy. So the verdict is still out on this. Personally, I think this may result in some slow down of retirements of these plants. But if you've got a plant on standby reserve, that's not necessarily translating into combustion of, if it's a coal plant, combustion of coal. So the emissions consequences and even the coal use consequences may be more minor and insignificant. And this is my last slide, but this is just my summary of the New York Times editorial of yesterday. And you can go look at the New York Times to get a better summary of that along with their arguments. Thank you. Great. So anybody have any requests for clarifications or number seven reasons and so on? Let's start with a couple of students and we'll come back right here. Okay, you, how about our friends in the back here, any students? You got it? Yeah, so four slides back you showed three different groupings of states. Meeting their targets. Can you characterize why, in simple terms, why the three groups are performing differently? Well, a lot of this is natural gas. That's driving a lot of this. So we all know that in the West, natural gas is a dominant fuel. It's a major fuel, particularly in California, we don't use any coal. So they use newer power plants? Well, with natural gas, we just have a lot of natural gas. And we also have environmental regulations, a lot of the coal plants are in the interior. And California doesn't want any coal electricity. A lot of these plants are old. They're from the 60s and 70s, their lifetime is marginal at best. They're being retired. So, and this is also this population growth, which tends to be one of your population growth. You basically, it allows you to build new of whatever you're building. Retire old ones, it's when you're stagnant that it's more difficult. And Florida's got some of the same issues. It's a little bit different picture and different stakes. There's also energy efficiency that's that's been pursued more aggressively in different places. So the Clean Power Plan gave you several ways of doing, including natural gas, that was okay. So it's a little, there's some idiosyncratic secrecy among the different sides. But that's a broad brush picture. Back up here on the across. Why did DOE exclude gas from their recent order to- Why did who? DOE, why did they exclude gas from the request? Well, that's a great question. Gas makes a very, very good way of supporting reliability. In fact, that's a really good question that hadn't occurred to me because that's a signal that it's not really for reliability. It's for other purposes. That's a very good point. Good here and then there. Oops, never mind. He's in charge. When you compare the Eastern versus Western coal, what makes the Western coal so much cheaper to produce? Aye, just sitting on the ground. Stripped mines versus dirt mines? All the stuff's underground, for the most part. There is a surface and underground in the east. But it's been mine for a long time. It's not so accessible. You've got the Appalachia, we've all heard about, mountaintop removal. It's just a messier project. It's sort of like, if you go out in the Central Valley and you remove 10 feet of dirt, the whole Central Valley is 200 feet of coal. That's sort of the mental image of the Powder River Basin. Over here and then back to Rob Jackson. Yeah, so along those lines, how is that huge differential and cost maintainable? I mean, why doesn't everybody, because the more could be produced in the West, they're not all operating at capacity. So why aren't more people switching away from Eastern coal to Western coal? Well, they are. But, you know, this is, is that it? I'm at the transport line. This one here. They are, this is Western coal, this is Eastern coal. But there are some, there are some footnotes. You know, basically you have some, you have a number of power plants built next to the coal mines. If you look, if you look at a lot of these power plants that are on the Ohio, Midwestern ones, they're on the Ohio River where it's virtually free to move the coal. A lot of the water there. They're also plants that are built when you, some of you know this better than I do. When you, when you design a coal-fired power plant, you design it for the coal you're burning. And making a change is not so easy to do. So it's, and some of these are actually captive mines. You know, their mine was built and power plant was built, they sort of go together. So there's, there are reasons why it still sticks around but your point is a good one. You know, why, why hasn't the Midwestern coal market disappeared altogether? Transport, more complicated. Rob and then back to you on the mic. Yeah, thanks, Charlie. That was great. And finally, just a couple of quick things. First of all, the reliability issue for gas, the reason gas isn't included is because you can't have 90 days of supply on site. You know, whether that's, you know, whether that's reliability is the real reason I'm not saying that, but there is a, there is a reason why gas isn't included. That's a very, very good point. I mean, every couple of winters there's a gas shortage because everybody's running and they're eating the pipelines or passage. And then just two other ones quickly. And I was really interested in the railroad analogy which I hadn't heard. And it seems like some of your factors contribute to a loss of jobs that should ultimately increase the, you know, the price competitiveness of coal. So you would think the deregulation of the railroad industry would help coal as a market and might burn jobs. So those two things are really different. And then the last one was in terms of regulation, you didn't really talk about environmental or electric, you know, renewable portfolio standards and renewable electricity standards in more than 30 states. So I was wondering what role would you think those play? Well, I think the renewable portfolio standards help wind and solar a lot in other renewables. And to the extent that they're competing away the market from coal, they certainly do play a part. But they're not part of the natural gas coal equation. And to me, that seems like a dominant pressure. But certainly the ability of wind and solar to compete with coal is fueled by not just the renewable portfolio standards. I mean, just think of us here in California, how much the state gives you to put solar on your roof. Sort of part of the same, pardon parcel the same thing. So you're right, that has a significant role, too. Don't talk, if I understood the first question right, it's just the deregulation of railroads makes coal transport cheaper, which makes Western coal competitive in more parts of the country so you can go farther east before you actually compete with the underground coal mine. You actually have that as your next point. I mean, you've got to remember that the Western coal, by the time it gets transported to Ohio, is no longer $15 a ton. It's now $45 a ton. So it's sort of competing with the Ohio coal, at least some of the Ohio coal. There's cheap Ohio coal and expensive Ohio coal. OK, we're going to do three. Back here, here, and there. And then John Nash always gets the last word, as long as he's brief. Should go. Can you describe the subsidy more? What's the subsidy that was asked for nuclear and coal? That's very new, and the subsidy is not clear at all. All I've seen is a letter from the Department of Energy to FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, requesting that there be a fair subsidy that gives a fair rate of return to qualified generating stations in coal and nuclear that are outside rate of return regulation. So it's left to be fleshed out. But it's whatever it takes to get that rate of return, as you said. Cole Price doesn't mention it. It's not that it's just one paragraph. It just says, make the result so it doesn't say how to get there. So if you look at the last graph, you see the question that East is going to move on down specifically since the year 1990s. And then if you look at the other graph, you see that the employments have risen in the year 2000s. And I'm wondering whether you knew how that happened. So you're saying that it's been going down here. Well, the East, of course, is a big place, and not homogeneous. I mean, particularly since it also includes the Midwest. But I really don't know how to answer that. You're basically saying that the employment stayed roughly constant, even going up a little bit. What were you saying? Which one am I looking at? Yeah, the red, which is in the opposite direction of that. Yeah, I can't explain that. What's that? Production went up faster than the other. This is the East. The blue line here. This is not a good graph. This is the East, the red line here. So the blue line went down since the 1990s. And the red line has gone up a little bit. But you know. I'll be heterogeneity. Interesting. I can't explain that. OK, so we have a third aisle here, ma'am. I've got a question about the subsidies for nuclear and coal plants. And the issue sounded like it was reliability. So I have a science background. So this obviously has an economic view. But is there a technical view, a non-political view, about how much of other sources of energy besides solar and wind do we need to have in order to have a stable system? Is there such an answer? Oh, it's almost entirely a technical issue. And you've got random events, which could be the sun not shining for the supply side or the wind not blowing, or cold weather, or breaking of equipment. And as some of you power system engineers know, you look at the probability of all those things happening. And you come up with what's the likelihood of the loss of failure to meet load at a given instant time. And that's your reliability has to be up to a certain level. And there's some justification for saying that, well, coal and nuclear have this advantage of being able to, particularly coal, being able to quickly respond and generate electricity if the events need it. So there is some basis for that, but there are other ways you can get reliability. It's a probabilistic frontier, and you can change the amount you've got on other things. So it's not necessarily required. But even if you had coal standing by, or nuclear, it doesn't mean you burned a coal very much anyway. You have it standing by. So the implications for the emissions is unclear. This would be a good question to say for two weeks from now, again, because Silicote, who's our Bits and Watts executive director, a smart grid person, actually has a title that's how to do reliable 100% renewable. So she's looked into that. The more the technical issues on that side is Charlie mentioned. Last word, John. Can you maybe address the sort of inter-regional politics of some of this, because you've got key body coal out in Wyoming? But Robert Murray, which is Murray, energy is in the Midwest, Ohio. He claims credit for this recent couple of weeks. Wow. I've seen his talk. He also claims credit for long-walled mining advances. He claims a lot of stuff. So I guess the question is, can you give a quick insight, because there's some conflicting things in some of these actions that are being taken about the sort of political power of the different coal groups? Well, I don't want to impume Robert Murray's motives. But I do know that when Romney was running in 2012, that he announced just I think in September that he was going to close coal mines in Ohio because of Obama's war on coal. And he better vote for Romney. And then in January after the election, he rescinded that announcement of going to close the coal mines. And he sued the EPA and lost regarding the war on coal. So he's a businessman. He owns these coal mines. And if coal goes, there goes his retirement. But I'd say it's a very good point. 30 seconds. Well, since you say that maybe the reasons why coal jobs have gone down is because of increased productivity in all these various energy sectors, could one possibly imagine the EPA coming up with regulations to deliberately try to decrease the productivity of the fuel holes and natural gas? I mean, I'm just thinking we have an immediate responsibility. We have an immediate responsiveness. Yeah, they can eliminate the ATC credit. Investment tax credit. I mean, there's no behalve of short-gratitude at this point in time. It wasn't for the 30 cents for a few wide hours. They're tax credit. So if they eliminate the ATC, they'll have it. So they'll try. We'll see how that'll be suffered. When? But gas. OK. We're just about here. Let's thank Charlie one last night.