 My name is Barry Graeme. I'm a professor here at the Ford School and Director of the Center for Local State Policy, which is just delighted to host today's event. This event directly links to close-ups energy policy initiative, which is interested in a range of issues at the intersection of energy development and environmental protection, including shale, including crack. This is a special edition of a public event for us and that not only is this open to the general community and why I have so many folks with us today, but it's also very closely linked to a major teaching initiative in the Ford School, namely Professor Paul Perron's public policy tool, one class, thinking analytically about the problems of the day, which is Paul's brainchild way to bring public policy questions to Michigan undergraduates in a very, very unique way. This is actually part of the module in Paul's class and we're delighted to have so many of the students from 201 with us this morning as we've been talking about issues of disclosure, environmental protection, energy, and even shale. So we link those two together. The question of disclosing information to the general citizenry is an enduring question in political systems like the United States but really around the world. This comes up in almost every arena of public policy, almost every area that the Ford School faculty and students engage in. This question of information, disclosure, access to information, how you present that information, what information is not disclosed is a millennial issue in question. Perhaps nowhere is that issue as sensitive and conflictual or potentially conflictual as in issues of energy and environment and so this gives us a very interesting opportunity to think about this intersection in some very creative ways. Let me introduce the folks who are gonna be speaking today in reverse order that you'll be hearing from them. We hope to have time to open up Q&A to a larger audience but we have a large agenda today. So we actually have an expert panel of questioners and I'm delighted to welcome Sarah Gosman from who came across the way from the University of Michigan Law School. Sarah took a lead role in some of the great work that the Graham Institute has done on the issues of shale gas and hydraulic fracturing in Michigan, wrote one of the technical reports that was submitted to the state. The deal is actually with disclosure issues extensively. She will be raising a question in Q&A. I've already introduced Paul Courant, member of the faculty here and holder of many current and former administrative roles at the university and always a thoughtful commentator and delighted to have both Cassie Brown and Colleen Campbell who have been the GSIs for this course all will have an opportunity to ask questions at the very end of our event then if we have time we will open things up. With that let me turn to our two speakers and two main topics. What we're really interested in doing here is looking at the larger experience with information disclosure programs in the environmental protection arena. What is the history, what are the lessons and when you have that conversation you often turn to the one dominant program, the toxics release inventory of the federal government, a program that's been in place now for over a quarter of a century although it was modeled heavily on the experimentation underway in a number of states prior to that time. The TRI has been used extensively, has been studied extensively but we're very pleased today to have the author of the leading political science interpretation of that book. For I say a few more words about my craft and I want to also welcome Chris Borek. Chris is a wonderful partner for close up in every possible way. As many of you know close up has expanded its survey research into issues of energy and environmental protection particularly with a focus on the role of state and local governments. Chris directs an extraordinary institute, a student run institute at Muhlenburg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania that does extraordinary work in public opinion, even holds a very, very high Nate Silver ranking. So you know he's the real deal and is partnering with us with a whole range of issues and questions. Chris will actually follow Mike and provide a bit of input that we have been able to discern thus far through some of our work related to public opinion on the issue of shale gas fracking and questions of disclosure. But he will follow my craft and it's a real pleasure to welcome Mike here. Mike is the Herbert Fisk Johnson Professor of Political Science and Public Affairs Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin Green Bay. I do not want to repeat that sentence again. For many years Mike has really played a central role in bringing the tools of the discipline of political science to a range of environmental policy issues. He is the author and editor of the two premier textbooks on environmental politics and policy which have been frequently routinely used in both undergraduate and graduate courses on this campus and campuses really all around the United States has worked extensively in a range of areas and with a pair of colleagues, Mark Stefan and Troy Abel, produce an extraordinary book called Coming Clean Information Disclosure in Environmental Protection published by MIT Press just about a year and a half or two years ago. This book has already received the Linton Keith Caldwell Award from the American Political Science Association. It is the highest APSA award for a book on environmental politics and policy and in effect tells the story of the TRI, the Toxics Release Inventory, but looking very much not so much exclusively at corporate behavioral, that's a key component in much previous research, but the governmental aspects and how different states respond and use this tool. So we've given Mike a really interesting challenge this morning. How do you take an arena where you spent a lot of time and spent a lot of research looking at the TRI and then begin to apply it to a new arena which was not really being thought of at the time the TRI was created or for most of it being implemented, namely shale gas and hydraulic fracturing with horizontal drilling. How do you begin to even think about transitioning lessons from that one experience to another arcane one? So Mike's presentation will focus very heavily on the experience and lessons from the TRI, transition toward issues of shale gas toward the end. He'll then hand the baton to Chris Bork for a deeper dive into some of the issues of shale related to public opinion and then we'll open it up into Q&A. Without further comment, please join me in welcoming Mike Rathen. Thank you. Thank you, Barry. Is this Mike on now? Well, thanks very much, Barry, for the introduction. We'll be mindful of the time and I'm very happy to be here and to talk about the TRI. We're not gonna cover everything in the book. It's about a 280 page book. I've got 40 minutes to take you through a lot of material. So let's start the outline. Sorry for the title. I didn't mean to put the title on the outline. So I'll give you a little bit of background. I think many of you already have studied natural gas fracking. We can be very brief on that as to why this has become an important issue and the role of information disclosure. And I'll just say right out, I don't think merely disclosing chemical information about fracking is going to accomplish very much. At all, as you will see, turn on how you designed a disclosure policy, what you released, how it's interpreted and how much the public can understand. There's a lot of misconception about the TRI program which we'll go into as I review the history of that a bit. So I'll present, as Barry said, some of the findings from the coming clean book but also to try to draw that out a bit. Some of the findings are pretty technical and it did supply their, I think they're about 31 or 32 slides here. I'll skip over some of them. But the full presentation is available for those who want it and I guess it's been posted already on a site that you can access. So what's right to me is interesting about the fracking issue. It's developed very rapidly. This is unlike many other industries. And of course this is part of the larger context of energy concern, environmental concerns. United States has moved remarkably fast to developing domestic sources of oil and gas that has greatly reduced our dependence on foreign oil. That's the energy security aspect, energy independence as we used to see back in the Ford and the Gerald Ford School. We talked a lot about energy independence and the reality is it kept, the reliance on imported oil kept going up every year and only under Barack Obama has it actually declined from about 60% to 40%. That's because of fracking in part. The other interesting thing about fracking activities on a policy end is it's been mostly at the state level and that's because Congress and its wisdom pretty much excluded federal regulation. So it's been left up to the states. The states have taken quite a varied response but generally have been friendly to the fracking industry because it's producing energy at low cost and creating jobs and the only more recently I keep hitting the wrong button here have environmental groups have been calling for a ban more and more it seems in the past year but natural gas production has soared, prices have declined, that's made a big difference to a lot of industries. It's a reason why many coal-fired power plants are not protesting even more because they're switching over to natural gas in the state of Wisconsin and one other state, nuclear power plants have shut down saying the main reason for doing that is they can't be competitive with natural gas, fired plants. Some may view that as a good thing and some not. And like reviewing any energy source is problematic because of multiple criteria that you have to take into account. One obviously is cost and efficiency and sometimes that's the only consideration. What we're talking about today is the environmental and health impacts and every energy source has some. Even putting solar panels in the Southwest Desert there are environmental groups concerned about the desert toward us. So there's no completely benign source of energy and we're concerned as they say about energy security as well. Mostly we're focusing today and the importance of the TRI here is on the health and environmental effects of using natural gas. And I'm really gonna talk about methane leakage but some people are actually more worried about that than they are about fracking chemicals. And that's because natural gas is appealing because it has fewer greenhouse gas emissions than coal. The problem is if you have only a little bit of methane leakage it wipes out the difference between natural gas and coal. So it really becomes important. And aside from information disclosure regulation of natural gas could mean tighter pipelines that don't leak and work here. But as far as I can tell nobody really knows how much methane is leaking because we haven't studied it carefully and that's something that's very important. Mostly the concern is the effect on water quality and that's the concern of the chemicals that are injected. I think most of you know it's a combination of sand some of which comes from Wisconsin where we mine that sand and water and chemicals, mixture chemicals, some of which we know about some of which the companies that drill for oil and gas don't like to disclose because they claim that would be an unfair advantage to their competitors. And we're talking about especially the impact of the fracking chemicals on health. Presumably they would be transported by a drinking water or surface water that would somehow affect people. And what does this have to do with information disclosure? Because people are attracted to this notion that we have a right to know about chemicals in the environment that could adverse the effect of. It's a pretty simple principle. Kind of rooted in ethics and has a long tradition as Barry said at the state level as well as at the federal level in many areas. So it's been widely used and by the way I would draw this distinction as we do in the book. Information disclosure is not the same as releasing information because typically when you say disclosure it means mandatory disclosure. It's still a non-regulatory policy but merely releasing information voluntarily is not the same as information disclosure that's compelled by law. It's widely used food labels, drug safety, drinking water quality. One of the earliest efforts actually campaign finance. We may not think of it that way. Campaign finance is basically a disclosure policy. There's very little regulation, especially these days. It's that you can find out who is contributing unless of course one of the organizations that file under a certain IRS rule where you don't get the full disclosure. So it's widely used, I think it's easy to understand. There's a belief here that if people have information they will use the information that's there for empowers people. And particularly for the Toxics Release Inventory I think there's a lot of belief that it empowers communities to respond to community-wide threats. And to address some of those concerns we'll draw from the book that I did with the Torian Abel and Mark Stiffon. And I would say we started with a proposition that maybe the mechanisms through which disclosure policies work aren't really understood well and maybe they don't work the way most people think they do. TLI is very educated. The prime example at the federal level to rely on information disclosure. It's been in effect now since 1986 when CERA Superfund Amendments Act was passed. It's widely considered to be the leading federal non-regulatory environmental program of this kind. The law mandates annual reports. I should clarify some of you know the history of this. It doesn't apply to every company, it applies to those that are above a certain threshold. That threshold is defined in terms of the size of the company, number of employees, and the pounds of chemicals released. There are about 20,000 companies that released these reports in recent years, but there are many others that fall below the threshold. In a study we actually found interestingly companies knew where that threshold was. They would try to get just under it so they didn't have to file the paperwork. So you're not getting everything, you're getting only those companies that because of their size and production levels exceed those limits. In the most recent years, it's about 20,000, 21,000 companies. There's a vast amount of information there. What I tried to underscore in the slides we'll go through is that TRI is widely considered to be effective and widely considered to be doing what it was designed to do to inform the public. And the evidence cited is that the release of toxic chemicals has declined precipitously since the beginning, since that first report, 1988. The number widely cited is from 1988 to about the year we finished work for the book, about 2007 or so. The decline was about 61%, okay, with a caveat. It's hard to measure over time because the TRI chemical list keeps changing. It's up to over 650 now, but the track over time, you obviously can't include those that weren't on the list to begin with. So you have to only track core chemicals. So core chemicals, about 286 of them have declined. But we really can't speak to the historical change for other chemicals. And I looked just last week again at the latest TRI report. They're no longer even providing the historical change. So I can't tell whether we're getting better or worse. They have a period I'll show you more recently, but they don't any longer go back to 88, which they did just a few years ago. So what we asked about, because this is what intrigued us, why should a program that is non-regulatory achieve the kind of effects that it does? And I think this leads us to believe there must be some mechanism by which if a company releases information, this changes their behavior in some way. I guess I have that on a later slide. And so let me come back to that. The assumption is releasing information will change the way people think and the way communities respond, but also does something within the corporation. Because once they know, gosh, now everybody can see what we're doing, we better not do something wrong. And I think there's an assumption this isn't, you've changed the internal motivation for production. Even if the community doesn't respond to the information, that internal change is taking place. And I guess the same is expected to be true of fracking. If you have to disclose, maybe you don't wanna do things you'd be embarrassed to disclose. In fact, the TRI has been described by one of my colleagues wrote an article on it called regulation by embarrassment. It's technically non-regulatory, but there's the embarrassment factor. You don't wanna be ashamed of doing something the community, especially the local community is going to blame you for. So why not just have regulatory policies? And I think that the backdrop to looking at disclosure is disclosure is called a non-regulatory response. Regulation meaning we'd have a US EPA or Department of Environmental Protection that would set standards and you'd hire a staff to enforce the standards and companies that violate the standards would be subject to some legal sanctions. Regulation is pretty complicated as Dan Fiorino puts it in his book from 2006. And we have an elaborate system of reporting, inspections and penalties to make people follow the rules. Corporations like people don't really like rules. They don't want somebody telling them how to run their business. And regulation has gone through several phases of change in the last 30 years. Part of, let me come back to that, but there are very large number of facilities in this. You know, we're a big country. So a lot of facilities. One reason regulation can't work is you can't hire enough people and have enough agencies spending enough money to regulate everybody. My students were often surprised to hear that most companies are not inspected not only weekly or monthly, not even annually. Some go years and years without a single inspection. So the information that's released, particularly in a TRI type program is information the company releases on its own volition more or less. And it chooses how to compile the information. But regulation is less, gotta put it, regulation is less regulatory than it seems because the notion that a monitor or a regulator is looking over the shoulders of corporate executive 24 hours a day is clearly, it may work in meat packing and some pharmaceutical companies. This is not the way it works in environmental protection. Companies are pretty much implementing policies on a voluntary basis with occasional inspections and penalties imposed. But we also have a political reaction to regulation, which is heavily criticized, particularly of course by those who are more conservative who don't like government regulation and spending and don't like private decision making incorporations imposed. But it's criticized also because invariably it's bureaucratic. You have to set up a US EPA. EPA has about 17,000 employees, state agencies, even though I would argue it's not nearly enough, it makes it the largest federal regulatory agency so it's the subject of frequent criticism. It's prescriptive as I was saying. Agencies by definition are setting rules and regulations and enforcing them. That means companies and individuals can't do what they might prefer to do. In the US system, this is a kind of longstanding, tends to be adversarial by its nature again. People fight the rules, they may sue the EPA when the agency finally develops its greenhouse gas regulations for coal-fired power plants. I guess I put the probability at somewhere near 100%. They're gonna go to court for years to defend it. No matter how carefully they develop it, that's the adversarial system. It's also fragmented. The EPA works with the states in enforcing laws. Most of the day-to-day regulation is done at the state level with federal oversight. It's highly varied across the states. Very a visitor. National recognized student of that phenomenon. So it's not as uniform and hierarchical system as you might think. And then economists have other criticisms. It's inefficient. Companies are spending much more money than they need to if we could impose some kind of economic device, if we could have economic incentives and disincentive market-based approaches. They argue that would be more efficient. And to some extent, I think they would say it would be more effective because you get away from relying on this cumbersome system of regulation. Now what's interesting is most of the environmental laws we have date back to the early to mid 1970s. Virtually all the major environmental protection statutes were enacted between 1970 and 1976. There had been amendments since then, none of which has been all that significant. Despite all the criticism from 1970 to the present, especially from the Reagan 80s to the present, almost nothing has changed. And if you know the way the current Congress operates, I think it's safe to say nothing's gonna change in the near term. They can't agree on a budget. They can't agree on much of anything. And so political gridlock almost ensures we're stuck with the system we have, even if alternatives like information disclosure or market-based approaches make more sense. What does the outcome been for the regulatory system we have on air quality, water quality, toxic chemicals? Generally good, I think. We have some pretty good data on air quality. It's definitely improved quite a bit since 1970, dramatically in some cities. The number of unhealthy days in most major cities has declined quite a bit. Water quality is a bit more problematic. Let's not dwell on that now. The problem with regulation is I think it's reaching the limits of what it can do. And there are some problems, most notably, I put up here, indoor air pollution and non-point source water pollution, farm runoff, urban runoff. Regulation simply cannot address those. There are too many sites, you obviously can't regulate every home in the country that has radon leaking in from the basement. So you rely on things like information disclosure and voluntary testing and guidelines and education and maybe some kind of market incentives. You can make radon testing kits free if you wanted to do something like that. So there's been a lot of discussion in the last several decades about alternatives to regulations such as market incentives and information disclosure. And what we decided to do was to put our study of the TRI in that context. That is, how can information disclosure be assessed for its potential to do a better job than conventional regulation? So we selected the premier federal program, the Toxics Release Inventory. As I said, it was part of the CERA Superfund Rewrite called the Emergency Planning and Community Right to Know Act, EPKRA, 1986. Interestingly, it took the Bhopal chemical accident in India, which I believe is still considered to be the most serious industrial accident the world has ever experienced. You get different counts of how many people were killed and injured, but it was a very severe accident and that prompted Congress to finally enact this. Many states had already developed policies of this kind. Now, so again, the key assumption. If you release information, people will come. People will find the information pertinent. They will devour it. They will talk to their neighbors. They will petition companies to cut back. That was, I think, the assumption because it seemed a logical assumption. If only people knew what they were breathing and what was in their water, they would naturally not something adverse to continue. It makes sense. It just doesn't work like that, and I don't know that it ever did. So again, I reviewed the numbers. EPKRA mandates annual public reports from about 21,000 facilities currently on over 650 chemicals. The progress on the original core chemicals was quite substantial. And the most recent report, which came out in January of this year, covers data through 2011, says another 8% decrease. My suspicion is, we're nearing the end of the decreases because I can't see you going to make more progress. That 8% would mean for all the chemicals that were, I'm not sure about that. I'm assuming they're counting all the chemicals that were on the list in 2003. Again, they're still adding chemicals. So EPA, for years, has said EPA is a resounding success. They actually, about 10 years ago, in 2003, they produced a report on how TRI data are used. They had selected case studies, what social scientists call anecdotal data. And they said it was a resounding success. Communities were mobilized. People took action. They got companies to change their behavior. And we did not find that in our study, which was a systematic nationwide study. And I don't believe EPA has ever done more than that little 2003 study to find out how this works. There's another problem. Despite all the progress, the amount of chemicals being released to the environment is still prodigious. We're a big country. Got a lot of companies. It's 4 billion pounds a year. These are not all chemicals. These are the chemicals on the TRI list. And more recently, they've started some new categories. Some of these were on the list, but these are overlapping categories. But the things that are more likely to disturb people, what we call PBT chemicals, persistent bio-cumulative and toxic, things like lead mercury with neurotoxins, PCBs, polycyclic aromatic compounds. And again, this is part of the larger 835 million pounds of carcinogens. My guess is, if you had a TRI report that said a local company is releasing thousands of thousands of carcinogens to the air, and you're downwind from that company, you wouldn't be happy to hear that. But it's awfully hard to track exactly what's being released. Well, if you go to the TRI report, you will see some nice colorful graphs that look like this. I'll go through these quickly. So there's the 4 billion pounds. I personally would be much more concerned about the air releases than anything else, because that's what you're breathing. It's not clear you're going to get exposed through the other kinds of releases. So land disposal, surface water discharges, injection. We have a lot of injection wells around the country. That might eventually affect groundwater, but not supposed to. Supposed to be injected in a way it stays put, if you're confident about that. But still 20% to the air. Then there's another category called production-related waste management, and here you can see the chemical waste that's produced is used for energy recovery. Some is recycled, some is treated, and this is the part that is released. And they come from, as you might expect, from the major industries in the country. An awful lot is metal mining, which was added more recently. That was not on the original TRI list. That was an awful lot of stuff released from mining metals. Electric utilities. Well, that's coal-fired power plants, again, substantially. Now, chemical industry, not surprising. Primary metals and paper. In Wisconsin, we've got a lot of paper metals. The biggest concentration in the world, right along the Fox River. And that's of concern. And then it's a scattering of other industries. So not all industries release it. Then again, if you look at the EPA and its latest TRI releases, we'll say, well, releases are down over time. If you look at the categories, so there's land. And here is what I'm looking for, total off-site releases. Land disposal, on-ground jets and surface air releases. Yes, this comes. That's pretty impressive down there. Some of the other categories don't look like they decreased all that much over time. So when you see the total figures, this breaks it down into, where has the decline been? And I think it's been substantially in releases to the air. And here, you even see it ticked up a bit recently. So these are, again, you can find this very easy if you download the full TRI report. And they're on the slide for you to ponder. I was pretty struck by it. So they didn't used to have this in the TRI reports. Now they show a 50% decrease in carcinogens in the air, 2003 to 2011. And there you see it. Although it's still not zero. You might wonder, why are companies releasing carcinogens to the air? Can't they capture this stuff before it goes into the air? And I think they would say not easily or economically. And so in many ways, it doesn't matter because if it goes into the air, it's widely dispersed. This is the old solution as the solution to pollution argument. And that's true if you look at various ways we have a measuring, as long as there's a big quantity of air and it moves stuff around, then your actual exposure is so low, it may not be worth removing that last bit. I'm going to talk a bit about rescue scores. Now so far, historically, what people paid attention to in TRI disclosures is pounds of chemicals released. If you go look at any given company, you will see how many tens of thousands of pounds of some chemical you've never heard of, but it may be something like hydrochloric acid in paper companies. It's hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid. What does that mean? Well, it's toxic chemical by definition, so it can't mean it's good for you. Is it unhealthy? In very small quantities, hard to say. In large quantities, probably. That's why we call them toxic. So what you want is a measure of health impact. An EPA actually does have a model. It's a computer model for doing this. It's not widely publicized. It's not easily available. But now I was struck by this year's report that they actually show the rescue scores. So what is rescue? Rescue implies it should be only air quality unless they've changed since we did our study. Rescue is actually a computer model that looks at not only the chemicals being released, but which smokestacks they're coming from, where they're located, how the plume goes up and spreads, and people who live within a certain distance. So it calculates an exposure score, not just pounds released. You definitely want to know about exposure because that's all the health effects of chemicals come from exposure, not pounds of chemicals released. If the water is polluted, but you don't drink the water, then it's not a health risk. Well, if you ate the fish from the river in the case of Wisconsin, you get it from there. In fact, the total, the PCB contamination of the Fox River in Wisconsin comes exclusively from eating fish in the river, not from crossing the river, drinking water from the river, it's too dilute. And that's driven a lot of toxic chemicals in Lake Michigan. It's only when you eat the fish because it's bioconcentrated as a food chain. It's comforting that rescue is going down, except a little uptick there that it's not a consistent pattern. So with that background to TRI, you can see what intrigued us, which is, wait a minute. Okay, so the numbers have gone down over time, but why did they go down? What mechanism would lead them to go down? That is, did people get excited about the information and petition the local companies? And did local officials get involved? Did the state regulatory agencies crack down on companies? Nobody really knows that. As I said, the EPA doesn't know. They just required release of it. It's a non-regulatory program. They're not required to regulate. They just require that the information be released. So we also want to know too, do the companies think this is an enormous burden because we had a major effort late in the Bush administration, a so-called burden reduction rule that was gonna shift from the annual reports to a bi-annual report and make it a little easier on industry. And that intrigued us to companies really think this is a burden and is it less of a burden today than it was initially? Because you get used to filing reports after all and so you expect this will get better over time. And that might apply to a natural gas racket as well. So we had a number of objectives. We wanted to know what mechanisms were played, what the facilities thought about it. We wanted to know what state and federal officials thought about it. Were they happy with the way it was going? Did they see some way to improve this? And we wanted to know what lessons there might be for, well, when we did the study, now we might want to know, are there lessons for other kinds of information disclosure? In the book we did mention the greenhouse gas inventory report and some of us thought, well, since TRI's been around the longest, maybe there are some lessons for how it will apply elsewhere. I'll skip over most of that. This is the model that we use. The assumption is you start with disclosure and our assumption is, we use the word capacity a lot, that companies will have a different capacity to compile and release information and act on it, large and small companies, for example, rich and poor companies. There may be a different reaction economically. Communities and states are gonna differ a lot. So we talk about the capacity to use information. And then we assume this will affect corporate decisions to, for example, cut back on releases, to search for alternative chemicals that are less toxic, find ways of altering production processes so that the wastewater is not contaminated. That's actually pretty easy to do these days. So the design was, it's a little hard to read from, we wanted to make this pretty comprehensive and given my limited time, I'm gonna rush through a lot of this on the findings so that we can get to the implications for fracking and you can read this on your own. We looked at all the TRI releases for the entire country from 91 to 2000. Someone wants to ask later, I'll tell you why those time periods. But if we thought of a more typical, we didn't wanna go early on, it was too early, things in that settle, we didn't wanna, we wanted a period that made some sense. And we looked both at releases and risk levels. The risk levels, as I said, come from the RECI model and EPA was making that available for those who asked for it on a CD-ROM and you could get rest of your levels for air quality releases for the whole country. And then we did surveys, which can be, yes, of course not, very time consuming and expensive to do. But we did surveys, we sent out about over 1,000 surveys to a sample we took very systematically from the full universe of all companies. So we thought we'd get a random sample of all industrial facilities in the country. We got 24% return on corporate, and if you know what we're talking about, that's low, but for corporate surveys, it's actually not bad. Corporate people don't return surveys, they think we academics are just pestering them with useless requests. So that's actually about as high as I've ever seen in a corporate survey. We did much better, 58% for state officials and 80% of the EPA, well only 10 regions, it was the lead TRI person each reason. And then we did some case studies. We did interviews to follow up on this. We had intended also to do community activist interviews, that part fell apart, because we couldn't identify any community activists. We started searching, we had this plan to search all the local newspapers around the country. We sent out inquiries to environment, who's been the leading people on this? And just nobody could think of anybody who was an activist on TRI. So this isn't gonna work as a, so we decided we would do without that. It would come up with case studies and I can tell you already as I'll anticipate one later slide, when we ask company officials, how often do you hear from local community activists? The answer pretty much is never. That's why we had trouble locating activists. There just weren't any that we could find. What we found is, again, very useful to know because the assumption I believe is when you talk about companies or natural gas fracking operations, like they're all the same. What we find is no, no, they're not at all the same. They're very different. We categorized them as we looked at their trends over time over that 10 year period into green, blue, yellow, and brown. Green is the good guys, they're at the top of the line. They decreased their releases but they also decreased their risk. And that was 42% of the country, if you will, a lot of the sample. The blue, they increased their releases but they lowered their risk. I'd say how's that possible? Because what they increased were less toxic chemicals for taking toxicity into account. The yellow decreased releases but actually went higher on the risk. And the brown went in the wrong direction, you might say on both. They increased the releases and increased the risk. So let me paint this picture for you. Overall, we have this 61% decline in the TRI emissions which makes you think the whole country is moving in the right direction. But that's a mix of very different kinds of companies. If you will, to simplify this, half the companies are getting better and half are getting worse. But the ones that are getting better have the bigger decreases. And so EPA can say, we have this impressive decline over time. I look at it and say, you still got a problem. You got a whole bunch of companies that are going in the wrong direction. So what can you do to turn them around? What do they need? Do they need regulation? Do they need technical assistance? Economic assistance? Part of the logic of the book, we have a chapter on leaders and a chapter on Lakers. We thought, oh, this is neat. We're gonna find out the variables that make leaders leaders and the variables that make Lakers didn't work. We could not identify a cluster of variables that for those in those statistics, we just couldn't get the R squared. There was no obvious explanation for why there was the difference between the two. And that we ended by saying somebody else can do this in the future to figure out why there's that difference. And you will see that on this as well. So here's the safer, riskier, increasing, decreasing. So you can substitute chemicals, you can change pollution control equipment. And I think the lesson here is don't think uniformity of companies, think typologies, think different capacities to use information and make progress. And here you can see it shows up here. When we asked about environmental expertise, and of course we're dealing, we're not dealing with CEOs and we're dealing with the people who actually filed the TRI reports. That was our audience. But we assumed they were sort of speaking for the company. And when we did our follow-up interviews, we often got a sense of that. How people would, if it was a company like Procter & Gamble, which has agreement, Procter & Gamble is one of those companies. It's headquarters makes decisions. And that means Cincinnati, it is. So you have a lot of local offices of national corporations. And sometimes the local offices are making the decision. Sometimes it's corporate that makes the decision. And we found differences. And some were ISO certified. These are international standards organization for setting management and environmental standards. Some, yes, some not. And those that not weren't even seeking to be certified. These are, I should say, are mostly smaller companies. Certification is a very expensive process. So they weren't about to do that. Some had an environmental management system, about 41% did not. Some TRI contact people were sort of professionals in their field. Others were not. Some companies intentionally rotated the position among their staff. Others kept the same person in for long periods of time. So for fracking, I think, again, that there are bigger companies and was centralized corporate headquarters making the decisions in smaller companies. There are a lot of, actually a lot of fracking. Barry and I were talking about this this morning. There are tens of thousands of sites in each state. I mean, there's a huge number of fracking operations. Don't assume they're all the same. They can have quite different corporate motivations. And smaller companies tend to be much more worried about burdens and costs. I got on the phone to one when we couldn't get our questionnaire returned. I said, so can you tell me something about that? I said, well, there are only three of us here. If your image is this is a corporation that must have tens of thousand employees. Yes, some of them and others are no. They're really, really small operations. Oh, and I didn't even mention something else. I should the decline over time. We could never resolve whether this was because some companies that were big releasers had closed operations here and shipped them to China or India or Mexico. We got a hint of that, but we just couldn't quite resolve that. But it came up in some of these interviews with small companies that, oh, we said, gee, you're not filing the reports anymore. They said, that's because we stopped manufacturing. It's in China now. So what looks like an improvement in operations may be shipping it abroad. That is shipping the pollution to other countries. It's hard to resolve that. Given that I have limited time left, I'll say we also asked during the surveys and in the interviews with corporate officials, well, what made the most difference as they sought to reduce their releases? And most of their interaction was with facility employees and corporate management, not with communities. And we thought, that's odd because the underlying logic here is communities will rise up in protest once they have this information. Hardly anybody mentioned that, and it shows up as we did the statistics. And as I said, plenty of figures, the bucket just nobody was talking about. We did it because the community protest. One company said, oh, we once had an article in the press about a fine from the state agency, and boy, we learned never to do that again. But wasn't the community, it was the fact that the local paper published the article and that embarrassed them. And when we asked them, what makes the most difference as you manage chemicals that's limiting legal liability and improving performance and so forth? Community, desire to improve community relations was way down. At the end of the book, we say what you really need is not just disclosure laws. You need regulation to continue because many companies said we're doing this because we figure sooner or later we're gonna be required to do it anyway. In other words, what we call in the book anticipated regulation. It wasn't just the disclosure that made the difference, is that they thought we're gonna have to, sooner or later there's gonna be a regulation that's gonna compel us anyway, so we might as well do it before we get to that point. And I wonder whether that might not be the same fracking. This is just an example of, so what I'm summarizing, you can get more details on in the book. And here you can see we're community relations will down. It's a mixture and for some companies they say yes, we did hear from people, not regularly, but from time to time. But I would say the broader pattern was no, they don't hear from community activists, no the press never comes by, they release these reports and nothing happens. Nothing happens. That bothered us, we thought that's not the way the designers of this policy thought it would work. They thought there'd be some outrage from the community and I can tell you what we found that that did not happen much at all across the entire country. About five minutes, yes, okay. The effects internally, now we did find that collecting the information even though it didn't mobilize the community it did make a difference with the regulatory agencies. And I'll rush through this, they really did use the information, state regulatory agencies and the companies themselves used the information internally to change what they were doing. So in this sense you can say TRI was a success but not for the reasons that the designers had in mind. It didn't mobilize the community but it did bring about changes and you saw that in the overall. So they were able to get more accurate data, to identify goals, to make changes. And by the way, we found mostly they were positive or neutral about the program. They were not as negative, I think as the opponents of regulation and environmental policy generally assume let me come back to that. And similar as I said, state officials really did use the information so it fit into the, even though it's not regulatory it feeds into the regulatory process because now they have some more information to check on what companies are doing and I'm sorry I'm gonna skip over that you can read it on your. The implication for fracking I think would be that you might need to have nonprofit organizations and public officials help to inform the public and digest the information because it might pertain to regulatory actions. So a lot would happen public officials said they didn't take pollution prevention activities. They mounted source reduction efforts. They tried to increase media coverage. They actually brought about meetings. All of this though did not come from the citizens themselves that came from the state officials using the disclosed information to prompt these changes. And I think that's one of the most critical findings of the book. People by themselves don't take these actions but making information public gives the regulator something they didn't have before. Even though it's a non-regulatory policy. So for fracking I think public officials can take significant actions that individuals I think can't. So I think TRI does work but not in the way people expected it to work. And there's a problem with the metric because releasing pounds of information information about pounds of chemicals in the air is not meaningful to most people if you can't put it in terms of a public health risk or something that people can understand. So one conclusion we made is when you release information it should be current, simple, clear and accessible. You make it complex and you put chemical formulas down and make it hard to locate material on a website. Nobody's going to use it. I also think there's a change over time. We found that there was a greater use in many ways by community groups in the first few years of the TRI program after a while it wasn't news. I still remember a headline in my local paper that Green Bay Pesquizette, front page. The whole front page. Each company what they released, they did that once. In later years even though the same companies were releasing the same amounts it was no longer news. That is they didn't consider it newsworthy each year it was the first time it was newsworthy after that. Not. I put a link here to the Toxic Trends Mapper, Troy Abel in conjunction with some other people at Western Washington University put together. If you go to that site you will find a map of the United States and then you scroll in on a state and it will show you individual companies. If you click on a company you will see your environmental performance over a 10 year period and you will see the risk levels for specific facilities all across the country. It's the only one. Environmental Defense Fund used to do a site that used TRI data and made it available then they stopped updating it almost 10 years ago anything. So this is pretty current. So information disclosure works best in conjunction with well-designed policies. I noted that. I think facilities that don't do well can be assisted. What are the implications for fracking real fast and then we can talk about this as we finish up. I think it's clear Chris will speak to this. Public support exists for shale gas extraction but the public's also very strongly in favor of information disclosure. I mean I think the polls are very clear on that. I think here too I looked at the frack focus site and I understand many of you did. It's pitiful, right? I mean it's impossible to know what any of that information is about. Plus it's hard to find. You've got to know, you've got to search for individual facilities. Most people want no to do that. So think of a better way. What does it people want to know and how can you make it easy for them to find it? I think the companies may not be interested in designing it that way so you have to watch. Sir Gosman has a wonderful law review article that identifies all the state, the new state disclosure policies but I'm a little nervous that states are quickly adopting policies that are minimally effective. Some would call a race to the bottom. If you get all these policies in place that will be yet and the companies will not be in convenience in the slightest. You go watch that that doesn't happen. Make sure that there's a periodic reporting that the information is current. A lot of the TRI stuff is not if it takes two years to get it out. Basically make sure it's everything you want to know is there. In the fracking area a lot of companies are certain that they can't release that information because it's a trade secret. And you want to be sure that's not the most toxic material that you're not finding out about. Where are you going to put that information and is it going to be easy to find it? Frack focus is not easy. Absolutely not easy. TRI is not easy either. I mean it should be able to type in your zip code and get all the information that applies to your neighborhood. That would be easy. It's not like that. And it could be. And there are all the problems. The industries are self-reporting data. Is anybody checking up to see whether what they're reporting is correct? Actually, yes. Turns out it's not. Always. Some environmental groups have actually flown over companies and done their own measurements and said, ah, it's like 30% off compared to what the companies are telling you. Maybe in some cases it's more than 30%. You might be surprised to learn that TRI data are not actual measurements. It's an estimate based on computer models what the companies think they're putting out. That makes you a little nervous. Welcome to the club. What you think is this is hard information about actual releases? No, it's estimated releases that the company's not a problem. You might get the same thing in that fracking area. So is industry going to deal with community concerns? Will it be somebody who will handle that and report on whether it's done well? How is this going to tie into regulatory agencies? So in short, if you go with information disclosure, deal with fracking, bear in mind I think somebody needs to be in charge. The information needs to be monitored. You need to make sure companies are reporting accurately the most significant chemicals really are identified and released to the public. And you've got to watch out for this. The reason states are acting quickly is they're afraid something's going to happen at the federal level. The federal government has been prohibited by Congress in acting. If this gets to be a big concern, the feds can come in and then there could be tough, well, maybe not from this Congress, but from another one. There could be tough regulations that would override the state efforts. And I think that's one reason. I think we've talked about that already. So more or less stayed within my timeline, I guess. And Chris, you're going to address the issues later on. So the questions we're coming back to is, I think there is a strong potential for information disclosure. The public clearly does favor it. It could be, as we found with TRI, maybe you don't stop with disclosure. Maybe you want regulation, for example, on methane releases, and maybe there should be inspectors coming in to make sure more than is now done that things are being done properly and that the wells are being dug correctly and the back, what's it called, the backflow? What? Flowback. Flowback, flowback. If the flowback, there's an awful lot of water that's coming up, so there's a use of water and there's also contamination of water. And in some areas of the country, it's made a real mess and ranchers out in the west have lost the access to the water they used to have. So a lot of related issues that have to be dealt with. And as always, I think, really, you need a combination of policy tools. Pretty rare in any policy area from healthcare to the environment that one single tool is going to solve all of your problems. So think hybrid or combination, diversity of tools. And with that, I will then leave it to Chris. I had to rush you along, too. Yeah, more than I had. Oh, I thought that would be good. Excellent, great. Thank you, Mike. And it's such a great setup and thanks to Professor Krant and Professor Rape for inviting me out to the talk and to follow up, Mike. And I think Professor Kraft did a great job of explaining the importance of information and the limits of information, right? Just having information by itself isn't necessarily sufficient to make it useful for the public. And so trying to now think about the context of the work and coming clean the book and where he's placed it, how does that merge with this new issue on our horizon that has arrived in fracking? And that's where I'd like to pick up today and talk a little bit about where we are in terms of public perceptions of risk, disclosure policy related to hydraulic fracturing. Does the public want the information? Do they care about the information? Are they engaged in the issue? Do they think it's a risk? All those factors are necessary if you're gonna use information and not only the limits of how we construct the information but the willingness to use it and all the things that Mike talked about in terms of navigation. So that's where I'm gonna take us through a quick 15 minute jaunt if you will and then end to questions. So just think about this. The emergence of fracking, just a few years ago, the idea of even having a conversation about fracking, the word fracking, was not part of our vernacular in the least, other than some engineers that talked about hydraulic fracturing, the real word. The idea of fracking was not a concept. It would get giggles of anything when people used it rather than fear or some type of reaction. Today the term is part of the common vernacular. I think every year when they come up with the word of the year, it was among the word of the year, either last year or the year before. It's become so popular, it's used in euphemisms, late night comics, love it. It really is part of our culture in a lot of ways and so we're moving in a short period of time. Again, maybe four or five years, it's pretty dramatic. So the concept itself has meaning and how we use it and so as much as we talk about it, the public's understanding, their knowledge about the issue remains fairly limited and often quite uncertain in terms of the practices. So what I wanna do in my short time today is talk about a few things that dovetail with what Mike talked about, about information and to look at public opinion on fracking from three perspectives. One, first, is the public engaged? Are they following the issue? Do they think about the issue? If you're gonna have information, you have to have an interest in it to begin with. Two, do they think it's risky? And if so, what are the risks and what are the concerns and why would they want to know about the information and underlying demand, if you will? And then finally, do they want it disclosed? And if so, where and when and under what conditions? Those are factors, I think, that make information useful or less useful going along and so that's what I wanna talk about in our area of fracking. Just a little bit about the evidence I'm gonna use and the public opinion data that we're gonna use is this is from a 2012 National Survey of Energy and the Environment in SEE, which has run out of close-up, just upstairs, and the Institute of Public Opinion at Muhlenberg College. We did a survey in Michigan and Pennsylvania last fall looking comprehensively at perspectives about fracking, perspectives on fracking. And so if you are interested at all in the surveys, I don't know if Barry, those have been shared. They're on the close-up website, so available. If you really wanna dig into the details and the methods, which I'm gonna skip over, but very available and hopefully you'll find it interesting. The context, I think, is important about the two states. Pennsylvania, my home state, is frack-central, if you will. It lies right over the Marcellus Shale, probably the richest shale play in the country. It is highly engaged. If you've been to Pennsylvania, you live in Pennsylvania. It is everywhere. It's part of our culture. It's part of our media. It's, I'll talk about it on television, on commercials. It's everywhere. It's omnipresent. So it's a highly engaged fracking state, if you will. Michigan is emerging. It's emerging as a fracking state. The shale play isn't quite as extensive. The level of drilling and fracking isn't as high, but it is someone that has been, at least spending some time in Michigan. I'm sure you see it within the conversations and the discussions and in the media in the state. I've seen it from looking at it and talking with Barry. So they're interesting to look at as from a public opinion survey because the populations are at different places with the issue. So finding similarities and differences can tell us a little bit about how people are experiencing fracking. So let's look at it. First of all, we'll start with engagement. Do people care about it? Do they look at it? Do they think about it? If you're gonna want information, you're gonna have to first have a knowledge that the issue is even there if you're gonna do anything about it. And as you could see, this is the level of public attention towards the debate and fracking. How closely have you been following the issue? And you could see a majority of both Michiganders and Pennsylvanians say that they have been following the issue either very closely or somewhat closely. You can see, although I was amazed when we looked at this last year, Barry and I, that it wasn't all that different for a very highly intensive fracking state and a more limited emerging fracking state that Pennsylvanians were a little bit more likely, you know, 49, or excuse me, 59% said it's very or somewhat closely compared to 48% of Michigan. There's about a 10% gap. But I think that gives us a sense that the issue really has emerged in the public mind to the point where people are at least paying some attention to it. Crucial, if you're gonna seek out information, you have to have some interest in it to begin with. And I think fracking is now at that stage. It's gonna be fun to follow that over time to see how it changes and if it changes. One other factor that I think is really important, and I'm gonna come back to this in a little bit, is just your reaction to the term. Psychologists tell us all the time, how are we primed to accept information? How will frames affect our view on an issue once they're presented later? And I think this is an important question. And so if we just ask you, when you hear the word fracking, do you consider it a positive or negative when you hear that term now that's become popular, what do you think about it? And you could see almost identical numbers in Michigan and Pennsylvania, places at different places and experience with fracking, but the term itself had very similar views. A plurality of both Michiganders and Pennsylvanians see it negatively. I think I'll come back to that later. I think that's really important how we'll think about processing and using information, the idea where it starts, 45%, 31% positive. So the starting point for a lot of people that might know nothing about it or think a lot about it is more likely to be negative than positive. And I think that affects how we process information later. Okay, so we know people are thinking about it, they have a generally negative view, but what do they think about in terms of the risk? And we can, I wish we had lots of time to talk about where the research is on this, where the science, the engineering, the public health data, which is just emerging. It really is at an early stage when we're thinking about research on fracking. But in many ways it remains unsettled. We have evidence on both sides of the equation of the safety of the practice. We have some studies that point to concerns. And again, I think a lot of this is gonna play out over time. We're early in the process. But I would say the reaction to most is that it's unsettled. And if you look at reports from Graham or NRC or others right now, it seems to be in that place. However, if you ask individuals, and this is back to our negative, if you ask many individuals if they think it's unsettled, they might say, say no. It's because substantial media coverage of the issue might be framing it in certain ways. If you live in, well, I'll come back to living in Pennsylvania in a second, but for individuals that might have seen documentaries like Gasland or Gasland 2, which portray the industry extremely negatively and the risk and concerns with fracking in a very emotional way, you might have certain views. If you look, on the other hand, at public relation efforts by fracking companies and drilling industry, you might get a very different picture. I live in Pennsylvania. So if you turn on the nightly news almost every night, you are guaranteed to see commercials that focus on the positive benefits of fracking and the safety of it. It's an enormous outlay of expense by the industries to convince Pennsylvanians at the heart of the fracking industry that it's safe. All these feel-good commercials slickly produced by Madison Avenue. So there's a framing war going on. So where does the public stand? So if you ask them, do most people, do the experts say it's safe? Do the experts say it's risky or is it unsettled? Here's what we find. And I think it's pretty interesting. This is, if you frame it, which of these statements comes closest to fit your views on fracking? Do most experts think the risk are high? Do most experts think they're low? Or are they divided on the issue? Most Pennsylvanians think 55% that they're divided. Michiganders, 45%, a little bit higher, not sure, which probably isn't unexpected here. And a fairly even split on the low and high end of the equation. That I think most individuals when they perceive the risk right now are unsure about the debate. Very much like, I think, the science and the research is. And I find that interesting. So where the public is might be, in some ways, where the science is on the issue. Looking more particularly at the risk, what do people consider risks? And I think that's key. You were talking about airborne talks and releases as very potent in terms of both dispersion of chemicals and where the public might enter in risk. For fracking, especially in a place like Pennsylvania, a lot of the concern comes with water. Obviously we're sending tons, injecting lots of millions of gallons, billions of gallons of water, inject it with sand and other chemicals into the surface to produce the gas. Water contamination is in this one place where we saw significant differences. Pennsylvanians are almost twice as likely as Michiganders to cite the primary risk, what the most important risk is in terms of the practice. To be water contamination, we also have ground water in there. That's the framing, if you will, where people in Pennsylvania, they don't think air, although air is a lot of these sites, there's a lot of questions about the localized effect of air quality. This issue risk is often focused on the water aspects of it. So we'll come back to that in a little bit. I wanna show a quick series of slides here that I think are interesting to look about, perceptions of risk and some different framings that we could do regarding the issue. So if we ask individuals, we give them a 10 point scale, zero to 10, and we say, what is the probability that there are serious health risks for people living near drilling operations where zero, over here, zero is extremely unlikely and 10 is virtually certain that there are risks. Blue is Michigan, red is Pennsylvania. This is what we see, a skewed to the positive side and that should not be surprising given the overall negative reaction towards the term fracking. You see a little bit of difference. Pennsylvania actually, I find this interesting. Of course, the five is the median and the modal answer for our distribution. But you'll see a little bit on the extremes, Michigan there's a little bit more likely to be on either extreme, perhaps based on, not so much on experience, but on the framings that we talked about before. So I find that interesting. But we do a little experiment. We split our sample in both Pennsylvania and Michigan when we do our survey and we give them two different framings. And one is we say, what if, in the first, and I'll flip to this, what if we, the lead environmental agency in your state, came back with a conclusive report, a conclusive report that said the risks of health risk are very low associated with fracking. How would you rate that same question that we ask on the zero to 10 scale? And you can see, and this is what I find fairly interesting and back to disclosure, which is fun to start framing the questions that Michael and his colleagues came up with, you can see a little bit of movement skewing towards the extremely unlikely side, but not dramatic, right? It moves, it moves down, you get more people that answer in this category than they did on the unframed original question. But look what happens when you frame it that the lead environmental agency comes back and says there is a high risk. And that's this slide. Moves much more in the direction of individuals saying it's virtually certain there is a risk. So same agencies, right? Same framing, all the random sample that we did and the structure of the experiment. You can see how it moves things in the direction that people are, I think, primed to immediately expect that the risks are higher and when given that framing, which I think is interesting for disclosure. How do we react to disclosure? How do we think about disclosure? I thought it was an interesting experiment, part of our research on this. So what do they think about disclosure themselves? What do the actual question when we asked Michiganders and Pennsylvanians about disclosure and a little bit of context and Michael has set this up nicely. There are no federal regulations requiring the disclosure of chemicals for the fracking process. There are none right now. The oil and natural gas industry is exempt from the emergency planning and community rights to know act, apcra. Oh, that Michael talked about. It doesn't apply right there. So there's no standards if you will. The Energy Policy Act in 2005, Energy Policy Major Federal Legislation also exempted fracking fluids from federal disclosure laws. So the fluids that are used on the list are not required. Therefore, they've turned this over to the states. They've turned this over to the state as Michael talked about frack focus. Some states have lined up with frack focus as their source for this as a group to try and put out the information. But largely, again, it's dependent on the states and states have different rules. So what does the public think about this? And here's what we find. If you ask individuals with what I would say is a framing that is more pro-public health. And here's the question. Natural gas drilling companies should have to disclose the chemicals they inject underground as part of the fracking process because the public has a right to know about any health risk that might be posed by these chemicals. We find overwhelming support. The public, largely 81%, strongly agree, high intensity, and then when you put them together, 90% as Michael referenced. People aren't unified that companies should have to disclose. And we said, well, maybe that framing is a little on the pro-health side, so we have to frame it in a different way. And we do. We take the question, we say, well, natural gas drilling companies should not have to disclose the chemicals they inject underground as part of the fracking process because they contend that those chemicals are trade secrets. That if it's a trade secret, we can't give away our trade secrets. That would be against our business interests to do so. And you can see that largely there's no movement. There's no movement, slight shifts. But anyway, we frame it, at least in this original experiments, public demands disclosure. Now the big question is, what do we do with that? That information, all the things that come in clean talk about, I think, are important. Couple of slides here, and I'll wrap up. This question, I think, gives you a sense about, and back to Michael's question, well, if the idea is disclosure, where it comes from, do the companies give us clean information? Do they give us good information? Where are we gonna get information on this from? So we ask the public, where would you turn first for reliable information? Where would you go first for information about the practices of natural gas drilling, either in Pennsylvania or Michigan? And what we find, and this might be back to the original positive negative, right? Where would people go or trust the most? Oops, sorry. Environmental groups in both states. That the number one source where they would turn to first is environmental groups. Much, you know, in terms of the industry itself, a lot of the source of disclosure, much less support for it. And I was, you know, even though the states are primary in dealing with disclosure and setting the rules, the states scored fairly low, and Pennsylvania significantly lower than Michigan, you know, related to possible experiences with the issue. So some interesting framings. Well, I'll wrap up there. Michael gave us some really good questions to think about. I want to be great to hear the question. You know, the public's increasingly aware every survey, we've been doing this in Pennsylvania now for a number of years, time series, the public's more engaged, more aware, at least on the surface about the issue. And they believe there's division on the research about the health effects. You know, the framing, I think, that we'll see so much since so much of the literature matters in terms of fracking, just like it does in any issue. And ultimately, while the public desires strong support for disclosure, what's that going to mean in practice? And I think that's a beautiful setup that Michael has led us. What is it going to mean if we really do establish these practices and who's going to use it and at what level? So with that, I will stop. Hopefully, I finished close enough to time. Thank you both, Mike and Chris. We're going to open this up, ask Mike and Chris to come up to the panel. And as I mentioned at the outset, we'll go through a sequence of questions. Sarah Gossman, the floor is yours. So if you have an operational mic. All right, I have an operational mic. So thank you both. This was a really interesting set of presentations and I learned a lot about information disclosure and what's happening in Michigan in terms of, and Pennsylvania in terms of what people are thinking. So one of the things I've been thinking about is this question that you both raised, which is what are people supposed to do with the information? So I love this quote from a Texas regulator when Texas passed its disclosure policy. The regulator says, the Texans will know more about what goes into hydrofracturing fluid than they know about the ingredients and their sodas. So this is the next step forward. And in fact, these on frack focus and a lot of these disclosure policies, we have a list of the chemical constituents, we have maximum concentrations in the fluid, we have the product names, we have the product purposes. It seems on the face of it to be a fair amount of information related to the chemical use. But then I look at some of the conclusions that you draw on Mike about the TRI and to me, they seem more on the regulatory side that information informs the state federal regulators, it informs companies themselves by actually requiring them to collect the information. So that could be done within a regulatory system, the system we already have as part of permitting. And it's the public piece that isn't there. And so I wonder whether really where all of this is going, even though the public has a deep desire for disclosure, whether we should be heading the straight up regulatory route here and not on disclosure. And let me sort of make one more argument about that, which is, given that we have a lot of scientific uncertainty here about what the risk ultimately is, I think there have been some arguments, I'm not sure whether I agree with this, but I'm interested in what you think that by disclosing information in this way without really knowing about the risks, disclosure actually creates more fear. And I think Mike, you actually brought this up in one of your slides. Then it does do any good in terms of public education. So which again, maybe leads to the question of whether we really should be in the business of regulating the precise chemicals going in and their concentrations rather than through disclosure. So that's my provocative question, I hope. Okay, let me go first again. What I tried to indicate is I think a lot of the information that's released, whether it's TRI or for fracking is sort of by definition pretty tactical information about chemicals and concentrations and dispersal patterns. I don't think the average person is in a very good position to make sense of that. So they need the help of state agencies and environmental groups. It was interesting to see Chris's slide that people actually trust environmental groups more than any other. That's not surprising because I've seen many other surveys that say people trust scientists in a university. People who are viewed as neutral are not in the business. The flip side of that is, and I didn't dwell on it, but it came out in our interviews with corporate officials that they fear that if you release information that makes people nervous when they shouldn't be nervous because they believe the risks are low, you've now created another problem. You have a fearful public demanding that companies change their ways when in fact there's really not a problem. In the book we cited an example of a national study that was released that was really badly done and it said there were toxic chemicals on school grounds all over the country. And one of my former students was actually head of the Wisconsin office that monitors that. And he said they were immediately called in to go start testing schools all around the city. He said, we found nothing, nothing. But communities all across the country were getting upset that now they had a report that said that their kids were being exposed to toxic chemicals in schools. So the other side of this is you don't want to unduly alarm the public if the risks really are minimal. And I think you want to have a disclosure policy. I think the particulars of it will have to be discussed. Every state might be a little different. In my mind, the proprietary chemicals shouldn't be a reason not to disclose. There are probably ways you can do this without releasing too many trade secrets. I think it would be very helpful to have expert panels at the state level to make some decisions about what to disclose, how to disclose it, what the format is, where people can turn to if they have a question about, and it's got to be done so people have some sense of what's close enough to them that it makes a difference. Would I be concerned about fracking 100 miles away? Probably not. A block away? Yeah. But maybe there's nothing wrong and people have to have some sources to turn to. And I really think a combination of regulation and disclosure, and designing the disclosure will so that you get what you are getting and don't make people fearful of everything that's going on if there's not a reason to be fearful. I'll agree almost with everything that Michael said, Sarah. And I think your framing is really cool because of the issue of, is it a substitute, right? Is, are we just using it as a substitute rather than a compliment for regulatory policies? And I think you touched on it really nicely, Michael. How do you tailor that in a way that it's not, that it's useful and productive, but not a substitute for regulation, which it can't be, right? Which it necessity can't be. Great question. Professor Koran. Yeah, so I'm saying we have the same question quite differently than that. Well, I'm gonna move quite as quickly towards regulation. But basically, it seems to me, so you get all this information, you actually don't know how to use it. It's the truth in lending act. Yeah. The third power. Right? And if you've ever done a mortgage, you actually have no idea what you're selling. And that's actually something where you have a lot to say, first of all, you might want to have an idea what you're selling. So there's this notion that Thaler and Sunstein proposed in the book, Dutch, around pricing active cell phone plans, they also apply it to the other case, the mortgage case of a reliable evaluation that can be summarized in their case for one statistic price. One statistic is probably too much to ask for. But could you imagine, as part of the disclosure policy for requiring disclosure, requiring actually, let's pull a bunch of these experts together, including purely experts from the industry, and construct a set of summary measures, maybe they're half a dozen, maybe they're a dozen, that people would come to know what they mean and allow them to change over time and recognize that the post-processing of the original source data required in such measures is going to be costly, right? This is an important program for public policy students. It's a very good idea. On a couple of slides, I had up the idea about selecting the right metrics and so on, I think this gets to the heart of it. If you're using lots of different chemicals as many companies are, and I'm not sure what number we're talking about with fracking, but let's suppose it's a dozen and different chemicals, and maybe it changes from time to time, depending on the formation, I guess that would be the reason for switching chemicals. So it would help if we had some chemical engineers and chemists and policy people and law people, but particularly those with expertise and chemical risk to public health and to the environment, both sides of that, to come up with some summary way that everybody can agree with, and that might be a challenge. One reason TRI never came up with that is that industry and the EPA probably could never reach agreement on what the proper metric would be. That's one reason they decided pounds of chemicals, which isn't a very useful metric, but maybe we could do better. And I think the risk level is the way to go. People don't, unless the chemicals and names that people don't understand and pounds, it doesn't cut it. If you could come up with an agreed upon metric about risk to public health, maybe you got a five, the old Homeland Security measure, you have like five colors or something. If it's red, you need to talk to somebody or when you do a radon test, if you're above four micro, you've got an issue to deal with, something that people can make sense of. Lists of chemicals, I don't think anybody short of, those with chemical degrees are going to find that very helpful. Agreed, agreed, really well said. Yeah, I'm afraid. Sort of at the closing hour. There's much more we could discuss. Want to just simply note that this is one, even in this state, that is moving in some very interesting policy directions. There's a regulatory proposal from the state agency to embrace the very focused program that Professor Kraft was talking about. We may be looking at direct democracy and ballot proposition and legislation is going forward in the state legislature in a year in which 41 states have enacted some form of fracking legislation. So we will be continuing that conversation as a community, as a center and stay tuned for further events in the winter. Before we close, please join me in thanking both Professor Kraft and Professor Gellner.