 So we are Off just off that that great talk from from Tom Woods on the lockdowns. It's fascinating topic I was just Just today the an interview that Tom did with me for his podcast was posted on Tom Woods calm on This issue which is environmental resource economics because as Tom mentioned in the podcast we eventually do have to get back to talking about other things besides all the issues surrounding Coronavirus and this is a this Field of environmental economics is something that's very important to me. It's what I studied in graduate school for the most part My dissertation was on on this topic. I've tried to keep my foot the door with this topic over the years and Really, there's a massive Field there's so much that we could talk about here one of the reasons I got interested in it Was because it seemed to present one of the more serious challenges for those who believe that markets Work what about the externality problems that? Environmental economists spends much time and ink discussing What about resource use resource exhaustion questions? And so we're going to tackle those in the short time that we have here We're going to look a little bit at resource use issues and and externalities And the core issue for both of these is property rights I'm going to spend some time talking about some other things too But if you if you divided environmental economics into two categories, this would be Pretty much it So I think the best way to talk about Property rights is to show you this picture. It's one of several that I showed in my classes to illustrate the importance of institutions and Understanding the the importance of the rules that we follow in Society those rules are not necessarily Governmental rules we follow informal rules and contract Derived rules all the time. We create these rules as part of living in a society. Well, this picture shows The border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic Both of these countries are Lower income we would call them less developed countries on the left. You see Haiti and On the right you see the Dominican Republic and the dividing line between the twos pretty easy to see because on the Dominican Republic side Of that line. You see a lot of trees and on the Haitian side. You see very little Denuded landscape there From that aerial photograph Well, it turns out that the economic freedom in Haiti in the Dominican Republic is very different there's a study that is updated every several years the economic freedom of the world index and Haiti ranks number 103 on that index out of I think some 200 and something countries and the Dominican Republic ranks number 62 not at the top, but certainly More economically free than Haiti now that index includes a large number of categories of economic freedom and the one that is particularly relevant for Questions about land use would be the protection of property rights and the rating for Haiti there is 2.79 for the Dominican Republic is 4.82 significantly higher Than in Haiti not surprising that if you've got land and you want to protect it from Having somebody else come cut down the trees on your property That's a lot harder to do in Haiti than it is in the Dominican Republic land is easy more easily protected against People coming in and taking your property taking your your trees off your land or whatever the case may be so We're going to talk here in the next few minutes about subjectivity Efficiency and the environment and look at some principles for understanding environmental issues some of this is going to be based on Murray Rothbard his Probably most famous work on environmental issues is a paper called law property rights and air pollution Which I encourage you to read once you get an opportunity And then next we're going to spend a few minutes talking about energy emissions and growth energy is key to growth But of course energy production causes pollution Different sorts maybe if you have nuclear power that's going to produce a different sort of problem than if you have coal-fired power plants So we're going to ask that important question. What happens when you have an economy that grows wealthier what happens to the pollution the environmental quality in that country and a large part of that is energy production So let's take the first piece of this So there are a number of allegations of market failure that you'll see if you take a basic economics class You'll probably have a chapter in your textbook on externalities and some of that will discuss public goods It'll discuss negative and positive externalities And and maybe market power Monopoly and that sort of thing so Those are those are the three key pieces of Allegations of market failure and typically the prescription is well. We need more government. We need more government to Engage in antitrust regulation or we need more government to subsidize the positive externalities and tax the negative externalities or to provide public goods, which are allegedly under provided by markets so the problems that we do see with externalities and and even with public goods Usually arise where property rights are not very well defined So-called tragedy of the commons Which often results in overuse of a resource is largely a Property rights problem property rights are not sufficiently defined But merely to show that the market has not achieved some ideal standard is not sufficient to determine whether or not some intervention is is admissible Not only do we have the moral questions of property rights, which we'll get to a little bit later But you'd have a very difficult task still remaining ahead of you Which would be to show that possible government intervention would produce results that are superior And it may be the case and very often is the case that when we Introduce government intervention to solve an allegation of market failure We get results that are worse not better So three basic approaches to environmental problems and again This is pulled out of you know classic economics textbooks that you would probably use if you were in a basic economics class One of these would be the Pagovian approach named for Arthur Cecil Pagu who argued that if you have a positive externality markets not going to provide enough of that Production activity so we need government to subsidize it and if we have a negative externality where there are these side effects adverse side effects that fall on our neighbors and bystanders Then we need to have government to step into to tax that That negative That that activity that produces the negative externality and then there's also a regulatory approach where government Forces reductions in emissions down to some level that's deemed socially efficient Then we have the approach I prefer which is the property rights approach but there are multiple variations on this property rights approach one is the Cossian kind of approach and using common law using tort law Coast who won a Nobel Prize partly for this this these this work Is is regarded as as as being one of the Most important contributions to our understanding of environmental Institutions But I would suggest that it might be superior to consider the approach that Murray Rothbard promoted the natural law torts Approach that you see in Rothbard's work. I mentioned earlier law property rights and air pollution and also also Walter Block has written Some on this and there's been there have been some others We in the quarterly journal of Austrian economics There have been several papers that have that have dealt with this kind of thing So there are two key problems with the mainstream approach one is that efficiency relates to individual subjective goals Which cannot be measured We are not in the position of being able to Rise above the economy as a whole and look down upon it and plan lives to maximize value Each individual has different Values different priorities and we we can't know Exactly what those priorities are for other individuals now the price system does a pretty good job of sussing out those Those priorities as people voluntarily reveal their preferences and their priorities by offering to pay prices or being willing to accept payment but government planning Wrecks that and makes it difficult regulation wrecks that makes it difficult for us to to Improve on what the market might produce so from the Austrian perspective efficiency is attained when legal institutions allow individuals to pursue their goals Conflicts will arise over the use of scarce goods, but the Austrian does not Try to assess the value of alternative uses because costs are subjective and can't be measured So if you were to take a typical Introduction to environmental economics or this might show up in a in a principles textbook at a more advanced chapter in that in that textbook You'll see it a graph that might look something like this This is not a supply-and-demand diagram, although it does have upward and downward sloping curves or lines On the vertical axis there you see marginal private cost in PC marginal social cost MSc and marginal private benefit MPB so we're going to look at the add additions to your personal benefits from Output of some product and then the cost that fall to you and the cost that fall on someone else now what this diagram shows is to Upward sloping lines there one the lower one is labeled in PC. That's your private cost from from purchasing and consuming some Product maybe this is electricity. Okay, so as you consume electricity, you're paying an electric bill That that cost is reflected here, but then there might be an external cost. So you consume electricity But in the process of producing that electricity that there are some external effects This is a coal fired power plant and you've got sulfur dioxide or you've got particulates or you've got carbon monoxide or something That's being ejected from that electric generating facility if it's a You know hydroelectric plant You've flooded land and you've created Some land was lost to other possible uses as a result of this any kind of electric generating Process involves some kind of external cost some more than others so if you add the External cost the cost that falls on bystanders then you get this marginal social cost. That's you plus everybody else so that leads the Typical mainstream microeconomist to look at this and say oh well This is inefficient see there's this deadweight loss because we're producing too much of the output. We're producing at QM Instead of Q star we want to produce a Q star instead of QM We have overproduced electricity because we now have this external effect that Individual consumer of electricity in the end and the producer of electricity are not sufficiently motivated To think about in their costs and benefit calculations. They're not thinking about that external cost They're only thinking when I flip on the light. I'm not thinking. Oh, well, you know, I'm adding Sulphur dioxide to the atmosphere and somebody's going to suffer as a result of this Typical person doesn't think very much about that So what if the government then and this is typically the next paragraph in your textbook What if the government then imposes a tax on the producers of these goods that create this external effect? The tax would be set to be equal to the amount of external cost Which requires then the producer of electricity to incorporate that into their Decisions about how much electricity to produce they now have to think about how much coal do we have to buy and how many workers Do we have to hire and you know maintenance of the facility and now they have to also think about the tax So then this pushes our production back down to Q star and Makes this process more efficient gets us to the ideal quantity of output where marginal social cost and marginal private benefit are equal Okay So this is not the only suggestion that you'll hear the other one is Maybe we need tradable permits. This is very attractive to people who like the idea of Markets and they say well We don't really necessarily need to impose a carbon tax or some other kind of tax to try to address this problem what we need to do is figure out what's the ideal quantity of output and Anyone who wants to produce say sulfur dioxide Then has to get a permit from the government To produce this quantity of sulfur dioxide. Maybe these are divided up into one ton chunks And we'll auction these off or we'll just hand them out to people who already produced sulfur dioxide But the key here is that they're tradable. So this allows the low-cost Reducers of pollution those that can cut back on their pollution most easily to sell their permits to facilities that find it very difficult or expensive to reduce their pollution and And Economists look at that and say well that's that's great because see now We're reducing pollution where it's cheap to do it and we're allowing pollution where it's more expensive to keep to prevent it You still have a problem. You still have to figure out where Q star is and in order to in order to find out Where Q star is you have to know what the external cost is You have to know how much of a burden you're placing on bystanders so if I were to to if I were Working for this government agency, maybe this is the EPA or something and I Go to somebody who lives knock start knocking on doors next to people who live near a coal-fired power plant and I say Ma'am how how much did the particulates in the sulfur dioxide and the carbon monoxide from that? coal-fired power plant five miles away Cost you how much did that cost you last year? Already write this down What what kind of response am I going to get I? Mean that this is not some this is not information that people are easily able to articulate and There are some more sophisticated methods of trying to get this information but they're all problematic extremely problematic and so much so that it is Entirely possible that when the government tries to impose a tax or create this quota that they're going to get this wrong Because they don't know How much of a cost they're having to account for? So what if the government then? Overshoots they overestimate let's suppose the external cost They they they get people maybe they knocked on doors and people you know They have a personal grudge against somebody that works at the power plant They want to play shut down so they say well, you know, it cost me a million dollars last year for all the particulates and the sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere because of the power plant Well, how do you know that's wrong? I mean, how do you know that they're lying? How they even know what their costs really are so if the government overestimated this you could wind up in a situation where the tax is excessive I realized that that's a foregone conclusion in this crowd, but It the tax is greater than what is necessary to get to Q star and you end up with far too little of the production of this of this good like electricity so in the process of trying to eliminate this dead weight loss the Gray triangle on the right. We ended up creating a much bigger dead weight loss on the left in order to appropriately Evaluate this governmental response to this this pollution problem. We would have to subtract From any regained dead weight loss The dead weight loss that we were creating from overshoot the cost of the bureaucracy and enforcement of this tax The cost of waste from political lobbying because of course there's a lot of that that goes on but the purveyors of pollution control equipment would be very interested in More pollution control even if that puts us below the optimal level of output of say Electricity, they don't care what the optimal output is. They just want to sell more of their pollution control equipment or if you are a a purveyor of green energy, let's say You sell solar panels or something? You don't care what the optimal quantity of sulfur dioxide is in the atmosphere What you want is for the government to be as as Strict as possible on reducing sulfur dioxide because that means that one of your major competitors coal-fired power plants Gets put at a disadvantage Those political considerations are very important Art Cardin Has has argued That this information that we would need to know that Q star to know Whether a particular regulation works quite literally does not exist and the key difference between firms and governments Is that firms have market tests for their decisions whereas governments do not? That's one of the articles I mentioned that appears in the QJ You can find that on mesas.org a later All right, so let's think a little bit about ethics. All right So I've talked a little bit about the problems that we would find In in trying to use that mainstream approach We don't know what we would need to know to make that work But there are some other problems. What if we could calculate the efficient quantity of product of pollution? What if we knew magically what that external cost was? How can this Trump? property rights So the issue becomes a matter of Violating the property rights of another person not about exceeding some level of emissions that we've deemed efficient or even a question of damaging the environment I Mentioned at the very beginning the tragedy of the commons. This is one of those Problems that tends to result in environmental deterioration That is very much property rights related. So the idea of the tragedy the commons Which I think the term originated with Garrett Hardin Decades and decades ago, but he basically Laid out the the essence of this of this of this problem where you've got a common Pasture where villagers have dwellings around this common field and everybody nobody in particular owns the the field but they all have livestock and put the livestock out on the field to graze and If you decide you want another Sheep or another cow or something then your decision process is how much is that cow or sheep going to cost me and How much am I going going to be able to get from the? The meat or the milk or the hide of this of this animal after they grazed and have Come back to my to my farm well that decision ignores the costs Imposed on everybody else who also wants to graze on the same pasture and it can result in Overgrazing because there are multiple people who are not considering the cost or the Deprivation of the resource the common pasture are putting their livestock out to graze the pasture ends up becoming a Everything's grazed down to nothing you get very little output now because of the overgrazing Everybody who is deciding whether or not to put a cow out onto the pasture is thinking about the benefits of the grass Their animals eat but they're only thinking about part of the cost because they are only one of maybe hundreds of people who are using that same pasture this has been laid out in a kind of a prisoner's dilemma Framework so you have two ranchers Alan Bob and Alan Bob are deciding should we put one cow out of the pasture or two? cows out of the pasture and they're making this decision independently and The outcomes of this decision are in the in the in the four cells of this Of this frame So if Al and Bob both put one cow each out onto this pasture, they both get five. I don't know what this would be five pounds of meat per day out of their livestock operation if Rancher Bob puts one cow out and rancher Al puts two cows out then Al gets six pounds of beef per day and Bob gets three so one thing to note here is that the total output Gets smaller as more cows are put out of the pasture So if you have one cow from each that's two cows you get ten pounds of beef because the grass is very lush and green and not any overgrazing If Al puts two cows out and Bob puts one out then you get a total of nine Al gets most of the beef because Al is Putting two cows out to eat, but they don't have as much to eat because there's now three Munching on the same grass and if both put two cows out to graze then the total is eight four pounds for each now if you work through the the incentives here you realize that well Bob doesn't really have any incentive to cut back on the number of cows Bob puts out on the pasture because if Rancher Al puts one cow out to graze then Bob is going to get more pounds of beef by putting two cows out to graze six versus five If Al puts two cows out and Bob's still got to make a decision do I put one cow out to graze or two? Bob gets four pounds of beef If Bob puts two cows to graze and only three pounds if he puts one Cow out to graze so again Bob's incentive is to put two cows out to graze in the pasture Al is facing exactly the same incentives and Al also would want to put two cows out to graze No matter what Bob does so the outcome is that we have four cows in the pasture We get a total of eight pounds of beef gained collectively Instead of ten which would be the case if only one each were put out to graze now. What's the what's the problem? that creates this Kind of situation it's it's a lack of property rights. So as Carl Carl Minger said When all members of society compete for a given quantity of goods that is insufficient a practical solution to this conflict of interest is Only conceivable if the goods pass into the possession of some of the economizing individuals and If these individuals are protected by society and their possession to the exclusion of all other individuals in the United States The American bison was hunted almost to extinction what saved the American bison It was the fact that a few people said you know We might want some of these Maybe just as a curiosity. They're not very tractable animals is kind of difficult to raise them unlike domesticated Cattle so but maybe you know, we'll we'll fence off an area. We'll put a small herd of bison in that fenced off area and Then then those are our bison now Why were bison hunted almost to extinction when nobody had Specific plots of ground that were their land That could be Protected against incursion or or theft Once people started to do that that preserve the and save that species from utter extinction And you could say the same in fact I was talking with Tom Woods on the podcast that I mentioned earlier about the Endangered Species Act and In fact, one of the one of the writers of the Endangered Species Act suggested that that act has actually created some pretty bad incentives Because it has encouraged landowners to deprive endangered species of habitat Because if you find an endangered species on your property then you you lose a number of important rights to that property You find a red-cockaded woodpecker colony on your property. Well They're gonna the government's gonna basically draw a big circle around that colony and say you can't harvest any trees inside that circle So what do you do if you're a landowner and you make your money cutting down trees to send to the paper mill? well You can either behave illegally what they call shoot shovel and shut up or you can dutifully call the Authorities and say yep, I got a red-cockaded woodpecker nest here They will draw a circle around it. You can't harvest anything inside the circle, but then what are your incentives? You don't want another one of these So you might well decide in fact there's been documented cases of this where the landowner says well I don't have any red-cockaded woodpeckers over here yet but I might soon So I'm going to go ahead and cut down the trees now And send them to market sell them because then I know at least I can get some money off of those Now I might clear cut around that red-cockaded woodpecker colony outside the boundary And ensure that I don't lose any more property So the incentives are to destroy habitat where the incentives might not have been there before This fellow I mentioned earlier ronald coasts very famous for the coast theorem, which is I don't know if it's still the case, but at least at one point not too long ago His uh one of his papers Was the most cited paper in economics But he he's famous for this coast theorem when it says that in the absence of transaction costs the costs of making arrangements between each other The amount of pollution will be the same regardless of the initial assignment of property rights people will once the judge decides On a disputed matter of property rights then after that, you know the plaintiff and the defendant Leave the courtroom and then they can make their own arrangements after the case and coast suggested that if the transaction costs are zero Then they will come to the same ultimate conclusion Even though the no matter what the court decided as long as the court basically Uh delineates property rights People will arrange make arrangements now in fact transaction costs aren't zero coasts did not suggest that they were um, so for coast then Courts would need to balance costs and benefits to both sides and make a determination now This is as we've already established Not possible to do courts don't know costs and benefits If you're interested in the details on this you can go back and I think you can find one of my presentations from maybe 2019 or 18 where I go through the the details on this I won't take the time to do that here Um about why the subjective value problem here is important And it is if we neglect the problem of subjectivity of costs and benefits The cosian solution is no solution at all Murray Rothbard said we cannot decide on public policy tort law rights or liabilities on the basis of efficiencies or minimizing of costs which is another problem with Trying to craft government policy to achieve efficiency We're ignoring the importance of Property rights Reacting as though these can just be willy-nilly moved around by courts Now what do we do about actual? Real-life environmental problems where if we're not going to have the government regulate If we're not going to have the government tax or subsidize to try to resolve an externality problem. What do we do? How does A solution how can a solution be arrived at that doesn't Violate Rothbard's ethical concerns or require us to make Decisions about subjective value that we can't Have any information about So Rothbard said in For New Liberty If a private firm owned Lake Erie Then anyone dumping garbage in the lake would prop would be promptly sued in the courts for their aggression against Private property and would be forced by the courts to pay damages and to cease and desist from any further aggression Why don't people dump garbage in my front yard? I mean I have They're trash collectors all the time to come through my neighborhood. I pay them to take my garbage away. It would certainly be Cheaper for the trash collectors to dump the garbage onto some nearby property Rather than take it off to the landfill Why don't they do that? Well because whoever owns that property is going to throw a fit about it and take them to court So if you notice a lot of the environmental problems that we have are in Are in areas of property that are not very well defined and not clearly owned by any particular person Are you more likely to see litter on the side of the road or in the front yard of a person who lives? You know along alongside a well-traveled road And people are going to dump trash on the side of the road a lot More than they're going to dump trash onto private property because they know not anything serious is likely to happen to them if they dump Trash on property that is not clearly owned. I know there are signs on the side of the road that said you know finds for littering and so forth, but You're going to find a lot more Pollution problems where the property rights are not very well defined lakes that are not privately owned rivers Oceans air These are areas where property rights are not very well defined So rothbard says only private property rights will ensure an end to pollution invasion of resources Only because the rivers are unowned is there no owner to rise up and defend his precious resource from attack If in contrast anyone should dump garbage or pollutants into a lake Which is privately owned as are many smaller lakes. He would not be permitted to do so for very long Owner would come roaring to its defense And I recommend walter block and peter nelson's but water capitalism if you want to know more about about that Many of you know the non-aggression principle here Which is referenced in rothbard's article law property rights and air pollution that no action should be considered illegal Or illicit unless it invades or aggresses against the person or just property of another I have only a few minutes. I'd like to Move ahead here to something that I don't want to Miss entirely before our time comes to an end And that is the question of energy emissions and growth. I've spent some time on this Number of years ago I Had the opportunity to to give testimony before a congressional subcommittee on emissions from coal-fired power plants and the issue at That I had I had Written on was on mercury Coming from coal-fired power plants. We often think about sulfur dioxide or particulates or carbon emissions, but A a recent more recent concern was about mercury emissions That might wind up in fish if people eat the fish then there can be some some problems. So I was I was um Giving some testimony on that and I don't know how much impact it had but one of the things that I mentioned in my um My write-up. I don't remember if I mentioned it in in the testimony was the relationship between economic growth and environmental quality energy is a big part of our production And it involves as I mentioned sometimes pollution so if we are concerned about pollution and we're concerned about Also economic growth are these two things At odds with each other. Do we have to make a choice? It's either We get to have a growing economy or we get to have a clean environment, but we Can't have both and There's been a lot of work done on this Diagram here. This is this is an environmental kuznets curve Named after an economist simon kuznets who was originally Interested in the relationship between economic growth and inequality But we've adapted this kind of framework for looking at environmental issues and kuznets had argued that economic inequality First increases as an economy grows and then begins to decrease as the economy continues to grow And we actually find that this is The case at least some of the time in environmental Issues as well that environmental quality initially Uh Gets worse as an economy grows But then as the economy continues to grow the environmental quality stops getting worse and actually begins to improve Now there there are hundreds or thousands of articles that have been written on this arguing about whether this Curve really looks like this or whether it maybe is is shaped differently and the impact of a country that is Um Maybe some of this dirtier industries are moving offshore To some other country and so maybe that's why the curve begins to Slope downward and a lot of a lot of debate about this and some of my recent work On this that I did a lot of here Last year when I was on sabbatical from wafford I came to the institute and did some work on this this subject and I found Some evidence that some environmental kuznets curves are kind of in shaped Or even in shaped That is we have multiple Curves to deal with without getting too much into the into the technical. Maybe I've already done that Too much of the technical aspects of that of that work. I'll just point out that the the turning point Is pretty low for a lot of these pollutants and in fact the united states and many other Developed countries are already well past this point. We're on the down slope of this curve Any further economic growth is likely to result or at least be correlated with A better environment if you look at um so to for example sulfur dioxide Commonly produced with coal-fired power plants This was the projection made in 1996 And you'll notice on the graph this Indicates A an estimate that sulfur dioxide emissions will continue to increase through 2025 Again, it's a 1996 estimate What has actually happened To global so2 emissions Not a continuing increase We've actually seen something that looks reminiscent of that environmental kuznets curve that we now this is not on The horizontal axis has changed. I don't want to you know switch things on you without telling you But this is not economic growth on the horizontal axis. This is time on the horizontal axis the environmental kuznets curve has growth or gdp on the horizontal axis, but gdp has been increasing Um in almost every country over this time period And we've seen less sulfur dioxide emissions You see the same thing here Uh for two countries that are developing very rapidly China and india india has not apparently yet reached that peak But china it appears has This is some of what i did, which i'll i'll skip over here for the in the interest of time, but What really matters here is not so much the aggregate amount of pollution or the concentration of particulates or the volume of sulfur dioxide, but How much is this impacting human beings abilities? To meet their goals their personal goals. How easy is it for a person to satisfy? Is it her own objectives? That's what we're really after so targeting a particular concentration of particulates or a particular tonnage of sulfur dioxide is missing something that is important that austrian economists have emphasized subjective value you cannot proxy And a person's ability to satisfy their goals by looking at the concentration of particulates Or carbon dioxide In fact, we find that people may be better off with higher levels of some pollutants If they are simultaneously able to get enough income from those production processes To avoid the worst effects of this pollution And i'll i'll just wrap up with one mention or example of this Many people around the world some of the poorest people in the world cook their food heat their homes And with Dried animal dung charcoal wood and other biomass Which i will point out is renewable energy But not necessarily the kind that we would want to have because it has correlated with a lot of lung problems A lot of health problems that result from this now if you Told this person you could have electricity piped into your house from 50 miles away, but that power plant is going to produce a lot of sulfur dioxide and it's going to produce a lot of carbon And other emissions mercury and other emissions that we don't want But you'll be able to have an electric light Instead of that kerosene light that threatens to fall over and burn your house down And you might be able to have an electric stove and other things that go with electricity. So what would you prefer? being mindful that that coal-fired power plant is going to produce a lot of pollution well now If you've got Particulates and all this other stuff is going into a person's lungs because it's right there in front of them that burning charcoal It's a no-brainer. It's an easy decision for that person For many of us who've already passed that that peak of the environmental kuznetskar We're on the down slope. We already have our electricity and our other cleaner energy for us to then look at that person who is struggling with a very Very different existence of a poverty-stricken existence and say no, no, no You're not allowed to have a coal-fired power plant You have to you have to have this much more expensive source of energy Because that is greener. We're essentially telling that person. No, you have to breathe dried animal dung fumes for a few more years Until we can get clean energy. Well, that's not clean energy that person's got right now And that's important for us to consider. It's not only about aggregates Aggregate pollution concentrations We have to think about the ability of an individual to accomplish His or her own goals and I'm afraid I'm out of time But I'll be happy to share more with you later privately if you like and and thank you very much for attending