 My focus in graduate school and my research since then has I've spent a lot of time on energy issues number of years ago I wrote a paper on Mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants the EPA was making noises about regulating mercury emissions and I was reminded of this when I listened to and That three-hour podcast where Joe Rogan interviewed RFK Junior and I was listening to this podcast on a road trip earlier this summer and it's very interesting thought-provoking but he was talking about his his early environmentalist days and He made some comments about a few things and one of them was on Mercury in in fish that came from coal-fired power plants and I thought well You know, I don't know much about some of the things that he's talking about in this in this interview But I do know something about that and he's he's wrong so it kind of colored my my view of some other things that that RFK Junior had to say But I've got an interest in in thinking through this from an Austrian perspective and one of the best things we can do here when tackling a subject like this is Realize what we don't know was it I think Mark Twain said it's not what you don't know that is bad It's what you think you know that isn't true or something up to that effect And and that's that's the case with a lot of a lot of these energy issues there's a lot of things that we think we know that that that we actually don't so I'll talk a little bit about efficiency and from the Austrian perspective we have to remember What we can't count what we don't know about costs and benefits we can't Figure out what is socially efficient for an entire society. We just don't have that information available and To recognize that is to move a long way toward understanding Where we are on things like energy choices? So if I'm sure some of you are kind of Pro fossil fuels and some of you are like pro nuclear and other people may be pro wind or something I don't know but we You can you can Advocate for one of these things, but you can't legitimately say That one of these is more socially efficient than the other The whole idea of social efficiency from the Austrian perspective is is nonsensical It look at these two cars. You've got like a 1970 or something Ford Bronco there and looks like a Nissan Electric something and By the way, do you see this about the ship that's on fire off and drifting off the coast of Europe I think and it's got a whole bunch of people are saying maybe this is an electric car that caught fire I don't know anyway, so Anyway, so most people if you if you show them these two pictures and you say well which car it's more efficient They're gonna point to the electric car and say well that one's more efficient well, it may be more Energy efficient in some sense that it consumes less energy to go a mile than the other vehicle does but Efficiency depends on your objectives How how easy is it for you to get your objective accomplished and that is an individual subjective decision? So if my objective is to go over Cinnamon Pass in Colorado Outside ure I'm not going to pick the electric Nissan That's that's not going to make a lot of sense. It's not going to be very efficient at accomplishing that goal so efficiency depends on your objectives and If we if we have different objectives from one person to another we're going to have Different ideas about what's most efficient Smaller cars may be more fuel efficient, but they may be less human life efficient We know that smaller cars you're more likely to get into it You're more likely to have a fatal accident if you're in a smaller car versus a larger Vehicle all of the things being equal mass tends to protect you if you're in a car accident I came to appreciate this on Sunday. I was in a car accident on the way down here and My car took a beating and I didn't and that was great. So I Appreciated the the the safety of my vehicle didn't really care about fuel efficiency was that when I was in that accident so This is a word you may hear if you're around Austrian circles for any time Cadillacs see Cadillacs is the study of monetary exchanges In a Cadillacs see there is no overall hierarchy of goals. They're only the separate objectives of individuals Economic efficiency is compatible with Austrian economics only in so far as it applies to the assessments of Whether the means chosen by the individuals are consistent with the accomplishment of the ends Chosen by those individuals. So to the Austrian you can't you can't engage in interpersonal comparisons of values of ends You know I as an Austrian economist. I can't say well my ends have more value than your ends There are your goals. There's there's no way to say this Cadillac efficiency occurs when economic efficiency is promoted by an Institutional environment that ensures that property rights are secure if you have an institutional environment which In which property rights are secure Then that's going to promote the discovery and use of information For the accomplishment of individual plans and that's what we mean by Cadillac the efficiency you as an individual You've got the ability to seek out your goals your goals Not the ones that I think you should have but the ones you have and then put together the means to accomplish that goal That happens to be a 1970 Ford Bronco or if that happens to be a You know 2023 Nissan electric thing then that's that's up to you Um, and so Cadillac the efficiency takes into account the fact we can't Judge the individual ends being pursued by the participants in the market So there's only the separate objectives of the individual We don't have any ability to compare ends across individuals from from an Austrian perspective and I I can On other grounds, you know It's a moral grounds. I can I can say something about what I think about the ends of other individuals But not not from an Austrian perspective. So if we're looking at institutional environments, this is one of my favorite pictures to show to students You see here a valley and on the Right side of the valley. You see wooded terrain. It's lush and green and on the left side of the valley It's kind of barren Looks like the trees have been cut down. Maybe Well, as as it turns out The right side is the Dominican Republic and the left side is Haiti Which approximately equal? Equally share an island And if you look at the economic freedom index Of these two countries, you see that The rank of the Dominican Republic is a lot higher than the rank of The of Haiti next door The terrain is very similar. The climate is very similar But the institutional environment has translated into very different You might say land use patterns across these two countries If you look not just at the index as a whole but you drill down to the component of the index That is about the protection of property rights, which I mentioned earlier You see that the score for the Dominican Republic Is a good bit higher at 4.82 than the property rights protection score for Haiti at 2.79 So Roughly what this this boils down to is that, you know, you cut down a tree on somebody's somebody else's property In Haiti the consequences for you are likely to be less serious than if you cut down a tree On someone's property in the Dominican Republic So you're going to you're going to see this kind of translate into Visually different environmental outcomes now, I can't say From an austere perspective Trees are better than clear land. Okay, that's it just depends on your purposes But I can say that you can observe people have not been able if they presumably Desire to make their land productive It's a lot harder to get something productive out of land if you don't have secure Property rights that are protected on that land So rory cardado, who's uh, austrian economies has written a some great stuff on environmental issues from an austrian perspective He says look efficiency is an individual goal seeking problem It is not a value maximization problem And this is where we begin to see that divergence between the austrian view of the environment and the mainstream Economist view of the environment even those main streamers that are kind of Generally pro-market you'll still see some of these kinds of differences So we see conflicts over the use of scarce goods many of which are you might say environmental goods But the austrian does not try to assess the value of these alternative uses I I I can't say as an austrian that using the air for me to uh to generate a A product of some kind Maybe i'm using the air as a a dumping ground for some kind of gaseous emission that comes from our production process I can't say that that's necessarily better or worse than using the air for some other Purpose we can't add up values. We can't compare these across individuals outside of a Uh a market which allows for some of that and that's why these kind of considerations are why marie rothbard Said that when we when we come to environmental issues, we have to Dispense with the idea that we can compare Efficiencies or we can somehow minimize costs and choose a course of action based on some kind of social efficiency so um Uh, let me let me just point out a couple of problems here That emerge when we think about environmental regulation when I when I talk with students about environmental problems It's a kind of a knee-jerk reaction that if we have an environmental problem Then we need to have some kind of regulation from government to solve that problem and the whole idea of of maybe Securing people's property rights is uh kind of a distant thought Which I try to remind them how powerful and important that is but um art carden Has said that the information that we would need 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 Governments do not The second problem is incentives So you're if you're going to regulate to try to solve what you perceive to be an environmental problem Then you're using government employees elected officials and bureaucrats and so on To to try to solve this problem and it's a quite bad assumption to think that these individuals Have environmental quality at the top of their list of of uh objectives their incentive structure is affected by their own personal goals um So elected officials aren't selfless publicly interested beings any more than we would assume the rest of humanity to be And so you might see a an elected official who says well, I I I advocate for this particular regulation and you say well, why why do you why do you think that regulation is appropriate? And of course what's going to come out of that elected officials mouth is something to the effect that well I care about the environment and I care about our posterity and so on But what's what what you may not hear about is the fact that some large industry Engaged in some lobbying and gave the politician a very large campaign contribution because the large industry knows that the regulation is going to end up Uh penalizing their competition. This happens all the time with environmental regulation It's very useful for that purpose Because it's got this kind of veneer this this the surface appeal of doing something that's That's uh beneficial for everybody. You know, we want cleaner air and so on but uh underneath the surface of this is a lot of regulation that Not only may not In reality work to produce cleaner air, but also has the effect of suppressing some kind of competition Uh furthermore political incentives may discourage a long-term view If you are an elected official, you've got your term in office and maybe you'll get reelected Maybe you'll get reelected multiple times But your time horizon is somewhat affected by that that limit on how long you're going to be in office And if you can extract resources and use those resources immediately You have a perhaps better chance of getting reelected by people who would benefit from the use of those of those resources now Uh and so to think that somehow politicians take the long view Whereas a private sector firm is going to take a short-sighted view is is uh, I think got it backwards You see some countries where there's a dictatorial regime and their incentive is to just get as much out of their natural resource endowment as they can immediately in order to perpetuate their power and their And the power of their friends I'm going to get a little bit technical here in the next few slides because I want to talk about some of the Austrian criticisms of mainstream environmental policies when I was in in in college and then later in graduate school The idea of using markets harnessing markets as they would say to solve environmental problems was very much in vogue And it still is to to a large extent um And now it's pretty standard treatment in in Principles textbooks and other economics textbooks to see some discussion of how you can you can use You know here we have a market oriented or market centered way of resolving environmental problems And one of these is tradable permits um So one of the best known examples of this is the epa is use of Tradable emissions permits for sulfur dioxide, which was a program started in the early 90s the first auction of these permits occurred in march of 1993 And sulfur dioxide is a chemical compound that's produced when you burn mainly coal and it's it's linked to Some environmental problems like acid rain it reacts with I can't remember what in the atmosphere and precipitates um, and so it's it's Something that the epa is interested in controlling um, and so they the epa said, okay, we're gonna we're gonna We're gonna we've decided That 275,000 tons of sulfur dioxide is the appropriate amount of sulfur dioxide to allow into the atmosphere And we're going to sell off a permit each permit says that I can I can emit a ton of this so too So the permits in the auction turned out to have a market ish price of about 76 dollars um, so the epa collected 21 million dollars selling off these these permits And the idea was well, this is better than what we have been doing What we have been doing is just telling coal fired power plants you have to cut your emissions to x And they tell each coal fired power plant you have to each cut your emissions to this this specific amount Um, and and they might even specify the technology that has to be used to accomplish that result This is called command and control regulation And economists and a number of other people said, well, you know, this is not really efficient If you wanted to get that result then you would allow um, you you would focus the uh emissions reductions on those Plants that can cut their emissions cheaply And you would allow the other plants that can't cut their emissions cheaply to emit more And so the auction process was supposed to allow For that to kind of naturally occur where you get the emissions cuts where it's cheap And you don't get the emissions cuts where it's not cheap And and so economists are like, oh, you know, that makes a lot of sense. We should do that You know, you had cases like one coal fired power plant where They stopped construction on a 350 million dollar scrubber Which was supposed to remove some of their emissions and they bought some permits instead Well, the firms that they bought permits from Were reducing their emissions more than they would have otherwise in order to Be able to have access permits to sell So it it seemed like to a lot of a lot of people that this is oh, this is harnessing markets. This is a great thing Unfortunately, there's a massive calculation problem here We we don't in general. We don't know what Overuse or underuse of resources Means we don't know what Overusing the air as a dumping ground for waste Means We don't know what in order to say overuse or underuse you not you have to know what the optimal use is Where's that information come from? I mean the epa came up with this 275,000 Figure for so two permits. Where do they give this number? And that's where I think it's it's a good thing to remind Regulatory bureaucracies and They're they're probably pretty intransigent on these kinds of things But at least remind people who don't make their living off of off of this regulation of the problems with this kind of thing So we we can't really assume that we know what that optimal rate looks like If you've taken a I guess you I would sometimes teach this in a principles class I might sometimes wait until maybe an elective or an intermediate level class before I get to some of this But the standard treatment of this in a textbook For any kind of externality and here we're talking about air pollution, but this is uh, This is classic kind of externality theory from the mainstream. You'll see this kind of diagram where you've got the marginal private benefit of Producing some kind of output Output like electricity from a coal fired power plant or paper from a paper mill And so, uh, you've got that that benefit to the producer and then you've got a marginal private cost or mpc Which is the cost to the producer of producing that electricity or producing that paper or whatever it is they're producing And then you've got the cost to the rest of society Which is depicted here as the gap between the marginal private cost and the marginal social cost Or msc so the msc would be the cost not only to the private producer But also to anyone who has to smell the bad smell from the paper mill The cost to anyone's got to breathe the particulates from the coal fired power plant anybody who's got to um You know deal with whatever the emissions might be from that production process And so the economics textbook treatment of this says, oh, well see, uh, the market is producing here at Let me see if I can get my laser to work. There we go. No, it doesn't show up on the screen. Anyway, so you've got the q star, which is the the sorry qm Which is the market produced level of output But then the textbook says well, that's inefficient because as we can see the ideal level of output is actually q star We needed to have less output in order to be Efficient, but we we ended up producing too much because see we relied on that market and we know the markets fail and so Here's here's that that problem. We've got to somehow resolve and so the um The the textbook goes on to say we'll see we've generated this this loss because we're over producing we're producing quantities of electricity or paper or something where the The costs of producing that paper including all the externality costs are greater than the benefits of producing that paper And so now we've got a real problem Of of inefficiency So, um Then they say, okay. Well, let's let's figure out how to deal with this Maybe and this is one of the older solutions to this. Maybe we can just impose a tax on the producer of this good Tax on electricity, let's say or maybe a tax on. Oh, I know carbon, right? You've heard about this carbon taxes so this was a favorite suggestion of the The old economist Arthur Cecil pigu and so this is sometimes known as a begovian tax And uh, he says well, all we have to do is figure out what that difference is between what the cost of the producer is and what the cost of the rest of society is and force that producer to think about the cost on everybody else By creating a tax equal to that amount and imposing it on that On that producer and then the producer says, oh, well, I don't want to have to pay the tax So I'm going to cut my produce production down to a q-star not because I suddenly became a conscientious member of society but because I don't want to have to pay the tax and so the government solved problem in this case With a tax now that that's I'm going to get to the problem with that in a minute, but that's that's one common suggestion. All right Another is as we said tradeable permits And the tradeable permit says, okay, well, we're not going to impose a tax per se What we're going to do is we're going to decide where q-star is And then we're going to create permits In the amount of q-star Or the at least the emissions that are consistent with the q-star output And then we're going to auction those off and in the auction process. We're going to have The the price that emerges is going to be a market price And so see we're using markets and see how friendly to free markets we are And so this is this is going to solve our problem not by creating a tax But by creating a limitation on the amount of emissions In this industry now That is problem. Both of these are problematic and for the same reason They're both problematic because fundamentally We don't know where msc is And there's no way to find out We don't know where msc is we don't know What kind of cost is being imposed on anybody else? Now the response that I've heard to this from from some Um People as well Okay, it's not perfect But at least it's progress and so let's not make the perfect the enemy of the good And so we're we're going to try to at least get something done And maybe the air will be a little cleaner than it was before and how can that be a bad thing? Well, okay First of all in the in the spirit of answering a fool according to his folly um we We could make things worse Just from the standpoint of the mainstream perspective on this What if we overshot? What if we thought that uh, the estimated marginal social cost was this uh, This uppermost of these three Curves here. So um In in such a case we would have imposed an excessive tax or Greatly restricted the number of permits way be uh way below what would be optimal And uh, then we've got a larger dead weight loss than what we had if we had simply left the market alone That's certainly possible within the framework of the mainstream So, uh, then on top of that from any kind of um Advantage that you might gain from dead weight loss you have to Remember, there's the cost of bureaucracy and enforcement the cost of waste from the political lobbying that i mentioned earlier that politicians and bureaucrats are always being kind of lobbied by industries who don't really particularly care where q star is If you're an industry that wants to shut down your competition You don't care about q star what you care about is shutting down your competition And if that happens to be q m or q star or q double star or wherever else in this it doesn't matter to you So you want your competition shut down and the politician who wants to be elected Will begin to share your goals In in the interest of of remaining in office So we see this as I said we see this kind of thing all the time. Um, we saw for example May say more about this later, but the oil and gas industry began to flip on the idea of global warming Um, this was maybe 20 25 years ago They had been saying things like well, you know global warming is not Doesn't exist or it's not a problem. And by the way, I'm I'm not trying to get into that issue I'm just trying to say this is what the the the oil and gas industry had been saying So they they began to flip on this and say, oh, yeah, yeah oil and uh, global warming is is well We need to deal with this it's a real problem. So all of a sudden you see kind of a shift Now is this because they Suddenly began to believe the ecologists and they suddenly began to to they were persuaded now Whereas they hadn't been before Or could it be that uh, if you're in the natural gas production business One of your major competitors in the at least in electricity production is coal And if you really want to go after coal coal is um, more vulnerable to an anti-carbon Regulatory agenda than natural gas is they're both carbon-based fuels, but coal Has is a more carbon intensive fuel. So if you're if you're in the natural gas industry and you're trying to grab market share from coal then Having a narrative that says something like, uh, you know, we need to reduce our carbon emissions would be to your advantage Maybe the possibly the same thing with wind power because When the wind's not blowing You need to have a natural gas generators to spool up and generate electricity as a backup So if you're in the natural gas industry, you've got an interest in promoting wind Which may sound a little odd, but That's that's certainly a motivation you might have um i'm Not not to to pass over Rothbard too quickly, but I do want to move on to some other things Um, let's think about these incentives We know that government can't know The proper amount of a particular pollutant We we often I mean, this is standard regulation though to say well, you know, this is the the maximum allowable amount of Pm 2.5 or so to or no x or whatever the pollutant is. This is the maximum allowable amount. Well, how do they come up with the number? Even if you assume That they are not paying attention to Cronies and lobbyists and all the rest They still don't have the information that they would need they can't get inside the heads Of hundreds of millions of individuals and figure out what their goals are What the means to those ends might be and the trade-offs that people are willing to make um between Or among competing goals so There are all kinds of pressures. I've mentioned a few of these but um Let me let me think for a few minutes with you about alternative and renewable energy um First of all, there's a lot of confusion about this I have students say well, we should promote renewable energy And uh the the should there sometimes takes on a kind of a moral tone And I and they and I say well why renewable well so that we can have more of it left for later. Um And so that so that it doesn't run out And I say well, do you do you know do you know when we would actually run out of coal? Uh, I mean, we're we're looking at a very long period of time and Uh, so if you're worried about running out, that's not a worry that would be really imminent Um, you have to think about that. Uh, so uh and furthermore if it's renewable, but if it's extremely expensive That's not really helping you Um, just just looking at things from an economic growth perspective if you if you pursue an energy source It's extremely expensive simply because It'll still theoretically be available in in 200 years And you slow down economic progress as a result of that what other kinds of innovations have you slowed down and delayed The the introduction of those innovations because you decided you were going to pursue Um This renewable energy and then there's just a lot of kind of basic confusion about this. I say okay, so why do you like renewable energy? Well, because it's low carbon I mean you're you're confusing two very different things here. There are I mean What nuclear is essentially zero carbon if you're concerned about that kind of thing Uh, and yet it's not renewable And then there's a lot of the world I mean mostly the developing world which is using things like crop waste dried animal dung charcoal All of these things are renewable But they're not low carbon and in fact, there's a lot of other pollution associated with the use of these kinds of fuels. So What is it that you're really after here? Um Is it is it really? Renewable for renewable sakers. There's some other goal that you're so clarifying with people What exactly it is that they they want is I think useful So this is us primary energy production by major sources and again, I'll emphasize before we get too much further that um Taking sides on energy sources From a from just a strict austrian perspective is something we can't we can't do we can't say well You know austrian economics our austrian economics leads us to prefer nuclear versus coal or any we can't say that um And neither can we say well, you know, we should be pro fossil fuels because we're because you know austrians are are pro I that that that's just not very good reasoning. So, um Natural gas is number one on primary energy production as of a couple of years ago Followed by crude oil and then coal and then nuclear And then a number of other things you notice that wind and hydro are pretty low on that list But there has been a lot of growth and change. So this is 2015 just in just in the seven no six years um Here you can see that natural gas is just exploded in um in in use in the united states Crude oil as well Coal has dropped precipitously In that six year period not much change to nuclear a little bit of change in natural gas plant liquids and Some change that looks big in percentage terms, but not real big in absolute terms in things like wind and and uh and hydro So coal is still a major energy source in the united states and this Coal is cheap and that's one of its one of its virtues. It's it's easy to um easy to uh to mine easy to uh to convert it into electricity It doesn't take something really high tech like nuclear power does and for that reason some countries that are not as wealthy as the united states prefer to use fuels like coal Again, I'm not trying to advocate one way or the other on this. I'm just trying to say That if we look at what other countries are are doing in terms of their energy sources um a lot of them are still building a lot of coal fired uh power plants and um That that has been controversial, of course As people in in wealthier countries start wagging their fingers and saying you shouldn't be using so much coal And they're quite to my mind a quite reasonable responses Well, you know, if we were as rich as you maybe we could afford all these These alternatives, but we we're not So when government begins to insert itself into energy choices We get all kinds of problems some of which we can pretty easily anticipate others we cannot or can't so easily anticipate but I've observed in some developing countries a a um There's there's been a push Mostly directed from outside from wealthier countries pushing developing countries to stop using fossil fuels Not just coal but any kind of fossil fuel and they'll they'll begin to tie Foreign aid and grant grants and other kinds of flows of funds to the abandonment of fossil fuels or at least the The severe restriction on the growth of the use of fossil fuels and some of these Lower income countries. We still have around three billion people in the world that cook and heat their homes Using open fires using simple stoves that are using biomass like wood or crop waste like I've mentioned before And this is dangerous Over four million people die prematurely every year from illness that is attributable to household air pollution from the burning of crop waste dried animal dung and the like That's about 45 times the number dying from natural catastrophes So when people say well, you know, the the developing countries are going to bear most of the burden of global climate change because of natural disasters and so forth Well, you know, they're already dying in very large numbers because they don't have access to electricity And because they don't have access to clean fuels like liquefied petroleum gas and so if you really wanted to resolve health problems in a developing country One of the easiest and fastest ways to do that is to improve their energy choices So they're not burning a fire in their living room or kitchen So that that lack of access to to energy is a real Problem that in the united states it's almost unheard of And yet if you look at the death rate from ambient particulate matter in the world That's the green. It has been declining over the last Quarter century or so, but it is still significant The death rate from indoor solid fuels Is significant worldwide in the united states Now this is a little bit misleading notice the scale here 120 on the top notice the scale here 40 at the top So we've dramatically changed the scale. So I want you to be aware of that But notice the death rate from indoor solid fuels in the united states I mean It's not even registering really on that on that chart Here's Haiti Okay, so death rate from indoor solid fuels is much much much higher in Haiti the poorest country in the western hemisphere so If you look at the choices that people that people are actually making right now in in poorer countries The the Indoor air pollution problems tend to be concentrated in those low income nations and Skip ahead to something here. I think you get that point Um, so what's happening is a lot of development finance transfers from outside of these poorer countries A lot of that development finance has adopted the Agenda the antifossil fuel agenda And again, I can't be really anti or pro at just But once government starts putting its finger on the scales you affect people's choices a former economic advisor in india Has called this antifossil fuel push carbon imperialism And the indian prime minister has complained about a new colonialism In which the developed countries of the world having already used fossil fuels to reach their industrialized state Are now promoting energy policies that would deny that growth to those poorer nations Um So we we've seen for example This is this is last year In the midst of fertilizer shortages caused by the war in ukraine and a growing food crisis that e.u Has refused financial investment to help gana and other cash strapped african countries To boost their own domestic fertilizer production, which by the way uses a lot of that uses natural gas to produce fertilizer Or develop their fossil energy sources because doing so would be inconsistent with their energy and environmental policies Formerly a net exporter of electricity gana has experienced complete power blackouts that have left millions Without water as well including irrigation needed to grow food so if you if you think about the The impact of environmental policies here in the united states, I mean I get frustrated because my refrigerator Fails because it's got three computer boards in it that are prone to failure and the refrigerator my my refrigerator that I bought in Like 1998 is happily chugging along in my garage keeping my beer cold And the one that I have in my kitchen, which is there because it's nice looking and stainless steel Fails about every four or five years Because it's got all of these uh energy conserving devices on it that I have to buy because the epa says You can't make a refrigerator anymore unless it's got those things on it. So You know that's you know first world problems, right? If you're dealing with the impact of some of these government energy choices in gana Or in another similarly situated country Now you're stuck in an environment where you can't use liquefied petroleum gas canisters, which would have been a lot cleaner not clean clean, but a lot cleaner Uh because somebody in in france or the united states or canada decided that you shouldn't be allowed to use fossil fuels So de facto you're left with burning The waste that your livestock drop in your in your um on your land That's that's not an improvement and it leaves people stuck in a situation where things are much much uh worse I'll just say something brief about mercury emissions from coal fired power plants since I mentioned that at the very beginning I'd refer to that uh interview of RFK jr. Um, I don't know a whole lot About him personally except what I a few things I picked up here and there But the concern there is okay. Well, uh burning coal releases mercury into the atmosphere the atmosphere the mercury precipitates and ends up being consumed by um wild freshwater fish and then if you are a pregnant woman and consume that fish then that mercury can accumulate and it can cross the across the placental barrier into um Into the uh baby and affect brain development And so that's the concern Now if you eat Freshwater farm raised fish, which is a lot of our fish. It's not wild caught fish that somebody threw a line into a river It's it's a farm Chalapia and catfish and things like that That has a pretty low level of methyl mercury And so the connection from us power plants to fetal health is very very tenuous Yellowstone national park produces more natural mercury emissions than all eight of wyoming's coal fired power plants Um forest fires in the united states emit roughly the same amount of mercury is all power plants in in the united states So just a little perspective on how much of this is actually being generated by human beings Now there are several problems with trying to regulate this kind of Go after this kind of a problem with regulation one of which is you know if you if you uh Initiate a regulation that says well, we we're going to try to control mercury gets people worried about this and now people say Well, I shouldn't eat fish because now that could have mercury in it and then um, and then I can I can hurt my baby and and uh, in fact People might back into a worse problem. I mean fish is a pretty good source of nutrition In several ways and so you you backed away from one problem that was actually quite trivial Into another problem of of inadequate nutrition that was was actually more more severe Um, I will leave you with this another one of my favorite pictures here North and south korea doubtless many of you have seen this or some variation on this But you can see all the lit up parts of south korea there North korea is a hero of energy conservation, right? I mean they're really going after excessive Light pollution and electricity usage and so on so uh Anybody want to uh Move to north well apparently the one guy did Right ran across the border a couple of weeks ago. What was that about? I don't never really I guess he was in trouble with the with the military and wanted to escape Anyway, so uh enough of that. All right. Thanks very much. I'll be happy to talk with you afterward if you like