 All right, I think we'll go ahead and get started. Thank you all for coming out on this chilly day. I'm Sarah Mills. I'm a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy Close-Up. That's here in the Ford School. I'm a lecturer in the program and the environment. First, I want to thank Close-Up for sponsoring this, as well as thank and acknowledge our co-sponsors across campus. We have the political science department program in the environment, the climate center, and the Energy Institute. So this was all made possible by them. This is a real special opportunity for Close-Up, because in addition to hosting these kind of public events throughout the semester, we have two key research activities that center around public opinion or survey research and what it means for public policy. And so it's a delight to welcome to campus a fellow scholar who has looked at this. And it's particularly timely to have David Kiniski here, not only because his book is recent, published just last year, but right now, as many of you know, states are trying to decide how they will comply with the federal government's clean power plan and which energy options will be part of that. And so I look forward to hearing what the public has to say about that at least, which might inform then what their state governments decide to do. David Kiniski is an associate professor of what's the public and environmental affairs at Indiana University. His research focuses on American politics and policy. And his most recent book is an edited volume on environmental justice. So I will turn it over to David. Thank you for being here. Great. Thank you, Sarah. So it's wonderful to be here. Let me thank you again, Sarah, for hosting and for Barry Rape, who just walked in for inviting me. It's a real great opportunity to be here and to share with you some of my research. And this project has been this book that came out last fall as a culmination of a 10-year survey project, trying to understand how the American public thinks about energy. And when we began this project back in 2002, we didn't actually know very much about this question. There have been some research going back historically about nuclear power, even before the Three Mile Island accident in the 1970s, and a little bit on oil going back to the oil crises. But there really had not been much work trying to understand how Americans think about, I sort of think about the bread and butter of energy generation in this country, which is coal, natural gas, in particular, and very little work looking across fuel sources. And that's what this project is trying to do. Let me also acknowledge my collaborator, Stephen Solberhair, who is currently at Harvard. We began this project when we were both at MIT some years ago. So let me first give you a broad overview of findings, particularly in case I don't get through the entirety of the talk. I want to at least have a sense of the main takeaways from our research. So the first thing is you look broadly across the American public. It is pretty clear that Americans express a preference for reducing our reliance on fossil fuels, particularly coal and oil. At the same time, there is really strong majority of the public that want to enhance or increase our use of renewables, especially solar and wind power. As I mentioned, this is a 10-year project. And a lot has been happening in this space over these 10 years. And what's remarkable about the Polkapinian is that attitudes have remained really stable. So we find very similar results, whether the survey was done in 2002 or 2011, 2013, there's not a lot of shift in American preferences for energy sources, despite all of the changes we've seen in the market, as well as in policy. So that's one key finding. A second key finding is one of the real goals of this project is to understand not just what people want, but why they want it. And as we're going to talk about, the two attributes that matter the most are how people view the local environmental harms associated with energy, as well as the perceptions of the cost of different energy choices. But when you look at, if you compare the weight of those two attributes, what matters the most are people's perceptions of local environmental harm. And it's about twice as much, sometimes three times as much, as the perceptions of cost in terms of importance. And what's really interesting about this is that that weight that people attribute to environmental harm is the same across all energy sources. Whether we're talking about renewables, whether we're talking about fossil fuels, or even nuclear power, it's a perception of local harm that matters the most, a little bit less, more so than perceptions of cost. A third key finding is that's, you know, where's climate change in this story, right? It turns out that concern about global warming is not a principal driver of how people think about the energy choices that they have for about their preferences. This has changed a little bit over the course of our study, but by and large, global warming does not appear to be the driving force in explaining people who either want to increase the use of renewables or decrease the use of fossil fuels. And then the final point I'd like to make, and I'll talk about at the very end of the talk, is that there is something about how Americans think about their energy choices and what drives their attitudes that also helps explain their preferences about climate policy. And it turns out that if you leverage their perceptions, if you sort of connect their perceptions to policy, where this comes up, where this materializes in terms of most support is in terms of EPA regulation of greenhouse gases, as opposed to other kinds of policy instruments you might think about, such as a carbon tax or cap and trade. And I'll put that puzzle together for you towards the end of the talk. Okay, so that's just a broad overview. Let me begin with where we started. So back in 2003, MIT released a report called The Future of Nuclear Power. This was the first in a long series of reports that MIT has put together, which I highly recommend, which I've looked at the scientific, economic, and policy questions associated with different energy sources, particularly focused on the electricity sector. And much of our research focused on electricity sector as well, including everything I'll talk about today. And the thought experiment that this group of nuclear scientists and engineers were thinking about was if we face this global challenge in climate change, what if we attempted to really expand our use of nuclear power, both the United States and worldwide? So their thought experiment was, let's imagine a world where we triple or quadruple the number of nuclear reactors across the world. Right, so the United States, we have about 100 or so active nuclear reactors. They thought, what if we try to have 300 or 400 nuclear reactors? And even that, you know, these are nuclear engineers, they're thinking about the technical complexity of such a challenge, but they had the foresight to think about the fact that historically, American public has been resistant to expanding nuclear power. That's a big part of the story as to why we've not had much of expansion in that particular sector of the last few decades. So we, as part of this study, we did a public opinion poll. And we tried to understand how Americans were thinking about nuclear power and other sources. One of the things that we found, which we found to be quite puzzling was that when you looked at people's concern about climate change, it was uncorrelated with support for increasing nuclear power, right? So this climate change frame, right, thinking about this huge challenge facing not just the United States, but the world was going to be insufficient in essence to motivate a large expansion of nuclear power. And what's interesting about this is the question that occurred to us was, well, is this particular nuclear power or does climate change not seem to be driving people's attitudes across a variety of energy sources? And this was the impetus for our study trying to think about not just the rule about climate change, but if it isn't climate change, what other factors do you drive? America's preferences for solar and wind or other fossil fuel resources such as coal and oil and natural gas. So this was the starting point. So what came of this was a 10-year plus survey project where we repeatedly conducted public opinion surveys asking the American public sort of a core set of questions about their energy preferences. And the key question essentially driving the research is what future do Americans want? Thinking of them as consumers, as voters, and more importantly perhaps why they want one path as opposed to another. So what we did in the project essentially are three things. We measured attitudes. We then compared these attitudes across different fuel types. We asked about seven fuel types in particular. Coal, natural gas, oil, nuclear power, hydropower, wind, and solar. So the seven principle ways in which we generated electricity in the United States. And then we want to ask the question what explains people's preferences? Why is it that some people want to increase natural gas while others want to decrease the use of nuclear power, et cetera? How does this then factor into their choices or their preferences about energy and energy policy? So that's sort of a broad overview of what these projects were, what they were about. I'm not going to speak about the specifics of the polling. I'm happy to do so in Q&A. I just want to sort of get straight to some of the key results. So the first question, what do people want? So to give you a little context, in part because the world is changing, here's where we were when we began our survey work in terms of the composition of electricity generation across sources in the United States. So in 2002, coal represented about half of the electricity generation. Nuclear power, about 20%, and that's pretty much the same it is today. Natural gas is also about 20%. Renewables were still their way down here, and they were pretty minor sources of electricity generation in 2002. So here's where we are today. And in fact, we went to 2015. This will even change a little bit more. But the big changes have been the declining use of coal. We're seeing an historic decreased use of coal in the United States for electricity generation. There are lots of factors associated with that. One of the factors is that we've had this huge boom in the natural gas, as I'm sure most of you are familiar with because of fracking and other things. So natural gas is increasingly taking up a big portion of this. And in fact, during some months of the year, over the last year or so, natural gas actually has exceeded coal in terms of its use for generating electricity. So natural gas is taking up a lot of that slack. Nuclear power has remained about the same as a proportion of the overall. And we've had this big shift in the increased use of renewables. Wind in solar, in particular, they're growing really fast. But still, as a proportion of the overall portfolio, they're still quite small. 5%, 6%, I think now for wind, solar power still below 1%, even though it's the fastest growing energy source in the electricity sector. So this is what the world looks like. And essentially what we're trying to do in this part of the research is to see if this is the future that Americans actually want, right? Just sort of match up, map on attitudes to what's sort of happening in the marketplace. OK, so this survey question really forms the basis of the entirety of the book, right? We're trying to understand essentially what people want in terms of energy. And you can read the question to yourself. But in essence, we're suggesting to the folks that we're going to need to build things, more power plants, and you have some voice, and whether or not these are going to be natural gas, or coal, or wind, whatever the case may be. And we want to ask folks whether or not they want to increase or decrease the use of these different fuel types or keep things about the same, right? This is the basic preference question that we ask the American public repeatedly as part of our surveys. So here's what we find. I'll focus first on fossil fuels. Hopefully these colors are, you can see, they project OK. What you're looking at are five different surveys conducted different years from 2002 to 2013. If we focus on coal first, what you see is that there's a strong majority of the public that wants to decrease the use of coal. It's pretty stable over the course of these surveys, right? 50%, 60%, suggesting they want to reduce coal use or not use it at all for generating electricity. Whereas only about maybe a quarter at most of the public, oftentimes closer to a fifth, would like to see us increase the use of coal as a source for generating electricity, OK? If we move all the way over to your right and look at the graph for oil, the first thing you know is we don't really use much oil for electricity generation, about 1%. But when we ask about this question, you see that there's not much support for changing that. In fact, there's support for decreasing the use of oil. People tend to get this a little bit wrong. They tend to inflate the amount of oil we're using in the electricity sector. So what a lot of this reflects, we think, are sort of their views on oil as a transportation fuel more than anything else. But in terms of their preferences, you see very few people want to see an increased use of oil across these five different surveys. Natural gas is really interesting because the public is, I want to say they're ambivalent, but they're generally positive towards the use of natural gas. There is some segment of the population would like to see us use less of it. That's actually has been shrinking in recent years. But there's a growing percentage of the public that is quite happy with the amount of natural gas we're using or would like to see us use more of it into the future. OK, so those are the fossil fuels. Let me turn next to some of the other fuels we asked about. If you look at solar and wind, you're seeing really big green to contrast it with these other graphs. What this reflects is a preference expressed by the American public around the order of 75% 80% of wanting to see renewables enhanced. This is a very strong majority. It's reflected in other survey work done by others. Americans are very enthusiastic about solar and wind power. Hydro power looks actually quite similar. Not quite as strong, but 65%, 70% wanting to increase the use of hydro power, even though we're not actually doing much new hydro power, if any, in this country. And I think as importantly, the other side of that equation, very few people express a preference to using less. So there's not much fight or opposition to the expansion of renewables. Nuclear power is probably the most interesting case because it evokes, for some, there's really strong support for increasing nuclear power. There's also a very equally strong opposition to increasing nuclear power. So opinion here is quite polarized. And it reflects the historical tension over the use of nuclear power. So people are quite divided on this. So this is just the overall story regarding people's preferences. So to step back and give you some broad observations, people clearly want more wind and solar, perhaps less coal, oil, nuclear power, natural gas is somewhere in the middle. Preference are pretty stable over time. So if you think back to those graphs, generally the lines are pretty much straight. There's not much shift or some in the later years. But not much. And interestingly, and this is not really reflected in those graphs, but I can point out some other analysis that we did as part of the book, is that there are very few people who we might consider to be pure conservationists who express a preference of wanting to reduce the use of all energy sources. At the same time, there are very few people who we would characterize as being supporters of all the above. As all the above is the catchphrase that President Obama has used over the last few years at least to talk about his energy policy. And there are very few people who actually express a preference for increasing everything. And what this suggests to us is that people are actually making choices here. They do have preferences across energy choices. They're not just filling out a survey question and hitting increase, increase, increase, which is something as a survey researcher you worry about. So people actually have preferences here. They're making distinctions across these energy sources. So what this suggests to us and what the question you should be next be asking is, why is this? What is it about the energy choice? What is driving how people think about these set of issues? OK, so let me turn to that next. So why do people want what they want? Or our catchphrase is, why do people love solar and hate coal? So what we develop in the book is the idea that you can think about energy preferences through a certain framework, which we're calling a consumer model, which is to say people don't inherently like or dislike a fuel type. People don't love solar because of solar or love wind because it's wind. They don't dislike coal because it's coal. OK, it isn't the fuel source itself. It is the attributes of these energy sources that matter. So let me say more about that. So it's like any other product on marketplace. People, there are things about products that people want. And in the case of energy, there are two attributes which we've identified as being the most important. It's the perception of environmental harms that people attribute to different kinds of energy use as well as their perceptions of the costs of these energy sources. OK, you can think about these in terms of economic costs or social costs in the case of environmental harms. So these two factors matter the most. So if you look at this graph, which let me explain, this is looking at those two attributes across the different energy sources that we asked our questions about. Everything is pegged towards existing coal. So having your head an existing coal-fired power plant. And you can measure what we call social costs, which you can think about as the environmental harms associated with burning or creating electricity from one of these fuel sources. So relative to existing coal, everything else is cleaner. Everything else has less social costs. That's why everything is to the left of coal here. At the same time, all other energy sources, at least when we began, these numbers were from 2012 put together by Michael Greenstone. He's an economist at University of Chicago. All other energy sources were more expensive in terms of the cost. And here, we're measuring something called levelized cost, which you can think about as the price or the cost of bringing a new power source online if we were to begin planning today. So it's everything from the inputs to the concrete to the labor that goes into building a power plant or a large energy provider. So what this reflects is that there's a trade-off. In the current marketplace, we don't have fuels that are both cheap and clean. We have fuels that are either inexpensive and dirty, think of coal. Or we have fuels that are clean but expensive, think of renewables. So in the short term, we have a trade-off. And people are essentially weighing this trade-off. They're thinking about these attributes when they're making choices or expressing preferences about energy use. In the long run, because of technology, we may get to a place where particular fuels are both cheap and clean. And that could be by making dirty fuels cleaner, think carbon capture and storage for coal. Or it could be by driving the cost curve down even more so than we see already for solar power and wind and things of that nature. But the idea here is that there's a technology trade-off in the short term. And we want to see if this kind of framework maps on to people's attitudes and explains their energy choices. OK, so we ask. We ask people to express their perceptions of the harms associated with different energy sources. And the way the questions are phrased, we're tapping into here their perceptions of the local environmental harm that comes from generating electricity from these sources. So in particular, when we think about something like coal, people are thinking about air pollution, be it particulates or sulfur dioxide and NOx that create ozone, things of that nature, perhaps mercury and toxics. And they're thinking about the health impacts that come from exposure, to think about asthma or respiratory ailments, things of that nature. So we ask people to express a preference about the harms they attribute to these different energy sources. The way the graphs are lined, if you will think things are presenting no harm, those get higher values on this graph. So not surprisingly, to start over here, renewables do fairly well on this measure. People recognize that generating electricity from wind and solar power don't generate the kind of health burdens, the kind of local environmental impacts that fossil fuels do. Fossil fuels are over on this side, and people sort of get their general ranking correct across coal, oil, and natural gas. They recognize that generating electricity from natural gas produces less environmental impact and generating electricity from coal or oil. Nuclear power tends to be viewed as the most harmful. Of course, the impacts here are a little bit different. What people are thinking about when they consider nuclear power are the hazardous waste questions and how you store over the long-term hazardous waste, as well as the potential for a catastrophic accident of some kind. People tend to over-inflate the probability of an accident in a nuclear power plant, but they worry about that a lot because of the dread associated with it. So people worry quite a bit about nuclear power, although for different reasons. So what you see here is people's perceptions are harmed. They're measured in these different surveys. They're pretty similar across the survey. So again, some indication that things are pretty stable. So let me show you the same graph for people's perceptions of cost. And this is pretty interesting. So people look at what you might call traditional fuels, coal, natural gas, oil, nuclear power, and they generally recognize the, get the perceptions of cost right for these fuel sources. They recognize that coal, natural gas are fairly inexpensive. Relative to oil, I should say. They recognize that they think coal or say nuclear power is a little bit more expensive. But what's really interesting about this is how people view the cost of renewables, right? People tend to underestimate the cost of renewable energy, perhaps because the sun is shining, it's free, the wind blows, we don't have to pay for it. They're thinking about the input cost, right? Not recognizing the other challenges that come with generating these, these ways of electricity. And of course the world here has changed quite a bit, right? So the cost of generating electricity from these sources has come down quite a bit since we started this. But you know, go back to 2002, solar power was probably an order of 50 times more expensive than coal in 2002. Yet people are expressing perception that this is really inexpensive, right? So they're getting this part of the story a little bit incorrect. Okay, so again, pulling back some big observations, things I want you to remember. So people have the relative harms about right. In terms of a rank ordering, the best we can tell in terms of how they're viewing local environmental impacts, people have those about correct. In terms of cost, things are generally right with the exception of renewables. People tend to underestimate the price of providing electricity from solar and wind in particular. So this is important. I want to sort of put this into your head right now. I'll come back to it a little bit later. And the idea here is that if we were to correct people's misperceptions about the cost of renewables, this would have the implication of potentially lowering their support for renewables if our framework is right. So if people are thinking about attributes and that's a driver in their attitudes and they're assuming that renewables are less expensive than they are, if you correct that, this may actually result in a reduction in support of renewable power, okay? And I'll show you some evidence specifically on that point a little bit, but this is the implication of this framework, right? If attributes matter, if you change information or you correct information there are misperceptions in the attitudes, this can make a difference. It's gonna matter less in the case of harms to extend people are already getting this right, okay? So I described to you what people want from the attributes. The next question is how much do these attributes matter? How do people relate the perceptions of these attributes with their preferences for energy, okay? So our goal in this part of the analysis is to estimate what we call the weights, so you can think about it as the importance of these attributes and explaining people's opinions about energy use. So just how important are costs and harms? How do they compare to other factors, right? Particularly things like political ideology or partisan ID, which have been shown throughout public opinion research and most areas of policy to be really important drivers of attitudes. How do things like education and income or where you live factor into people's energy choices? There are a whole set of other factors which might actually predict people's preferences for energy across these fuel sources. So we pursue two strategies for understanding this question. First is pretty simple multiple regression, so statistical analysis. And the second part is we include experiments in our surveys, right? Where we can manipulate the information people are getting before they answer questions on these particular attributes to sort of see if you can move public opinion. I'm just gonna briefly talk about some of the evidence from each of these two different approaches that we discuss in much more detail as part of the book. Okay, so let me start with the simple regression model. And I'm trying to explain this intuitively, setting the math aside. But essentially what we're setting up here is that we're trying to explain why here, which is an individual's preference for increasing or decreasing the use of one of those seven fuels in one of our surveys, okay? And we argue that this is a function of their perceptions of environmental harm, their perceptions of economic costs, and a whole bunch of other stuff, including their concern about climate change, whether or not they're Republican or Democrat, whether or not they're liberal or conservative, if they live in California or Florida, depending on their college education, their income, gender, all those kinds of things, okay? So what we can do from this is first, compare coefficients on harm and cost. They get a sense of just how important are these attributes in people's assessments of what kind of fuel they want to use, right? So the size of the coefficient of B and C in this model will tell us that. We can then compare the importance of harm and cost across fuels, right? So it could be possible that people are putting more weight on harms, let's say for coal, less so on renewables. Or it's possible they could be similar across fuel types. Same thing for cost. And then finally, we can get a sense of the total effect of these two attributes compared to other factors. So perhaps we find, you know, statistically significant effects, but they're small in terms of explaining the overall variation in preferences and what matters the most is if you're a Republican or Democrat, or if you have a high education or a low education, high income, low income, things like that. So that's the nature of the analysis. So let me show you one set of results on this. And this takes a little bit of an explanation. So what you're looking at, in essence, in each year is a separate statistical model that's estimating those weights of environmental harm and economic costs as well as about concern over climate change or global warming, okay? And we do this separately for each of the different energy sources we asked about. I'm showing you four on the graph here. So one more piece of context. The way these variables are measured for harms and cost, higher values suggest that a fuel source is less harmful or more inexpensive, less expensive, okay? So what does this show? If you look at the top left and look at the coal graph first, what this is basically showing is that if you view coal to be less harmful, not surprisingly, you want to increase its use. If you view the cost of coal to be particularly less expensive, then you wanna see its use increased as well. Global warming is measured in the opposite way. So if you're more concerned about global warming, you may, conceptually, you theoretically at least think that you'd wanna use coal less, which is why that line is generally negative, okay? So what can you pull away from these kinds of graphs? The first thing to note is that harm has a larger weight than cost, right? So that coefficient, that B, those B's and C's I showed you in the last slide, the weight of harm is about two to three times more important than the weight of cost. They both matter, but in people when they're making their assessments about energy, they're putting more weight on their perceptions of the local environmental impacts of the energy source, in this case coal, much more so than costs. In terms of climate change, if you look in the early years, this is essentially around zero, which you can interpret as being uncorrelated, meaning the more you're concerned about climate change did not have an independent effect on wanting to increase or decrease the use of coal. Very similar to the finding I showed you at the beginning of the talk on nuclear power. That begins to change a little bit as we go through our surveys, but still the overall weight of climate change, while close to the perception of costs is much less important than perception of local environmental harms. So what it essentially means is that what's driving people's preferences about coal use is not concerned about climate change, but concerns about local environmental impacts. And that concern about local environmental impacts has a weight of about two or three times more than their worry about the cost of utilizing that energy source. So I'm not gonna go through all of these, but nuclear shows a very similar pattern. Harms matter more, climate change matters not much at all. In fact, this is hovering around zero for the entirety of our surveys. Something similar for natural gas, a little bit less distinction between harms and costs, but harms are still always more important than costs. And something similar for solar, although things begin to converge in our latest survey. The one exception I do wanna highlight is that for solar power and wind looks very similar, climate change is playing a little bit more of an important factor. So people who are particularly worried about global warming or climate change, that that is the relatively important factor in explaining their wanting to increase the use of solar power and wind power. And it's almost not quite, but it's getting close to being on par with their concerns about local environmental impacts. Okay, hopefully that was clear. So I just showed you a bunch of correlations, right? A statistical analysis correlation that people's concern about attributes are correlated with their preferences for different kinds of energy use. The next question is whether or not this is causal, right? Whether or not we're getting the direction of the effect correct. And this is where survey experiments can help, right? So one way to think about this is can you move people's preferences on energy by giving them information about prices, about pollution, about climate change? So if our story is right and our framework is right, we should be able to move people, right? We should be able to give them information that shifts their understanding of these attributes and that should then affect how they value or how much they prefer different kinds of energy. So to do this in almost all of our surveys, we included what are known as framing experiments. You provide some portion of your sample information, then you compare that to part of your sample that's our control group that gets no information. So it's very much similar to a laboratory experiment just in a survey context. So I'm just gonna show you one survey experiment that we did, we did many, but this is one that's pretty indicative of the kinds of things that we did. So in essence, what we do is we provide information to the survey respondents prior to the question that I showed you at the beginning of the talk on their preferences for different energy use, for increasing or decreasing the use of energy. Some portion of the survey samples is a control. They get no information. And in fact, everything I've showed you to this point are results from a control group who receive no information about prices or pollution or climate change or anything else. They're just responding to the survey question as you saw it about 20 minutes ago. But then what we do is we divide part of the survey into these different groups. We give them different treatments. And this particular survey experiment we're only manipulating cost. We're providing their survey respond to information about the cost of generating electricity from different sources. And because this survey was particularly focused on nuclear power, we actually had two treatments on the cost for nuclear power. So this is what the survey respondents saw, at least those who are not in the control group. They're told that the IEA is a leading source of information on energy resources and they've estimated the cost of generating electricity from these different sources. And then in the first treatment group receives this information as you see it without the red. I'm just highlighting the red because we changed the nuclear power information. So we align information on the cost of generating electricity from these different sources. And clearly here we're telling them that coal natural gas are less expensive, are the least expensive, less expensive than nuclear power and oil and renewables are quite expensive. Again, these numbers have changed quite a bit. So don't get hung up on the particular numbers. This is also 2007 before we've seen sort of the really declining cost and solar power in particular as well as the declining cost of natural gas. What's most important is sort of getting a sense of the rank ordering and what people are being told about these energy sources. And this was information that was about right when the survey was conducted in 2007. And then the second treatment gets the same set of information we've only changed nuclear power, right? So if our framework is correct, what we might imagine happening here is across these two treatments, people who get this information should be more enthusiastic about nuclear power than people that get this information, right? As well as people who get this treatment compared to the control, maybe more enthusiastic about fossil fuels and less enthusiastic about renewables because we're giving them information about the cost of these two or these different ways of generating electricity. Okay, so here's what we find. So just to orient you, this is the control group. What these numbers reflect is a sort of score on our scale of energy preferences. We're zero, the bottom of the scale was people who wanna see us not use this energy source at all and then the highest value of five is a six point scale would wanna see us increase that energy source a lot. So what you're seeing in the control group reflects what I've already showed you, right? People are really enthusiastic about renewables, solar wind and hydro, a little bit less so for coal and oil and natural gas is somewhere in the middle and nuclear power somewhere in the middle as well, okay? So for everything but nuclear power, I combined the results for those two treatments because they got the same information and there's really no difference between the two treatments. But let me show you what happens here. So if for coal, given the fact that you were presented with price information on coal, what you see is that there is an increase in support for utilizing coal of about half a point in our scale which in survey world is a pretty big effect. So it's a pretty big jump in people's preferences given this pretty modest treatment about what the price is of coal relative to other energy sources. Similarly, you see jumps in support although not quite as big for natural gas as well as for oil. But then look down at the renewables here and you'll see that we find pretty big effects but they're negative, right? So when people are told that renewables are more expensive, they, it decreases their enthusiasm. It decreases the amount of support they have for utilizing these energy sources. And then finally for nuclear power, recall we had two treatments. This was $150 per month, this was $100 per month. Relative to the control, you see an increase in support for nuclear power as well consistent with that information. So what we do here and what we do in other survey experiments is manipulate this information about costs or climate change or local pollution to get a sense of whether or not these attributes are sort of causally prior. They're actually determining people's attitudes about energy and work in advance that they do. Okay, so let me pull back one more time to sort of summarize this part of the talk. So people give more weight to harms than costs. Local environmental harms is about two to three times. Harms matter more than costs for all fuels, right? So this framework about harms and costs works across these different fuel types. So you're talking about wind or solar or nuclear or coal, the same basic story holds. What I didn't show you, but I want to sort of get back to you is the fact is sort of the overall importance of these attributes. So it turns out that just knowing how people perceive harms and cost explains about 80% of the explained adherence of energy choices, which basically means that other factors that I haven't showed you don't matter very much. Party does not matter very much. It's really hard to find any issue in public policy where party is not a driving factor, okay? Political ideology is not mattering. Where you live is not mattering very much. Education, income, they matter on the margins, but we can explain people's preferences, at least 80% of their preferences, simply by knowing if they perceive a fuel choice to be harmful to the environment or costly or vice versa. So these attributes really do a lot of the heavy work of explaining people's attitudes. And finally, the point to emphasize is that climate change is at best secondary, right? People worried about climate change is not driving their energy choices, at least as they express them in a survey. And in some cases, they're completely uncorrelated with energy choices, although this has begun to change a little bit in our later years. Okay, how am I doing on time? Okay. So let me conclude by talking about policy implications and what this all means. We're very interested in what this all means for climate change. That is sort of the policy and political question at stake here. And frankly, when we got through this part of the analysis, we were a little distressed, a little concerned, right? Because one of the key findings here is that people's concern, people worry about climate change is not influencing how they want to sort of see the electricity that are allocated across sources. And electricity certainly is not the only contributor to greenhouse gases, but it's a very large one, one that has to be reckoned with if we're going to address both domestic and international emissions. So again, just to summarize our distress, I guess, concern about climate change is not a driving factor in people's energy choices. And analysis that I didn't show you, but we also do in the book, is that when you ask people about their climate change preferences, people, for example, express a very low willingness to pay to address climate change. So if you ask them, we did a sort of variety of different kind of experimental as well as other survey approaches, how much they're willing to pay to address climate change, half the public's willing to pay nothing. Another 20%, maybe to pay $5 extra per month on their electricity bill, maybe $10. Nothing at the scale that we're probably talking about to make the kind of transition to decarbonize the electricity sector. People's willingness to pay for climate change is really low. It also turns out that, as you probably all know, climate change is not a highly salient issue for most of the public, so places like Gallup ask every month the most important problem question as we talk about it in the survey world, where they ask people to volunteer with the most important problem facing the country, and they tend to say the economy or healthcare today would probably be terrorism, right? Climate change, energy environment, generally registers about 1%, sometimes 2%. 2% if oil prices are really high, in essence, right? Climate change is not a factor that's on top of people's minds. Also interesting is they ask people about what's the most important to them in terms of environmental issues, and Gallup has been doing this for now for about 20 years, climate change generally ranks at the very bottom. When people express their level of concern for different environmental problems, climate change is pretty much at the very bottom, at the top are things like air quality, water quality, pollution in rivers and streams, drinking water quality, things like that, right? So you put this together with our survey results, it leaves you thinking and worried about, well, how do we move forward towards changing the energy sector if climate change is not such an important factor in how people think about this? And a final point to make, and this comes out of the survey experiments, is that education may actually be counterproductive. I don't want to take that too far, so don't quote me, there's any media in the room, but which is to say, if you were to correct some of the misperceptions that people have about energy, it may not actually lead you to more support for renewables in particular if people are getting the costs wrong, right? So that is something we have to sort of bear in mind that just being people over the head with more information may not be sufficient for a change. Okay, so how do we get out of this box? So if we think broadly about policies that are out there to deal with greenhouse gas emissions from the electricity sector, there are three that we commonly talk about. The first are some sort of regulation of emissions. You think about it as regulatory caps, right? This is essence of what the Clean Power Plan is, right? EPA is telling states that we're going to cap your greenhouse gas emissions at such a level and we're gonna allow you to figure out a way to reach those limits. You can think of state renewable portfolios standards or other clean energy mandates in a similar way. More indirect, but the idea here is that we're going to change emissions through some sort of regulatory mandate. Okay, that's one set of policies that we have out there. A second set of policies, of course, is cap and trade. And five years ago, everyone expected cap and trade at the national level is gonna be the way we pursued this problem, right? It was the central piece of legislation that made it through the U.S. House, but not the Senate in 2009, 2010. So in essence, cap and trade is regulation, a regulatory cap, along with tradable allowances, right? So you're allowing regulated sources to buy and sell permits in a way to reduce the cost, the overall cost to society of reaching these emissions gains, right? Everyone agrees this is a more efficient approach than regulation itself, okay? So we have regulation, we have cap and trade, then of course is the carbon tax. Carbon tax, and if you ask pretty much any economist we'll tell you that this is the preferred policy instrument, right? You can imagine this as being both a usage tax or a production tax, and everyone agrees that's more efficient than a regulatory cap, and people generally agree that it would be easier to implement than a cap and trade system, okay? So generally speaking, these are the three policies people talk about in the climate area, at least in terms of electricity generation. So what do we know about public support for these policies? And what we did essentially was grab a whole bunch of surveys, including some that Barry had done to ask about people's climate policy preferences, and we try to come up with sort of a rough average of people's support for these different areas of climate policy, and what you find is the following, you find really large substantial support for regulation, right, for the EPA taking direct action to regulate carbon dioxide greenhouse gas emissions, okay? 75, 80% in some surveys. You find it's a perfect cap and trade to be a little bit less resound. Some surveys you find bare majorities that support others, bare majorities of opposition, right? And people generally, you know, you don't have strong support one way or the other, it's just sort of there. Carbon tax, there's the most noise around this, and it's because people are less familiar with carbon taxes, and a lot depends on the level of the tax and how you might use the revenue, right? And survey questions are all over the map in terms of how they assess the tax at what level and how revenue might be used. So support ranges from very low, 25%, in some cases you can get up to over 50 depending on how you talk about the revenue, right? So revenue people have talked about is there being, you know, a dividend back to taxpayers, it could be used to invest in clean energy, energy efficiency programs, it could be used to pay down the deficit. Lots of different ways you could frame that question, and that explains why there's so much varying in surround that answer, or that policy. But the big picture here is there's pretty large public support for regulation. That's the main point I want you to bear to keep in mind. So it raises this puzzle, right? So why do Americans prefer what is, everyone agrees to be the least efficient, the worst way to go about reducing emissions from electricity sector, right? If you are interested in efficiency and probably simplicity, it would be a carbon tax, right? It would not be a clean power plan or anything akin to a clean power plan like we're seeing now. But Americans really want something like the clean power plan or more generally regulation on carbon. So it's a bit of a puzzle and this brings us back to the research that we did and our findings, right? So it turns out that people see a direct link or connection between those attributes of how they view energy that I talked about, local environmental impacts, perceptions of costs, but particularly local environmental harms with EPA regulation. They are making a connection, they believe that through EPA regulation, you're actually going to achieve something beyond climate policy. You're going to generate these dividends in terms of reducing the local environmental impacts that they care most about. Moreover, they don't see these dividends, these co-benefits alongside carbon taxes or cap and trade. Another way to put that is people view EPA regulation as environmental policy and people like environmental policy in this country. They view these other instruments as climate policy and people who are either divided on climate policy or don't know what climate policy is, right? So, and I'm going to show you some evidence of this, but in essence, the regulatory approach that people favor is because they're a little bit more comfortable with it and they view it as producing things that they care about and they don't see these other climate approaches as doing the same thing. So, let me show you evidence of this. So, what you're looking at here is a graphic that is trying to explain public support across these three different policy instruments, a regulatory cap, a cap and trade system, or carbon tax, and the very bottom here is looking at just the factor that that dark gray people's climate change concern. So, just knowing how concerned people are about climate change or global warming explains some of the overall support for these energy sources. And what you see is people who are most concerned about climate change, it generates quite a bit of support for cap and trade about the same support as a regulatory cap. So, in essence, just knowing climate concern, it puts the cap and the cap and trade on par with each other. Carbon tax less so, just being concerned about climate change is not strongly correlated with wanting a carbon tax, okay? Which really interesting is what happens when you add on perceptions of those environmental attributes or those energy attributes that I have been talking about throughout the morning. When you add on perceptions of the environmental harms of traditional fuels, the costs of traditional fuels, as well as alternatives, what you see is that you can explain or you can generate, if you will, high levels of predicted support for a regulatory cap, right? So, this is all done through statistical modeling, which I won't go into, but you get to a point where just knowing one's concern about climate change, also knowing their concerns about these attributes of energy generates about 80% support for a regulatory cap. But those same factors don't generate an equivalent amount of support in cap and trade or carbon tax, right? So, in essence, they help a little bit, particularly the local environmental harms, which is associated here with traditional fuels, but they don't generate the same amount of overall support for these climate policies. So, the point here is that people are making a linkage in terms of regulation and the environmental harms associated with these energy choices, and they see it as being part of the cap but not part of these cap and trade and carbon tax policies. Okay, so what does this mean for the political implications? So, two take-home points, and then I'm gonna stop and open up for discussion. Concern about climate change is not enough to deal with climate change, at least in this country, okay? Even though a majority of the public, in most surveys that you have seen, and including the stuff that we've done, just because a majority expresses concern about climate change does not mean a majority is going to favor a particular policy approach to climate change, okay? This may explain why we've had large support in this country for concern about climate change for a long time. We have yet to see at least a Congress that has responsive in terms of passing national legislation. But the good news is that there's another way, another path, if you will, towards getting towards climate policy. There are actually multiple paths. The one that we focus the most on and we think there's a lot of promise for is to address climate change by pursuing policies that are at least less explicitly about climate, okay? So one example would be going after regulating the co-pollutants of carbon dioxide that come out of the coal-fired power plants in particular, right? So if you regulate mercury, or if you regulate particulate matter, you're going to drive up the cost of draining electricity from coal. You're going to drive coal out of the market. You're going to get cleaner sources. And as a derivative, you're going to get less carbon, right? The policy itself does not explicitly target carbon dioxide, but you get the same benefit, right? So that's one important strategy. And frankly, it's one you've seen this current administration pursue. And while EPA does not talk about climate change when they're advocating, let's say, the toxics rule for mercury or the Titan-Yosone standard, which they did just in the past couple of months, if you talk to people inside the administration, they will often tell you this is part of a larger strategy to deal with climate change. This is all about making coal more expensive and allowing alternatives, natural gas, and renewables to enter the marketplace on a more cost-competitive basis. The other important dimension is in terms of communication strategies, right? So rather than talk more and more about climate change, which frankly is what the environmental movement has done for the last two decades, right? If we can just convince people that it's gonna be really, really bad. Temperatures are gonna get really hot. We're gonna have really bad extreme weather. That's going to convince them that they're gonna push their policymakers to make changes in policy. The implications of our study is that that may not be very effective. In fact, it hasn't been very effective over the course of the last couple of decades. If instead you talk about clean energy and dirty energy and have in your mind these attributes that really push people's attitudes on energy, you're likely to make more progress, particularly if you push on the local environmental impact which people care about. And just one anecdote on this, I'll say this in conclusion, some of you may be familiar with the Sierra Clubs Beyond Coal Campaign, which has been very effective in leading to the retirement of coal-fired power plants. They take a lot of credit for this. Natural gas is part of the story as is EPA regulation, but we've had in this country about, it's over 250 now I think power plants, coal-fired power plants retired in the past five or six years. If you look at the messaging of the Sierra Club around the retirement of these power plants, it's really not about climate change. They are talking about asthma, particularly in kids. They're talking about other respiratory ailments that come along with burning coal, talking about toxics. They are not talking about climate change because they know that it also has not been a very effective strategy, right? They care about climate change. They care about asthma too, right? They care about local environmental pollution, but fundamentally they care about climate change. That's what the Beyond Coal Campaign is about. But they've adjusted a communication strategy in a way where they're speaking less and less about climate change. And I think we're seeing the same thing, we'll see the same thing materialized with respect to implementation of the EPA's Clean Power Plan. When states go about trying to change their electricity sector, they're gonna be talking more about energy attributes and clean and dirty energy as opposed to climate change. I think I'll leave it there. Thank you. Thank you very, very much. Giving us lots to think about and talk about and hopefully discuss and we have 25 minutes to do that. So I'll open it up. Just so you know, there's a boom microphone here. So as long as you talk so that we can hear you, you should be able to be picked up. All right, so, go ahead. Yeah, so it seems like the local farms is just keeping the picture. I don't know if you collected data that sort of allowed me to look at this, but what if you have just any thoughts, but I'm curious whether you have any sense of people's concerns being related to actual location, like where they actually are living and how much, you know, how many of our farms are in their area or, you know, did they ever go over that kind of thing? And is it kind of the, like their real perceived, like I am concerned about the power plant down the road, or is it a more abstract, I'm concerned about local pollution that might occur around the future, you know? Yeah, so it's a great question. So we don't directly look at, so the basis for our analysis is people's perceptions of these harms or costs, and, you know, people obviously have different experiences and that their perceptions may be based on local realities or may be based on their just general knowledge about the sector, right? So, but one could sort of, you know, dive down into particular communities to sort of see if these things are more salient, I guess, but we haven't done that. There's some research that looks at sort of these more localized effects, particularly around wind and nuclear power, and sometimes you get results which may be counterintuitive. So, for example, on nuclear power, people who tended to be the most supportive of nuclear power are people who live closest to nuclear power plants, despite what I sort of showed you, right? And it goes to the fact that generally speaking, unless mishandled, we can handle the hazardous waste problem with radioactive waste problem with nuclear power. And the probability of an accident is actually pretty low and people who live near these plants understand a lot better than, let's say, people who are thinking the abstract. So we don't draft direct evidence to that and our interest is more sort of these national surveys, but there's some evidence that those could work in different directions, I guess. Yeah. Yeah, thanks so much for sharing this great research. So I was actually optimistic with all the results you showed about how the harms matter more and people love renewables and all that stuff and I'd actually worked a lot on the Beyond Coal campaign in Indianapolis that shut down the Harding Street plant there and of course that plant's being replaced with natural gas just like almost all of the coal plants are and so that's where I'm more pessimistic and I'm wondering, you talked about the stability of your results, but that would seem to be the one area where there's the most movement is growing people who want more natural grass increasing over time and maybe consistent with your model. It seemed like people thought the costs were going down and the harms were going down somehow and so I'm wondering what you thought about that and what's, if there's something behind those changes, maybe that takes you outside of your data, but just why people think harms are going down and if that's just because people have natural gas or what it might be. Right. So I actually drove by that Harding plant my way up yesterday. So again, going back to the conceptual framework, right? So if what matters are local environmental harms and secondarily, perceptions of cost in particular, right? So one thing we've seen over the past decade is that the cost of natural gas has come down significantly, right? Particularly compared to when we started this in 2002 which is pre-fracking, free, the free, the natural, the shale gas revolution to use that term, right? So people are beginning to understand that and it factors into their preferences, right? Which is gonna, it actually increases the weight people are putting on it because I think it's more salient because it's more in their face, they're learning about it as we speak. They're probably also learning about comparing at least natural gas to coal, right? And whatever you think about natural gas as compared to coal, it's a cleaner way of generating electricity. I think the concern people have is that the natural gas boom is crowding out renewables, right? And that's not something that we directly get to. You can only indirectly get to it. So that's sort of a longer term question, but if the framework is right and what matters are perceptions of harms, I think people understand natural gas already. So you're not gonna get much more bang for your buck in terms of changing people's impressions of the harms, but the cost, that's what's changing. And that's gonna bump up support for natural gas which leads to them replacing it with natural gas opposed to just a full-out retirement. Thanks again for agreeing on this, it's really interesting. I was curious in terms of the mechanisms of the survey when you have sort of the hypothetical scenarios where people seem to be more concerned with harm and cost when you transition to something that sort of solidifies that cost more in a way that the carbon tax and you pitch it to whoever's taking the survey as you're forcing them to eternalize the cost of the harm at that point. How do you differentiate between sort of aversion to that sort of internalization of the harm versus aversion to the framing of climate policy? How did you sort of hone in on that? That was like the key sticking point for those people versus the fact that they were now being asked to sort of visualize the cost in a way that they were going to pay for it. It's a good question. So we, I think this part explains why there's a lot of variance around survey work on carbon taxes. It's a lot depends on how direct you make the cost to people, right? So in stuff I didn't show you, we did a bunch of survey experiments where we made the cost much more direct on people by either increasing the cost of gasoline, which is the way most people directly consume energy. Even they know more about the gasoline prices. They even do their own electricity bills, for example. But also their electricity bill, right? So actually the prices people pay. And people, let's just say, are not very enthusiastic about paying more for any of those things, right? So they're the cost is directly being shown to them, demonstrated. As opposed to some of the work we did and others have done on carbon tax, when you talk about that revenue, either being given back to consumers through some sort of tax swap or through a dividend of sorts, or invested in clean energy or things like that, you tend to get a little bit of a higher bank for your buck. I think because people are not realizing, at least directly, that they're gonna be actually paying those surcharges, right? So this is not only unique to carbon tax. This is probably true of most sort of taxes in general, used taxes, right? People are really resistant to paying the cost of this. And I think it's safe to say it also explains some of the support for regulation because people don't fully recognize that just because we're regulating, your costs are gonna go up, at least in the short term, but it's a less direct connection to get the mechanism as you're suggesting. So I think that's a big part of the story. Yeah. So two questions, first one really quick. I was surprised about to see Fukushima show up in the nuclear plot. And then secondly, as far as the cost goes, there is some current costs with like solar and then there's like a future expected cost. And I don't know what I'm thinking about my desire to use solar. I know it's expensive now, but the cost will go down where nuclear and coal probably won't. Did you see that in the data? Right. My first point on Fukushima, so this is reflected in our survey work as well as others. There was a short, at least in the United States, there was a short term decline in support for nuclear power after Fukushima that basically dissipated quickly thereafter, which is quite surprising given how much media coverage that the accident got. But we didn't see the kind of response here that you saw in Germany, right? Or they really moved away from nuclear power even to go towards coal as an alternative. And so it really did not register much of an effect on US opinion on nuclear power. It's very different than the case of Three Mile Island, which happened in the late 1970s where support for nuclear power declined pretty quickly and never really recovered after that. So that's just empirically that sort of the story. It's been different cross-nationally, at least in the United States, didn't have much of an effect. On your second question about costs, right? So, I think that's a good question. I mean, people don't, I think one thing that's clear is that people have a misperception about the cost of renewables. And we're trying people to think about today, so like what's the current situation is, right? Not so much about expectations of the future. But it's certainly possible that people are thinking about the future when they're responding to survey questions, right? I think what gives us some confidence that that's not happening, or at least it's not driving results is the survey experiments where we actually can control the information they're getting, or at least in the short term, right? And we can sort of see a shift in just those getting the information compared to that control. So it gives us some confidence that it's working the way we expect. But this is both the fun and challenging thing about studying in such a fast-moving area, right? Is that solar costs are a lot different now than they were when we began this in 2002, right? And in some places, because of policy, it's actually reached parity with coal and natural gas, right? Because of policy. So are people factoring that into their perceptions? I don't think much, because I think level of knowledge is pretty low still. But for some, perhaps. So I don't know if that's responsive, but that's kind of how, yeah, you think about it. Hello, thanks for your talk. I had a question about energy efficiency and whether or not you look at that at all, or there are changes in attitudes or values. Yeah, so we did not look at this. So I can't speak to our data because we didn't ask any questions, at least that wasn't part of our core analysis. But others have asked about energy efficiency. People are generally enthusiastic about energy efficiency. There's actually some polling going back to the 1970s from the oil crises about energy efficiency. And the public generally at that time, I think this is still true today, we're very supportive of sort of it in principle. The question is how do you implement it, right? From a policy standpoint, I think we know less, whether it be at a mandate or something else. But generally speaking, people are comfortable with energy efficiency if the mandates are being placed on, let's say, people who manufacture appliances, right? Or fuel, if more efficient cars. I think because, again, it goes back to the question about cost, people are not recognizing that that might increase their costs. So I can't say much more on that, but that's kind of what I know. Regard. Go ahead. My question is about the methods that your survey methods and who you were talking to. I'm wondering in part, whether this is like how big the samples were rather than representative of people across the country, but also whether, I know a lot of surveys under-represent young people because they don't have landmines. And so those graphs might look very different in 15 or 20 years because you're not talking to some of those folks. So I'm wondering, and also sort of voters versus non-voters, different regions of the country. Can you speak a little bit about those, Sure. So the surveys we did were all internet surveys, but they were not getting too far in the weeds. They, most of the surveys were done by a firm called Knowledge Networks. They since changed names, I forgot their new name, which their basic method is to, they randomly contact folks through rampage dialing. They identify folks to respond to their surveys. They've created a massive online sample of a couple of million people. And then they draw random samples from that and you can weight it so that it reflects the characteristics of the national population. So these surveys are all done of adults, 18 plus, voters and non-voters alike. And they are done in a way to, as long as the sampling is uncorrectly to be representative of the public at large. The way that this particular company deals with the digital divide issue is that they essentially give internet access to free to those who don't have it. So they are capturing that segment of the population, which in 2002 was much larger than this today, who didn't have internet. Different than the cell phone question, which is more relevant if you're doing telephone surveys. People are less frequently doing telephone surveys for that reason. The cohort effect is a really interesting one, right? So we are capturing the population as it stands from the composition across age, right? But it could be, we do control for age, we control for region, all those kinds of things. So I don't think it's driving the results. But it could be that preferences differ in some parts of the country and for some ages. And over time, as those folks become a larger part of the sample, you might get to different kinds of results. So just for example, young people tend to be less enthusiastic about nuclear power, right? So over time, if that continues, you might have something look even different on nuclear power. But these polls were designed to be reflective of the US population as it is at any given time in this event. Assuming that people's preferences stayed relatively flat based on their, can you make any reasonable predictions about what those charts will look like in 10 or 15 years, just based on new demographics which supports robots moving on? Yeah, I guess I would think about it a little differently. So if our story, because overall, demographics are not playing a big part of the story, right? The big driving factors here are people's perceptions of these energy attributes, right? So I guess my response would be is these attributes are gonna change. Perceptions are gonna change as things develop in the marketplace, right? So for example, as the cost of solar and wind power come down because of technology improvements, we should see even more enthusiasm, right? If the same time, if we were able to ever to figure out carbon capture and storage technology, that is a way to make coal cleaner. You might actually see rising support for coal. So it's on those two dimensions, making things cleaner or driving the cost down as the market produces improvements or changes in those factors or other market conditions just change generally as we're seeing with natural gas, that's what I would expect to shift people's preferences over the long term. That the age, party, region are just not playing, they're not big factors in our analysis. So you might find some cohort kind of effects, but I think they're on the margins compared to these other things. Thank you. You just mentioned party affiliation. I'm wondering how that affects the lack of popularity for carbon tax, if that was measured at all. And then the second question about the carbon tax was you used the word efficiency. I heard the word efficiency a couple of times in comparing carbon tax to policy. I'm wondering about effectiveness as opposed to efficiency, how those differ. Right, so when I was thinking about efficiency, it was sort of in the textbook way, right? So as people design a carbon tax or think about designing carbon taxes or even cap and trade, in terms of efficiency, what I have in mind is the fact that you can achieve the same level of reductions in whatever you're targeting, in this case, carbon dioxide or greenhouse gases, at a lower cost. The whole idea of the carbon tax or cap and trade is that the reductions occur places where it's less costly to do so, right? And for CO2, you don't care where those actually occur geographically. So that's what I meant by efficiency. The easy implementation is a little trickier because we don't have lots of examples of carbon taxes. They're a handful across the world, but nothing on the scale of an economy the size of the United States. So I think that's mostly a sort of conceptual thing. We actually don't know the answer to that. But people who have thought about the design of carbon taxes, you know, you can sort of put them upstream in a way that they're pretty, they're not that intrusive on consumers. They'll pay the cost, but the implementation is pretty straightforward. Your first question was about, right? So everything I showed you controls for both political party identification as well as political ideology. And they're just not driving factors once you control for people's perceptions of harms and cost in these energy attitudes. On the carbon tax specifically, you know, there is a divide. There's actually divide of all those policy instruments by party. It's less true on regulation though. And this has been borne out as we speak on things like DPA's Clean Power Plan where majorities of both parties generally express support for that kind of an approach. And not surprisingly, that's why the administration has been advocating this kind of an approach, right? Because the public is at least less objective to it. I mean, less, they're objecting less. But there's actually pretty good support. One last question. Yeah, I'm wondering what the messaging of the proposal for the cap and trade was back in 2009, just in 2010. If that played a part in why it didn't get through the Senate, if there was another kind of primary reason why that didn't happen. Great question. There's actually been several different, lots of different sort of retrospective analysis as to what happened with that piece of legislation. And in general narrative you hear or the people think is that President Obama had to make a choice between healthcare and climate and he chose healthcare. Didn't put his personal weight behind it. But on messaging you know, I think what you saw it was presented as climate policy, not clean energy policy, I think that's fair. Barry might disagree. But moreover opponents talked, they didn't actually even say cap and trade, they said cap and tax, right? And they're looking at numbers like this from their own internal focus groups and polling and know that the tax doesn't, doesn't, it's not very highly supported, right? So the messaging was to really make this about climate policy rather than something else. I think the distinction is looking how the EPA has unrolled or unveiled the Clean Power Plan, which again is basically about climate change, but they tend to use frames more about public health, a little bit about cost, trying to alleviate people's concerns that this is gonna lead to really high electricity prices, I guess mixed assets. And even when they talk about carbon, they say carbon pollution, right? That's not, that's not by accident, right? I mean they're using the word pollution because people don't like pollution. And it's easier to generate support for doing something about it rather than thinking about climate change or sea level rise or warmer temperatures or things like that. So I think you are seeing, you see a change over time and how folks at the administration EPA and Washington are trying to talk about this issue. Please join me again in thanking you. Thank you.