 Thanks for showing up for my energy talk here. This is going to be an interesting talk for me here as well, because I'm curious as to whether I'm going to get through one fourth of my slides or a third of my slides and see how that goes. When I was a graduate student here at Auburn many, many years ago, I focused on environmental economics. That was my dissertation focus. And I took some classes in that, of course, because I was thinking that this would be a difficult area for people who are free market oriented. And I wanted to sort of conquer those problems, at least for myself, to figure out how markets and environmental issues connect. And it's been an interesting journey for me to learn more about this. And I'm hoping I can pass on a little bit of this to you. So we're going to talk about how Austrians would tend to think about energy and about government policy toward energy and externalities, some of these terms that you may have heard about if you've taken a basic economics course, where if you take a typical principles of economics course, you're going to hear about market failure. And they're going to talk about externalities and public goods and market power and those kinds of things. And so I want to tackle some of that here. And then focus on government and energy policy, which is maybe more timely now than it has been in a long time. And what about what happens when government makes energy decisions instead of leaving this to the market? What about alternative energy when there's this so-called pursuit for efficiency? What are we to make of that? Don't we want efficiency? Isn't that a good thing? Don't we want to conserve scarce resources? And so we may want to think about this carefully because the terms that we use, sometimes we use them in a different way than the mainstream does. And we want to be able to communicate and help other people understand where we're coming from. So which of these vehicles here on the screen is more efficient? Well, I mean, that's kind of the tendency is for us to look at the one that gets the best. Well, I can't say gas mileage, right? But the gas mileage equivalent or something. On the other side, you've got an old Ford Bronco. But efficiency is not something that's entirely about getting a certain number of miles with a minimum energy input. There's more to it than that. It could be that for some purposes, the Ford Bronco is the more efficient mode of transportation. If I wanted to tow a boat, the leaf would be a pretty inefficient way to do that. Bronco might be a little better for that purpose. So it depends on what your goals are. And from the point of view of Austrian economics, we respect those individual goals and we understand that efficiency is about allowing people to accomplish the goals that they have in not trying to impose our view of efficiency on others. So that brings us to the concept of catalaxi. I don't mean catalac, but catalaxi. And hopefully you've heard that term before. That's just the study of monetary exchanges. And in a catalaxi, there is no overall hierarchy of goals. There's only the separate objectives of the individuals who are making decisions. So economic efficiency is compatible with Austrian economic theory, but has to be restricted to determining whether an individual's chosen means are consistent with that individual's goals. We can't say, make a blanket statement that the Nissan Leaf car is more efficient than the old Ford Bronco. We have to think about it in terms of the individual's preferences and the individual's means to accomplish those goals. Catalactic efficiency means that the institutional setting, which hopefully includes strong property rights, that that promotes economic efficiency. That is, maybe property rights are protected insofar as individual plans can be accomplished. We don't try to make interpersonal comparisons of ends. We don't try to say, well, the person that chose the Ford Bronco is somehow choosing badly compared to the person that chose the Nissan Leaf. We can't make those kind of interpersonal comparisons of individuals. Now, when we look at these institutions, we can compare and see what happens when we've got competing institutional frameworks. And so here, I like to show this picture to my classes. It's a picture of the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, which share an island in the Caribbean. And if you look at the Haitian side of the border, you can see that there are virtually no trees. Someone is, or multiple people have cut down the trees on the Dominican side. There are a lot of trees. Why is this? Well, it's a difference in institutional frameworks. So if you look at the Economic Freedom Index, and this is taking the number from the Fraser Institute study, which I think they update every couple of years or so, you can see each, I think they rank about 165 countries where they can get data and they try to give each country a score on how economically free they are. And for Haiti, they are ranked number 103. And the Dominican Republic is ranked number 62. And if we drill down to the component of that index, it looks at the protection of property rights, which would be the most relevant for understanding what's happening with the forests in the two countries, then Haiti's rating is 2.79, and the Dominican Republic's rating is much higher at 4.82. This is, in this case, literally visible from the air. You can see where that border is by just looking at the deforestation on one side and not the other. So Roy Cardado wrote that efficiency is an individual goal-seeking problem. It is not a value maximization problem. We can't compare those values across individuals and that's something that we as Austrian economists keep in the forefront of our minds as we're working through these kinds of problems. So from the Austrian perspective, efficiency is attained when those legal institutions allow people maximum latitude to pursue their own ends. You say, well, where's energy economics of this? We're getting there. So we will see conflicts over the use of scarce goods, but the Austrian economists, if they're being consistent with the Austrian framework, is not gonna say, well, this end is more valuable than that end. It's more important to save gas than to tow a boat or something like that. We're gonna be looking at the individual's own decisions about what they want most and what their hierarchy is for their values. Murray Rothbard in a chapter in Mario Rizzo's book, Time Uncertainty and Disequilibrium, says we cannot decide on public policy, tort law, rights or liabilities on the basis of efficiencies or minimizing of costs. This is important for us to recognize as we go through problems related to energy because it's a strong temptation in our current environment to say, well, this particular type of energy is more efficient than this other type of energy or this is higher cost than some other type of energy. So when we think about what really matters, it's tempting to say, well, let's look at different levels of pollution across different energy sources and try to find an energy source that minimizes pollution concentrations. Well, this is not going to account for the varying subjective valuations of individuals. And from our framework, we can't make these kinds of comparisons of coal versus natural gas versus wind power versus solar power, et cetera. So if you use pollution concentrations to try to measure environmental quality, well, we're not taking into account people's varying tolerances for different environmental qualities. Some people are willing to live in a city that has more pollution than in a countryside that has less pollution and that's a trade-off they're willing to make because of maybe job opportunities or amenities that they have in the city that they would not have in an area with maybe a cleaner atmosphere. So people will trade off air quality against other goods and they'll accept sometimes a higher degree of pollution in exchange for something else that they want. And sometimes people adapt. They can, even if the ambient air is more polluted, maybe I don't spend a lot of time in the ambient air because I work in an indoor space or something. And so that's an adaptation that people will make to varying environmental conditions. So when we have government policy that tries to favor one type of energy over another and try to subsidize this type or penalize that type, then it's getting into an interpersonal comparison of ends. It's violating that ability of individuals to make their own choices about what they value most. And that takes us to the problem of knowledge and incentives, really a dual problem that Austrian economists have focused on in many, many works. Art Cardin has pointed out that when we're trying to compare the effects of different regulations or compare the effect of a regulation versus a market environment, we don't have the information necessary to determine whether a regulation works. We can't just tally up costs and benefits because that information is not available to us. He says the key difference between firms and governments is that firms have market tests for their decisions, whereas governments do not. So if government's making a regulation, it can't, it doesn't have a profit loss measure of its success or failure. It can't say, well, this is more profitable than that, so therefore we need to pursue the more profitable course of action. The second problem I'll talk about here is incentives. Elected officials are not angelic beings that have somehow managed to dispense with all of their human foibles and vices. They have vices at least as much as everyone else, and many would say more. You have to have a certain degree of aspiration to power in order to pursue political authority. And so we shouldn't expect elected officials or the appointed bureaucrats that are presiding over the creation of various regulations to be any more publicly interested than the average person on the street. That's, they are subject to the same human condition as the rest of us and are subject to falling victim to temptations to abuse their powers. So political incentives actually may discourage a long-term view. Now you hear the opposite. Well, the private sector is just gonna exploit the environment until it's all gone and then we're gonna be left with some kind of garbage planet. And if we trust our decisions to government officials and they'll take the long-term view and they'll make sure that we don't extract all the resources immediately, but we will continue to have them for future generations. And if anything, the opposite is true. Elected officials have to think about the next election. People who are owners of firms have to think very long-term. If they in a sense kill the goose that lays the golden egg, their profits in the future have to be factored into their stock valuations today. And if they kill off their future sources of income, then they're gonna feel the results of that immediately. So there's no particular reason to expect that the private sector is gonna have a worse set of incentives than governing officials. So just to give you an example of the knowledge problem that I mentioned first. Economists around the time I was in graduate school were very enthusiastic about the use of markets to trade pollution permits. This was a fairly new thing. In 1993, the EPA held an auction of sulfur dioxide permits. So if you bought a permit, if you were, say, a coal-fired electric power plant, you could buy a permit to pollute the atmosphere with a ton of sulfur dioxide, which is a byproduct of burning coal. And so the government said, we're gonna limit the total number of permits. And so therefore effectively, we're reducing the level of pollution, but we're gonna allow the market to work within these tight confines and we're gonna have trading of these permits. So if you're a coal-fired power plant that has a low cost of reducing pollution, then maybe you don't need a lot of permits. Then if you're allocated some permits, you can sell them off to other power plants where the cost of reducing pollution would be much higher. And so economists get all happy about this and they say, well, look, see, we're pursuing efficiency because the low cost avoiders of pollution are the ones that reduce pollution and the high cost avoiders of pollution are the ones that continue to emit the sulfur dioxide. So this turned out to be something that got people very happy about the market possibilities and see, we're really free market types here because look, it's an auction, there are prices. Well, you know, I see that to an extent, but there are some problems that I'll get into here in a minute. It did seem to have the effect of changing the levels of pollution emitted by various coal-fired power plants. So one of them stopped building a very expensive scrubber and bought permits instead and other electric utilities began upping their game on their pollution reduction techniques. So it did have some effect, but there is a serious calculation problem in this. How do we know that the number of permits that the government allocated was the right level? And there is no way to find that answer. That's the calculation problem. So if you think about using the air as a dumping ground for effluent, which I'm doing right now, I'm breathing. So I'm inhaling ambient air and I'm exhaling air that is a little lower in oxygen than what I breathed in and it's a little higher in carbon dioxide than what I breathed in. So I'm disposing of effluent right now as I stand here, okay? So I'm using the air as a dumping ground for effluent just like any production process will do. So if we talk about overusing air as a dumping ground for effluent, we're implying that we know the optimal rate of use as a dumping ground, that we know how much effluent is ideal. The EPA assumed back in 1993 and since then that it knew how many tons of sulfur dioxide were optimal to be released into the atmosphere. There are a few people that thought, well, the optimal would clearly be zero because we don't want any pollution, but the ideal level of pollution is almost never zero. That being said, we don't know where the ideal point is and government policy is not gonna help just because it's able to make a decree about this kind of thing. We don't know how many sulfur dioxide permits if we decided to pursue something, an alternative program like a carbon tax, we would have no idea what the optimal tax would be either. So tradable permits, even though they've got some elements of a market to them don't really solve that problem any more than a carbon tax does because the government can't really assess the optimal level. It can't know the cost that the pollution is causing, it can't know the benefits of pollution reduction. Now if you take a basic economics class or if you didn't see this in your principles level class you probably see this maybe in intermediate class or certainly if you took an environmental economics class of some kind, you'd see a graph like this and this is the basic model for depicting an externality where there's some kind of side effect of your production or consumption activity on some bystander. I'll talk later maybe briefly about Murray Rothbard's classic work on this topic which is law, property, rights and air pollution where he presents a very different view of this. But the mainstream is gonna throw this kind of diagram up on your board and they're gonna say, well look here's the market and the market's gonna find this equilibrium here where the marginal private cost equals the marginal private benefit because of course the private sector is not thinking about the side effects of their activities on other people. The paper mills not thinking about the bad smell that they're generating for the neighbors that's not really factored into their costs. So they're gonna produce more paper than maybe would be optimal because they're kind of, they're shoving off some of these costs onto other people who had nothing to do with the production process. They're not buying paper, they're not selling paper, they're just innocent bystanders or you've got a coal-fired power plant that's dumping particulates into the atmosphere. When I was a student at Clemson, there was a power plant, I think it heated water for the dorms or something and it burned coal and so if you parked your car in a certain spot that was not too far away from this then you'd come out to your car after a few days and you'd find a thin coating of coal dust on your car. So that's a cost that was being imposed on bystanders. Well, so the mainstream's gonna say, okay, well you've got this external cost and if we include that along with the private costs then we get this marginal social cost, not just the cost to the plant of their labor and their electricity and their water and their raw materials and whatever else. You've also now got this externality that we have to take into consideration. And so they'll say, well, see, there's this deadweight loss because you should be producing down here at Q star where it's efficient but we're actually producing here at QM, which is where the market produces and so we are creating this loss to society and wouldn't it be great if we could figure out a way for us to get back down here to Q star? How do we do that? Well, let's get the government involved and let's create some kind of tax or quota to make that happen. So you could impose a tax. You could have like a carbon tax or some other kinds of emission tax to discourage production. Basically, you're forcing the producer of the pollution to incorporate that external cost into the cost of their other inputs, their labor and electricity and so forth. And so this is very attractive to I would say the vast majority of economists who will say pretty much every mainstream textbook is gonna say this. Well, of course, this is what you do. If you don't do a tax, then you have a tradable permit system and you decide where Q star is, you allocate that many tradable permits and then the market sort of adjusts until the price of the permits is roughly equivalent to the tax that you would otherwise be imposing. Both of these approaches have the same knowledge problem. We don't really know what Q star is because we can't measure the externality costs. We don't know where that MSC curve actually is. And if the government misestimates that curve, which it is almost certain to do, we could end up maybe in a worse situation of what we started with. So let's suppose the government says, well, we've estimated the marginal social cost to be here and so the optimal quantity of the good is now QT. And the problem with this of course is that they so overshot with this tax that now the market is worse off than it was before. So even using their own analytical framework under their own analytical framework, they are still subject to fatal problems with this kind of policy. And not only do you have to think about that cost of overshooting, you have to think about the cost of the bureaucracy that you're employing to try to manage these emissions, to enforce imposed fines on violators to go around and inspect to make sure that people are following these permits or paying their taxes. You have political lobbying. You've got, maybe you've got an industry that is selling an alternative energy technology. And the industry that we're looking at here might be say coal-fired power plants. And so you've got an alternative energy lobby that says, well, we're gonna go after those coal-fired power plants not necessarily because we care so much about the environment, but because we know that the coal-fired power plants are going to end up shutting down and we'll get their business. So that takes us to a problem of incentives. When you have government that owns public property and that means oil reserves, it could mean rivers, any kind of possible natural resource, governing officials know that their ownership is not secure. They could lose the next election. So they're gonna think of themselves as only transitory owners, and therefore they're going to have an incentive to use the resource more rapidly than the private sector would that has a longer time horizon. And this is a point that Rothbard makes in man economy and state that the government official has to quickly exploit the property. So if you're some dictator of some oil-rich country, your incentive is to extract that oil as fast as you can, sell it off, use the proceeds to buy yourself political friends and stay in power as long as you want. Now I would add to this, that's not the only possible outcome if a government owns resources, although it is certainly possible. In other cases, the government might actually push under usage of a resource if the use becomes unpopular with powerful interest groups. You might have ideological motivations. You might have environmental groups that have a commitment to lower pollution levels. You might have some industry that wants to shut down their competition. So they want to disadvantage that competing source of energy. One of my favorite stories about the use of a resource and how much of a difference it can make when a private sector organization owns it versus government is, this is an older story, but there was an oil and gas deposit under a piece of land in Louisiana. And it was quite valuable and I think it was the Audubon Society that gained ownership over this piece of land, which was the Audubon Society is known for advocating for the preservation of wildlife, especially birds and so you got this environmentalist organization that now owns these oil and gas deposits. And so now that they own the oil and gas deposits, they decide we're gonna drill. And they did and maybe it made sense because of course you can use the proceeds from the drilling to maybe buy some other land and conserve it or do something else that preserves waterfowl or whatever your objective is. So it's not necessarily a bad thing if I'm sure they were very careful about how they went about it, but it just goes to show you if you own the resource your incentives are very different than if you're simply advocating or trying to regulate someone else's property, which is often what we see. So this takes us to alternative and renewable energy, which is something that of course has been pushed by governments and non-governmental organizations for quite some time and it seems the pace is picking up. I took my son on a trip to the Grand Canyon this summer and driving through West Texas, you see countless wind turbines and it's just amazing how much the countryside looks like this instead of the kind of flat grassland that you sort of associate with parts of the American West. Most of our energy production in the United States though is natural gas and crude oil. Natural gas, crude oil and coal are by far the largest sources of energy production in the US. This is 2021, even though wind power in particular but also solar power has been increasing, it is still a tiny fraction of our overall production. And if you look at the growth in energy production since 2015, so just a six year period, you see this. I mean, where's the big growth occurring? It's natural gas, which was 26 quadrillion BTUs in 2015 and is now 35.4 quadrillion BTUs of production. Big increases here for crude oil. Coal has dropped in production significantly. So what we've really seen, the big story in energy in the United States has been a switch from coal to natural gas and crude oil. Used to be most of our electricity was produced with coal and now natural gas has overtaken that and that's our largest single source of electricity production. Nuclear hasn't changed very much. There have been a lot of regulatory barriers to nuclear although that may be changing. There seems to be a resurgence of interest in nuclear power. This is natural gas plant liquids and I have to confess I'm not quite sure what that is, but I'll have to ask one of the oil people I know, but biomass, wind, hydro and then everything else. So there's been an increase in percentage terms, pretty big increase in wind from about two quadrillion BTUs to 3.3 in percentage terms, that's significant over six years and a little bit of an increase in hydro as well, although not a lot. Other would also include solar, by the way. Now one thing you know about wind power if you've seen West Texas and other places is these are massive installations and you can see them for many, many miles and I didn't get out of my car and walk over to one but my understanding is that they can be pretty loud and occasionally see a bunch of dead birds underneath them and there's a lot of other things that can be kind of problems with these kind of devices, not to mention that every time you build one you've got to get a bunch of rare minerals from generally parts of the world where they're scooping these things out of giant toxic pools and it's a mess, environmentally speaking. So it would be challenging, I would say, to say that wind power is a hands down wind for the environment, it may not be. You have to think about backup power for one thing which means that you have to think about natural gas which you can run at any time or crude oil or coal or nuclear which are all kind of baseload sources of power. Now if you look at consumption, primary energy consumption in 2021, again, the big story is that the elephant in the room here or maybe I should say dinosaur in the room is petroleum and natural gas, right? And a little bit from nuclear, about 8% and this is consumption so we produce a lot of energy some of which we export and Germany right now is crying out for natural gas because they're not sure if the Russian natural gas is gonna continue to flow. So we've been exporting a good bit and so that's why production and consumption don't match all the time. But then you've got renewable energy here which is all this other stuff, wood, biofuels, wind, hydro, solar, geothermal and all of that together is still just 12%. Now one of my kind of pet peeves is that people always use renewable when they mean environmentally friendly or when they mean low carbon if you're concerned about that kind of thing. Well, not all of this is environmentally friendly. In fact, I'll talk later about the problems that emerge especially in the developing world when people are burning wood and biomass and nuclear is pretty low carbon but it's not renewable so which is it? What is it that you're aiming for here? People talk about renewable energy as though that's some kind of panacea for environmental problems and as I hope I can show you it's not. So especially in the United States we may pay more for our energy we have been paying more for our energy but it's not like it's gonna produce the kind of devastating change to our standard of living that it would in some developing parts of the world and some of the policies that we just sort of roll with or we're not too upset about and we think, well, it's okay if we kind of shift away from cold and toward wind or something like that. We don't really think that much about it in a country where, yeah, well of course the refrigerator is gonna continue to run and the water is gonna continue to flow and the lights are gonna come on and maybe my electricity bill is gonna be 5% of my budget instead of 4% of my budget or something like that. So I'm not in a wealthy country like the United States I'm not gonna be as devastated by some of these policies as you see in some parts of the world where the efforts by the EU and by the United States and other developed parts of the world to influence the energy choices made in Ghana and Nigeria and other developing countries can be tremendously devastating. So LPG is liquefied petroleum gas roughly think like propane tanks and that kind of things like what you might run your grill off of, right? So if you put a regulatory limit on electricity and liquefied petroleum gas, you are creating an environment where indoor air pollution is going to persist and maybe get worse or many millions or even billions of people. Around three billion people cook and heat their homes using open fires and simple stoves burning biomass that's wood, that's dried animal dung, that's crop waste and then coal. Over four million people according to the World Health Organization die prematurely from illness attributable to the household air pollution from cooking with solid fuels meaning again wood, coal, charcoal, animal waste, that kind of thing. That is 45 times the number dying from natural catastrophes and they say the lack of access to electricity for at least 1.2 billion people many of whom then use kerosene lamps for lighting creates other health risks, burns, injuries, poisonings from fuel ingestion as well as constraining other opportunities for health and development which many of these victims are people that spend a disproportionate amount of time in a household of women, young children, et cetera. I did a report on this and some other things a number of years ago and actually ended up testifying before a congressional subcommittee in Washington about some of these problems when we start making these policy decisions without regard to the ripple effects on many people who can't afford to make these energy changes or don't have access to cleaner sources of energy because the policies have discouraged them. This is indoor air pollution, the death rate from indoor air pollution per 100,000 worldwide. And you'll notice the death rate from ambient particulate matter that's like your particles floating around in your atmosphere and then this large blue area is the death rate from indoor solid fuels. The little yellow area you can barely see is ozone. This is the United States, where's the blue area? Well, like one pixel or something right down there, okay? It just isn't a problem here. And so we tend to think, oh, well, it's not a problem but it is a problem if you live in, oh, I don't know, Haiti. It's a problem. Death rate from indoor solid fuels is actually quite a bit larger than the death rate from ambient particulate matter. So air pollution is largely an indoor air pollution problem in Haiti and we have large chunks of the world where government trying to discourage fossil fuels which includes liquefied petroleum gas means that people are stuck burning, very polluting wood, charcoal, dried animal dung and so forth. All right, so the darker the country is on the shaded map, the closer they are to their indoor air pollution goals. All right, so the lighter shaded countries are the ones with a more serious indoor air pollution problem, much of sub-Saharan Africa, much of South Asia, parts of South America. So these are very serious problems. And so you've got, in some of these same countries, you don't have access to electricity, liquid fuels, gaseous fuels like LPG. You don't have natural gas, they don't have access to as much of the cleaner burning fossil fuels and because they're fossil fuels, the European Union and non-governmental organizations around the world are discouraging investment in the development of these technologies. No, you can't have LPG, why? Well, it's a fossil fuel and we oppose fossil fuels and we're trying to wean ourselves from fossil fuels without any regard to the impact that this is having in some of these countries. Vice President of Nigeria has pointed this out and in fact some people have called, I don't think it was the Vice President of Nigeria, but another official in a developing country has called this carbon imperialism, okay? He says, as development finance institutions try to balance climate concerns against the need to spur equitable development and increase energy security, the UK, the US and the EU have all taken aggressive steps to limit fossil fuel investments in developing and emerging economies. Such policies often do not distinguish between different kinds of fossil fuels, well, coal, LPG, natural gas, they're all fossil fuels so they're all regarded as equally pernicious from the point of view of an international investment that's being governed by these ESG goals, environmental and social governance standards. Nor do they consider the vital role some of these fuels play in powering the growth of developing economies, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. Larry Ball in a paper, an article that was published just a few days ago, said in the midst of fertilizer shortages caused by the war in Ukraine and a growing food crisis, the EU has refused financial investment to help Ghana and other cash-strapped African countries boost domestic fertilizer production or develop their fossil energy sources because doing so would be inconsistent with their energy and environmental policies. Formerly a net exporter of electricity, Ghana has experienced complete power blackouts that have left millions living in the Ashanti region without water as well, including irrigation needed to grow food because the well pumps run on electricity. So this is like completely invisible to a lot of people who would tell you, well, yes, we need to wean ourselves from fossil fuels but do we even think about the impact this is having on people who don't know that the lights are gonna come on because they are so dependent on these sources of energy. I, in the report that I had mentioned earlier that where Dr. Terrell goes to Washington, one of the concerns at the time was mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants and there was this big push to try to suppress coal-fired power plants not only because of sulfur dioxide but because of this concern about mercury emissions. And what I found is I did, dug into the research on this is, well, the concern is that mercury could end up in from coal-fired power plants, it could go into water sources and then the fish consume it and then if you're a pregnant woman and you consume the fish, then you could accumulate this in your blood, it could cross the placental barrier to your baby and then the baby has brain damage or less brain development because of this mercury. And so it turns out if you're looking at freshwater farm-raised fish like a lot of you would be eating farm-raised catfish or tilapia or whatever, then that doesn't have a lot of that mercury. And so the connection I found from power plants in the United States to fetal brain development in the US was very, very tenuous. Just for perspective, Yellowstone National Park produces more natural mercury emissions than all eight of Wyoming's coal-fired power plants. And forest fires in the United States emit roughly the same amount of mercury as all US power plants. So it starts to look more and more like it's an ideologically-driven agenda than it is something that actually has to do with trying to improve human health. In fact, we find that in my study, I pointed out that if you discourage people from eating fish, because of this, I would say exaggerated concern about mercury in fish, then you may end up with people not consuming as much fish, maybe because they're afraid of it, and then they end up with nutritional problems because they've avoided a great source of protein and nutrients that you can obtain from eating fish. Let's talk about electric vehicles just briefly before I run out of time. If you look at the news, you see a lot of this about pushing for electric vehicles to replace natural gas-powered vehicles. California has banned the sale of gas-powered cars by 2035. GM is only going to produce EVs apparently by 2035. And what we're seeing is possible evidence of a bubble in EV production because it's one of those things where we pushed and we pushed with subsidies to try to encourage this. And then sort of like the infamous case with Solyndra, the solar panel company a number of years ago, we may end up with some of these countries ended up in bankruptcy because of the impossibility of converting our vehicle fleet to EVs in any kind of realistic way. So you can talk about green jobs and this has been one of those selling points for environmental policy, but if you count jobs, that's not really a good measure of policy success. And in fact, I read just a few days ago that the UAW Auto Workers Union in the US estimates that increasing electric vehicle manufacturing could result in the loss of 35,000 union jobs because it doesn't require as many parts. So we've got a real battle I would say ahead of us in trying to fight back against some of the misinformation about what green energy really means, about what's good for human beings, what's good for our environmental surroundings. And I hope that this sparks some thoughts that you'll be willing to follow up on later. Thanks very much.