[MUSIC] I want to focus on cognition here, and I'm going to talk about, sort of, three sets of studies. The first, there's now a handful of studies that show that poor environmental quality reduces test scores. So for the students in this room, please make sure to look at the pollution forecast a couple days out, before you schedule your GREs, or whatever you're going to do next. Because there's lots of compelling evidence that if there's pollution, if, if, if there's high levels of pollution, mo, in fact, modest levels of pollution. Pollution levels we experience here in San Diego on occasion, can impair your test performance. Will impair your test performance. We also have some evidence from, from nuclear testing in cher, the Chernobyl accident, in Russia, that led to radiation plumes thousands upon thousands of miles away, very low levels of radiation exposure in largely Sweden and Norway, the, the studies are largely in Sweden and Norway. Found that exposure to radiation, in utero, so both in utero and in early years of childhood, led to lower test scores in high school. So you had the misfortune of being born the month of Chernobyl, you live in Norway in a place that's in the plume trajectory. Congratulations, you're going to be, be condemned to lower test scores in high school. And I think, the last year is a study of my own, so I can talk more about it. We're now looking at low levels, low levels, and when I say low levels, I mean we're looking at levels of carbon monoxide and ozone pollution that are well within current EPA regulatory standards. We're looking at exposure to those levels in utero, and they're leading to lower national test scores in eighth grade in a study based in Chile, South America. That's profound, that's enormous. And, to give you a sense of the context, I'm not really giving you details on these studies, the size of the impacts of these, of these test score impacts, is on the order of the best you could hope for in a positive sense if you engaged in a targeted educational intervention to improve grades. So dropping pollution by 25% in this, in Santiago in particular in most recent decade would improve test scores in school, or test scores on the eighth grade national exam by the same amount as the best school intervention we know about. That's huge, and largely invisible. And let me add to this, in case it's not abundantly obvious, that assuming that tests are a good measure of knowledge and performance, we're educators and we like to think so, at least some of the time, Assuming that those are a good measure of cognitive performance then presumably they're a measure of cognitive performance later in life. And we like to think that cognitive performance is a very important indicator of economic prosperity, earnings capacity at the individual level and at a national level, earnings capacity and national income potential for a country. So that's cognition. Let me go one step further down the chain here and talk about labor markets. Again here we're going to talk about a couple of different studies. First, we find that poor environmental quality reduces contemporaneous labor productivity. Maybe that's not surprising. I think, I, I find it surprising because, the environmental quality levels we're talking about or environmental qua, the, this study I should say is based in Central Valley, California, five years ago. So, levels of pollution experienced in the Central Valley of California five years ago led to five to 10% reductions in, in labor productivity among agricultural workers. Still much more to be done here, but clearly it's not hard to imagine that a pollutant that could impair your respiratory function, that could impair your cardiovascular function, would make you a little slower in your job. And if it makes you a little slower, but it makes everyone a little slower, that compounds it to significant economic impacts. Again same studies on radiation but now looking at, following them beyond high school test scores and later into life and you see, they see, pretty significant reduction of salaries in adulthood. So that is again sorry you were born the month of Chernobyl in Norway, but now you are condemned to a lifetime of earnings potential that's much lower than the cohort that was born a month before you or a month after you, And the most recent studies here in the US looking at TSP pollution in the 70s and 80s between the the Initial Clean Air Act and the Clean Air Amendments. Finds that TSP pollution exposure in childhood, leads to diminished lifetime earnings based on US tax returns. And those again, are about the same order of magnitude, significant, 5% of GDP. That's big. So, let me now put a slightly positive spin on this, slightly [LAUGH] which is I think it's useful to revisit the tension I initially set out, which is on the one hand, energy is really good and important for the economy. On the other hand, the byproducts are really bad for us. And that has sort of classically, particularly in the U.S., been, been turned into an argument that says, environ, environmental protection is expensive, and it's a drag on our economy. And I think recognizing all these subtle impacts on productivity, on intellectual capacity, sort of turns that argument on it's head at least a little. Which is to say that improving environment may cost something, but it's actually more like an investment than a tax. Because it offers you a return in terms of increased human capital, which then could allow your economy to grow and prosper going forward. Let me be clear, I'm not saying, I'm an economist so it's all going to come down to what are the relative costs of this and the relative benefits of that, I'm not saying that means we should regulate unbridled. But clearly there's a sense in which investing in the environment can improve human capital. The one thing almost every economist agrees upon is that human capital is the engine of economic growth. It is essential for economic growth. The returns of human capital are particularly high in developing countries where the human capital base tends to be low. And so, the value in cleaning up the environment appears to be quite large in that setting. So, I somehow seem to be missing a slide here but, well, I'm not missing a slide, sorry. I'm missing a link in my brain. So I want to just say a few words about alternatives. We heard a little bit about, exciting alternative energy sources. We're going to hear some more in this series. I just want to be clear that going green is wonderful, and I am very supportive of lots of alternative energy strategies. But, we need to be mindful that many of those alternative energy strategies, are still going to involve some form of combustion. Much of that push is being driven by C02 and our concerns about climate change as it should be. But let's be mindful that some of those combust, some of those C02 reducing combustibles, may actually increase NOx and ozone. Which have the negative impacts we've just described. Of course there's also non combustion alternatives. Wind and solar and ice and that they're clearly not throwing off NOx and DOC's and carbon monoxide with the minor exception of perhaps in their construction. But even here the economist in me wants to remind everyone that we need to be thinking about what those things are offsetting. When we think about the, the, the environmental protection they're offering us. Not the energy, not the energy production, but the environmental protection. But if wind is blowing strong in the evening, then wind is going to offset some combustion of a fossil fuel we would have put, we would have, we would have burned in the middle of the night. In many places in this country, that's coal. So that's wonderful. But in places where we might be offsetting really clean natural gas, the returns are clearly going to be small, right? And, and that's, that's all I'm, all I'm suggesting is we need to be mindful of that calculation even in the non-combustion alternative. So let me, I want to do a little si, se, shameless self promotion here of a result that we have that relates to this point. It, it, it, at least among my green friends, has led to at least a few bricks thrown, maybe not through my window, but at least at my front lawn. This is a picture that illustrates a couple of things. First, this is a picture of the impacts, the environmental impacts of a plugin electric vehicle. Right, so let me, let me put all my cards on the table here, calling a plugin electric vehicle a zero emission vehicle drives me mad. It's not zero emissions, it's zero emissions at the tail pipe. But it's plugging into something that's combusting something somewhere else in the state or maybe even out of the state. And so we need to think about what that is that's combusting. What this picture illustrates is a comparison here. This dotted line is a hybrid. This is an economy car. This is a light duty fleet average, so the average over the entire fleet. These clusters here are different energy production regions in the United States. This one right here is the Midwest, and what this suggests is that given how nasty the composition of energy production is in the Midwest, at least during some times of the night, you're better off driving a light duty average car, just the average car in the fleet. Than driving an electric vehicle, because that car is less dirty than the energy source that's, that's feeding the electricity outlet that you're plugging your car into. The good news in California is you can rest easy, the plug-in electric beats everything, all the time. But you see hybrid, here. We use a Prius as an example, but all the hybrids are sort of in the same ballpark. The hybrid beats out an electric car in many places, because of the composition of what we currently have. All of this is a way of saying as you think about alternatives and you think about how that changes the pollution mix as well as the energy mix, you need to be mindful of the entire system and what it's plugging into and what it's off setting. So I have 51 seconds here, so let me move to my concluding slide I'm an economist. I have to at least mention price or taxes once or they take away my license, so let me say, very clearly, I think the problem here is that we do not price all this bad stuff. And I mean all of this bad stuff, not just the price on CO2. I want a price on CO2, I want a price on nox, I want a price on ozone, I want a price on VOCs, and I want that price to reflect all the negative things that those pollutants do to our economy, to our well being. And once we price those things, then we can make reasoned decisions about the tradeoffs inherently we're going to be willing to make, because of course, energy provides us with huge benefits. My preference is to see government support of basic R&D. But I want to step away from picking winners and say, Let's do this, let's not do this, let's do this. My hope is at least as you walk away from this talk, that this evidence based on these human capital effects, these cognition effects, these labor market effects that they at least illustrate that there's some return on investment to thinking more cleverly and strategically about national and international investments in energy systems. Thank you. [SOUND].
