Welcome. This is quite an active event period for the University, but certainly the Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy, and we're delighted to have you with us. I'm Barry Rave. I'm a member of the faculty here at Ford and also the Director of Close-Up. I do want to thank our supportive cosponsors, all of whom are identified on the front of your program. As we continue, what I think is going to be a very, very interesting conversation today and is already proving to be a very interesting fall speaker series for us. The issue of climate policy or climate policy success is an interesting one. It was not that long ago that a great many world leaders held hands and raised them above their heads in Paris and talked about their commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions but also do something called carbon pricing. The challenge then becomes how do you take those commitments and translate those into policy? How would we design a climate policy in a world where our primary focus was economics and efficiency but then translate that into a world in which political factors and calculations have to enter in? This is not a new issue post-Paris. In fact, it is now almost 20 years since the Kyoto Protocol was agreed upon at which point there was a widespread consensus that the way to deal with the issue would be through a market-based policy, either a version of emissions trading or a cap and trade, possibly building on the U.S. experiment with sulfur dioxide, possibly a carbon tax or a price. In that case, year after year going by in the United States and other countries around the world where the idea did not disappear but the issue of how you operationalize that goal or that policy.  How do you launch that policy? How do you sustain and build support for it over time? And then over a longer period, does it really have much of an impact? Well, 20 years or so after Kyoto, it's really hard to look back in North America or anywhere else and say, here are the shining success stories. This is what has worked and why. And so we're particularly fortunate today to be joined by Lee Raymond. I've had a good fortune of knowing and Lee for many years. He's a faculty member professor of political science at Purdue, where he also directs the Center for Environmental Policy on that campus. Many of you will know his earlier work that really looks at the intersection of political science, political theory, and policy design and development, including some really, really interesting earlier work related to market-based policies, including the kinds of things that we're going to be talking about this morning. Today's title is very similar to the title on a new book, which was just published within the last week or two by MIT Press called Reclaiming the Atmospheric Commons. In that case, the subtitle is not a new strategy for climate policy success, but the regional greenhouse gas initiative and a new model of emissions trading. So that will be the topic as Lee looks at this intriguing, now nearly a decade-long experiment. And with it, places into the context of how we politically and normatively begin to think about the challenge of climate and the opportunities of carbon pricing going forward. So please join me in welcoming our guest, Lee Raymond. Thanks for having me. It seems fitting that, well, first thing I should say since Barry mentioned the book is you're all especially lucky because my publisher, when they heard that I was coming here to give this talk, said, oh, so you have to give everybody a discount on the book.  Probably too late for those of you who are already enrolled in Barry's class. I apologize for that. But nevertheless, if you're interested by what I have to say, I have flyers up here at Good Olmey through, I think, the middle of October. So there's my initial huxterism, but now that I've gotten that capitalist part out of the way. It's really nice to be here. I actually gave a talk here six years ago at the very beginning of this project at Barry's invitation. So it's a pleasure to kind of come back and full circle and talk a little bit about some of the reasons why I'm optimistic about carbon pricing, which is actually pretty difficult to be today. So I actually really thought I'd start after my optimistic title with a little bit of realism. So this is one of my favorite cartoons, right? Talking about the technological solution to our climate change crisis, which is a time machine that sends us back 50 years when we should have implemented a carbon pricing scheme. So this is in 2060. So we hopefully can avoid that fate of having to wait for that technology to be developed 45 years from now. But really, for those of us who study this problem, carbon pricing really feels a lot like that whale and we feel like the little people in that boat. So carbon pricing really is the mobidic of sort of environmental policy. So we've talked about it for years. We've talked about how this is the thing that we need to have. We even have cartoons saying that in 50 years we'll regret that we didn't have it, and yet it has been an incredibly difficult thing to obtain politically. And so partly today I'm going to talk a little bit about how a group of people were some of the first to really overcome that challenge. Maybe you want to extend my mobidic metaphor, right? One of the first groups to capture this white whale and actually implement a meaningful carbon price. And that's the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which is a partnership of the 10 states that you see here in Dark Green. Now nine, actually I talked about that more in Q&A, but at the time it was 10, who created a cap and trade program to reduce carbon dioxide emissions starting in 2008 from the utility sector. That was quite surprising in and of itself. Even more surprising was the fact that this group chose to make the people using that resource, the atmospheric commons, pay for that use. So in Reggie you had for the very first time ever the decision to auction or make the users of that atmospheric resource pay for that use. And indeed not just for a small number of these allowances, right, but for almost all of the emissions rights created by that program, which raises a really important question. If this is what carbon pricing looks like and that then I should use my pointer and this is what most of the policy actors trying to create carbon pricing look like, which I think Barry would agree with me is typically pretty accurate, how did this group sort of overcome those odds, right, and make this possible starting in 2003? And that's one of the things I want to talk a little bit about today. The short version of this story is that they really were able to use a new way of thinking about this problem, reframing this as an issue about a common resource that all of us own, rather than the sort of the atmosphere being something that is available to private polluters, because they have been traditionally using that and so we ought to recognize, right, that traditional right of use. Also critically, and I'll talk more about this, the key insight in Reggie was it was one thing to talk about making the polluter pay and environmentalists have been saying that for a long time, so if you've been studying environmental policy that's probably a very familiar idea. But the folks who were working on Reggie, I think, figured out from some of their failures that you couldn't just talk about who was going to pay, you really also had to talk about who should get paid. And this is one of the big omissions in a lot of actually market-based policy literature, going back to Coase and others, is we're really good at talking about who ought to pay and we're not as good at thinking about, but who should actually receive those payments, right, who should benefit from those payments. And Reggie's environmental entrepreneurs really were able to overcome that sort of deficit. So they did this, of course, in a cap and trade program. I will not spend a lot of time on this. This image is a pretty good sort of representative of what's going on when we talk about cap and trade. The two basic key ideas are that this is a bit of a misleading diagram, but it's pretty useful. Really, this should be one cap, right, that these two polluters are under. And the idea being that, of course, this firm, which is probably located in Indiana where I'm from, is emitting far too much pollution, right, much more than they have allowances for. And so this lovely firm that might be located in Michigan, who knows, are probably more likely located in a place out west, which is able to reduce emissions much more cheaply, right? So the economic theory is no problem. So here I am polluting like crazy in Indiana, but I will just give some money, right, to the folks who can make the emissions reductions that it's expensive for me to make. They'll make them more cheaply. I win, they win, everybody wins. So goes the theory, right, of cap and trade. And the environment wins because, although this, again, this sort of picture doesn't show it very well, all of that smoke, right, that's coming out of my cap actually fits, right, under this other company's cap, right? So we're really not actually polluting more. We're just moving that pollution around, right, to where essentially the cost of reducing it are as low as possible. So the paradigmatic example of this, and again, I won't spend a lot of time, this would be its own lecture, is the 1990 acid rain program, which reduced the emissions of sulfur dioxide from the electricity sector. This program is without any exaggeration, often called, well it used to be called living legend, actually now it's not living anymore, it's dead, it's been sort of put to rest by some other regulations, but at the time it was considered to be an incredible accomplishment in terms of reducing the cost of pollution, and also reducing emissions related to acid rain, as you can see from this image, right? So this is back when the law was enacted in 1990, and then this is 10 or 15 years later. So a very dramatic increase in pollution reduction at a relatively low cost using the cap and trade strategy. Okay, so having just talked about how great the acid rain program is, now I'm going to pour a little bit of sort of negativity on it, so that the acid rain program is really the classic example of what I call in the book and otherwise the old model of emissions trading. So the old model was good, but the old model had some problems. So the old model, like most old models, it had some problems, right? Really, because this was such a new idea in the old model of emissions trading, we paid very little attention to who got these rights initially. We were much more interested in what that cap was going to be, and we were much more interested in making sure that those polluters could make the trades that I just described, right? So we weren't that worried about who was going to get these allowances, but actually one group was worried about that, that was the emitters. So as a result, what you got effectively was kind of a default into a model of allocation of rights where we gave these rights away, we call it grandfathering, to the existing polluters. Again, stories complicated, but basically in rough proportion to their previous levels of emissions. This, it's worth noting, was completely contrary to what economists had been arguing for decades. They had been saying that you should be auctioning these rights, but that advice, as often unfortunately for my economics friends, was widely ignored in the political world in favor of this idea that we will just give these rights away largely to these politically influential, right? Large emitters. And so in the old model of emissions trading, we give these rights away, even though they have a tremendous amount of value in a way that I describe as sort of recognizing this Lockean norm, right? So if you've been using the resource, then you're entitled to having this value at this point. Okay. And again, having just said that, the Acid Rain Program for all of its successes, and it was very successful, is a classic example of this old model of emissions trading. Gave these allowances away for free. Very little discussion about allocation in the debate. That's not quite right. No discussion, though, about auctioning in the debate, right? So the discussion was only really about who was going to get a slightly larger, smaller share of allowances. And environmentalists at the time were really not paying attention to that allocation question, and that was important. And even more important, the success of this program, the ARP, really posed a problem then for anybody who wanted to deviate from that old model. Because the sense was, why would you change what is arguably the most successful environmental policy ever, including, for example, going to a mode where we actually sell allowances, right, rather than giving them away, or even other deviations from that Acid Rain Program model. So as you can see a lot, if you look at the Reggie story carefully, many of the actors in that story said we labored, right, under the shadow of the Acid Rain Program. It became incredibly difficult to persuade anybody to do anything that was different from that program, because that policy was considered to be so successful. But nevertheless, in Reggie, we had a different, we moved to this new model of emissions trading, and that's the story I want to tell a little bit about today, where instead of people not paying attention to allocation, now it's 10 or 15 years later, you have actually quite a bit of attention to allocation, including among environmentalists and regulators, not just among industry. So as a result, you have less control of that process by the large emitters and more influence over that process by environmentalists, right, and by regulators. And you also have this new way of framing this idea of auctioning that uses this public benefit frame that I'll talk about in a second. But the key for now is that instead of making efficiency-based arguments for auctions, that if we sell allowances, they will go to the person who values them highest, and so that's better, because I'm an economist and I want sort of people who value things the most to have them. Now we're talking about what's going to be fair in terms of allocation, right? Now we're going to talk about actually, if you want to use the commons, the atmospheric commons, you have to do that in a way that benefits the public. And that change was actually politically quite important, and I argue really made the shift to where we now assume more often than not that we're going to sell allowances rather than give them away. And that's an incredible transformation of this policy model, right? So again in the heyday of the acid rain program in the 1990s and even the early 2000s, if you would try to tell people that I'd be giving this talk in 2016 and talking about how auctions have become the new normal in emissions trading policy, people would have laughed you out of the room and said you were basically a lunatic, right? Or whatever you're smoking, I want some of it. So, all right, so there were some seeds of change for this, right, before we had Reggie, and it's important to note these because they're relevant but not sufficient to explain this change. You did see in the course of the 1990s gradual movement away from grandfathering to some little kind of embroidering on these ideas, right? We started talking about benchmarking and we started talking about set-asides, but we were still fundamentally talking about giving these rights away in this period. But in the meantime, in other areas, interestingly, like spectrum rights, which is a whole another somebody else either has or should write a book about this whole story, right? We moved into a model of actually no longer giving away a valuable public resource, right? And forcing companies to pay for those spectrum rights in the 1990s. That was important in showing the people who designed Reggie that you could write auction large and valuable kinds of sort of public rights in this way. We also saw in the 1990s the deregulation of our electricity markets, which had important implications for grandfathering really made it limited the power of regulators to prevent companies from essentially making a windfall profit off of grandfathered allowances. So under the Acid Rain program, we could tell ourselves that the public utilities commissions would prevent the power generators from capturing the value of these free allowances. But in a deregulated electricity market, you could no longer rely on the utility regulators to do that, right? So now you had more of a threat of a windfall profit for those generators from free allowances. And then finally, again, a long and interesting story that I will not have time to tell today. You had the emergence of these sort of mini carbon taxes in the 1990s, these public benefit charges or system benefit charges that were also quite important in basically both creating the programs that then programs like Reggie wanted to use auction revenue fund, things like energy efficiency programs and the like. And also again, sort of introducing the notion that we could charge people a little bit more, right, for their electricity consumption in this way. So the key here is that even with all of these changes, we had a very prominent discussion of the potential of auctioning allowances in the NOx trading programs, nitrogen oxide trading programs, in the 1990s, where at the end of the day, there was still a decision to really effectively do no auctioning whatsoever. And similarly, you had a fairly extensive discussion of auctioning in the early stages of the European Union's emissions trading system. And again, despite all of this arguing and all of these seeds of change, you had a decision to effectively auction almost no allowances. So the puzzle for us then becomes, so what happened in Reggie that was different, right, than these earlier cases? And so the argument that I want to make to you today and that I make in the book is that it was really this normative piece that was crucial. So when you talk about norms, you're at risk of sounding like at least for some economists and political scientists, like you're talking about these soft and fuzzy things like, oh, what's a norm and unwritten rules or appropriate behavior, who cares, right? That's for like teenagers, like what kinds of clothes should I wear? And it is those things, right? But it is also a profoundly influential way that we organize our daily lives. And in fact, the more people study norms, the more including political scientists and economists, they realize that the thing that explains 90% of your behavior today is not rules, it's not laws, and it's not economics, it's norms, it's social pressure, right? And so a great example of this is the image I have here.  So this really shows you how powerful these can be, right? He felt so much pressure to live up to this norm, right? That even though he's saying to himself, this is dumb, I'm going to die, I don't even really believe in this sort of standard, right? He still went out and suffered this fate the next day. So here we are really understanding that norms are incredibly important in explaining our behavior and the behavior of political actors, right, and political outcomes. But unfortunately, although they've started to be integrated into our policy theories, they really have not been sufficiently integrated into our policy theories. And so the story I want to tell you today is that the key to explaining this change to reclaiming the atmosphere of commons in Reggie really relies on the insight of some environmental actors initially and then other people that if we reframe this whole notion in terms of a different set of norms, we give a different sort of conceptualization of the issue or what I call a normative frame, we can really change the politics of this issue. And a great example of this that I highly recommend to you in a wonderful book by Frank Baumgartner and others that has nothing to do with the environment but really gets at this idea is this book about the innocence frame for the death penalty and really compelling social science that indicates that if you continue to hammer away as many death penalty opponents have on the notion that it's normatively immoral for the state to kill one of its citizens, right, that that's the reason we should not have the death penalty, that that argument is really quite ineffective. But if you reframe the issue around the idea that we can never know for certain that we might not have an we might have an innocent person on death row, right, and you talked to people about the death penalty in that language, you suddenly have a very different ability to change people's attitudes because you've refrained that issue in terms of a different norm that we should not allow even one, we should not risk even one innocent person, right, potentially being put to death, right, which is a different argument to make. And it has a very powerful impact on people's attitudes towards the death penalty. And so the Reggie process I think can be explained in a very similar way of this kind of normative reframing. So this is the old normative frame. This is one of my favorite pictures of all time. So if you're from Chicago, you know what this is. But this says, again, do not park here, I shovel the snow, not you. So this is my favorite example of the Lockean norm in action. John Locke, who famously said that if I labor on something and it is not owned, then I now am entitled to ownership of that resource. So in cities like Chicago, Pittsburgh, Boston, other major urban areas, people have internalized this Lockean norm to say, if I have dug my car out of a public parking spot on a public street, I am now entitled to ownership of that parking spot. And this norm, like most norms, actually is actually enforced quite vigorously with extra legal activities. So if you actually make the mistake of moving this guy's chair and parking your car there, you will face very severe consequences. So this is the Lockean norm, which was clearly the old way of thinking about allocating emissions rights. And so environmentalists really proposed these alternative norms for this idea of allocation. They put forward on the one hand the more longstanding norm in environmental policy that polluters should pay. But in addition, crucially, they also thought very seriously about who should benefit from those payments. And here they seized upon the notion of kind of egalitarian shares for all, right? If we're going to have a policy that is about using a public resource, it's as important to make sure not only that the people who are using that resource pay, but that everyone benefits from that resource in a very tangible and sort of obvious way to the public at large. So I describe really a two or three-step process for doing this normative reframing. So the first step, if you want to take the strategies, you have to point out the sort of the poor fit of the original norm for the policy in question. And again, as others pointed out before me, the idea that we would give away pollution rights on the basis of a norm that says we should reward beneficial labor is definitely one of those arguments that really does not stand up to very long scrutiny when you actually think about it for more than about 30 seconds. And so as environmentalists pointed this out, right, they noted that really what you're saying basically, right, is that we're going to reward not a right of prior use, but a right of prior abuse. And when you sort of pull away that curtain, it becomes much harder for the generators and the people who are doing the polluting to sort of stand by this argument, right? Although they tried and they tried primarily by saying, well, but wait a minute, we did it this way in the asterine program and it works so well, why would you want to sort of mess that up, right? But this argument really made that argument much less effective. And instead, environmentalists noted, first of all, that the polluter should pay, which is a pretty straightforward norm, one that really goes back to what presumably most of your mother saw you, which is if you make a mess, right, you're responsible for cleaning up after yourself. But then also critically write this idea that if we're going to talk about using a public resource, we really need to make sure that the benefits of that use, right, those payments go to something that really benefits most or all of our citizens. And that was the key insight. And that brought us to what really was developed in Reggie, which is this what I call the new public benefit model, which is simply a combination of this new sort of framing, right, this new way of arguing for auctions, but then combined with a policy design that really fits that frame. So it's lovely to have a new frame to argue for a change in policy, but if you don't have a policy that really fits with that, you're really not going to make very much progress. And so the key in Reggie was thinking about ways to use auction revenue to deliver these tangible consumer benefits. And so in the Reggie case, the thing that environmental advocates seized upon were these public benefit programs, right? So wait, take this money, fund energy efficiency programs, right, for homeowners in our state, fund programs that lower the cost of zero or low carbon energy sources, all of which will basically lower the energy burden, right, the energy bill costs for consumers. This is going to make it possible for an elected official to support this program because when he or she is attacked, as they will be for saying, you're going to hurt your constituents by essentially raising their energy prices at a time when they can ill afford that, those elected officials can say essentially, well, higher energy rates do not equal higher energy bills, right, because I'm going to use this money in a way that will lower your energy consumption so you'll be using less energy, which means you'll pay less for your energy, right, even though you have this higher rate. And so this really was this public benefit model that was so successful in Reggie. Again, I can talk more about the details of that process in Q&A if people want. This is just a quick indication of a few important points in that five-year process to come to that decision. One thing worth noting is that this was a very bureaucratically driven process initially. There was this staff working group made up of non-elected officials from the 10 participating states who worked extremely intensively over the first couple of years on developing the proposal for Reggie. It's worth noting that contrary to some accounts of this process, the idea of auctioning did not emerge sort of late at the last minute, but it was actually something that environmentalists immediately seized upon at the very beginning when this idea was announced in 2003 and consciously decided that this was the place where they were really going to make an even more concerted effort to promote this new idea of auctioning based on this new normative framing. Consistent with that story, by the time we had the initial memorandum of understanding that was signed by at first seven of the Reggie states and then eventually all ten, you already had a commitment to what was already artfully being called the public benefit allocation. That was the language that got used instead of saying auction. People said public benefit allocation to stress this new framing. So really even by 2005, you had a firm commitment to sell at least a quarter of the allowances in the program. That was very early in the program. And at that point, things really sort of cascaded so that in 2006, you had a rapid deterioration of the situation, if you were a generator, to where you were actually immediately now fighting a rearguard action to try to only limit auctioning to a quarter of allowances. And so really by the end of 2006, you had a model rule that was now saying, well, so actually 25%, we really think of that as more the floor. That's not now a minimum for auctioning, right? Not in some ways a firm limit. And you even had some utilities and a few of the large energy consuming industries now saying, yeah, okay, actually in a lot of ways, auctioning would not be such a bad thing, especially if this revenue were used to defray these higher energy costs. So by the time that happens, really, the whole thing is over. And so although there's a little bit of kind of complaining in rearguard action, by the time the states adopt their policies in 2007, mostly in 2008, virtually all of them choose to auction, again, virtually all of their allowances, right? So more than 90% of all of the allowances in the program are actually auctioned. And again, this is a result that when you talk to the people, even who are involved in the process, one of the people I talked to, Franz Litz, who was the co-chair of that staff working group, said, when environmentalists, I'm paraphrasing here, but this is basically a direct quote, when environmentalists came to me in 2003 and said, not only do we want you to create a cap and trade program for greenhouse gas emissions among 10 states when the federal government can't solve this problem, not only do we want you to do that, we also want you to make the emitters pay for all those allowances. He looked at them like they had basically grown a second head, right? Like you've got to be kidding me, right? This is the craziest thing I've ever heard, right? How can we possibly be expected to do that? And ironically, by the end of the story, it was really the auctioning that was critical to making this policy politically sort of palatable for many of the elected officials who were involved. So without belaboring that point any further, I'll just note that the environmental advocates, people like Seth Kaplan, were really banging away on this point from literally day one, saying if we don't, again, to paraphrase this long quotation, we have to design this in a way that goes beyond just telling people we're solving climate change and also produces a benefit, a tangible benefit, he would say in other times, that people can get their arms around. And then even upon reflection, when I actually talked to Governor George Pataki, who was the governor of New York at the time and a big promoter of Reggie, again a rare nowadays, at the time he was a Republican who was actually supporting climate change policy, even he said, right? If you want to get serious about this, you have to recognize the difficult economic times and that the program has to not put new burdens on industry or consumers. So it was only through auctions, right? And then using that money to defray those sort of consumer costs that you could really make this program politically palatable in this way. So just to summarize that process, again, you really essentially had these environmental advocates first undermining, right, this initial private entitlement frame, which really did not have a very good fit with the problem. And then promoting a stronger sort of public benefit frame based on these other norms. And again, in the book, and I'm still basically standing by this, I don't know, the book's only been out for a few weeks, so I guess I should still stand by my predictions at this point, that I think is going to be much more stable. So in my mind, this idea of auctioning has got this much stronger sort of normative foundation. And so really we ought to see more programs moving in this direction if I'm right is what I'm arguing, right? If anything, we should see more programs going in the direction of auctioning and these public benefit frames. Okay. So the initial data on this is not entirely clear cut and I won't spend too much time, but the quick take home message is that basically that's true. Through 2015, so Reggie went into actual into operation in 2008, you've had a number of new cap and trade programs created. More than half of them, if you measure them by the sort of size of the number of allowances they generate, are programs that are auctioning either all or a majority of their allowances. Another third are in programs that are at least auctioning some of their allowances and only as of July of 2015, only about 10% are still in programs that are giving away all of their allowances. So you cannot dismiss Reggie at a minimum as sort of a blip, right? An exceptional blip. You've really had a pretty dramatic change at least in the 10 years that we've been looking at this issue through 2015 in this respect. And you also see a kind of a growing reliance on different forms of this public benefit framing. Again, I will not belabor these details too much, but even in Reggie, which was subjected to a lot of challenges, number of the governors who agreed on Reggie when it was first put into operation in 2008, left office, new people were elected and those new officials resisted efforts in most cases to repeal Reggie. And they did it primarily by really pointing out how useful this revenue had been for their residents, right? In the way that the state from New Hampshire governor John Lynch talks about, right? And not only did that allow Reggie to pretty much prevent states from defecting with New Jersey being the one important exception, but also allowed Reggie to take their program to a much more ambitious set of emissions goals. So the initial goals for Reggie were relatively modest, hold emissions constant, and then some very moderate declines in the first final few years of the program. But in 2012, in a program review, Reggie basically cut emissions for their region by almost 50%, so much more meaningful emissions target that was enabled by this new public benefit framing. And so really in Reggie, when we talk about all of this stuff for creating jobs, energy efficiency, reducing consumer costs, I would call this sort of consumer benefit framing, one type of this public benefit framing, right? But then we saw some sort of different flavors, if that's kind of the plain vanilla version of public benefit framing. In the EU, which also, in the wake of Reggie, moved towards auctioning the vast majority of its allowances. You got a slightly different spin. The focus in the EU was more on investing this money in R&D to develop new low and zero carbon technologies. So here the key is still a public benefit, right? We're not going to let you use this public atmospheric commons without benefiting the public, but the benefit here is more around climate protection, right, rather than consumer benefits. And then finally, even more interestingly, I would say, in the most recent example that I'll talk about, the US EPA's Clean Power Plan, which is just released last year, requires all US states to reduce their carbon and greenhouse gas emissions by 32% by 2030. You have the emergence of even another set of public benefits, right, which I would call these public health benefits, right? So you have people like Gina McCarthy, the EPA administrator talking now about carbon pollution, which is a very interesting rhetorical shift, and saying, really, the reason, again, to paraphrase this quote, that we ought to limit these emissions is, yeah, sure, climate change, but I don't even want to talk about that, right? Really, this is about childhood asthma. This is about the concentration of other pollutants associated with carbon that are very bad for people's health, right? And so this is this public health framing, which is really even a little bit more of a stretch, right, away from kind of that core public benefit framing that came out of Reggie, which was specifically focused, right, on kind of limiting the economic harms, right, of this policy. Now we've moved all the way to trying this strategy of saying, and actually this is really about benefiting the public in terms of reducing, right, childhood morbidity and public health problems. Okay. Also interesting, I think, and again, this is a longer conversation, but the programs that tried and failed to implement new sort of cap and trade policies after Reggie really did not follow the kind of Reggie model. So one of the most famous of these cases was the major conflict over the Waxman-Markey bill in the federal government, which went down in flames in 2010. And although there is much debate about what exactly happened in terms of explaining why that bill failed, I'm most persuaded by an argument by Theta Scotchpole and one that I think echoes my own looking at this problem, that really the basically the environmental advocates and the people supporting this bill were unable to respond to the criticism of the Republican right that this law is going to be devastating to the middle class, that you're going to raise energy prices for people who can't afford it. And this is at the time of the Great Recession at this point, right, so these are very hard economic times. And environmentalists and advocates for this bill were really left sort of speechless and didn't know what to say, right? Well, but we're fighting climate change and that's great, right? That should be enough. And really because the law did not include, right, the provisions to use allowance revenue in ways that really protected consumers, it left the supporters of that bill sort of powerless, right, before this very strong critique that emerged in the summer of 2010 about how this was going to be devastating to the middle class. And similarly in Australia, you had a little bit of the same kind of story. It's a little more complicated, but it's basically the same idea where we enacted a cap and trade program with auctions, but failed to really sufficiently connect that to consumer protections. And that really led to that bill being repealed in 2014. Okay. So let me finish by talking just a little bit about the future. So lots of predictions in sort of my review of Reggie and events subsequent to Reggie that really argue, right, that we ought to see this public benefit model continuing to be influential and indeed to be a little bit more controversial and sort of like the topic of the title of today's talk. Really the argument that I continue to make is that for all of its warts, cap and trade and really cap and auction and public benefit framing is probably the best strategy we have for promoting climate policy from a practical perspective, not from economic perspective, right, from a political perspective. So, okay, so let's do a little bit of work just to see whether that seems to be what's happening so far, right? And let's look at the clean power plan as a way of sort of dipping our toe into that water, which is what I want to do. So working with a couple of students, we've been looking a little bit at how debates over the implementation of this right EPA regulation has been playing out, what have the framing strategies been, what have the political results looked like. And so here basically, if I'm right or we're right, and this public benefit model really is this important political innovation, then we ought to see continued reliance, right, on these public benefit frames in these clean power plan debates. And we ought to see even more so that they're showing some strong political influence, right, which is a little bit harder thing to show, but we hopefully can show some of that as well. So one of those projects, we looked at a sample of the leading newspapers in every state of the 47 states that are affected by the clean power plan and coded those news coverage of those debates for a whole variety of different potential frames that people could be using about how to describe this controversy, including looking for all four of those different public benefit frames that I just described, right, consumer benefits, public health benefits, and also climate protection benefits, right, but then a whole host of other arguments as well, right, climate science frames, climate change is going to be devastating to our state in terms of sort of the local impacts of climate change, right, so lots of other frames we looked at, looked for as well, pro and con. So to boil an awful lot of data down to one very simple table, the most common frames in that data set across all states, both sort of pro and con are consumer benefit frames. So both by opponents, people criticizing the clean power plan, they were using these sort of again, this will be devastating to our citizens economically, it's going to ruin our economy, it's going to put people out of work, and people supporting, right, this idea that we should be doing something aggressive on climate change in our state. We're also saying now, obviously not that this is going to put people out of work, but the opposite, right, that this is a job creator, the clean power plan is a way to put our state and our residents out in front of the new economic wave, right, and sort of this kind of green jobs argument, renewable energy is the wave of the future. These are by far, actually the most common frames we found across all of these states, right. So nearly 40% of all of the articles in our data set featured at least one of these arguments in this type of framing. Interestingly, you also saw then some divergence. So opponents of action are still also stressing the notion of higher energy prices. So that's the third most common frame by opponents. At this point, people arguing in favor of these policies have not yet sort of adopted the kind of regi argument about using, again, auctions or something as a way to avoid, right, these kinds of problems. Instead, you're seeing more of this public health argument, right. So the kind of argument that again, this is maybe not that surprising since this is really the way the EPA has been framing this issue, right. You're really getting a lot of that being picked up as well by local advocates and people debating this issue at the state level. So this is pretty good evidence that we're not seeing a major shift away from this sort of public benefit framing. Notice some of the things that you're not seeing here, science, right, debate about science or a number of other things. You are seeing some other interesting things that I can't really talk about too much because I don't have time, but the kind of the legitimacy argument, right, the sort of constitutionality argument is very big in terms of opponents of the Clean Power Plan, saying this sort of, you know, beyond the EPA's actual legal authority, but not much about some other prominent climate arguments that are out there. Okay. And then finally, I'll just say a few things about a really interesting conflict that is happening in actually some detail around the Clean Power Plan. This is in Illinois, neighboring Indiana. And so Illinois back in 2015, again, a large environmental coalition put forward what they called the Clean Jobs Bill. So this image really says it all. What they are talking about when they promote this bill is jobs. They're not talking about climate. The bill is definitely not called, right, a climate bill. It's not even called an environmental bill, right, except for the language of, we're sort of clean, right? But it clearly draws on the same kinds of ideas that were so popular in Reggie, right? Investment in energy efficiency as a way, again, to protect consumers, right, and keep them whole, even if energy prices rise. And even initially this bill included a cap and invest program modeled on the Reggie model. And although this conflict has not been settled, this bill has had significant progress. And I think most people expect that the Illinois legislature will sometime in the near future adopt something that will include a lot of the provisions that were proposed by the proponents of this Clean Jobs Bill. So here again, doing a more qualitative assessment and really looking in depth at what's been happening in Illinois over the last two years, it's quite clear that the advocates for this bill are again stressing how this will benefit consumers in Illinois, that this will not put costs on constituents, that this will prevent the loss of clean jobs. This will put more dollars back in the wallets of Illinois families. These are all quotes, right, from key actors in this debate. Little bit of discussion about public health framing. Again, clean air means healthier people. But really, again, almost no discussion of climate change at all. So I wouldn't quite put this in the category that Barry first introduced of calling us a full-blown stealth policy. There is at least some recognition, right, that this has some connection to climate change. But that's really not what the political actors are talking about and it's definitely not what the advocates are talking about. What they are talking about is energy prices, right? And they're talking about a few other things that are unique to Illinois, like the potential economic effects of closing a couple of nuclear power plants. But really, this debate is very consistent with what we would expect, right, if this public benefit model were continuing to be politically influential. These folks are framing this issue in much the same way that we would expect them to. In addition, although it's harder to say this at this point, it seems quite evident that the provisions of the Clean Jobs Bill that are most consistent with that sort of consumer benefit framing are the ones that are likely to make it. So there's a compromise bill that's now being talked about in Illinois that is going to include some major new energy efficiency program and will also include some kind of reform of Illinois' renewable portfolio standard, and then may or may not include other provisions, right? And so again, although it's early, the early signs are that politically this framing and this way of thinking about the problem has still been quite influential, even in a state like Illinois, which is an interesting and complicated state politically and otherwise, right? So not a northeastern relatively liberal state, but a state that actually has more complicated politics and is located in the Midwest, burns a lot of coal, has a lot more going on. So that really suggests at least that the early signs are that this public benefit framing program may well continue to be influential, including maybe some of these public health benefits that people are talking about. Okay. So in the end, where does that leave us? I think it's indisputable, but maybe you'll all dispute this in Q&A, but I would say it's indisputable that public benefit framing really has just been pivotal in a dramatic shift in climate change policy post sort of 2005, 2003, and that the sort of the depth of that shift is still a little bit underappreciated. At the moment, early signs are that sort of ongoing debates about climate policy in the Clean Power Plan are consistent with the notion that that shift is enduring, right? And we'll continue. We'll see how that goes over the next five years, but so far, so good. But interestingly, we are seeing this kind of complexification of that public benefit framing. So in Reggie, the real main focus really was on consumers, right? We're going to keep consumers whole, and that was very efficacious politically. So then in some other states and in other places, we saw this kind of broaden out to a web, but we're also going to talk about how this is going to help protect you from climate through R&D and other programs, right? Or this is going to also right even protect public health. Seems clear that at the moment, advocates are more willing to use that public health framing, and they're still shying away from sort of the climate protection framing for, I think, some interesting reasons that we could talk about. But this, I guess, leads me to my last point, and this is a much broader point, but I think this work speaks to it. There's a big debate now in, I'd say, climate science and policy in general. Should we be talking about science? Should we be talking about policy, right? And so there's, I think, a group that's probably a minority still, but is growing in terms of their influence that is saying, really, climate science is not what's driving people's climate policy attitudes. So the kind of linear model that we have of science drives policy choice is wrong, even though that's very intuitive. Really, and lots of experiments even will indicate if you can frame a climate policy in a way that people are comfortable with, and then you ask them whether they believe in climate change, they're happy to believe in climate change. It's when climate change belief threatens what they think of, right, is their dominant sort of political or economic worldview, okay, then I can't believe in climate change, basically, right? I mean, that's not a conscious thought, but that's the way we think. So I think a lot of this work suggests that political actors have gotten this message, right, and that the political debate, although it was always partly about costs and benefits of policies, right, and policy design, is now more than ever explicitly about what's a fair policy and what's the right way to sort of allocate, right, the costs and benefits of these policies, what's the fair way to do that, and much less about arguing about whether climate change is real or not. So I think this work really suggests that that is an important thing to keep in mind. And then finally, I think some really, as hopefully with most work, right, that's at least interesting, lots of important questions going forward as this sort of notion of what's a public benefit, as advocates keep trying to sort of expand that idea, it'll be very interesting to see which of these arguments are persuasive and which are not, because you can imagine this sort of idea of a public benefit, just keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger until it actually sort of loses, right, its ability to convince people. That's an empirical question, right, that's something that we have to see how that works in terms of what forms of those public benefit frames will be persuasive going forward. And then of course, when I say that, you also have to talk about it in what context, right, because the kinds of normative arguments that maybe I find persuasive or people in Michigan find persuasive may be quite different than the ones that people find persuasive in Brazil or Russia or Australia or other places around the world where we'll be talking about these conflicts. And then finally, as I sort of this dual kind of question to fit, right, on the one hand, we're arguing about trying to figure out what kinds of public benefits I can fit into this new frame. But then I have to also figure out what kinds of policies, right, I can fit into this frame. And one of the things that you're seeing with the Clean Power Plan is at least some renewed interest in things like funding energy efficiency programs, but not necessarily through a cap and trade, right, or a cap and auction sort of program. So you're still talking about at some level making polluters bear the costs of their emissions. But you might or might not use an actual sort of cap and trade policy design to do that. And so this will also be interesting to see where that goes, right. So as states grapple with this Clean Power Plan mandate, what kinds of designs will people see as still fitting, right, with this notion of kind of public ownership, right, of the atmospheric commons in this way. I think will also be a really interesting question. Okay. So with that, I'll give a quick thanks to Heather Kahn and Lindsay Hummel who did a lot of the research on some of those Clean Power Plan projects that are just undergoing and give you the final sort of plug for my book and be happy to open it up for questions.


Internal Revenue Service IRS tax news. Taxpayers should file their tax return on time to avoid costly interest and penalty fees. Interest and penalty fees otherwise known as the stick that the IRS wields. It may not look like much, but that thing can cause damage. But first, an attempt at a joke, I apologize in advance. The administration still wants to increase government spending in the midst of an inflationary period. That's like ironing a four leaf clover. You really shouldn't be pressing your luck. It's clear that a few of the four leaves on the clover have long since burned away from the excessive clover pressing process. Is a one and one third leaf clover still lucky? I can still see where the other leaves were. I think they've refused to pick up the iron out of embarrassment of what they did to the once lucky clover. Oh, what a tangled web we weave. Once we've burned up the lucky clover, we stumbled upon due to stupidity. IRS tax tip 2022-42 March 17, 2022. Taxpayers should file their tax return by the deadline even if they cannot pay their full tax bill. Taxpayers who owe tax and don't file on time may be charged a failure to file penalty. This penalty is usually 5% of the tax owed for each month or part of a month that the tax return is late up to 25%. If an individual taxpayer owes taxes but can't pay in full by April 18, 2022, that being the deadline, they should. And just note that if you can't pay in full, then generally you want to be setting up the payment plan as stated here. Because what you don't want to do, in other words, is to just say, well, I can't pay the taxes, therefore I'm going to ignore it. And if you do ignore it because the IRS is kind of a slow moving bureaucratic machine, you might say, ah, that's no big deal for a while. And then you might get letters for a while and then it'll start to build up as the IRS wheels that stick and get some momentum in on it. And then they build up the penalties and interest which can build up over time. So what you would like to do instead if in that situation is to say, okay, I know I'm going to owe money. And so what I'm going to do is basically still file and then possibly set up a payment plan. If I have to, you could do most of that stuff basically online. You don't really even have to talk to anybody to set up the payment plan. Generally it's something that you could do pretty much automatically or through the IRS website oftentimes. So that's what you want to do to once again avoid the stick of penalties and interest. So here's what we got. We're going to file the tax return or request an extension of time to file by April 18th deadline. Note that if you request an extension of time and you owe money by the deadline of April 18th, which might not be the case for many people because many people you would think if they were a W2 employee, you might have overpaid the taxes and are expecting a refund. If you're in the situation where you're getting a refund, the IRS is not as concerned that you don't file the taxes by April 18th because they owe you money and it's not as big a problem. However, if you owe them money, you haven't made the payment and you're going to owe them money, then there's two types of penalties and interest you got to be aware of. One is the filing requirement. And so you want to make sure that you file and make them aware that you owe them money. You might ask, how can I do that? Because the point is that I haven't done my taxes so I don't know how much I owe. In other words, maybe I have bookkeeping stuff I need to do for my Schedule C business or something like that and I haven't done it so I don't know how much I owe but I know I'm going to owe money because I made money and I haven't paid my taxes in estimated tax payments. Well, then you're going to have to estimate it in some way, shape or form to avoid the penalties and interest. One, you can file and avoid that penalty and two, so you can make an estimated payment at the point in time that you file to once again avoid the stick that the IRS wheels around which is called penalties and interest. So people who owe tax and do not file their return on time or request an extension may face a failure to file penalty or not filing on time. Now, if you file an extension, remember that that does relieve possible penalties for not filing on time but not payment penalties. So you still got to make the estimated payment to avoid. So that means you get hit by the one stick but they still got that other one that they'll hit you with that you got to be careful of. Taxpayers should remember that an extension of time to file is not an extension of time to pay. An extension gives taxpayers until October 17, 2022 to file their 2021 tax return but taxes owed are still due April 18, 2022. Again, you might say, how do I know how much taxes I owe because I didn't do my taxes because I didn't have the information. That's why I went on extension. Well, then you got to estimate it and then give them money if you want to avoid penalties and interest. That's just how it is. That's how they do it. So to get an extension to file, taxpayers must do one of the following. Form 4868, there's a link to that here through their tax professional tax software or using free file on IRS.gov. So it's typically fairly easy to get that form. You could just find it on the IRS website. If you're using software, you can use the software. If you have a tax professional, you can request them to do it for you most likely. Submit an electronic payment with direct pay electronic federal tax payment system or debit credit card or digital wallet and select form 4868 or extension as the payment type. So if you owe money, one way that you could just make the extension payment is to make the payment that you owe and then just simply select form 4868 as the reason for the extension, which will in essence file the form or put you on extension status. Obviously, you can only really do that if you owe them money and you make the payment, which will put you basically on extension, which is really when you need the extension most. Because again, if they owe you money, they're not quite as concerned about this whole thing because they're happy to pay you later your refund. But if you owe them money, they are concerned and action needs to happen. Action needs to happen because you owe us money. We want something happening here. So pay as much as possible by April 18th due date, whether filing a return or requesting an extension, taxpayers must pay their tax bill in full by the deadline to avoid interest and penalties. So you want to pay whatever you owe by the deadline or interest penalties accrue one way or the other. And the stick will be starting to circle over the head of the IRS. They're kind of get some circling around.  The IRS has options for taxpayers who can't avoid to pay taxes. They owe can't afford to pay taxes. So then you can look up your options if you can't pay the tax at that point, possibly setting up a payment plan or something like that. Set up a payment plan as soon as possible. Taxpayers who owe but cannot pay in full by April 18th don't have to wait for a tax bill to set up a payment plan.  And I'm going to go on extension. But do I have to wait till I get the tax bill in order to in order to file a payment plan? No, you could set up a payment plan with the IRS and start paying them penalties and you know, start paying them in installments earlier, which typically will want to do so that you can avoid penalties and interest. So they can apply for a payment plan on irs.gov. There's a link to that here. Taxpayers can also submit a payment plan request using form 9465 installment agreement request. Interest is based on the amount of tax owed and for each day it's not paid in full. Interest rates are determined every three months and can vary based on type of tax. For example, individual or business tax liabilities. More information is available on the interest on under payments and over payments page of irs.gov. There's a link to that here. There's also more information and links down below for what is the due date of my federal tax return or am I eligible to request an extension tax topic 653 IRS notices and bills penalties and interest charges. There's links to that wonderful reading information and more all this wonderful stuff to avoid that sticks of those multiple sticks that the iris wheels at one time with like their million hands like a centipede of hands. Wielding various sticks that are threatening to hit you with and this is how you can look into this stuff to see how to avoid them. So there'll be a link to this in the description.


Why, the wickets are still standing, so you're getting irritated? Don't take Chennai wickets, okay?  Dhoni brought a certain kind of calm and control. I think he did a great job for the country. You've mentioned it. It's about learning about each other. Taking it back to what we talked about right in the beginning. About you exploring the native Indians culture and bringing awareness to it. And that's how we learn about each other. And as humans, we learn that we just all want to get along. So that's actually very liberating. How would you say one can liberate their minds, especially when they are in... I mean, we've been in a bubble, I'm going to be quite specific to sport. You know, when you are in a bubble, we tend to forget or we tend to get a bit irritated now, that we can't actually... Why, the wickets are still standing, so you're getting irritated? Sometimes, you know? Somebody is very happy, somebody is very happy the wicket is not falling. I'm happy that they are falling, trust me. Sometimes when you're in the room, it can get a bit hectic and that's the phrase that comes to my head is liberating your mind from negative emotion. How would you say people can actually practice that? See, we must understand this. Right now, how do I liberate this dream? I'm saying I don't have to liberate it, I just have to nourish it. It will grow as tall as it can. All right?  Nourishment for the body is one kind which people know what to eat, even that they don't know that also we are teaching them what to eat, what not to eat. That's another matter. But generally, let's say people know what to eat. But nourishing the other dimensions of the human being, what does it mean? See, a human being, in human being's experience of life, just fulfilling survival process and reproductive process is not going to settle him. This is true with every other creature. If they get to eat well and they get to reproduce, they're fine. Beyond that, they are not aspiring for anything else. They are quite fine. They are not suffering insecurities of what I can be, what I cannot be. You know, a lion in Africa is not worried, will I become a good lion or will I become a house cat, what is my problem? He has no such problems, he's just had to get food. If he eats well, he becomes a good lion. That's all. But that is not the case with the human being. When survival is in question, it's a big issue. Once it's taken care of, well, when stomach is empty, there's one problem. When stomach is full, there are one hundred problems, all right? And more successful people become, they seem to multiply their problems. So what is it that is going wrong? What is going wrong is just this. We are thinking that this human being will settle for something little more.  What I heard that you got twenty-three wickets, huh? At the moment, yeah. I think so, yeah. So you want more wickets? Don't take Chennai wickets, okay?  I think he brought... I just met him, just saw him once on a golf course, I didn't really get to chat with him or anything, just met him and said, hello, kind of thing. But I think he brought a new sense of life to Indian cricket, you know? Well, Saurav Ganguly brought some victories to us and brought a new spirit and of competitiveness. But Dhoni Baur brought a certain kind of calm and control and, you know, completely a different kind of atmosphere on the cricket field, a sense of bonding with everybody. I think he did a great job for the country and now I think the youngsters have built upon that in a much better way, that's a great thing. Anyway, living… Yes. You're going to get to cricket conversation now. On that point, I think I got your point though, when it comes to, you know, nourishing yourself and being grateful for what you have, that when you do, you always want more and more and more. But when does it cap? Is that where you are at or we're going to say more on that?  Yeah. You're looking at, come on man, I won't make such a blunder. You'll knock down everything with your bow. So suppose you become the king of this planet, will you be fulfilled? No. Now you're already looking up, you're looking at the moon, I can see that. You would want the moon also. If I give you the moon, will you settle? No, you'll want the other planets.  No, you'll look at the galaxy. So there is something within a human being longing to expand. Yeah. So if you really look at it, you're not looking for more, you're looking for all. You want to expand limitlessly. Please see if I make you king of one galaxy, will you not look at the other galaxies? You definitely will, isn't it? So there is something within a human being longing to expand limitlessly. When I say limitlessly, it wants to become boundless. But the world of physicality is a world of boundaries. Without a defined boundary, there is no physical existence. So now you're longing to be boundless means, unknowingly you're longing to be beyond your physical nature. But you are trying to settle it with little more money, little more wealth, little more shopping, little more this and that, but it will not settle that way. Somebody was telling me recently, I met someone in, you know, where who's achieved, was a big achiever in United States. And he was saying, I thought if I make money, if I build this big house and become famous, it'll settle, but it is not, the scratch is not settling the itch. It doesn't because the longing is to expand limitlessly. So can you become limitless physically? What, in what sense? Like... No, can your physical body become limitless? Don't try that. No. Physical has to have a boundary. Defined boundary is the basis of physicality. But there is a longing here which wants to become limitless. So this longing to become limitless means in some way you're longing to be something more than your physical nature, because your physical nature is an accumulated process, isn't it? You were not born like this. You were born like this, but you became this much. Because this is an accumulation of food that we have eaten. What you call as mind is also an accumulation of impressions and experiences that we have gathered.  But there is something within you longing to be boundless. If this has to be settled, your experience of life has to go beyond your physical nature. When that happens, now we will apply the most corrupted word in the world, spiritual, because everybody has distorted this word in so many different ways. Essentially, it means your experience of life has transcended the limitations of your physicality. Because physicality comes with limitations. Physicality comes with cyclical compulsions. Right now, you and me are fine.  This is a cycle of compulsions. So physical nature is like this only. So there is something here which wants to go beyond all these cycles, that is called as the spiritual process. So spirituality does not mean going to the temple, church or mosque. It is about turning inward and knowing that which we are, that which we gathered is one thing. See, what you gather is yours. But what you gather cannot be you, isn't it? It can belong to you, but it cannot be you. Right now, this is the fundamental mistake humanity is making. What we have gathered, we think it's me. The moment you make this mistake, it's endless problems. Whichever way, just see, tell me one thing that human beings are not suffering. If they're poor, they suffer their poverty. Make them rich, they suffer their taxes. If they're not educated, they suffer that. Put them to school, endless suffering. If they're not married, they suffer that. Get them married, don't tell me, all kinds of things will happen. You tell me one thing that they are not suffering. They are not suffering life. They are suffering the state of their own mind, because they have not learned how to discipline themselves between memory, experience and imagination. What happened ten years ago, they still suffer. This means what? Are they suffering their memory or they're suffering life? They're just suffering their memory. What may happen day after tomorrow, they already suffer. This means they're suffering their imagination. These are the two faculties which set us apart from every other creature. We have a very vivid sense of memory and a fantastic sense of imagination. This is what makes human beings very different from every other creature, but that is what they're suffering. Essentially, they're suffering evolution. So if one has to be liberated from this, in our education systems, there is nothing about how to handle this. They will teach you how to go to the moon. They will teach you how to extract protein out of an invisible bacteria, but they will not tell you how to handle these faculties that we have, because this is the most sophisticated machine that you have on this planet, but nobody has read the user's manual. That's a problem. Little bit of understanding, this mind is fine. This is the most fantastic thing you have. The greatest thing that you have here right now in terms, in comparison to other creatures is you have a mind. You have a cerebral capability that nobody else has. This is what human beings are suffering, their own cerebral development.  Okay. With that being said, I think I've got one final question. That question would be, how would you put that into practice? See, the important thing is one's identity. There is a whole structure. I could send that video to you about how the mind is, you know, the different parts of the mind, how to do this. But the simple thing to put it very simply is this, what are you identified with? Suppose right now you're identified with your game, you're playing the game.  Let's say tomorrow we wiped out your memory and we gave you football. And now you think I'm a football player, football player. Now in your dream also only football will bounce, not the cricket ball. So now you think I'm South African. Now everything works around that. Now you think you're a particular race or religion or whatever. Every identity that you take on, your mind will work only to protect that. Your intellect will essentially function only to protect that. This is why, like I was saying yesterday I was at Martin Luther King's memorial, why do people get to do such horrible things? Because they're identified with something and it makes it all look good. When such things were being done, because it's not one or two people doing some evil, it's a whole population doing it, generation of people doing it, all right? So that can only happen because you fixed an identity which makes you feel it's all good. So in the name of your country you can kill, in the name of your religion you can kill, even the name of your race you can kill, in the name of your caste, creed, whatever other nonsense you've identified with you can kill, all right? This is simply because you're identified with something which is limited, but something within you is longing to become boundless. This needs a cosmic identity. A little bit of work, everybody can do this, that if you just breathe consciously, you understand your lung is not just here, it's the entire bubble of atmosphere is your lung, isn't it? Hello? Little bit is in and out, push push it's happening, but tell me, isn't this a whole bubble of your breath all over? Right now last 36 days I've been traveling all over the place, where all I left my exhalation is anybody calculating or where all I took my inhalations, anybody calculating? I'm saying at least identify with the world in which you live, global identity. Well, you can have smaller identities of nationality, race, community, family, it's all fine, but the fundamental identity has to be much larger than what you can see. Globe used to be a wonderful thing at one time, but now everybody can see the in and out of it, so I would say a cosmic identity is best.  Once you take on an identity like this, your mind is not a problem at all, because once you are not identified with anything that you can see here, believe me, if you sit here, you will sit like me without a single thought on your mind. Nothing happening in my head, empty. Yeah. No, that's very interesting. I guess that's why you have a lot of people, indigenous people, Africans who believe in a God. They don't know what this God is, but they believe in a God. You've got people in India, they believe in many different gods. I don't know, we create them, we create them. It's fascinating and it touches on what you're seeing. You have the Japanese culture where they focus on what you're saying is, if you attach yourself to an ego, you limit yourself, but then when you... Now who is this, who is this Mr. Ego, KG? The ego is the mind, isn't it? No, no, no, no. See, Mr. Ego is a fall guy in everybody's life. When you're wonderful, you say this is me. But when you do something nasty, you say it's Mr. Ego. We must stop this, because within you there is only one person.  This is very important. You do not divide yourself into my higher self, lower self, my ego, my super consciousness, all this. This is an individual. This is me. Sometimes I'm wonderful, sometimes I'm nasty, sometimes I'm fantastic, sometimes I'm horrible.  If you see this is me. But you know, it was Mr. Ego doing that. So you're never going to fix it. So don't create other guys, these are fall guys. If you bowl well, it's you. If you don't bowl well, it's you. All right? Fix that one thing, you will see you will bowl very well. Yes, let's end on that. Super kings, Chennai super kings go easy, huh? No, we've already played them twice, so we're done with Chennai super kings. Tired of Chennai winning. Tired of them winning. It's our turn now. It's our turn. All the best, KG, huh? You must play well. You're a young man. You've done very well. Great to see you from South Africa. I think at one time you guys had a great team and now it's a little down, but it's great to see that you're shining the way you're doing and what speeds are you hitting? Around the 140 to 150. Oh, that's great. That's great. And what you're doing swinging this way that way. I've not seen you play, man. I should watch it. All the best for your game coming up. Thank you so much. No, thank you for chatting. And hopefully we chat soon. Thank you.


I've been really delighted at Griffith because I really value the sense of community that Griffith offers. It just so happens that my final course that I'm doing is called Digital and Interactive Marketing and I really enjoy the face-to-face experience so when we had to switch to online it was a little bit daunting for me. With my first collab, online collab experience, I let my fellow colleagues and my lecturer never know that I'm a little bit anxious and I'm really grateful that they took my hand virtually and guide me through the whole process so it's been much easier than I expected. The online hasn't been as daunting as I thought it would be and I find that I'm still able to be productive. I just need to really prioritize and clear my head of everything and get the sound and the noise away and all that sort of thing so I just need to have more thought process involved in the home experience. For adult learners and mature age students, I think the most important thing is to be very organized with your time. It's a really good idea to have some sort of routine in place and allocate your time for study and everybody in your family knows that this is your time for study and nobody's to disturb you and just respect the fact that you need your few hours to yourself. That also takes a lot of pressure off you by having that organization and ensuring that your space that you're studying in is free of clutter. As an adult learner, it's been a very supportive environment for me so when I finished my undergrad, there was no thought in it. I just wanted to do my post-grad with Griffith as well and I hope to continue after this.


it when this happens that's if we can fix this thing. Hey guys we have this dresser here we keep in the closet because you know of space in our little bedroom this is the this is part of the match set of this so of course it's not working I think there is a drawer missing on the bottom that sorry about the noise but the neighbors mowing grass you always mows grass when I do and I cut grass yesterday but on here you can see June 12 1978 so yeah furniture industries incorporated in 1977 so no price on it but yeah that's you know 42 years old but we're gonna try to get this drawer out of here I can see it's kind of I mean you know skits kind of like real wood I mean you see it's got the dovetail joints there you can still actually see the pencil marks on that so let's see if we can get these drawers out of here without tearing it up too bad and see if we can at least get them working right this is what she keeps all my things in because 99% of her stuff hangs up on a hanger so I got my little buddy out here he's gonna help me apparently so let's see if we can try to coax these drawers out of here without tearing them up too bad again sorry about the the noise but I can't wait on neighbors to do their thing so I can do mine looks like it's in your crooked for one thing it's always been like this since we've been together I keep telling her I won't fix it someday so but yeah looks like there is a drawer missing I think what we can do is re-glue these okay that's not a pencil mark I thought it was but I think it's just the way the wood is on here someone's tried to glue that in you're not supposed to glue the bottoms end of these things guys because that's that could be what happened with this because it can't it can't move you know with the the heat and the cold so you're not supposed to glue these bottoms in someone's tried to glue this so that one like I said I think it's missing it's missing a bottom drawer so we might get by with just cleaning this out real good this looks like looks like it's broke right there so maybe I can take the bottom one off here switch them to I don't know yeah this is definitely broke since there's not a bottom drawer if there is I don't know where it's at so let's go ahead and we're gonna put some glue on these things wherever it needs it okay from there let me get that cleaned out and I'll get some glue out and we'll see what we can do with this thing okay I got some glue here again guys sorry about the about the noise but not much I can do about it but I can't wait on them like I said to do their thing so I can do mine so okay so what we're gonna do is we're gonna put a little bit of glue in each one of these dovetails like I said the bottom these bottom pieces are not supposed to be glued in because they have to give they got to move where it needs to be this one still seems to be pretty tight good shape this side here so I'm gonna set this aside and I'm gonna do that on any of them that need to be re-glued and then we'll move the the runners there and see if we can't get this you know somewhat workable so let me check the other ones okay guys I've come to the conclusion I'm gonna leave these the way they are I'm not sure there's one screw in the front but I don't know what's holding it back here there's no other screw holes so I'm just gonna leave it the way it is it's got to be better than it was right so let's get the drawers put back in here it's been a little while it's worn quite a bit that's the wrong drawer this I believe is the top drawer I take this one out of the top see this one doesn't want to fit in here I guess so maybe one of these has to be on top for you with this let me get this figured out okay this is what we figured out here third drawer down is missing that's the very bottom one so that's why we'll keep it I'll put my jeans in there down on the bottom I said it's not gonna be seen it's always in the they shouldn't go back that far they're supposed to stop but pieces broke off the other side it's not stopping it but probably find me some some regular about the drawer is back in there but with the drawer missing it's and it being in the closet it there's really really not much sense in it so guys there you go we we kind of fix something we made it better it's not right because the plastic things that the drawers slide in you guys know what I'm talking about I can't think of them the rollers the slides whatever they're not right they're broke so this dresser's never gonna be right which is unfortunate because the rest of the bedroom suit is well other than you know need and refinished it is in good working order all the drawers work everything works the slides and on the bed you know it's got the slides on the headboard like where your pillow are you can slide it slide it open or close put stuff in there they work great this is the only one had the issue so like I said as long as it's working for now like that it's fine without the other drawer you know what am I gonna do so here you go guys thanks for watching she bears admit the man legend it's getting hot out here I'm gonna have to change my shirt I'm gone for now bye bye guys take care he's sitting in the dresser that we're working on crazy dog look at that what a goof


Sad to know where all the best toys are and this December many of the hunter's smartphones are just a penny with service in Appalachian Wireless. Stop by your local Appalachian Wireless to check out all of the great smartphone deals that consistently top the nice lists. This Christmas is truly going to be bigger and better than ever. Better service, bigger savings, that is. That's today's Appalachian Wireless. Every year in America, the beginning of the Christmas shopping season is normally reserved for Black Friday after Thanksgiving. However, there are those shoppers who like to wait until the very last moment right before Christmas to do their Christmas shopping. Now I've always wondered, what is it that brings these people out on the day before Christmas Eve to do their Christmas shopping? Well, we did most of our stuff kind of early. But then, you know, things come up and we forget and then we got looking at stuff, looking at our gifts that we've got hidden under our bed.  And so that's what we're out doing today because all the stuff I forgot to do before. I really didn't put it all. I just, I'm going back in to see if I have anything to do here because I'm not satisfied with what I've bought. I've just been busy with work and just not enough hours in the day. I also asked shoppers, who is that special someone who could get you out to the stores on the day before Christmas Eve? Who is it that gets you out the day before Christmas to go shopping? My daughter-in-law. My husband. Yes, my husband. You waited until the last minute to go shopping for your husband? Yes, yes. He's more understanding than everybody else, I guess. My wonderful dear husband. He is an amazing man and he has a lot of patience for me. Who did you all come out Christmas shopping for today? For our family. As it typically is with the Christmas spirit of giving, it's the thought that counts. Reporting from Pikeville for EKB News, I'm Jackson Ladder. Have a Merry Christmas.