In this episode, host Kristin Hayes talks with Mary Evans of Claremont McKenna College and Matthew Kotchen of Yale University. Evans and Kotchen—both environmental economists and members of the External Environmental Economics Advisory Committee (E-EEAC), which uses economic research to provide evidence-based, nonpartisan counsel about EPA policies—explore the flawed analysis underlying EPA’s recently updated evaluation of Mercury and Air Toxic Standards (MATS). Expounding on a recent article in Science, which they coauthored with RFF Senior Fellow Karen Palmer and RFF University Fellow Joseph Aldy, Evans and Kotchen contend that EPA’s push to revise MATS relies on data that underestimates the benefits of reduced pollution and does not sufficiently consider how the declining use of coal has impacted regulatory costs.
Listen to the Podcast
Notable Quotes
- How a small regulatory shift could hinder implementation of MATS: “[In] 2019, the Trump EPA issued a proposal to rescind that “appropriate and necessary” determination for [MATS]. And in rescinding that determination, that would remove the legal basis for the rule. So while it's technically not a rollback, it would in effect be a rollback. It would make the rule or compliance with the rule subject to challenge in the courts.” —Mary Evans (7:33)
- The change in estimated benefits with EPA’s revised assessment of MATS: “In the case of MATS, what has the Trump EPA done differently? … They didn't start anew and redo a benefit-cost analysis. What they did was they reproduced the benefits and costs from EPA’s original benefit-cost analysis completed back in 2011, with one major exception. And that was the elimination—the complete elimination—of co-benefits … It essentially changed the bottom line of the benefit-cost comparison from one in which benefits far exceeded costs to the reverse.” —Mary Evans (12:46)
- Changing energy landscape complicates benefit-cost analysis: “What the agency did in their more recent analysis in support of their proposed rule was not conduct a new benefit-cost analysis, but just go back in time eight years and reinterpret the numbers that they estimated in that earlier analysis. Since that time, we've had tremendous change—in particular, in the way that we generate electricity in the United States … It turns out that it's been much less costly to comply with the regulation than was originally anticipated.” —Matthew Kotchen (21:20)
- Bigger risks of using flawed data to justify regulatory rollbacks: “EPA over the past three or four decades has made tremendous strides and, in many ways, is a leader among the government agencies for doing rigorous economic analysis and cost-benefit analysis … I fear that some of these types of moves that have been coming out of the Trump administration recently are basically going to undermine the credibility of the agency.” —Matthew Kotchen (26:00)
Top of the Stack
- "Deep flaws in a mercury regulatory analysis" by Joseph Aldy, Matthew Kotchen, Mary Evans, Meredith Fowlie, Arik Levinson, and Karen Palmer in Science
- "Lead pollution tracks the rise and fall of medieval kings" by Ann Gibbons in Science
- DJ D-Nice spinning on Instagram Live with Club Quarantine
The Full Transcript
Kristin Hayes: Welcome to Resources Radio, a weekly podcast from Resources For The Future. I'm your host, Kristin Hayes. My guests this week are Mary Evans and Matt Kotchen, both professors of economics at Claremont McKenna College and Yale University respectively.
Mary and Matt are two of the authors on a new study recently released in Science, which takes a critical look at the EPA's recent and updated benefit and cost analysis of its Mercury and Air Toxic Standards, or “MATS.” At the risk of skipping to the punchline, the paper author suggest that the EPA's analysis is seriously flawed and Mary, Matt, and I talk about why they and their colleagues reached this conclusion, what the perceived flaws in the analysis could mean for human health in the environment, and how the administration should proceed from here. Stay with us.
Mary and Matt, thank you so much for joining us on Resources Radio. It's really nice to talk with both of you.
Mary Evans: Thanks for having us.
Matthew Kotchen: Pleasure.
Kristin Hayes: So you both are environmental economists, which is a discipline that's of course close to RFFs heart. And before we talk about the specific piece of research under discussion today, can you tell our listeners just a little bit about what drew you to economics, and maybe to environmental economics in particular? Mary, do you want to kick us off?
Mary Evans: Sure. Well, as a child I spent a lot of time with my family experiencing the environment. My father has always been an avid fisherman. In fact, he's continuing to fish even as we speak and, so, I have fond memories of being around the water in particular. And I wouldn't characterize my dad as environmentalist, but he did instill in me an appreciation and a respect for the natural world.
My interest in economics came later. I had never been exposed to economics before my first year of college. And I actually remember sitting in my first economics lecture ever thinking, "Wow, this is just clicking." So economics wasn't at all what I expected. I expected interest rates and effectively finance.
But for me, I found economics to be a way of thinking about the world that really resonated with me. So environmental economics kind of just allows me to combine those two features.
Kristin Hayes: Yeah, that's great. What about you Matt?
Matthew Kotchen: Well, my sort of interests started almost by accident. As an undergrad at the University Of Vermont. I was studying environmental science initially and then my first job after graduating, I was working on lakes and invasive species— Eurasian watermilfoil in the lakes in Vermont. And we went around to a bunch of different community lake associations and we're presenting the results of some of our research. And I realized in that process that nobody, at least at the time, cared much about our science at all. Everybody just cared about the property values of their houses and the lakes that were being impaired by this invasive species. And so my eyes got kind of opened up to economics as being an important dimension to environmental problems. And so I ended up going and getting a master's degree in that and then came back and forth with a love of economics over time. And I've kind of settled just because it seems like an area that strikes me as really important for thinking about how to understand environmental problems and how to come up with solutions.
Kristin Hayes: Mm-hmm (affirmative) That's great. Thank you both. That's really interesting background and I think lays the groundwork really well for the conversation. So Mary, let me turn back to you for a second, and can I ask you to start sort of the meat of our conversation here by giving us a refresher on the MATS rule in general? So why it was originally designed, when it was finalized, when it took effect or any other background that you feel like our listeners should know about the rule.
Mary Evans: Sure. Yeah. So MATS actually has a somewhat complicated history, so I'm going to attempt to give you the elevator pitch version. MATS was promulgated by EPA back in 2012 to regulate emissions of mercury and other hazardous air pollutants or “HAPS” from coal and oil fired power plants. And at the time EPA determined that MATS was "appropriate and necessary," which is a legal term, as required under the Clean Air Act and that “appropriate and necessary” determination is important. And we'll sort of revisit it I think throughout our discussion today. But that initial determination was motivated by three factors.
The first is the threat that the mercury and HAP emissions pose to public health. The second is the fact that power plants represent the largest domestic source of mercury emissions. And then finally, the availability of technology that could be used to reduce those emissions.
A few years later, MATS ended up in the courts and in 2015, the Supreme Court ruled that in making its appropriate and necessary determination, EPA needed to consider cost, explicitly to consider cost. But at the time the Court also allowed the rule to be implemented, so it basically said, "EPA, you have to go back and take a look at the cost, but we're going to allow power plants to proceed in complying with the role."
So the next year, which was 2016, power plants did just that. They began demonstrating compliance with MATS. And around that same time, EPA issued its findings on cost. It used several different metrics, but one of those metrics was a reference to a benefit-cost analysis that EPA had done in support of the rule back in 2011, and that benefit-cost analysis showed that the benefits of MATS far exceeded its cost. And so kind of the punchline is that that 2016 finding, which accounted for cost explicitly as required by the Court, came to the same conclusion as back in 2012, namely that regulating mercury and other HAPS is appropriate and necessary.
Kristin Hayes: Can I just ask one point of clarification?
Mary Evans: Sure.
Kristin Hayes: So just to make sure I'm getting this here, the rule went through the legal system based on the idea that the rule as originally promulgated hadn't accounted for costs or hadn't done so in sufficient detail, but it sounds like there was in fact some benefit-cost analysis that went in from the beginning?
Mary Evans: There was, and Matt, maybe correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that costs were not explicitly considered in making that appropriate and necessary determination.
Kristin Hayes: Gotcha. Okay. Yes, there are subtleties to the legal language in the legal system that I realize have very profound implications for these kinds of rules but are definitely outside of my expertise.
Mary Evans: Yes. And not being a lawyer, I'm sure I'm not picking up on all of those either.
Kristin Hayes: Okay. Alright, great. So, in 2016 where we left off, plants were beginning to comply essentially, to put in place equipment that would allow them to meet the standards promulgated through the rule. Is that right?
Mary Evans: That's right. Yes.
Kristin Hayes: Okay. And what has happened since 2016?
Mary Evans: Well, if we fast forward a few years to 2019, that's when the Trump EPA issued a proposal to rescind that appropriate and necessary determination. And in rescinding that determination, that would remove the legal basis for the rule. So while it's technically not a rollback, it would in effect be a rollback. It would make the rule or compliance with the rule sort of subject to challenge in the courts. And that brings us up to date in terms of the regulatory history, that proposal to rescind the appropriate and necessary finding that hasn't yet been finalized. And we're not sure exactly when that's going to happen. We anticipate in the near future, but how near in the future we're uncertain.
Kristin Hayes: Gotcha. Okay. So Matt, let me turn to you. And so what can you tell us about why the current administration has chosen to take another look at MATS? What are their concerns?
Matthew Kotchen: Sure. Well, as your readers will certainly be well aware, the Trump administration—and the EPA in particular—has been in a very strong pattern of pursuing regulatory rollbacks. And environmental protection in public health protections are some of the big areas that they have been focused on. And MATS is an example of that, but in some ways, it's a more subtle one.
So there's many EPA rules that have been rolled back for various reasons and have done some cost-benefit analyses, which the types of issues that come up in them are some that we might find problems with or quibble with. But MATS is kind of important in the sense because when it was first proposed—Mary did a great job of telling us the background—it's also a very important regulation because at the time it was considered to have some like astronomical benefits in terms of the public health benefits that would happen from a reduction in pollution emissions.
And so, it was considered very economically beneficial. And in the process of revisiting this appropriate and necessary finding, the EPA is showing a different kind of strategy. Instead of directly rolling back a rule by pulling it back, it's kind of eroding and trying to undermine the legal basis for it. So Mary mentioned before that MATS would likely be subject to legal challenge if this appropriate necessary finding gets overturned. And I think that that's part of the strategy here instead of just trying to roll back the rule, it's taking away the process that led to the rule in the first place. And in some ways that can be more problematic because it can have consequences beyond MATS in terms of how we think about comparing the costs and benefits of a whole host of environmental regulations, not just mercury and hazardous air pollutants.
Kristin Hayes: Mm-hmm (affirmative) Interesting. Well, I will note that the title of the paper, which is “Deep Flaws In A Mercury Regulatory Analysis,” I would say pretty much sums up the overall conclusion that you and your coauthors came to. And you call out three primary reasons that you feel that EPA's analysis has some pretty significant challenges. So Mary, let's start with the first of those, which deals with so-called “co-benefits.” And can you tell us sort of what co-benefits are in economic terms, just help us understand that term a little better, and then tell us about how the Trump administration is considering them differently than in the past? And maybe a little bit about why you feel that that interpretation might be flawed?
Mary Evans: Sure. So let's start very big picture. Co-benefits are benefits that arise from changes that take place as a result of some regulation, but from changes that are not the direct focus of that regulation. So now let's go a little bit more narrowly in thinking about the MATS context. In MATS, as I said, the regulation is targeting mercury and HAP emissions. So we can think about those pollutants as being the target of the regulation, but when power plants comply with MATS, they might, for example, switch to using cleaner fuels or they might install pollution control equipment. Those actions also reduce their emissions of harmful particulate matter, or “PM.”
So we can think of PM as being the indirect pollutant or the co-pollutant, and the health benefits that arise from reductions in PM have been called co-benefits. So if we think about co-benefits from the perspective of a benefit-cost analysis, benefits are benefits, whether they arise from reductions in the target pollutant or from reductions in some co-pollutant. And if we treat all benefits equally, then that is both consistent with economic fundamentals. And importantly, it's also consistent with longstanding guidance on benefit-cost analysis from both EPA as well as the Office Of Management And Budget.
And so, in the case of MATS, what has the Trump EPA done differently? Well, I earlier referenced the 2019 proposal to rescind the appropriate and necessary finding, and Matt talked a little bit about how benefits and costs were considered in that context. Well, EPA at the time of the proposal to rescind that finding, they released a benefit-cost memo, and I'm going to reference it as a memo because they didn't redo the benefit-cost analysis. They didn't start anew and redo a benefit-cost analysis. What they did was they reproduced the benefits and costs from EPA’s original benefit-cost analysis completed back in 2011 with one major exception. And that was the elimination, the complete elimination of co-benefits.
So the impact of that was significant. It essentially changed the bottom line of the benefit-cost comparison from one in which benefits far exceeded costs to the reverse. So I've already said that the failure to account for co-benefits is inconsistent with economic principles and regulatory guidance, but it might be helpful for some listeners to have another example to think about the intuition on why ignoring co-benefits is problematic just from the perspective of decision making.
So, let's think about kind of a non-environmental example. Let's suppose we have a pharmaceutical company, and the company is developing a drug to treat epilepsy. And let's suppose that through the company's research and development, it discovers that the drug is also an effective painkiller. Now, at some point the company will face a decision, and that decision is, "Should we bring this drug to the market and incur the cost of doing so?" For example, "Should we spend the money required to get FDA approval and so on?"
So when the company is faced with that decision, would the company ignore the potential revenues it could earn by selling the drug as a painkiller?
Kristin Hayes: Almost certainly not.
Mary Evans: Almost certainly not because from the firm's perspective, those represent true revenues. Not to mention the fact that they represent true benefits to patients, even though they came about indirectly. So in the case of MATS, those PM co-benefits, they are bona fide public health benefits, and they deserve to be considered on equal footing with the direct benefits of the rule.
Kristin Hayes: Great. That was a very helpful explanation. I guess just again, one quick clarifying question. So does that imply however, that, in fact, reductions from mercury alone from the pollutant, that this rule was in fact sort of designed to target in the first place are potentially much smaller than the co-benefits, and so, that's one of the reasons why the calculation changes so radically when those co-benefits are literally taken out of the equation?
Mary Evans: Yeah. So, in that original analysis that was done in 2011, there was only one benefit category that was monetized, and that was a very narrowly defined benefit category, which was increased IQs for children who would be born to women living in recreational angler households. And so because of that narrow focus, the direct benefits were in the range of $4 to 6 million dollars, whereas the PM co-benefits, they're measured in the billions.
Kristin Hayes: Wow. That does seem like a very narrow focus. Okay. Interesting. Alright. Well thanks. Thank you Mary for talking through that first main point of criticism. I want to turn to another one as well and ask you about another point of criticism that you call out. So you and your colleagues note that the Trump administration's analysis fails to account for recent science that identifies other important sources of direct health benefits from reducing mercury emissions, such as fewer heart attacks. So, you just told us about how the original direct benefits were fairly small. It sounds like there are other direct benefits that should be looked at. So, what can you tell us about those?
Mary Evans: Yeah, that's right. So let's think about that narrowly defined benefit category. It's narrow in at least two important dimensions. First, it's only one health endpoint, increased IQs. And second, it's a very specific impacted population. Children born to women within recreational angler households. And that 2011 analysis, it did mention other potential direct benefits, but it didn't quantify any other direct benefits. And the reason for that was that at the time EPA felt like there was too much uncertainty about those other direct benefit categories to move forward in monetizing them.
Okay, so now let's fast forward to 2018. That's the time when EPA merely replicated the direct benefits that were reported in that 2011 analysis, but keep in mind that almost a decade had passed. And during that time, scientists began to have a little bit of a better understanding on how mercury emissions from power plants disperse and end up bioaccumulating in seafood that then gets consumed by us. And that more recent research suggests exposure for a far greater portion of the population, not just the recreational angler households that were the exclusive focus of the earlier analysis.
So, that sort of deals with the impacted population. There's more recent research suggesting that a larger number of people would be impacted just by reductions in the mercury emissions. And for example, even if we focus just on increased IQs, but the second factor to consider has to do with other direct benefits that might relate to other health endpoints, and in particular we focus in our paper on the potential for there to be cardiovascular effects of mercury exposure on the basis of some studies that find a link between mercury exposure and heart attack risk. So as an economist, I'm not particularly well suited to assess that body of literature. That's a task for epidemiologists and toxicologists. But if we apply the mercury and heart attack link that's found in those studies, then the direct benefits of MATS are much, much higher.
So there have been a couple of studies that have done just that. So they've looked at what would be the cardiovascular benefits of MATS in terms of reduced heart attack risk, and one study in particular that came out in 2016 estimates that MATS would provide direct benefits of more than a hundred billion dollars. And again, that far exceeds the $46 million with an M in direct benefits that was sort of carried forward into EPA's recent cost-benefit memo.
So when it comes to direct benefits, I think the punchline is that, had EPA redone the benefit-cost analysis taking into account these more recent findings, then the final calculation might look very different.
Kristin Hayes: Right, right. Okay. Well, and Matt, let me turn to you and ask you about the third point that you and your coauthors lay out. And you note that the analysis ignores what you refer to as transformative changes in the structure and the operations of the electricity sector over the last decade. And you point out that these changes make compliance with the MATS rule much cheaper and therefore presumably lower the cost of the rule. So we've been primarily talking about the benefits side. Now let's turn and talk about the costs for a second. So Matt, can you tell us a little bit more about what's changed in that area in the past decade and why that matters in this case?
Matthew Kotchen: Sure. So since the original MATS benefit-cost analysis that Mary has been talking about, as she mentioned, what the agency did in their more recent analysis in support of their proposed rule was not conduct a new benefit-cost analysis, but just go back in time eight years and reinterpret the numbers that they estimated in that earlier analysis.
But since that time, we've had tremendous change in particular in the way that we generate electricity in the United States. Your listeners will also be familiar with the ideas that we have had a tremendous shift from coal generation to natural gas. We also generate a lot more of our electricity from renewables, and both natural gas and renewables of course emit much less mercury and other hazardous air pollutants than coal.
So, what that means is since that time when that original analysis was done, the whole landscape has changed. Some of those years it is true that the MATS regulation has been in place, but it turns out that it's been much less costly to comply with the regulation than was originally anticipated. So the costs have actually gone down a lot. But it turns out that the benefits have actually gone down a lot too because the emissions were not as high as they would have been without the MATS regulation, which raises another sort of important question over these years. How much of the reduction in generation from coal and more polluting sources has been a result of MATS or would have happened otherwise?
And to this question, we don't do original research to answer it, but we do lean on some other research that has been done by some economists that show that a vast majority of that emission reductions would have occurred anyway even without the regulations.
So primarily it's the shift to natural gas, which has happened because of the changes in the industry of hydrologic fracking, and the decreasing cost of natural gas has led to very unprecedented shifts in the way that we generate electricity consumption. And so this leaves us in a situation where now we are in 2020 and we're thinking about whether or not the MATS rule is appropriate and necessary. And in order to do that factory cost, we want to think about, "Well, how do the costs of this rule compare to the benefits?" And what we know is that the costs are much lower, and we know that the benefits are much lower, but we're also missing an important category of direct benefits that Mary mentioned before. And so the outcome is that we don't actually really know.
And so to just go back in time about eight years in the past and reinterpret numbers is just not a satisfactory way for the EPA to sort of have 180 degree turn in whether or not it thinks a very significant environmental regulation is appropriate and necessary without actually doing original analysis to see if that conclusion is well-founded.
Kristin Hayes: Right. Okay. Matt, that's actually a really nice lead-in into my final question for you both, and thank you for this very clear overview of what's been happening and this important rule. But, I guess I wanted to sort of wrap up this substantive part of our conversation by asking, so you've laid out some challenges, some significant challenges. And Matt, if you were, for lack of a better term, the benefit-cost czar in the federal government right now, what would you recommend that the Trump administration do to address the challenges that you've laid out? Would they in fact go back and do that original research that you just mentioned? Are there other steps that they should take? What would your recommendation be?
Matthew Kotchen: I think for this case, in order to have a justification at least on an economics basis for overturning their twice held previous decisions, I think that it actually does require a new analysis that takes advantage of the best available science, and using appropriate economic methods. So I would say that in particular that is what is required. And as Mary mentioned before, the final rule hasn't come out yet. So, it could happen any day now. We don't know, but we're hoping that in part that this maybe contributes to the much criticism that the EPA has been hearing and they reevaluate this and actually go ahead and do that sort of analysis.
But I would also just say a broader point is that, you've had different types of administrations and they have different political orientations, be it Democratic or Republican, and that stuff is inevitable. In some cases, it's appropriately so. But what we're seeing here is this is an example of where sort of the political agenda of an administration is filtering down into how they're doing the economic analysis. And the EPA over the past three or four decades has made tremendous strides and in many ways is a leader among the government agencies for doing rigorous economic analysis, cost-benefit analysis, where it's really important for these environmental and public health regulations. And I fear that some of these types of moves that have been coming out of the Trump administration recently are basically going to undermine the credibility of the agency to actually be providing credible information that the public can actually rely on as a source to separate out political orientation versus what really is a good cost-benefit analysis.
And I think that's really important. So, if I was the czar, I would say it's really important that we don't let political views filter down to how we actually are doing our science and our economic analysis, and that's really important in the long term.
Kristin Hayes: Yeah. And that reminds me too a little bit of sort of the genesis of the set of authors who actually came together to put this paper together. And my understanding is that you as a group came together to act as an informal but expert and external advisory board to replace the Environmental Economics Advisory Committee that in fact used to live within EPA and was disbanded at some point. And so can you say a little bit more about the E-EEAC and kind of the role that you hope that would play in informing these types of analysis sort of in the short or long term?
Mary Evans: Sure. Yeah. So this report is actually the first to come out of a relatively new organization. You had the acronym right, so it's the, E-EEAC, so E-EEAC and it stands for External Environmental Economics Advisory Committee. The intention of that organization was, as you said, to kind of replace the previous EEAC, which existed under the structure of EPA's Science Advisory Board. The EPA made the decision back in 2018 to retire that committee. Matt and I were both members of the committee at the time of its retirement and some of us from the committee just decided that we needed to do something to fill the vacuum that was created by the retirement of that committee. And so we created this organization.
We've gotten some funding from the Sloan Foundation, other funders. And with that funding, we are starting to fund review committees to look at different rules or actions that EPA might take, which might have been looked at by the previous committee, which no longer exists. So the MATS committee, of which Matt and I were both a part, is the first committee. We also have another committee that's looking at the Waters of the US rule and we're hoping to sort of move forward in funding a couple of more committees in the next couple of years.
I guess our ultimate goal is that EPA make the decision to recreate the EEAC within its internal structure, but until that time, we're planning to exist with this external organization.
Kristin Hayes: Great. Alright. Well thank you for talking us through that too, and you're welcome to come back on the podcast anytime to tell us about future projects that you have as well.
Well, thank you both again very much. This has been a really illuminating and I think important discussion. And I just really appreciate you taking the time. I wanted to close the podcast with our regular feature, which we call Top Of The Stack and we ask our guests to recommend some good content. It can be a book, it can be an article, another podcast. Recommend something to our listeners. And it can be related to the topics that we're talking about or quite frankly, it can just be something fun and interesting and I think particularly in this time of relative isolation, the more mirthful the better. So Mary and Matt, let me ask you both, what's on the top of your respective stacks?
Mary Evans: Matt, do you want to go ahead first?
Matthew Kotchen: Sure, sure. I think right now what's on the top of my stack and what's on the bottom of my stack are the same things, which is how to teach your kids math all of a sudden in addition to my normal research obligations and teaching. I am involved in teaching my first grader and kindergartner here about math, so that is my stack. But one thing that did strike me as kind of interesting and in some ways it was triggered by this work that we did is I happened to be looking at Science magazine when our paper came out to see it posted there. And I saw another paper there, which reminds me of everything that's going on in the world right now where we've all probably seen some of these articles about how one interesting feature of during these challenging times that we're seeing are these tremendous declines in pollution with these satellite images that are going on.
I'm looking forward to all the future studies that are going to take advantage of that in various ways. But it turns out that last week in Science, there is an article, an in-depth archeology article that is titled “Lead Pollution Tracks The Rise And Fall Of Medieval Kings.” And it seems like, we think we're discovering some of these new patterns today, but during successful kings over time, during their reign, they can look back, and I haven't read the paper yet, so it's on my stack, but look at trends in mercury pollution. So this seems like something I want to check out and maybe some of the readers might find it interesting too.
Mary Evans: Yeah, you'll have to send it along to me as well, Matt.
Matthew Kotchen: Sure.
Kristin Hayes: That's great. What about you Mary?
Mary Evans: Well, I'm going to give a decidedly lighter recommendation. As you said, this is an unusual time. It also happens that we're recording on a Saturday. So I'm going to give you a recommendation that I'm certain is unusual for this podcast, but over the past few weeks, I have experienced a lot of joy listening to a DJ who has started to spin on Instagram Live almost every night during the week. And his name is D-Nice and he calls the virtual community he's created Club Quarantine. And it started out with a hundred or so listeners, and it's grown to, I think one evening, it was over a hundred thousand people who were tuning in on Instagram Live to listen to him. And he plays a mixture of genres, but he's pretty heavy on the hip hop and R&B from the '90s. So, if that's your jam, you can check him out later today on Instagram.
Kristin Hayes: Well, fantastic. That is definitely a mirthful recommendation and yes, as you noted, appropriate for a Saturday evening. Well thank you both again, this has been a pleasure and we'll look forward to talking to you in the future either as other studies come out of the E-EEAC or as your other research continues and I hope people stay safe and well.
Mary Evans: Sounds great. You as well, Kristin, thank you.
Matthew Kotchen: Thank you.
Kristin Hayes: Thank you so much.
You've been listening to Resources Radio. Thanks for tuning in. If you have a minute, we'd really appreciate you leaving us a rating or a comment on your podcast platform of choice. Also, feel free to send us your suggestions for future episodes. Resources Radio is a podcast from Resources for the Future. RFF is an independent nonprofit research institution in Washington DC. Our mission is to improve environmental energy and natural resource decisions through impartial economic research and policy engagement. Learn more about us at rff.org.
The views expressed on this podcast are solely those of the participants. They do not necessarily represent the views of Resources for the Future, which does not take institutional positions on public policies. Resources Radio is produced by Elizabeth Wason with music by Daniel Raimi. Join us next week for another episode.