Environment Growth Good – Environment – General Growth’s key to the environment --- wealth, innovation, and efficiency
Adler 3-16-13 – Jonathan H. Adler, Johan Verheij Memorial Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Business Law & Regulation, Case Western Reserve University School of Law; Senior Fellow, Property & Environment Research Center. Case Research Paper Series in Legal Studies, Working Paper 2013-9, March 16, 2013, CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLES FOR ENVIRONMENTAL REFORM, online, jj
Green through Growth
Conservatives should not only seek to constrain government programs¶ that cause or increase environmental harm, but they should also seek to¶ harness competitive markets and economic growth for the environmental¶ benefits they can provide. Economic growth is essential to environmental¶ protection. Market-driven competition not only spurs such growth, it also¶ creates tremendous incentives for more efficient resource use and¶ technological innovation.¶ As a general rule, increases in societal wealth correlate with increases¶ in the demand for environmental quality and the means to protect¶ environmental concerns.71 As people get wealthier, they have greater¶ levels of disposable income to devote to environmental concerns. Surveys¶ find that public support for environmental measures, both public and¶ private, correlates with changes in personal income. Thus, it is no surprise¶ that donors of and members to environmentalist groups are predominantly¶ drawn from upper-income groups.72 There is also evidence that wealthier¶ communities are more likely to support measures to preserve natural¶ resources and are more willing to forego development for environmental¶ reasons.73¶ Economic growth also fuels technological advances, such as the¶ development of less resource-intensive technologies. At the same time,¶ wealth accumulation provides for the resources necessary to deploy¶ advanced technologies that help meet human needs more efficiently and¶ with less environmental impact.74¶ In a competitive economy, businesses face constant pressure to¶ economize on resource use to reduce costs. This, too, can feed¶ environmentally beneficial innovation. Market-oriented economies¶ generally experience more efficient resource use. In the¶ telecommunications industry, for example, copper wire was gradually¶ replaced by fiber optics (made from sand), which was in turn supplanted by¶ wireless technologies. Each of these steps was the result of competitive¶ market-driven innovation, but each produced tremendous environmental¶ benefits as well.75
Cap solves environmental destruction
Veer 12 (Pierre-Guy, Independent journalist writing for the Von Mises Institute, 5/2, “Cheer for the Environment, Cheer for Capitalism,” http://www.mises.ca/posts/blog/cheer-for-the-environment-cheer-for-capitalism/)
No Ownership, No Responsibility How can such a negligence have happened? It’s simple: no one was the legitimate owner of the resources (water, air, ground). When a property is state-owned – as was the case under communism – government has generally little incentive to sustainably exploit it. In communist Europe, governments wanted to industrialize their country in order, they hoped, to catch up with capitalist economies. Objectives were set, and they had to be met no matter what. This included the use of brown coal, high in sulfur and that creates heavy smoke when burned[4], and questionable farming methods, which depleted the soil. This lack of vision can also be seen in the public sector of capitalist countries. In the US, the Department of Defense creates more dangerous waste than the top five chemical product companies put together. In fact, pollution is such that cleanup costs are estimated at $20 billion. The same goes for agriculture, where Washington encourages overfarming or even farming not adapted for the environment it’s in[5]. Capitalism, the Green Solution In order to solve most of the pollution problems, there exists a simple solution: laissez-faire capitalism, i.e. make sure property rights and profitability can be applied. The latter helped Eastern Europe; when communism fell, capitalism made the countries seek profitable – and not just cheap – ways to produce, which greatly reduced pollution[6]. As for the former, it proved its effectiveness, notably with the Love Canal[7]. Property rights are also thought of in order to protect some resources, be it fish[8] or endangered species[9]. Why such efficiency? Because an owner’s self-interest is directed towards the maximum profitability of his piece of land. By containing pollution – as Hooker Chemicals did with its canal – he keeps away from costly lawsuit for property violation. At the same time, badly managed pollution can diminish the value of the land, and therefore profits. Any entrepreneur with a long-term vision – and whose property is safe from arbitrary government decisions – thinks about all that in order to protect his investment. One isn’t foolish enough to sack one’s property! In conclusion, I have to mention that I agree with environmentalists that it is importance to preserve the environment in order to protect mother nature and humans. However, I strongly disagree with their means, i.e. government intervention. Considering it very seldom has a long-term vision, it is the worst thing that can happen. In fact, one could says that most environmental disasters are, directly or indirectly, caused by the State, mainly by a lack of clear property rights. Were they clearer, they would let each and everyone of us, out of self-interest, protect the environment in a better manner. That way, everyone’s a winner.
Statistical models prove growth leads to tech that solves the environment
Tierney, ’09 (John, science columnist for the New York Times, journalism degree from Yale U, cites Nobel Prize winning economist Simon Kuznets, Ph.D from Columbia U, Apr 20, [tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/20/the-richer-is-greener-curve/])
In my Findings column, I explain how researchers have discovered that, over the long term, being richer often translates into being greener. Many environmental problems get worse as a country first industrializes, but once it reaches a certain level of income, the trend often reverses, producing a curve shaped like an upside-down U. It’s called a Kuznets curve (in honor of the economist Simon Kuznets, who detected this pattern in trends of income inequality). As promised in the column, here are some graphic examples of Kuznets curves for sulphur dioxide pollution, as measured in an assortment of rich and poor countries, and also as measured over time in the United States. Each line is an environmental Kuznets curve for a group of countries during the 1980s. The levels of sulphur dioxide pollution (the vertical axis) rise as countries becomes more affluent (the horizontal axis). But then, once countries reach an economic turning point (a gross domestic product close to $8,000 per capita), the trend reverses and air pollution declines as countries get richer. In this analysis by Xiang Dong Qin of Clemson University, the green line shows countries with strong protections for property rights; the red curve shows countries with weaker protections. I’m not trying to argue that all environmental problems fit these curves, or that these improvements happen automatically. How fast the environment improves depends not just on money but on whether a country has an effective government, educated citizens, healthy institutions and the right laws. (For discussions of the variability of these curves and the factors that affect them, see this PERC report by a group led by Bruce Yandle of Clemson University and this article in Environment, Development and Sustainability by Kuheli Dutt of Northeastern University.) But rising incomes can make it more likely that improvements will come, and these Kuznets curves give more reason for optimism than the old idea that economic growth endangered the planet. In the 1970s, rich countries were urged to “de-develop” by Paul Ehrlich and John P. Holdren, now the White House science adviser. I welcome your thoughts on what can be learned from Kuznets curves — and whether people at opposite ends of the curves can find common ground. As America got richer in the the 20th century, emissions of sulphur dioxide rose. But thanks to new technologies, new laws and new desires for cleaner air, the trend reversed, and sulphur-dioxide pollution declined even though population and wealth kept rising.
Growth spurs resource and tech investment – solves environment
Indur M. Goklany, 8/30/12, Analyst for the Department of Interior, “Economic Growth and the State of Humanity”, PERC, http://perc.org/articles/economic-growth-and-state-humanity-no-21
Improvements specific to health, food, and agriculture also benefit from a larger, more general cycle in which broad technological change, economic growth, and global trade reinforce each other. Other technologies—invented for other reasons—have led to medical advances and improved productivity or reduced the environmental impacts of the food and agricultural sector. For example, computers, lasers, and global positioning systems per-mit precision agriculture to optimize the timing and quantities of fertilizers, water, and pesticides, increasing productivity while reducing environmental impacts. Plastics—essential for food packaging and preservation—also Increase productivity of the food and agricultural sector. Transportation of every land in-creases the abiWto move inputs and outpuWfrom farms to mar-kets, and vice versa. Broad advances in physics and engmeenng have led to new or Improved medical technologies, including elec-tnaty (without which virtually no present day hospithl or operat; mg room could fimction), x-rays, nuclear magnetic resonance; lasers, and refngeratio . These specific impacts do not exhaust the benefits of broad economic growth, technological change, and global trade. Tech=I nological change in general reinforces economic growth (Barr997;Goldany 1998)Allowing countries more resources to research and develop technological improvement(Gbklany 1995) and to increase education.
Capitalism is key to environmental preservation.
Taylor, ’03 [Jenny Taylor, senior fellow CATO institute, Happy Earth Day? Thank Capitalism, http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3073]
Earth Day (April 22) is traditionally a day for the Left -- a celebration of government's ability to deliver the environmental goods and for threats about the parade of horribles that will descend upon us lest we rededicate ourselves to federal regulators and public land managers. This is unfortunate because it's businessmen -- not bureaucrats or environmental activists -- who deserve most of the credit for the environmental gains over the past century and who represent the best hope for a Greener tomorrow. Indeed, we wouldn't even have environmentalists in our midst were it not for capitalism. Environmental amenities, after all, are luxury goods. America -- like much of the Third World today -- had no environmental movement to speak of until living standards rose sufficiently so that we could turn our attention from simply providing for food, shelter, and a reasonable education to higher "quality of life" issues. The richer you are, the more likely you are to be an environmentalist. And people wouldn't be rich without capitalism. Wealth not only breeds environmentalists, it begets environmental quality. There are dozens of studies showing that, as per capita income initially rises from subsistence levels, air and water pollution increases correspondingly. But once per capita income hits between $3,500 and $15,000 (dependent upon the pollutant), the ambient concentration of pollutants begins to decline just as rapidly as it had previously increased. This relationship is found for virtually every significant pollutant in every single region of the planet. It is an iron law. Given that wealthier societies use more resources than poorer societies, such findings are indeed counterintuitive. But the data don't lie. How do we explain this? The obvious answer -- that wealthier societies are willing to trade-off the economic costs of government regulation for environmental improvements and that poorer societies are not -- is only partially correct. In the United States, pollution declines generally predated the passage of laws mandating pollution controls. In fact, for most pollutants, declines were greater before the federal government passed its panoply of environmental regulations than after the EPA came upon the scene. Much of this had to do with individual demands for environmental quality. People who could afford cleaner-burning furnaces, for instance, bought them. People who wanted recreational services spent their money accordingly, creating profit opportunities for the provision of untrammeled nature. Property values rose in cleaner areas and declined in more polluted areas, shifting capital from Brown to Green investments. Market agents will supply whatever it is that people are willing to spend money on. And when people are willing to spend money on environmental quality, the market will provide it. Meanwhile, capitalism rewards efficiency and punishes waste. Profit-hungry companies found ingenious ways to reduce the natural resource inputs necessary to produce all kinds of goods, which in turn reduced environmental demands on the land and the amount of waste that flowed through smokestacks and water pipes. As we learned to do more and more with a given unit of resources, the waste involved (which manifests itself in the form of pollution) shrank. This trend was magnified by the shift away from manufacturing to service industries, which characterizes wealthy, growing economies. The latter are far less pollution-intensive than the former. But the former are necessary prerequisites for the latter. Property rights -- a necessary prerequisite for free market economies -- also provide strong incentives to invest in resource health. Without them, no one cares about future returns because no one can be sure they'll be around to reap the gains. Property rights are also important means by which private desires for resource conservation and preservation can be realized. When the government, on the other hand, holds a monopoly on such decisions, minority preferences in developing societies are overruled (see the old Soviet block for details). Furthermore, only wealthy societies can afford the investments necessary to secure basic environmental improvements, such as sewage treatment and electrification. Unsanitary water and the indoor air pollution (caused primarily by burning organic fuels in the home for heating and cooking needs) are directly responsible for about 10 million deaths a year in the Third World, making poverty the number one environmental killer on the planet today. Capitalism can save more lives threatened by environmental pollution than all the environmental organizations combined. Finally, the technological advances that are part and parcel of growing economies create more natural resources than they consume. That's because what is or is not a "natural resource" is dependent upon our ability to harness the resource in question for human benefit. Resources are therefore a function of human knowledge. Because the stock of human knowledge increases faster in free economies than it does in socialist economies, it should be no surprise that most natural resources in the western world are more abundant today than ever before no matter which measure one uses. This is not to say that government regulations haven't had an impact or aren't occasionally worthwhile. It is to say, however, that free markets are an ally -- not an enemy -- of Mother Earth. The Left, accordingly, has no special claim on Earth Day.
Growth is comparatively better -- collapse speeds up environmental degradation.
Sagoff 97 (Mark Sagoff, Director of Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, A.B from Harvard, fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the Hastings Center. “Do we consume too much,” The Atlantic online,
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/97jun/consume.htm
Peasants in less-developed nations often confront intractable poverty, an entrenched land-tenure system, and a lack of infrastructure; they have little access to markets, education, or employment. Many of the rural poor, according to the environmental consultant Norman Myers, "have no option but to over-exploit environmental resource stocks in order to survive" -- for example, by "increasingly encroaching onto tropical forests among other low-potential lands." These poorest of the poor "are causing as much natural-resource depletion as the other three billion developing-world people put together." Myers observes that traditional indigenous farmers in tropical forests moved from place to place without seriously damaging the ecosystem. The principal agents of tropical deforestation are refugees from civil war and rural poverty, who are forced to eke out a living on marginal lands. Activities such as road building, logging, and commercial agriculture have barely increased in tropical forests since the early 1980s, according to Myers; slash-and-burn farming by displaced peasants accounts for far more deforestation -- roughly three fifths of the total. Its impact is fast expanding. Most of the wood from trees harvested in tropical forests -- that is, those not cleared for farms -- is used locally for fuel. The likeliest path to protecting the rain forest is through economic development that enables peasants to farm efficiently, on land better suited to farming than to forest. Many have argued that economic activity, affluence, and growth automatically lead to resource depletion, environmental deterioration, and ecological collapse. Yet greater productivity and prosperity -- which is what economists mean by growth -- have become prerequisite for controlling urban pollution and protecting sensitive ecological systems such as rain forests. Otherwise, destitute people who are unable to acquire food and fuel will create pollution and destroy forests. Without economic growth, which also correlates with lower fertility, the environmental and population problems of the South will only get worse. For impoverished countries facing environmental disaster, economic growth may be the one thing that is sustainable.
Growth key to renewables that solve the environment and make the economy sustainable
Sagoff, ’97 (Mark, Director of the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy and Professor of Philosophy at George Mason University, Do We Consume Too Much; Volume 279, No. 6; pages 80-96. http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/97jun/consume.htm))
Contrary to these expectations, no global shortages of hydrocarbon fuels are in sight. "One sees no immediate danger of 'running out' of energy in a global sense," writes John P. Holdren, a professor of environmental policy at Harvard University. According to Holdren, reserves of oil and natural gas will last seventy to a hundred years if exploited at 1990 rates. (This does not take into account huge deposits of oil shale, heavy oils, and gas from unconventional sources.) He concludes that "running out of energy resources in any global sense is not what the energy problem is all about." The global energy problem has less to do with depleting resources than with controlling pollutants. Scientists generally agree that gases, principally carbon dioxide, emitted in the combustion of hydrocarbon fuels can build up in and warm the atmosphere by trapping sunlight. Since carbon dioxide enhances photosynthetic activity, plants to some extent absorb the carbon dioxide we produce. In 1995 researchers reported in Science that vegetation in the Northern Hemisphere in 1992 and 1993 converted into trees and other plant tissue 3.5 billion tons of carbon -- more than half the carbon produced by the burning of hydrocarbon fuels worldwide. However successful this and other feedback mechanisms may be in slowing the processes of global warming, a broad scientific consensus, reflected in a 1992 international treaty, has emerged for stabilizing and then decreasing emissions of carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse" gases. This goal is well within the technological reach of the United States and other industrialized countries. Amory Lovins, among others, has described commercially available technologies that can "support present or greatly expanded worldwide economic activity while stabilizing global climate -- and saving money." He observes that "even very large expansions in population and industrial activity need not be energy-constrained." Lovins and other environmentalists contend that pollution-free energy from largely untapped sources is available in amounts exceeding our needs. Geothermal energy -- which makes use of heat from the earth's core -- is theoretically accessible through drilling technology in the United States in amounts thousands of times as great as the amount of energy contained in domestic coal reserves. Tidal energy is also promising. Analysts who study solar power generally agree with Lester Brown, of the Worldwatch Institute, that "technologies are ready to begin building a world energy system largely powered by solar resources." In the future these and other renewable energy sources may be harnessed to the nation's system of storing and delivering electricity. Last year Joseph Romm and Charles Curtis described in these pages advances in photovoltaic cells (which convert sunlight into electricity), fuel cells (which convert the hydrogen in fuels directly to electricity and heat, producing virtually no pollution), and wind power ("Mideast Oil Forever?" April, 1996, Atlantic). According to these authors, genetically engineered organisms used to ferment organic matter could, with further research and development, bring down the costs of ethanol and other environmentally friendly "biofuels" to make them competitive with gasoline.
Every prediction about overpopulation and declining resources has been wrong. Given time, technology will solve every negative argument.
Goklany 9—Indur M. Goklany, Ph.D, is the Assistant Director for Science and Technology Policy, Office of Policy Analysis, US Department of the Interior, and co-editor of the Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development [“Have increases in population, affluence and technology worsened human and environmental well-being?” The Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development, (2009) 1(3), http://goklany.org/library/EJSD%202009.pdf]
Long term empirical trends offer little support for NeoMalthusian worldviews. Yes, global population has continued to rise, as has affluence, output and consumption, But metals, food and energy are more affordable today than they have been for much of history. More importantly, human well-being has never been higher. Moreover, population is no longer increasing exponentially. In fact, there are signs that it could plateau, and possibly even decline in the coming decades.¶ Initially in the arc of development, environmental quality indeed suffered, but by virtually every critical measure – hunger, malnutrition, mortality, education, income, liberty, leisure, material goods, mobility, life expectancy – human well-being advanced. In the U.S., for instance, this advance has been more or less continuous since the 1850s, despite the waxing and waning of a variety of environmental problems in the interim. And this is also true for the world as a whole, at least since the 1950s (Goklany 2007a).¶ The improvements in human well-being despite increased population suggest that contrary to NeoMalthusian claims e.g., Diamond (2005, p. 505), affluence and technology have solved more problems than they have created.¶ Historically, in the richer countries hunger and water related diseases were conquered first, then indoor air pollution, and finally outdoor air pollution. Once richer countries learned to cope with water related diseases such as cholera and dysentery (through knowledge of basic hygiene, a better understanding of the causes of these diseases, better access to safe water and sanitation, draining of swamps, and so forth), there was little public emphasis on other environmental problems. Despite that, private actions for the most part cleaned up indoor air pollution. These actions, including voluntary switching to cleaner fuels and installation of more efficient combustion appliances, were enabled by greater prosperity and technological change, and driven by each household’s natural desire to advance its own quality of life (Goklany 2007a, pp. 79–100).¶ Similar economic and behavioral forces were also at work for outdoor air pollution, and the pollution intensity of the economy declined, but not rapidly enough even though, in retrospect, many of the traditional air pollutants were in the midst of, or had even gone through, their environmental transitions (Goklany 2007a, pp. 130–139, 146–151, 191–201). In the U.S., in the wake of the prosperity of the 1960s and early 1970s and once the privations of the Great Depression and World War II had become distant, the clamor for governmental intervention grew. The resulting regulations helped maintain the momentum, although they do not seem to have accelerated, the underlying rate of improvement driven by the imperative of economic efficiency in a relatively free market system, and compounded by the transition from a manufacturing economy to a service and knowledge based economy (Goklany 2007a, pp. 232–234).10 Consequently, environmental quality is much better now than in previous decades. Carbon dioxide emissions, however, continue to grow. But this is due to the fact that it is a late arrival to society’s list of environmental problems – in fact, its importance, given other global problems, is still contested – and, in any case, there’s been insufficient time to address it economically (Lomborg 2004; Goklany 2005, 2007a; Nordhaus 2008).¶ Today’s developing countries have been following the path laid down by the early developers. Many of them have lower environmental quality than previously, but because of the diffusion of technology (which includes knowledge) from developed countries, they are farther along than early trailblazers such as the U.S. at the same level of economic development. For instance, in 2006 when GDP per capita for low income countries was $1,327, their life expectancy was 60.4 years, a level that the U.S. first reached in 1921, when its GDP per capita was $5,300. Even Sub-Saharan Africa, the world’s developmental laggard, is today ahead of where the U.S. used to be! In 2006, its per capita GDP was at the same level as the U.S. in 1820 but the U.S. did not reach Sub-Saharan Africa’s current infant mortality level until 1917, and life expectancy until 1902 (estimated from World Bank 2008a; Maddison 2003, GGDC 2008; USBC 2008).¶ It can not be overemphasized that despite any environmental deterioration that may have occurred, the well-being of the vast majority of the world’s human population has been improving continually over the past several decades, as indicated not only by life expectancy, but by other critical measures of well-being, including poverty, mortality rates, food supplies, education, child labor, and so forth (Goklany 2007a).¶ Why does reality not mirror Neo-Malthusian concerns?¶ First, much of the environmental and Neo-Malthusian narrative implicitly or explicitly equates human well-being with environmental well-being. While the latter may be a component of the former, the two aren’t the same. Few inside and even fewer outside rich countries would rank environmental indicators among the most important indicators of human well-being,11 except perhaps for access to safe water and sanitation.12 In fact, the most critical indicators of human well-being – life expectancy, mortality rates, prevalence of hunger and malnutrition, literacy, education, child labor, or poverty –generally improved even during periods when other environmental indicators were deteriorating (e.g., Figure 3), indicating a lack of correlation between the two over the long term. In fact, long term trends are consistent with the environmental transition hypothesis in that in its early stages, economic and technological development is negatively correlated with environmental quality, whereas at high levels of development the correlation is positive (Goklany 2007a).¶ Second, as already emphasized, population growth has slowed. It is no longer growing exponentially. And affluence and technology have much to do with that (Figure 2).¶ Neo-Malthusians also overlook the fact that in many respects affluence, technology and human well-being reinforce each other in what has been called the cycle of progress (Goklany 2007a, pp. 79–97). If existing technologies are not up to the task of reducing impacts or otherwise improving the quality of life, it is possible with wealth and human capital to improve existing technologies or create new ones that will. HIV/AIDS is a case in point.¶ When HIV/AIDS appeared on the scene, it was totally unanticipated. It was, for practical purposes, a death sentence for those who contracted it. It took the wealth and human capital of the most developed countries to launch a response. Out of this came an understanding of the disease and the development of various therapies. Once among the top ten killers in the U.S., today HIV ranks nineteenth (counting all cancers and cardiovascular diseases as individual categories). From 1995 to 2004, age-adjusted death rates due to HIV declined by over 70 percent (USBC 2008). The rich countries have figured out how to cope with it, and developing countries are benefiting from the technologies that the former were able to develop because they had the necessary economic and human resources, and institutions at their disposal.¶ Third, both technology and affluence are necessary because while technology provides the methods to reduce environmental problems, affluence provides the means to afford them. In fact, access to HIV therapies in many developing countries is much higher because of wealthy charities and governments of the developed countries (Goklany 2007a, pp. 79–97).¶ Fourth, there is a secular component to technological change (see Figures 2 and 4), so that it ought to advance even if affluence does not, provided we are open to scientific and technological inquiry. Thus, with secular technological change and the mutually reinforcing advances in economic development, the ability to reduce untoward impacts and enhance the quality of life has also grown rapidly.¶ These factors acting in concert over the long haul, have enabled technology for the most part to improve faster than either population or affluence and helped keep environmental damage in check (e.g., for cropland) or even reverse it (e.g., for water pollution, and indoor and traditional outdoor air pollution), particularly in the richer countries (see Table 2).¶ Table 2 also shows that in the long run, technology has often reduced impacts by an order of magnitude or more. Thus, notwithstanding plausible arguments that technological change would eventually increase environmental impacts, historical data suggest that, in fact, technological change ultimately reduces impacts, provided technology is not rejected or compromised via subsidies (which usually flow from the general public to politically favored elements of society).¶ To summarize, population, affluence and technology are not independent of each other. Moreover, technology is a function of time. Therefore, in the IPAT equation, the dependence of the I term on the P, A and T terms is not fixed. It evolves over time. And the Neo-Malthusian mistake has been to assume that the relationship is fixed, or if it is not, then it changes for the worse.¶ A corollary to this is that projections of future impacts spanning a few decades but which do not account for technological change as a function of time and affluence, more likely than not, will overestimate impacts, perhaps by orders of magnitude. In fact, this is one reason why many estimates of the future impacts of climate change are suspect, because most do not account for changes in adaptive capacity either due to secular technological change or increases in economic development (IPCC 2007, Figure SPM.2; Goklany 2007d; Reiter 2007; Southgate and Sohngen 2007)).
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