Whither Carbon Policy?
What do we want from carbon policy? Internalizing pollution’s external costs even though that may not incent a polluter to abate? Or, mandating reductions and attacking emissions head on? These two options are not merely opposite sides of the same coin. They demonstrate the gulf between liberal and traditional conservative thought.
In my second carbon policy article describing Market Driven Compliance, I reserved until now the philosophy for choosing an intensity-based carbon reduction market over a cap and trade or a tax. This article approaches that choice as one between liberal and conservative values; between unbounded and unquestioning faith in the ability, indeed, the obligation of government to control and solve many if not all individual and collective problems versus a conviction government in this arena should generally constrain itself to defining boundaries on individual and group behavior and thereby encourage efficiency in the private sector.
This and two previous articles ask the reader to think about carbon and climate policy in a different way. As previously observed, a carbon tax is now the default in most policy conversations, with an auctioned cap and trade coming in second. The two are truly Frick and Frack versions of a Pigovian tax, named after the British economist Arthur C. Pigou. A Pigovian tax is supported by economists William Nordhaus (a Nobel laureate), Gregory Mankiw, and a host of others. A quick online search on Pigou reveals Pigovian taxation has been challenged by Ronald Coase (also a Nobel laureate) and others advocating instead for negotiation. The Library of Economics and Liberty describes this evolution of thought as follows:
Pigou’s analysis was accepted until 1960, when Ronald Coase showed that taxes and subsidies are not necessary if the people affected by the externality and the people creating it can easily get together and bargain. Adding to the skepticism about Pigou’s conclusions is the new view, introduced by public choice economists, that governments fail just as markets do. Nevertheless, most economists still advocate Pigovian taxes as a much more efficient way of dealing with pollution than government-imposed standards.
If economic thinking is moving away from Pigou in other areas, it may be time to see pollution in a new light, too.
How we got here.
The liberal-conservative dichotomy is best understood through a bit of history. In 2004, at the beginning of the European Trading System or ETS, member states submitted National Allocation Plans or NAPs for European Commission review. Each member state’s NAP proposed its GHG budget. The EC revised many NAPs downward.
Although the ETS had and perhaps still has surplus emission allowances, member states generally assigned allowance shortages to electric generators. Two reasons for this decision were: the power sector did not have competing imports discouraging electricity price increases, and the opportunity to switch to natural gas made lower emissions possible. An EU tax proposal had failed in the 1990s, trading was included in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, and industry opposed an allowance auction. The only policy consistent with all three of these realities was a no-tax trading system using free European Union Allowances or EUAs. Each EUA was a permit to emit one metric tonne of CO2 and CO2 equivalents.
While electric generators received some free EUAs, their allocations were intentionally short, and they had to buy more. The unforeseen but, in hindsight, predictable result was spot market electricity tracked full EUA prices even when generated with free EUAs. Electric generators received free EUAs, passed the EUA market price through to customers, and benefitted from windfall profits or economic rents compliments of the ETS.
These rents were not the product of any sinister scheme or price gouging. Rather, markets simply work this way, an economic fact of life. There may be several plausible explanations for the result. For example, the free EUAs can be seen in the context of opportunity cost. If a generator holds an EUA and can sell that asset in the carbon market, it will seek to realize at least the market value when using the EUA for any other purpose, such as generating electricity. If generation does not create the same or greater EUA value, the EUA will be sold. Whether the EUA was acquired free or through purchase is of no consequence. Or, the price increase can be seen as protecting the replacement cost of the EUA. If an EUA is used to create electricity, the generator will want to replace the EUA and, therefore, must realize at least the EUA market value when generating electricity so it can restock its EUA inventory.
A third possibility is the Economics 101 principle that incremental or marginal supply sets the market price of a good. If a geographic region is short of gasoline, the market price of all gasoline will rise to reflect the cost of trucking in more supply. If market prices do not rise to that level, incremental supply will not arrive, and there will be a shortage. Likewise, federal tariffs on the incremental supply of Chinese imports will increase prices on all goods, both imported and domestic. Since electric generators were forced to purchase EUAs for their incremental generation, all electricity was priced at that incremental level.
For me, the bottom line is simple: a significant portion of EUAs had to be purchased. Once electric generators purchased EUAs, any or all of these three economic concepts and more could apply. In the ETS, electricity markets were not offering two electricity prices — one with free and another with purchased EUAs. Electricity prices were driven by EUAs purchased to meet power demand.
The ETS had come to a fork in the road and, following Yogi Berra’s advice, took it. The EC could not or did not want to control electricity prices. On the other hand, the EC certainly was not going to allow utilities to keep this generous windfall. The obvious, from the liberal perspective, solution was to transfer the windfall to government by auctioning allowances to generators. An auction would neutralize generators’ windfalls and increase government revenues, all with a single and, in my view, liberal policy.
Thus, the ETS auction and, for some of the same reasons, carbon taxes came into being. Some EUAs are still free, but the auctioned part is growing, putting “into practice the principle that the polluter should pay,” begging the question: pay for what? Pollution or abatement? For cap and trade programs, auctioning has become the default response to windfalls. The Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 or ACES specified auctioning to allocate allowances. In the U.S. northeast, Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative or RGGI allowances are auctioned to electric generators.
An auctioned cap and trade, however, is as flawed as a carbon tax. If one must pay to pollute, permission to pollute may be purchased. Those most able to pay are most likely to pollute. That cost is passed on to consumers who, in reality, end up reimbursing polluters for failing to abate. Polluters with high profit margins can drive up allowance prices and squeeze low margin polluters whose goods might have more economic value.
From my soapbox, taxes and auctions fit a classic liberal template: manage every tonne emitted with a penalty. These policies manipulate consumer choice with deliberately higher prices and are left-of-center, passive-aggressive liberalism at work. A self-righteous omniscience that assumes government must and can direct us, step by step, down the correct path to net-zero carbon emissions.
Rather than seek a pollution solution defining acceptable behavior utilizing property, minimal government influence, maximum individual choice, and the significant potential of a carbon market, the ETS auction and its carbon tax twin miss much of property’s utility, enlarge government’s role in the private economy, indirectly distort consumer choice and overlook the full possibility of a market supplying emission reductions at the lowest possible price. Auction and tax approaches do not take full advantage of free markets and cannot be the most efficient.
Unjust Enrichment and Rents
The proverbial fork in the road, however, offers another choice, one less traveled by. (My apologies to Robert Frost.) If rents or windfalls are never created, there is no need for an auction or tax. An intensity-based cap carbon reduction market such as Market Driven Compliance does not produce windfalls or rents seen in a freely allocated cap and trade for two reasons.
First and most important, MDC has no emission allowances or tax for which consumers can be charged. MDC addresses abatement, not emissions. This subtle but important distinction highlights the difference between paying to pollute and rewarding abatement. No credits or allowances are required to emit at the MDC emission limit. To emit more than the limit, the source must purchase credits from those emitting less. There is no replacement or opportunity cost associated with complying with the limit. MDC polluters gain market entry through emission reductions, not government indulgences to pollute.
Second, MDC imposes the same compliance burden on every dollar of sales, first to last. Incremental production does not bear a higher compliance requirement than any other production. In contrast, the ETS market gave away base generation EUAs and charged full price for incremental generation EUAs. The power market, in turn, charged customers EUA prices for all generation. This cannot happen if both base and incremental generation bear the same compliance burden.
As a result of these two facts, consumers pay only for abatement, not for emissions, and abatement is where our money should go. In my own experience, the petroleum refining industry has been operating since the year 2000 under intensity-based pollution reduction markets, known as averaging, banking and trading, controlling sulfur and benzene in gasoline and diesel. I am unaware of any claims or evidence these refining rules create ETS-type rents or unjust enrichment for any refiner.
Who Pays and Where Does It Go?
To be sure, money will be made by some polluters under MDC, but it will not be unjust. A polluter may sell credits if it emits below its limit. For example, if a polluter emits 90,000 MT but may legally emit 100,000 MT, that polluter will have 10,000 tonnes not emitted or TNE to sell or bank for future compliance. If the market price for TNE is 50 $/MT but the polluter’s cost of abatement is 30 $/MT, the 10,000 TNE could profit this particular polluter by $200,000 [(50 $/MT — 30 $/MT) x 10,000 MT]. These profits come from reducing emissions more than required — a good thing.
Surely, under any carbon policy, high abatement cost polluters will try to raise prices for their goods. These higher prices will benefit competitors with lower abatement costs. This low production cost advantage will exist under any policy but is distinct from rents created by free cap and trade allowances.
This table illustrates an example of costs for five hypothetical polluters under a 50 $/MT tax, each having different emissions, revenues, and per tonne abatement costs. The polluters can all be from the same or different sectors. I picked the inputs to make the example easier to understand; they were not chosen with any particular endpoint in mind. It is assumed if a polluter’s abatement cost is less than the tax rate, the polluter will abate 100% of its emissions. Costs, of course, are ultimately passed through to consumers.
In this example, Polluters D and E eliminate all emissions since their control costs are less than the tax. Polluters A, B, and C, with control costs greater than the tax, abate nothing and pay 50 $/MT on all emissions. For the group, taxes of $1,350,000 are levied on residual emissions, and $400,000 is paid to control 40,000 MT/Y of emissions down to 27,000 MT/Y. The total compliance cost of $1,750,000 will most likely be passed onto consumers. The blue cell highlights the 14% price increase on goods required to recoup costs for the highest abatement cost polluter. To the extent that polluters can implement it, this price increase is also available to other polluters with lower abatement costs. Polluters with lower abatement costs will gain a market advantage of $350,000 if goods prices rise 14%. Eliminating 13,000 MT of emissions costs industry and consumers an average of 134.62 $/MT. The resulting carbon intensity or implied performance standard for this situation is 1,800 MT/$million of sales.
Now, examine the same set of polluters regulated to the same emission level, carbon intensity, and performance standard under MDC.
At 1,800 MT/$million, Polluter A has an annual limit of 9,000 MT (5 $million x 1,800 MT/$million). Limits for other polluters are calculated in the same manner, and group emissions are enforceably limited to 27,000 MT/Y. Instead of a $50 tax, the market clearing price for TNE is 60 $/MT, which is Polluter C’s control cost where TNE supply and demand are in balance. Polluter C purchases TNE because doing so is easier than installing controls. If the TNE price were any higher, Polluter C would also control its emissions, the TNE market would be oversupplied, and the price would drop back to where Polluter C would no longer generate TNE, thus rebalancing the market.
In this example, every polluter’s limit is lower than its historical emissions. Polluters D and E again eliminate all emissions and generate and sell TNEs in the amount of their unused limits. Polluter A controls nothing, emits 1,000 MT more than its limit, and must purchase 1,000 TNE to achieve compliance. Polluters B and C must also purchase TNE in the amount of their excess emissions.
Under MDC, Polluters A, B, and C control nothing and pay $324,000 for TNE, whereas the tax would have been $1,350,000. For the entire group, compliance costs are $400,000 rather than $1,750,000 under a tax. Eliminating 13,000 MT of emissions in this scenario costs industry and consumers an average of 30.77 $/MT vs. $134.62 under a tax. The break-even revenue or price increase is 14% under a tax and 5.2% with MDC. The potential pass-through to consumers is much smaller under MDC. I subscribe to the following theory: if emission reductions cost less, polluters will buy more of them; if emission reductions can be sold, polluters will create more of them.
Moreover, the $324,000 paid by Polluters A, B, and C goes to Polluters D and E, who actually reduce emissions, not to the government. Under MDC, polluters pay, not to pollute, although they may see it as such, but to ensure real abatement, at the lowest economic cost to all, by those who can best provide it anywhere in the economy. A B and C are able to find the least cost option for compliance. D and E are financially rewarded for going above and beyond their legal obligation to provide that option. The consumer gets real abatement, i.e., cleaner air, and pays no penalty for unabated emissions. Rents, windfalls, and unjust enrichment will not be an issue with intensity-based Market Driven Compliance.
Implied Subsidy
A common criticism of intensity-based policy is it impliedly subsidizes increased production and, therefore, emissions. Intensity-based performance standards are expressed as a ratio such as lbs/kWh, gCO2e/MJ (grams of CO2 equivalent per megajoule as in the California Low Carbon Fuel Standard), parts per million of product, or MT/$million. Given that fact, the argument goes, a firm may emit more by increasing kWh, energy content, product volume, or $ of revenue. Increasing a ratio’s denominator allows the numerator to increase without violating the standard.
My reaction: is that all bad? A firm increasing production should be allowed a transitory emission increase if the additional production carries the same compliance burden. A national cap should have some elasticity to accommodate surges in economic growth or shifts in consumer demand. Consumer demand may, in fact, lead to increased production, prices, and, therefore, emissions, but I argue consumer choice should be respected rather than manipulated.
Fortunately, the MDC national cap will limit the impact of any implied subsidy. Performance standards are indexed to the cap. A cap violation will signal regulators to tighten the performance standard. Other intensity-based programs generally do not have a cap. Their performance standards use sector-specific denominators that cannot be applied to multiple sectors. A single cap employing multiple performance standards risks over-allocating or under allocating one or more sectors. This result is politically and economically perilous. An implied subsidy may not be and, indeed, shouldn’t be preventable. With a national cap and a common-denominator performance standard, however, implied subsidy can be managed.
Also worth noting are these MDC aspects working against any implied subsidy. First, just as an electricity generator with a lb/kWh performance standard can increase emissions by producing more kWh, an MDC polluter can theoretically increase emissions by generating more revenue. More revenue, however, means either increasing production, which tends to depress prices or increasing prices, which tends to decrease demand. Generally, these options run counter to unilateral attempts to increase emissions with more revenue.
Finally, the MDC option to generate and sell TNE creates an incentive to reduce emissions below one’s permit limit even if sales increase. The MDC common-denominator performance standard applies equally to all sectors, be they refineries, steel mills, power plants, etc. On the other hand, the Obama EPA Clean Energy Standard applied only to electric generators. California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard applies only to transportation fuels. MDC TNE emission credits can be created in any sector and will have the same use and economic value in all sectors. This larger market encourages superior performance. Since a tax has no performance standard, taxpayers cannot create credits, and the incentive for superior performance found in MDC, i.e., getting paid for emission reductions, is missing.
Property
Property has been proposed in these articles (here and here) as the guiding principle for carbon policy and the basis for rejecting a carbon tax. This notion deserves further explanation. The essence of property is establishing boundaries, the lines defining what is mine and, more importantly, in my view, defining what is not mine. Boundaries play an important role in other arenas such as mental health — no one likes an invasion of their personal space, and we should all perhaps work on our personal mind-our-own-business skills. Boundaries and the property corollary are a natural and integral part of the human condition in many ways. A carbon policy utilizing property rather than discarding it runs with, not counter to human nature.
On December 13, 1968, Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, published the groundbreaking The Tragedy of the Commons by Garrett Hardin, a biology professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Hardin explained that natural resource problems such as air or water pollution are much like a commons where villagers graze their livestock. Grazing one more cow benefits one villager to the extent of one cow, but the negative consequences of overgrazing the commons are spread equally across all villagers. When all villagers make this same calculation, “Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.”
The answer to this dilemma, Hardin argued, is “mutual coercion mutually agreed upon.” In practice, this concept evolved into command and control regulation where polluters accepted, sometimes grudgingly and sometimes not, standards applicable to an entire class to minimize the competitive disadvantage imposed on a single business. The Clean Air, Clean Water, and Resource Conservation and Recovery Acts follow this model.
Mutual coercion mutually agreed upon, however, was not Hardin’s first choice for avoiding the tragedy of the commons. In the first half of the article, on page 1245 of that issue of Science, Hardin states:
The tragedy of the commons as a food basket is averted by private property, or something formally like it. But the air and waters surrounding us cannot readily be fenced, and so the tragedy of the commons as a cesspool must be prevented by different means, by coercive laws or taxing devices that make it cheaper for the polluter to treat his pollutants than to discharge them untreated. We have not progressed as far with the solution of this problem as we have with the first. Indeed, our particular concept of private property, which deters us from exhausting the positive resources of the earth, favors pollution.
The contention of my articles is that our concept of property has, indeed, progressed beyond “coercive laws or taxing devices.” We actually have devised property concepts such that we can fence “the air and waters surrounding us” to deter “us from exhausting the positive resources of the earth.” While earth’s physical resources are surely finite, our individual and collective imagination, innovation, and initiative are unlimited. Property, the constraint of operating within boundaries, drives us to apply that imagination, innovation, and initiative to maximize the value of resources at hand.
In 2000, thirty-two years after Hardin’s article, Hernando de Soto published The Mystery of Capital. De Soto is president of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy [ILD] in Lima, Peru. The inside leaf of the dust jacket states The Economist magazine regards ILD as the second most important think tank in the world. The back of the dust jacket carries praise for the book from Ronald Coase (1991 Nobel Laureate in Economics), Milton Friedman (1976 Nobel Laureate), Francis Fukuyama (author of The End of History and The Last Man (1992)), Jeanne Kirkpatrick (former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N.), Javier Perez de Cuellar (former U.N. Secretary-General), Margaret Thatcher and Walter Wriston (former Chairman of Citigroup). De Soto is a serious thinker with serious ideas and a highly regarded economist.
In Mystery, de Soto reports on ILD research into the world’s informal economies. ILD found huge wealth among the poor. In Egypt, for example, assets of the poor were fifty-five times greater than all recorded foreign investments, including the Suez Canal and Aswan Dam. The poor were poor, not because they lacked assets, but because their assets were not formally recognized as property. Because legal title was lacking, assets of the poor were handicapped. Among other things, assets could not be traded, taxed, or pledged as security for loans. In short, assets existed, but they were not capital, the stuff on which economic value is built and expanded.
Even in the absence of legal recognition, the human imperative to create and honor boundaries existed among the poor. In one anecdote, de Soto recounts a tour through Bali.
As I strolled through rice fields, I had no idea where the property boundaries were. But the dogs knew. Every time I crossed from one farm to another, a different dog barked. Those Indonesian dogs may have been ignorant of formal law, but they were positive about which assets their masters controlled.
De Soto, Hernando. The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (pp. 170–171). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.
De Soto says the history of western economies is very much the same. Property and boundaries were at first informally recognized and socially honored. This extralegal arrangement eventually evolved into a complex system of property laws, unintentionally leading to the growth of western wealth. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes observed, “The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience.” The Common Law (Holmes, 1881).
Creating order out of chaos using our common propensity for boundaries and property is demonstrated by westward expansion in the United States. I once believed, and I suspect many still believe, the white man’s expansion of the American frontier was enabled by the Homestead Act of 1862. De Soto argues otherwise.
Even the celebrated Homestead Act of 1862, which entitled settlers to 160 acres of free land simply for agreeing to live on it and develop it, was less an act of official generosity than the recognition of a fait accompli: Americans had been settling — and improving — the land extralegally for decades. Their politicians gradually modified the law to integrate this reality into the official legal system and won some political points in the bargain. Having thus changed their laws to accommodate existing extralegal arrangements, U.S. officials left the assets of the American settlers and miners primed to be converted into capital.
De Soto, Hernando. The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (p. 111). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.
This historical experience parallels the climate crisis in a clear and inescapable way. Settlers occupied federal land extralegally, just as carbon polluters now occupy our atmosphere. In 1862, Congress did not forcibly remove settlers from federal land or collect rent on land already occupied. Congress did not tax or subsidize production from settlements in order to influence commodity consumption back East. Instead, in the modern sports vernacular, Congress “played the ball where it laid.” In 1862, formal recognition of casual boundary arrangements converted claims into capital and spurred settlers’ imagination, innovation, and initiative to the most efficient use of the land, creating great national wealth.
We can do something similar with carbon policy. Occupation of our atmosphere was not illegal, but extralegal often encouraged and even subsidized by public policy and consumer demand. We had best recognize this informal arrangement as “where the ball lies,” or even as a form of short-lived property, perhaps as a lease or term of years. Efficient use of that informal arrangement, defined as less occupation to produce the same or more, can be quantified, rewarded and converted to formal property that can be sold, banked, and even hypothecated to secure loans. Rather than collect rent or taxes for occupying our atmosphere, accept territory occupied for the time being as territory to be cleared just as each western settler condensed extensive claims into 160 acres. Create new property, i.e., TNE emission reduction credits, and award that property to those vacating the public resource ahead of schedule.
Such an approach would indeed “play the ball where it lies,” rewarding what we really want — emission reductions. There would be no pollution indulgences purchased by industry to be funded by consumers and the economy. The lesson of the Homestead Act for climate policy is not one of penalizing those who, with our encouragement and subsidies, have occupied our atmosphere. Rather, the lesson is one of rewarding those who most efficiently reduce the occupation of the atmosphere (and, for that matter, the ocean) as a dumping ground.
Regressive Impacts
In the tax vs. MDC tables above, consumer prices will rise by perhaps 14% under a tax and 5.2% under MDC. Bill Gates has described this as the “green premium.” These price increases are regressive because they will hurt low-income and poor people most. The tax and auctioned cap and trade response to regressivity is to recycle the government’s tax and auction receipts back to the private sector in the form of reductions in distortionary taxes and direct dividend payments to individuals. The first article in this series explains why this approach is a political minefield fraught with unacceptable consequences.
Not being an expert on social and welfare policy, I only repeat my belief wealth and income disparity in the United States are very significant and even existential issues requiring a separate solution. Regressivity from carbon policy should not be addressed with a carbon policy but with a wealth and income disparity policy. Although I consider myself a classical conservative, this thought is consistent with the Green New Deal, which channels climate change and social welfare onto separate but parallel tracks.
My first and still nascent thought is to replace all current categorical assistance — food stamps, rent assistance, heat and light assistance, and most of the rest of them — with cash, probably through something like a negative income tax. Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman, himself no raging liberal, made the idea famous in the 1960s and defended its conservative nature. The idea
has been greeted with considerable (though far from unanimous) enthusiasm on the left and with considerable (though again far from unanimous) hostility on the right. Yet, in my opinion, the negative income tax is more compatible with the philosophy and aims of the proponents of limited government and maximum individual freedom than with the philosophy and aims of the proponents of the welfare state and greater government control of the economy.
M. Friedman, “The Case for the Negative Income Tax: A View from the Right” In Proceedings of the National Symposium on Guaranteed Income, December 9, 1966, pp. 49–55.Washington, D. C.: U.S. Chamber of Commerce (1966)
The idea has current cachet. Andrew Yang campaigned for president on a universal basic income “Freedom Dividend.” Finland has been experimenting with $600 per month checks to certain unemployed persons and comparing them to a control group receiving standard benefits. The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, recently signed into law, may go further than any other federal law in providing direct cash assistance to American families and individuals. Even this assistance can be seen as property; cash has boundaries defined by its amount, giving people freedom and rewarding imagination, innovation, and initiative in its use. The time may have arrived to address wealth and income disparity stemming from an almost impossibly large number of causes, including regressive impacts of carbon policy, with a singular policy addressing just that.
This and That: Conclusion
There is a necessarily implied consequence of MDC, a carbon policy imposing a uniform limit on emissions for every dollar of product sales. If every dollar of regulated product sales has the same emission limit, every consumer dollar spent on regulated products will have about the same carbon footprint. Certainly, gasoline, electricity, or steel prices will bear a green premium. However, a dollar spent on gasoline will be associated with about the same emissions as a dollar spent on electricity or steel. Rather than manipulate consumer choices to induce emission reductions with a tax or auctioned cap and trade, MDC keeps responsibility for choosing how to reduce emissions on the polluter. The path to lower emissions is made less burdensome with a multi-sector carbon market that simultaneously minimizes costs for some while rewarding overachievement by others.
The consequences of expanding government control in the economy under a tax or auctioned cap and trade are more than significant. The prospect is reminiscent of the Land of Oz, where Dorothy’s only way home was to follow the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City and ask the Wizard, claiming to control all things great and small, for help. Scarecrow’s, Tin Woodman’s, and Lion’s faith in the Wizard convince them a brain, a heart, and courage can come only from him. In truth, they possessed all these virtues on their own, and Dorothy returned home safely using the slippers worn since arriving in Oz. Believing in the Wizard’s omnipotence and omniscience, none of them knew their own power and potential.
We are not Scarecrow, Tin Woodman, or timid Lion. We are already wearing made-to-fit ruby slippers, and the path before us is not confined to the Wizard’s Yellow Brick Road. All we need to know is the destination. With imagination, innovation, and initiative, we will find the way. Let us pay no attention to the man behind the curtain frantically pulling all those levers.
