Transcribed from the 12 January 2021 episode of This is Hell! Radio (Chicago) and printed with permission. Edited for space and readability. Listen to the whole interview:
The talk of a “green recovery,” if it’s not going to be only wishful thinking, needs to be backed up with some sort of social muscle. It’s not going to happen by itself. That’s been pretty clear by how key advanced capitalist countries have dealt with the pandemic crisis and how they have injected trillions of dollars into their economies.
Chuck Mertz: Climate change activism really picked up globally before the pandemic, with new vast movements taking place all over the world. Not that climate change was losing—in fact, more and more future projects to extract and burn fossil fuels are being planned seemingly every day. And if it were not for the pandemic, we would have likely again set records for fossil fuel being burned—which makes one wonder just how effective climate change activism is.
Here to help us understand the current state of climate change activism, returning to This is Hell!, social ecology scholar Andreas Malm is author of the new book How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire. Andreas is also author of The Progress of this Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World. We discussed that with Andreas back in 2018, and we also talked to Andreas back in 2015 about his book Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. Andreas is associate senior lecturer in the department of human ecology at Sweden’s Lund University.
Welcome back to This is Hell!, Andreas.
Andreas Malm: Thank you so much, Chuck.
CM: It’s always great to have you on the show. Thanks for coming up with a title for a book that will not get me any interest from the FBI. I really appreciate that. Are you getting any grief over the title of the book?
AM: Some people who read the book are disappointed that there is no actual manual in how to blow up a pipeline; there are no concrete instructions for how to do it. That’s the main disappointment so far that I have received.
CM: You start by explaining that the manuscript for your book was completed before COVID-19 struck. “As I write these words, the pandemic is killing some two thousand individuals worldwide per day. It also has political victims: one of the first being the climate movement, whose high-flying popular mobilizations were punctured in an instant by the outbreak. The climate strikes that swept the globe in 2019 have been put on hold.”
What role does climate change, in your opinion, play in this pandemic? I fear a lack of climate change activism can lead to a lack of awareness of whatever contribution climate change made in potentially causing this pandemic.
AM: That’s a difficult question. I’m not sure that we know enough to say that climate change had any role in causing this particular pandemic. I don’t know that there’s evidence yet to say that. But scientists working in these fields tell us that rising temperatures increase the risk for pandemics of this sort, because rising temperatures induce animals to migrate, including animals like bats that carry viruses around with them, and bats are the prime natural source of coronaviruses such as the one which is now wreaking havoc on humanity. When animals migrate they come to habitats that they haven’t lived in before, they bump into humans, and they shed their viruses. We can’t exclude that there was a role of climate change in this pandemic, because bats in China are known to migrate further into the center of the country because of rising temperatures; they are trying to follow the climate that they are adapted to, and when temperatures rise that means that they travel northwards.
In the long run, for sure we’ll see more pandemics of this kind, more infectious diseases coming from wildlife, when wildlife is in chaos because global heating is messing up all habitats and all ecosystems.
The climate movement should have been out in the streets trying to convince people (and it shouldn’t be that difficult) that this pandemic is a symptom of the ecological crisis—not only climate change but other aspects of the ecological crisis as well—and unless we deal with the drivers of pandemics such as this one, we will find ourselves in this situation again and again, facing new diseases coming to us from nature. There is a very substantial scientific body of work to back up this claim. But the climate movement has agreed to suspend itself completely, unlike quite a few other social movements, over the past year—notably the Movement for Black Lives in the the US, which charged ahead after the murder of George Floyd even though there was a pandemic. Whereas the climate movement has done almost nothing since the pandemic started, which is very unfortunate.
CM: Why has climate change activism had such difficulty in adapting to a world where in-person protests are not allowed for concerns over public health and safety? What explains to you that lack of adaptation? For instance, prior to the pandemic we were seeing a global mass climate change movement taking place and an internationalization of that movement happening. It’s something that we forget.
So what explains to you why that movement has had such difficulty adapting to the pandemic?
AM: It almost seems like another epoch, what just happened just over a year ago in 2019, in precisely the way you’re describing: this surge in climate activism across the world. Then it just fell off a cliff when the pandemic started. What explains that? I’m not sure, but some leading figures in the movement, including Greta Thunberg, the instigator of the Fridays for Future or Climate Strike movement, went out saying that now it’s all about the virus and we have to respect it—go home from the streets and only do digital activism; we’ll have our strikes online. This is pretty pointless, in my view.
Perhaps that attitude, that deference, if you like, which was not evinced by the BLM movement in the US or by the abortion movement in Poland, or other instances of social revolt that have happened through this pandemic—this deference, this obedience almost, or even meekness, might have something to do with what I am sometimes slightly frustrated with about the climate movement: that it is—how should I put it—very polite. Even though so much is at stake and we’re in such a dire situation, an emergency that just accelerates by the month, the climate movement is still very civil in its methods, and keen not to break too many laws or appear overly militant. Perhaps that is one part of the explanation for why the climate movement agreed to essentially abolish itself once the pandemic started.
Investors here are not looking for the cheapest technology to produce energy. Investors are looking for where they can get the highest profit, the largest return on their invested money. So the idea that investors will automatically flock to the cheapest energy source is profoundly flawed, because that’s not what they’re looking for.
Not abolish itself—it’s in hibernation. It’s in paralysis. Like so many of us, and so many other movements, it’s waiting for the pandemic to end so that it can resume its activities. It lost all of the momentum that we had built up in 2019. It will be difficult to regain that momentum, although of course we will have more climate catastrophes coming, and that should prompt people to go back into the streets and into the squares and into the mines and target fossil fuel infrastructure at perhaps a higher degree of radicalism and militancy than before. But we’ll see. I hope it kicks off again very soon, because we can’t really wait. We can’t lose an entire year in passivity like we’ve done in the past year.
CM: I want to get to that politeness and passivity in a little bit. But you also write of the pandemic that “world capitalism has also had to close its shops like never before, and therein lies an opportunity. Emissions will plunge again, just like after the financial crisis of 2008, for reasons entirely unrelated to climate policy, which in itself is a good thing.”
But since the financial crisis, as you know, we’ve seen nothing but more fossil fuel consumption, setting records for consumption every year. What opportunity do you see in a fossil fuel consumption slowdown caused by a pandemic once that virus has been minimized due to a vaccine? Repeatedly in the media and from politicians, we hear a desire to return to normal. Will we just return to normal, just burning more and more fossil fuels each and every year as we did following the slowdown caused by the financial crisis?
AM: Yeah—the risk of that is overwhelming. But signs are contradictory and it’s a little bit hard to say because we don’t know how this crisis will end. We don’t know how deep it will become. We don’t know if it will last longer than the financial crash. It’s a very different crisis, for many reasons. It’s much more intense. The recession is worse. But if a vaccine works, maybe things can go back to business as usual quicker, and the rebound effect could be more dramatic than in 2008-10. We simply don’t know.
But the talk of a “green recovery,” or using the pandemic as an opportunity to shift away from fossil fuels—that kind of talk, if it’s not going to be only wishful thinking, needs to be backed up with some sort of social muscle, some sort of popular mobilization. It’s not going to happen by itself. That’s been pretty clear by how key advanced capitalist countries have dealt with the pandemic crisis and how they have injected trillions of dollars into their economies. Countries like the US, Germany, France, and the UK have pumped astronomical amounts of money precisely into fossil fuel companies. Here in Europe, companies like Shell and Total and major oil producers and airlines are receiving the bulk of the money injected by actors like the European Central Bank chiefly responsible for managing this economic crisis. They’re not doing anything like killing the fossil fuel industry that’s been weakened by this crisis. They are resuscitating it and trying to keep it alive, even though these companies, Shell and Total for instance, are planning for an increase in production of fossil fuels by between ten and thirty percent in the coming decades. And we need to halve emissions! We need to cut CO2 emissions by half to avoid total runaway global heating.
CM: You write, “In 2018, for the third consecutive year, the amount of money flowing into upstream oil and gas (meaning infrastructure delivering those fuels from under the ground) grew by six percent. Year on year, six percent more capital was sunk into fresh drills, wells, rigs, and investment in exploration alone was projected to shoot up by eighteen percent in 2019.” You even point toward how the investments in alternative, non-fossil fuels have been decreasing. So not only are we burning more fossil fuels than ever, the current plan is for more and more fossil fuels to continue to be burned, year in, year out, setting records for climate change-causing fossil fuels to be burned on an annual basis.
Andreas, is the public aware of how much the fight over climate change is being lost and that we are expanding fossil fuel extraction and even having less investment in alternative fuels?
AM: No. These are not numbers at the top of everyone’s head for sure. It’s not like this is intensely discussed here in Europe, and I don’t think it is in the US either. I should say that some of these trends might have been modified by the pandemic, and there are instances of the fossil fuel industry suspending some investments and shelving expansion because of, for instance, the plunging oil price in the wake of the pandemic. The question, again, is what happens when the pandemic is over, if it ever is. But the key takeaway from all these reports about investment trends is that if investors have their way, and if they continue to be showered in money like they are now when states try to buffer against the crisis, business as usual will just continue. This means drilling and exploring and digging up more and more fossil fuels.
The climate crisis is a cumulative problem. That means that the more CO2 is added to the atmosphere as fossil fuels are burned, the worse the problem becomes. This expansion is inherent to how capital works in this field. There is no private corporation that would voluntarily cease to grow, and cut back on production of fossil fuels. You’re not going to see Shell or Total do that. BP, when it talks about going climate-neutral, doesn’t offer any concrete plans for actually diminishing their production. Rather, they are planning to expand it. The only way to break this constant expansion is to amass sufficient force to compel states to impose limits on fossil fuel production and start to reduce it very, very quickly.
There are no signs yet that this will happen spontaneously on its own without something like mass pressure from below.
The responsibility for driving the climate crisis is becoming more and more concentrated to the top of the pyramid for every year, because our societies are so extremely unequal.
CM: Why doesn’t the market correct itself? You write, “The International Energy Agency [IEA] sees glittering treasures ahead. Exxon Mobil expected a profit in excess of thirty percent from its novel deep water fields off the coast of Brazil and Guyana. As ever, the financial picture for this line of business remained bright. The gas boom roared on, demanding new pipelines. Texas and the prolific Permian Basin is the epicenter of the development of new pipelines, the IEA said, but the steel snakes darted through the grass on other continents as well, their flammable breath about to reach, for instance, Sweden. Nowhere on the horizon of ongoing capital accumulation could a transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy be sighted, despite the latter now being consistently cheaper (as noted by the billionaire’s rag Forbes).”
Why keep burning the more expensive, more destructive sources of fossil fuels? Why hasn’t the market corrected itself from rewarding fossil fuels that are not only more expensive but more destructive to the planet?
AM: Because agents on the market, the key agents—the investors, the owners of the means of production; the capitalists, to put it frankly—don’t go after the lowest prices. They go after maximum profit. That is the purpose of investing capital, to maximize profits. The ultra-cheapness of renewable energy that we are now seeing developing (not least from solar PV, which produces some of the cheapest electricity ever in human history around the world right now) is a very mixed blessing for renewable energy, because it doesn’t involve any promise of great profits precisely because it is so extraordinarily cheap.
Once you’ve installed a solar PV facility, you can virtually harvest the energy for free. But that means you don’t have a product to sell. With oil, it’s very different. Again the problem is that oil has become awfully cheap for oil producers during the pandemic. But before the pandemic when there was a reasonably high oil price, that was all the better for the investors because that meant that the commodity that they produce could fetch a price high enough to generate a profit.
Investors here are not looking for what’s the cheapest technology to produce electricity or energy. Investors are looking for where they can get the highest profit, where they can get the largest return on their invested money. So the idea that investors will automatically flock to the cheapest energy source is profoundly flawed, because that’s not what they’re looking for. For humanity as a whole it might be an enormous blessing that renewable energy is now so cheap. It’s not only the energy source that we need to limit the catastrophe of global heating, it’s also the cheapest source of electricity. But that might be precisely the reason why capitalists are shying away from it.
Now what we’re seeing in the world is an expansion in renewable energy infrastructure. But so far what it has done is only add to fossil fuels. It is an expansion, it is an all-of-the-above strategy being implemented in markets worldwide. There is an increase in solar capacity and wind capacity, but what we really need to make a difference for the climate is to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy. We need to desist from burning fossil fuels. As long as we continue burning fossil fuels and add more CO2 to the atmosphere it doesn’t matter how many wind turbines and solar PVs you build. That fundamental transition entails, to be straightforward, a liquidation of a whole department of capital accumulation, namely making profit from the production of fossil fuels. Nowhere in the world do we see, as yet, any initiative to accomplish such a liquidation.
CM: So is the goal—or should the mission of climate change activism be making fossil fuels less profitable and making alternative fuels more profitable? And how would you go about doing that, if that’s something that should be the goal?
AM: The idea that I throw out to fellow climate activists is that we sometimes like to think of ourselves as the investment risk. It’s a slogan that’s been used in the German climate movement, the one that I’ve identified myself with most in recent years. We said that we are the investment risk for capitalists who plan to expand the lignite coal mines. Lignite coal is the dirtiest fossil fuel in the world, and there is no country producing it to a larger extent than Germany. The idea is sound: we need to demonstrate to capitalists who continue to bank on fossil fuels that you cannot feel that you own the world, and you cannot trust that you will have those investments in safety, and we’re going to damage those investments. Not people—not the investors as human beings. But the machines that they have invested in that actually ruin this planet.
The strategy here would be to establish a kind of deterrence against further investment in fossil fuel infrastructure. Establishing a deterrence of that sort would of course entail a herculean effort from the climate movement and its allies. It would mean destroying enough fossil fuel infrastructure—pipelines, coal mines, rigs, what have you—to make it clear to capitalists that you can’t invest in this any longer without running a serious risk of losing the money that you have invested. That won’t be easy.
The climate movement in the US, in Europe, and elsewhere has been successful in certain cases, as in stopping a pipeline project here, blocking a terminal expansion there, winning a struggle around an oil refinery or a coal mine. So it’s not like we’re completely impotent and powerless. It’s just that we need to get much stronger than we have been so far, and we need to do it very fast.
And I’m not saying that this would solve the problem of continued business as usual. Rather what I argue is that it might have to be one component of a groundswell of activism that compels states to move in this direction. At the end of the day, neither me nor any other private activists, individually or in groups, will be in a position to make the requisite decisions to shut this industry down. That kind of decision can only, if only potentially, be taken by state apparatuses.
It’s only a matter of forcing them to do so. They’re not doing it on their own.
CM: You also write, “To say that the signals of climate change have fallen on the deaf ears of the ruling classes of this world would be an understatement.” Why do you blame the ruling classes? Aren’t we all complicit in climate change every time we start our cars—or ride public transportation, even—that depend on fossil fuels? Or even every time we heat our home or build a fire? Are we not just as guilty for using fossil fuels for our own benefit as the ruling class is?
That’s something that we’re told on a regular basis: that it’s all our fault.
AM: No. The data is very clear on this point. If we count emissions from consumption, what we see is that the richest one percent of humanity has emitted more than twice as much as the poorest half of all humanity since 1990. This is according to figures that came from the Stockholm Environment Institute and Oxfam recently. This pattern reappears on every scale in every country. Figures specifically for my country, Sweden, were recently published and it’s the same picture. The very richest elites account for absolutely disproportionate amounts of emissions, notably from how they travel. Rich people have a thing for private jets, for super yachts, for SUVs, and for combining them and traveling like hell all over the world. Ironically, Bill Gates is about to publish a book on how to solve the climate crisis while he is investing in a corporation that leads the private jet business in the UK and other countries.
The other aspect here, apart from consumption, is investment. What drives business as usual, fundamentally, is investment in expanding fossil fuel production and consumption. And investment decisions are of course not shared in any even or democratic fashion, but are to the contrary extremely centralized in the hands of very few individuals in the ruling classes who decide on where they are going to invest their money. The inequality here is increasing year by year, because our societies are becoming more and more unequal, which means that the money is centralized at the top of society and that’s where the decisions are taken about where to place this money.
So no. The picture here is rather the other way around. The responsibility for driving the climate crisis is becoming more and more concentrated to the top of the pyramid for every year, because our societies are so extremely unequal. We see this for emissions from air travel, from SUVs, from transportation in general, from private consumption—and we see it even more when we look at how investments produce emissions.
CM: What if the ruling class’s argument is that they just didn’t know? That’s the big thing we always hear from the wealthy. “We had no idea that we were benefiting from the exploitation of others, and we didn’t even know the level of exploitation!” Often with the use of subcontractors you can do a lot to hide that kind of exploitation.
What would you say to members of the ruling class who simply argue, “We didn’t know”?
AM: If some cotton manufacturer emerged from the grave, having died in 1840 or something like that, I might accept that argument. But knowledge of fuel combustion driving climate change has been fairly widespread in the contemporary ruling class, and in oil and gas companies in particular. We have new revelations coming almost on an annual basis of just how far back this knowledge went. In the auto industry as well. In the 1950s and ’60s and ’70s, major players like General Motors and Exxon Mobil and Chevron were well aware that they were fanning the flames of this global disaster. And yet they proceeded.
Not only did they proceed with it, but they acted to sow doubt about facts that they knew themselves, and create a campaign of disinformation that has been incredibly harmful to any attempt to address this problem. This story is very well documented and a lot of peer-reviewed scientific literature is demonstrating just how wickedly and viciously these corporations behaved in the critical decades when they were among the first to receive the knowledge of what was about to happen, and how they responded by concealing the truth and saying something completely different and denying the climate crisis, and going for all-out expansion of fossil fuel production. This history is going to live with us for a long time. Eventually it will catch up with the capitalists who were guilty of this crime.
There are people in the climate movement arguing for owners of Exxon Mobil and other climate criminals to be put on trial. I think in the long run that’s an entirely decent demand.
CM: You were discussing this earlier: can civil protest be successful? Can protest that’s focused on not being rude be effective in stopping something as big as climate change? Do you believe that civil protest is in itself proving to be increasingly ineffective within neoliberalism, late capitalism—whatever you want to call the political economy in which we currently find ourselves? Do you think it’s not just climate change activism but all kinds of activism that are finding shortcomings when it comes to simply having civil protests?
AM: Yes. The general challenge for progressive forces in our historical era is precisely this: how do we project power? How do we build power, how do we seize power, how do we change societies? Every strategy that is outlined and attempted tends to reach some kind of a dead end, or at least that’s the feeling among many of us. But on the other hand there are cases, in quite recent history, of social movement mobilizations that actually achieve something, that wring concessions from ruling classes. I think the Movement for Black Lives in the US managed to extract quite a few concessions, even though they were local and limited, regarding the police system in the US: initiatives to cut back on police budgets, and putting the idea of defunding the police on the agenda. That is obviously entirely a result of the wave of mobilizations following the murder of George Floyd.
To some extent similar to this, we can see the climate movement in the US, in Europe, and elsewhere being successful in certain cases, and on small scales, having small victories, as in stopping a pipeline project here, blocking a terminal expansion there, winning a struggle around an oil refinery or a coal mine. So it’s not like we’re completely impotent and powerless. It’s just that we need to get much stronger than we have been so far, and we need to do it very fast.
I don’t see any other way forward, because none of these problems will be solved on their own. Our enemies, including (obviously, as we’ve seen in the past weeks) those on the far right, are very aggressive and quite capable of causing a lot of social turbulence from their side. So just sitting back and waiting for these things to sort themselves out is not an option. The only alternative I can see is to try to amplify our strength, and that entails also escalating our tactical behavior in our struggle against fossil fuel infrastructure.
The intellegentsia of the climate movement are people who belong to a certain kind of white middle class and do not have any other political position concrete to that class, and that is part of the explanation for why the movement has taken on this extreme pacifism.
CM: Which you say should lead to a kind of “militant radicalism that is more confrontational,” and you write, “Many critiques of nonviolence are widespread and universal within the climate change movement, and most of its intellectuals would shudder at the thought of another stage beyond absolute nonviolence. For a particular doctrine has taken hold, that of pacifism. It comes in two forms. Moral pacifism says it is always wrong to commit acts of violence. Moral pacifism claims to hold life in the highest regard and detest its violent termination, but a defensive act that saves lives and reduces violence is unacceptable to it insofar as it involves active physical force. This seems flawed. It also appears to yield a priori to the worst forms of evil, precisely those agents intent on taking as many innocent lives as possible. Fascist mass murderers, for instance, will be the least receptive to meek nonviolent opposition. Indeed, the precepts of pacifism have often come across as exhortations to surrender to suffering and atrocity.”
In the wake of the siege of the US capitol last week, there is a debate in the United States (especially among the left) over whether intolerance should be tolerated. Is tolerating intolerance, in your opinion, surrendering to intolerance? Can tolerance overcome intolerance? Can moral pacifism overcome violent fascism?
AM: Fascism and the struggle against it has always been the weakest point of pacifism, because the idea that you can combat something like the Nazi regime in Germany by nonviolent means was a hard case to make. Gandhi tried to do it, and it didn’t work out very well. He even encouraged Jews to more or less enjoy their suffering as a form of spiritual sacrifice. That’s the kind of over-the-top pacifism that really becomes morally repugnant in the end.
Resistance against fascism has had a tendency to include physical confrontation with fascists. And as everyone knows, the fascist regimes in Europe came to an end only when they were overpowered by a larger physical force, from partisans or from the Soviet army or a combination of the two (with some help from the West), and it’s very hard to see fascism having ended in any other fashion.
There is a very strong case to be made for militant antifascist resistance. If you accept that, and if you also accept that certain forms of militancy and property destruction have been essential components of a lot of emancipatory struggles in history, including struggles that climate intellectuals like to point to as analogs for what we’re trying to do in the climate movement, such as the struggle against slavery or the struggle for women’s right to vote or the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa, or the struggle against various dictatorships around the world—all these struggles have included some component of property destruction and confrontation with the forces of the ruling order. It’s dishonest, from a strictly historical point of view, to say something else.
If that’s the case, should we conclude that we in the climate movement can do without any kind of confrontations of this kind, because our enemy is weaker or more vulnerable? Or should we rather conclude that we might perhaps have to step up our game, just as our forebears in those various social movements in history have had to do at critical junctures? That’s the case that I try to make: we are now in such a dire situation and we’ve tried with completely peaceful, polite, civil means, with no property destruction involved, just maximum restraint and absolutely peaceful civil disobedience—generally speaking, with very few exceptions, that’s as far as the climate movement has dared to go in the decades that it has existed. And we haven’t reached far enough by employing only these methods. The time may have come to try something different.
To again take the parallel of the BLM movement, what happened after the murder of George Floyd was that the people of Minneapolis stormed the third precinct police station and burned it down to the ground, and that was the catalyst for the movement, the key incident (as I understand it from a distance) that made the movement leap to another mass scale. What that act showed was that the police are not above the law, and the police are not beyond our power. We can actually go in and break down police infrastructure if we exercise our power in the street. The climate movement needs something similar.
CM: You cite the official handbook of Extinction Rebellion, where Roger Hallam, cofounder and ideologue, states, “There are two types of destruction: violent and nonviolent. The social science is totally clear on this: violence does not optimize the chance of successful progressive outcomes. In fact it almost always leads to fascism and authoritarianism. The alternative, then, is nonviolence.”
Why do you think there is this active attempt at erasing the success of violence in having progressive outcomes of protest? Do you believe there is a racial component to saying that violence does not always or ever work? Or is there a class component? Why do you think that is?
AM: Yes, there is a race component and a class component. Because the climate movement, and not least the intelligentsia of the climate movement, if you like—the intellectual strata, the layers of the climate movement that expound on strategy and formulate these ideas—are people who belong to a certain kind of white middle class and do not have any other political position concrete to that class, and that is part of the explanation for why the movement has taken on this extreme pacifism. That quotation that you just read from Roger Hallam is one of the most hair-raising accounts of the history of social struggle that I think you can find. It’s just so deeply, fundamentally false that it’s almost revolting.
Now yes, if we look at something like the Movement for Black Lives in the US or the Yellow Vests in France—these are social movement that have not been committed to a similarly doctrinaire and dogmatic pacifism. These are movements that have had other class and race components and bases than much of the climate movement in the Global North. So yes, the climate movement has to extricate itself from the white middle class, politically and demographically and socially, and broaden its base to include many more working class people and people who are nonwhite. Then we’ll see a different attitude towards these things and a different attitude towards the police.
The love for the police that a group like Extinction Rebellion flaunted when it was at its height in 2019—that love for the police just can’t go on. It’s stone dead after the events of the past year in the US and elsewhere. If the climate movement is going to break out of that white middle class fold, it has to have a completely different attitude towards the police.
CM: Andreas, it’s always great to hear your voice. Great to have you back on the show.
AM: Thanks so much for having me.
