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“That’s going to cause confusion.”
It’s been nearly two years since the Inflation Reduction Act passed, and two of its programs designed to encourage home electrification and energy efficiency — worth a combined $8.8 billion — are still not operational.
The delay has already caused consternation among homeowners who can’t understand why they still don’t know when the rebates will be available or what they will cover. Now it’s becoming apparent that these programs could look quite different state by state.
This is, to some extent, by design. The rebates will be distributed by state governments, who must first apply to the Department of Energy for their share of the funding. Most states are still in the process of putting together their applications. The law laid out some rules for how these programs would work, e.g. which kinds of appliances and upgrades the rebates will subsidize and the maximum subsidy per appliance and per household. It also put restrictions on who could benefit from the programs, with most of the money earmarked for low- and moderate-income households. But it left plenty of flexibility for states to tailor the programs to their own needs.
That’s mostly a good thing. Many states already offer robust electrification and efficiency rebates, but their existing programs have major shortcomings. Apartment buildings, in particular, have been hard to reach — both because landlords have little incentive to make upgrades and because it’s much more complicated to retrofit a big apartment building than a single-family home. The IRA rebates create an opportunity to try and fill these kinds of gaps.
But the result is also, frankly, messy. The money is taking a long time to get out the door, and when it does the programs are going to be convoluted and challenging to communicate to consumers.This could turn out to be a missed opportunity for Biden. When the polling nonprofit Data for Progress asks voters about their greatest concerns relating to climate, they point to energy costs, pollution, and extreme weather. The IRA rebates are an opportunity to address these concerns, and 71% of voters support the programs — including majorities across party lines — according to the group’s surveys.
“Nobody would say that this rollout has been as fast as they would have wanted,” Sage Briscoe, the federal policy director for Rewiring America, told me. “But I’m hopeful that it's going to be really impactful, and at the end of the day, that’s the main thing.”
Information on how states are thinking about distributing the money is scarce. Some did extensive stakeholder engagement prior to submitting their applications and made their proposed plans public, while others are saving that process until after they apply. I combed through as much publicly available information as I could find and discovered a number of ways in which these rebate programs could diverge. The programs may go by different names in different states. Moreover, a heat pump discount in Maine may not exist in Rhode Island, or a family that qualifies for funding in Wisconsin may not have qualified had they lived in New Jersey.
Here are some of the big themes.
The challenge in understanding these programs starts with their most basic feature. What are they called?
One of the programs will provide point-of-sale rebates on specific appliances and upgrades such as heat pumps, insulation, or a new electric panel. This was originally called the High-Efficiency Electric Home Rebate Act, or HEEHRA. Some states have continued to use that acronym. Others have adopted the name the Home Electrification and Appliance Rebates, or HEAR. (For the sake of brevity, I’ll use HEAR.)
The other program, which is a bit more complicated, provides rebates based on the amount of energy a home retrofit project saves. For example, if a homeowner implements a bunch of improvements that will reduce their energy consumption by at least 20%, they could get up to $4,000 back, while upgrades that result in a 35% reduction are eligible for up to $8,000. This was originally called the HOPE for HOMES Act, and many states simply refer to it as HOMES. Others prefer the title Home Efficiency Rebates, or HER. (To make things more confusing, the Department of Energy refers to its two programs together as the Home Energy Rebates and also uses the acronym HER. For the sake of clarity, I’ll refer to this one as HOMES.)
Meanwhile, some states are funneling the money into their own pre-existing rebate programs or creating new programs with new names. For example, New York — the only state to have received funding under the IRA rebate programs so far— will distribute at least some of the HEAR money through its Empower+ program, which already helps low- and moderate-income households save energy. The state will be able to expand the program’s offerings to include paying for electrical upgrades needed to install heat pumps or induction stoves. Vermont wants to allocate most of the HOMES funding to its Weatherization Assistance Program, which is an older, federally funded, state-implemented efficiency program for low-income households. New Jersey is considering putting most of the funding from both pots toward a new program called M-RISE.
Ultimately, this could mean that many people who apply for or receive these rebates will have no idea that they’re benefiting from Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.
“That was baked in the cake the way the law was written,” Andy Frank, the founder of the home electrification company Sealed, told me. He said he thinks the bigger communication challenge will be when the first few states start launching their programs. Biden officials may take the opportunity to do a victory lap, inviting national press. People in other states may see the news and think they can get rebates too. “That’s going to cause confusion,” he said.
Briscoe acknowledged the branding challenge but said it was not the most important part of the legislation. “The most important thing is getting families the help that they need, and I think that’s rightfully where the emphasis has been,” she told me.
Congress included a long list of technologies that would be eligible for discounts under the HEAR program: Heat pump space heaters, heat pump water heaters, heat pump clothes dryers, electric stoves, electric panels, electric wiring, insulation, air sealing, and ventilation systems.
While it seems that most states plan to copy and paste the whole list into their plans, a few are narrowing it down. Maine, for example, has proposed offering rebates only for heat pumps, plus electric wiring and panel upgrades if needed. Its draft strategic plan from January says that the state has alternative funding streams to sustain its existing programs for water heaters and insulation, and that the other appliances, like stoves and clothes dryers, “have less impact on home energy costs and carbon emissions.”
Rhode Island, on the other hand, may not allocate any of the funding for heat pumps. The state conducted a “gap analysis” to identify which of the technologies have the least funding support under its existing programs and determined that stoves, clothes dryers, electric panels, and wiring were the best use of the HEAR funds. That doesn’t mean Rhode Islanders wouldn’t be able to get rebates for heat pumps — the state energy office offers incentives, as do all of its utilities. It just means they wouldn’t be able to get more funding on top of what’s already offered.
Wisconsin, which is further behind these Northeast states in promoting electrification, is opting to make all of the technologies eligible. Though narrowing the list would extend the budget for each one, state officials noted, it would also “preclude the state from accelerating market adoption for those upgrades.”
Congress restricted HEAR program funding to low-income households, defined as those making less than 80% of the area median income, and moderate-income households, or those making between 80% and 150% of the area median income. The HOMES program is not income-restricted, though states were instructed to offer higher rebates for low-income households.
There’s going to be a lot of variation between states regarding how much funding they dedicate to each income bracket. But there also may be some variation in the types of buildings that are eligible.
Maine has proposed dedicating 100% of the funding under the HOMES program and much of the funding under HEAR to multifamily buildings. For the HEAR program, it might also prioritize subsidizing heat pump retrofits in manufactured housing, formerly referred to as “mobile homes.” That means if you’re a single family homeowner in Maine, you probably won’t benefit from the program — although Maine already has extensive subsidies for single-family homes and has completed more than 100,000 heat pump retrofits since 2019.
“They're taking this funding to try and move beyond that section of housing and open up robust programs for areas where they still have really high need,” said Briscoe.
New Jersey has proposed a similar approach, dedicating 100% of HOMES funding and 85% of HEAR funding to multifamily buildings in low-income neighborhoods. The remaining 15% will go toward an existing state program called Comfort Partners that subsidizes energy efficiency measures to expand its offerings to heat pumps, electrical panels, wiring, and water heaters.
Sealed and Rewiring America are both working on tools to help consumers and contractors navigate all of this confusion. Frank told me Sealed was developing software for contractors that will help them determine customer eligibility and calculate total savings at the point of sale, and then process the rebate paperwork as quickly and easily as possible. Rewiring America is building what it intends to be a user-friendly calculator in which a homeowner will be able to enter their zip code and income and get information about all of the programs they are eligible for, including state, local, and utility-run offerings.
Or at least Californians are. Dozens have written to the California Energy Commission to ask when the rebates will be available, whether they will qualify, or to express their frustration with how long it’s taking to get the program up and running.
Consider the following comment submitted in April by Kristen Talley, a homeowner who wants to replace her gas furnace with an electric heat pump. “We’d hoped to do the project last fall … and we can’t proceed until the rebates are available,” she wrote. “Please establish criteria and make applications available NOW!!! It’s crazy that it's taken this long!”
Richard Pellin, a 77-year-old retiree who does not have enough income to qualify for the tax credits, wrote that he wants to install a new heat pump system so that he can have air conditioning. “We suffered badly last year from the summer heat … Waiting until the state programs are ready to issue rebates would cause us to suffer longer,” he said. He implored the commission to allow the rebates to be claimed retroactively, warning that otherwise there might be “a surge of activity when rebates are approved” that will tax supply chains and labor and cause further delays. (The Department of Energy has specified that the HEAR rebates cannot be claimed retroactively, but it may be possible for the HOMES rebates.)
Some of this frustration is misplaced. California submitted its application for the HEAR program in January and is waiting on the Department of Energy to approve it. In the meantime, it may even be possible that Talley and Pellin are eligible for existing California rebate programs, though discounts through those are significantly lower.
Another public comment from Richard Bailey had the subject line: “Time is of the essence.” Bailey warned that the rebates could be “canceled, denied, delayed, etc” if Trump was elected. “Much is at risk. Do not delay,” he wrote.
I asked Briscoe how much of a risk this was. She said it would require an act of Congress to cancel the programs — in other words, it’s not something Trump could do on day one. Even then, money that’s already been awarded to states cannot be clawed back. Fifteen states have already submitted their applications, and are expected to receive funding by the end of the year.
“Hopefully, we can get a lot of these applications in and processed before any new administration were to take over,” said Briscoe.
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On the first night of climate week, I headed over to a happy hour hosted by a bunch of progressive climate advocacy nonprofits, including Climate Cabinet, Data for Progress, and Evergreen Collaborative. The event was called “Progress No Matter What,” and the theme was states’ ability to advance climate action regardless of national politics.
On the packed back patio of a beer garden on the Lower East Side, a handful of speakers took turns climbing atop a picnic bench to address the boisterous crowd. State and federal officials celebrated the billions of dollars flowing to states to decarbonize and pressed attendees not to ignore the down-ballot climate champions running for office in November. Then, to close things out, White House Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi got up. Over the past year, I’ve heard Zaidi deliver the same impassioned but rehearsed preamble on press call after press call reminding us of President Biden’s climate accomplishments during his term. But here, Zaidi let loose. He said the Wall Street Journal had published a story that morning that started with the line “Climate optimism is fading.” He didn’t think so. “This is popular shit!” he declared, of efforts to fight climate change while reducing pollution, and the audience erupted in cheers. — Emily Pontecorvo
Last weekend, I attended the U.S. premiere of The Here Now Project at the inaugural Climate Film Festival — and was totally wowed. The 75-minute documentary is unnarrated and composed entirely of archival cell phone videos, vlogs, and news clips that were shot during climate disasters in 2021, ranging from the Texas power crisis that left almost 250 people dead after a February cold snap to the “sea snot” that covered Turkey’s Sea of Marmara over that summer.
While it’s harrowing to see all the footage back-to-back — and to learn about disasters I hadn’t paid close attention to at the time, like the subway flooding in Zhengzhou or the dust storms in Brazil — I was even more struck by the seemingly universal urge people have to document the way extreme weather upends their lives, even when those lives are quite immediately at risk.
The movie’s power lies in echoes and patterns of human nature, from our curiosity to our horror to our powerful compassion and self-sacrifice. I spoke to the filmmakers, Greg Jacobs and Jon Siskel, for my article about the Climate Film Festival last week, and Jacobs told me they hope to make The Here Now Project an ongoing chronicle of climate change in the style of Michael Apted’s famous Up series; I very much hope they will succeed. — Jeva Lange
At several events this week related to carbon dioxide removal, the conversation turned again and again to the challenge of finance and the scarcity of buyers. During a marine carbon removal panel on Monday, for instance, James Lindsay, the director of investments at the philanthropic Builders Initiative described the tension between simultaneously trying to raise capital for a given carbon removal approach while also trying to prove that it’s safe and actually works. While there are a few buyers, like the Frontier Climate initiative, that accept these conditions and are willing to support nascent approaches that may or may not work out, making one big deal with Frontier doesn’t provide the consistent cash flow that a startup needs to progress, he said.
Later that day, at a mini-conference hosted by the direct air capture company Climeworks, CEO Christoph Gebald declared that the industry simply cannot rely on voluntary purchases if it is going to scale. “We need to transition to regulated markets,” he said. Josh Becker, a California State Senator gave a brief presentation on a bill he introduced this year, SB 308, to do just that. It was a “government-enabled, market led” policy that would have required corporate polluters to begin paying for carbon removal. The bill “died a mysterious death,” he said, but he plans to try again in 2025.
The event closed out with a panel on “the economic opportunity of carbon removal in the U.S.,” and yet the talk once again turned to the economic obstacles. “Demand is an existential challenge,” Giana Amadour, executive director of the Carbon Removal Alliance, said. “If we want deployment beyond these 1,000- to 10,000-ton facilities, we need a demand signal that is robust, steady, resilient, growing, in order to make sure these companies can raise the private and public sector funding they need.” — Emily
While most of the energy developers, technologists, and investors I spoke to and/or heard speak this week were excited about artificial intelligence as a way to bring forward demand for clean electrons, there was one interesting note of caution from Katie Rae, chief executive of Engine Ventures, the investment firm that has backed Commonwealth Fusion Systems and the long-duration battery company Form Energy. “The government has to think about it: Are the people going to get energy? Or are the hyperscalers going to get energy? The pitchforks can come.” — Matthew Zeitlin
On Tuesday morning, I stopped by “Geothermal House,” a day-long event and installation at the Hall des Lumières near City Hall. It’s a former bank building that now hosts “immersive experiences,” which essentially amount to wandering around a room decorated with floor to ceiling projections of art, like the paintings of Chagall. This time, however, the room was made up to bring you miles deep within the Earth’s crust.
The VR lounge at Geothermal House.Emily Pontecorvo
The event was put on by Project InnerSpace, a nonprofit dedicated to transferring skills and knowledge from the oil and gas industry to scale geothermal energy. “This is the first time geothermal has shown up at NY Climate Week,” the group’s executive director, Jamie Beard, declared at the start of a series of panels held in the central hall. Unfortunately, the talks were nearly impossible to hear in the cavernous marble room, but I spent some time wandering around, watching the animated projections of geothermal power plants and hit up the “VR lounge,” which offered a much more convincing immersive experience and taught me about the difference between “enhanced” and “advanced” geothermal.
The event also had some of the best swag I saw at Climate Week, including a station where you could 3D print your face onto “the core of the Earth.” Jeva was accurate when she compared the resulting object to a Ferrero Rocher. — Emily
Two members of the Jean Charles Choctaw Nation — which is considered to be one of the first communities in the U.S. to be displaced by climate change — spoke at an event on Wednesday hosted by EarthRights International. They emphasized the way the state of Louisiana failed to keep the tribe intact during the relocation effort, with Chief Deme Naquin and Tribal Secretary Chantel Comardelle explaining that while their own story is one marked by failure, they hope other communities will be able to learn from it. After all, it’s not just a house or neighborhood that you lose to something like coastal erosion; it’s also the stories and memories of the place you’d called home. “We probably weren’t the first” community to be displaced by climate change, Chief Deme told the room, “but we’re definitely not the last.” — Jeva
And over in D.C., during “National Clean Energy Week,” a more industry-focused panel-ganza, the cofounder and chief executive of the most important company in energy was sharing his thoughts on the sector. That would be Nvidia's Jensen Huang, the head of the company that designs the chips that power many artificial intelligence models and applications.
During his one-hour chat with former Education Secretary Margaret Spellings at the Bipartisan Policy Center on Friday, Huang focused mostly on what good AI could do for energy and grid efficiency, including weather simulation and designing smart grids. While it's true, Huang said, “that AI does take energy,” AI-trained models can predict weather and climate “tens of thousands of times more energy efficiently” than supercomputers. But he was also straightforward about the intense energy demands of training artificial intelligence models.
“These data centers could consume, today, maybe 100 megawatts. In the future it will be 10, 20 times more than that.” To reduce strain on the grid, these data centers could be located “where the energy” is located, Huang suggested. “The AI doesn't care where it goes to school.” And like a student, “it’s okay” if it sometimes has to “take a nap” when the sun’s not out. — Matthew
Ocean-based storms are increasingly affecting areas hundreds of miles from the coasts.
After a hurricane makes landfall comes the eerie wait for bad news. For Hurricane Helene — now a tropical storm as it barrels toward Nashville — that news came swiftly on Friday morning: at least 4 million are without power after the storm’s Thursday night arrival near Florida’s Big Bend region; more than 20 are dead in three states; and damage estimates are already in the billions of dollars.
But that’s just the news from the coasts.
As Helene is set to illustrate yet again, hurricanes are not just coastal events — especially in the era of our warming climate. The National Weather Service warned towns in the Blue Ridge Mountains of South Carolina and Georgia that Helene will be “one of the most significant weather events” in the region in “the modern era,” while the Appalachians are in store for a “catastrophic, historic flooding disaster” according to AccuWeather’s Chief Meteorologist Jonathan Porter during a briefing with reporters Friday morning. He added for good measure: “This is not the kind of language we use very often.”
Helene’s dangerous inland impacts are precisely what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration sounded the alarm over earlier this year. Ninety percent of hurricane fatalities result from water, and almost 60% of those are freshwater deaths caused by heavy rainfall. Such fatalities often occur hundreds of miles from the shore in flash floods fueled by the warmer atmosphere, which can hold and dispense far more moisture in a short period than would have been possible in the pre-industrial era.
With Helene specifically, “there are going to be communities that are cut off” as bridges are compromised and roadways wash out, Porter said. Especially in mountain communities that might have only one or two ways in and out of town, that kind of rain raises the level of difficulty for any sort of emergency response and can make evacuation impossible. There have already been reports of 12 to 15 inches of rain in some parts of North Carolina.
“This is steep terrain,” Porter said. “When you get rain rates of 2 to 4 inches per hour, that is going to result in very significant flash flooding that can go from a dangerous situation to a life-threatening emergency over the matter of just a few minutes.” Rivers could exceed record levels by tonight, with more than 2 million under flash flood warnings around Raleigh and Fayetteville. Landslides are also a possibility in the mountains, where just 5 inches of rain from a single storm can be enough to trigger a disaster, the National Hurricane Center warned; two interstates near Asheville, North Carolina, are already closed due to slides.
It’s certainly not unheard of for the remnants of tropical storms to pass over the Carolinas and Appalachian Mountains — hurricanes such as Katrina in 2005 and Lee in 2011 were deadly billion-dollar disasters even as far inland as Tennessee. But as storms get bigger and wetter like Helene, “even people who have lived in a community for decades may see water flowing fast and rising rapidly in areas that they’ve never seen flood before,” Porter said.
It’s time to adjust expectations — and preparedness plans — accordingly. Louisiana, Texas, and Florida still stand for “Hurricane Country” in the popular imagination, but the mountain states of the southeast are rapidly joining that list. The National Hurricane Center is already monitoring a new low-pressure area in the Gulf of Mexico — in nearly the exact same spot that birthed Helene.
Helene’s winds stretch close to 500 miles across. That’s half the width of the entire Gulf of Mexico.
When Hurricane Helene began to take shape in the Gulf of Mexico, there was one factor that quickly made the storm stand out to meteorologists: its size. Helene is “unusually large,” the National Hurricane Center said; “exceptionally large,” per the Washington Post. Upon landfall, it was one of largest hurricanes in modern history, according to hurricane expert Michael Lowry — bigger than Harvey, bigger than Katrina, surpassed only by 2017’s Hurricane Irma, which was one of the costliest tropical storms on record and resulted in dozens of deaths.
Bigger does not always correlate to stronger. Discussions around the strength of a hurricane typically center on its wind speeds (which is what the categories connote) and the volume of rain it is expected to unleash. But in Helene’s case, there was both size and power — when the storm made landfall in Florida’s Big Bend region late Thursday night, it was classified as a Category 4 storm, with sustained winds of 140 miles per hour.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis declared a state of emergency in 61 of the state’s 67 counties ahead of the storm, speaking to the breadth of damage he expects to see and the long recovery process to come. Already, images of flooded streets are circulating on social media, multiple deaths have been reported, and millions are without electricity. As Helene continues its course, it’s bringing tropical storm conditions to Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Tennessee.
In the hours and days to come, we’ll get a better understanding of how well forecasters did predicting the path and strength of this storm, a task that has become increasingly difficult. Because at the same time technology has improved oversight of these storms, with artificial intelligence models that have raised the bar for prediction accuracy and the ability to deploy radar systems as they pass overhead, climate change is altering the ingredients that feed their formation. For example, record-high temperatures in oceans have changed the behavior of storms as they form, Matt Lanza, who monitors Atlantic storm activity for The Eyewall, explained to me, resulting in more storms intensifying rapidly ahead of landfall. This has made storms like 2023’s Hurricane Idalia tougher to predict, despite being closely tracked.
Helene, too, rapidly intensified on its way to reaching land. The area of Florida where it hit, a little over 50 miles from the state capital in Tallahassee, is no stranger to storms— in just the past 13 months, Florida’s Big Bend has had to absorb the impacts of both Idalia and Hurricane Debby, each of which caused billions of dollars in damages. Still, Truchelut said Hurricane Helene could be a “truly unprecedented scenario for North Florida.” Part of the unusual force behind this storm can be attributed to another unprecedented scenario — the warmth of the water in the Gulf of Mexico. CBS News said the water surface temperature below the storm’s formation was up to 89 degrees Fahrenheit, which is as much as 4 degrees above average. This follows the overall Gulf warming trend observed by NOAA, which the agency says “increases the intensity of hurricanes.”
Another factor that allowed Helene to grow so huge so fast was the lack of wind shear, a term meteorologists use to refer to the way wind changes speed or direction or both across different elevations. Strong upper-level winds can inhibit storms from forming or growing. In Helene’s case, however, warm water was accompanied by low wind shear and plenty of moisture— conditions that aligned to provide tremendous energy for the storm’s formation. The only thing really standing in Helene’s way was its own size, Lanza noted, which would have made it more difficult for the storm to get organized and strengthen further.
The most obvious reason size matters is the footprint the storm will have on land. To give you an idea of just how large Helene is, Lowry said in his newsletter Friday that the full breadth of its winds upon landfall stretched over 450 miles across, nearly half the entire width of the Gulf of Mexico. This means the effects of the storm began long before it officially made landfall and will continue long after the eye of the storm has moved on.
Hours before Helene officially reached Florida, rain was already drenching communities in the storm’s projected path. Meanwhile, “Severe and life-threatening impacts from Helene will occur hundreds of miles from the cone confines, especially on the eastern half of the storm,” Florida meteorologist Ryan Truchelut wrote in the Tallahassee Democrat, summing up just how far-reaching Helene’s effects could be. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a self-described “rare news release” on Wednesday to warn of the potential for major flooding as far inland as Appalachia, some 300 miles from the Gulf Coast.
Another serious size-related consideration relates to the potential storm surge, or how far above average tides the water will rise. “When you have a storm this big, you’re just inherently moving a lot of water over a broader area,” Lanza said. As Hurricane Helene’s eye approached Florida, water levels easily surpassed multiple storm surge records. But what stood out to Lanza was not just that the surge was powerful, it was also that the threat of surge was so widespread. “A much smaller storm, you can still have a very large storm surge, but it’s going to be very isolated near to where it comes ashore,” he told me. “With a storm like Helene, because of its size, near and east of where it comes ashore, you’re going to have a massive storm surge — and you’re going to have a pretty big storm surge even down the coast from that.” The NHC warned that much of Florida’s Western coastline would see multiple feet of water.
Messaging the risks of these storms to an extreme weather-weary public is another challenge stemming from climate change. “Record breaking” has now become a familiar phrase for most of us, describing everything from extreme temperatures to rainfall rates. But as tropical storms become more intense, fueled by warming-influenced weather conditions, finding ways to accurately convey threats to the public is increasingly essential.
Ahead of Helene’s landfall, the NHC stressed that the storm surge would be “unsurvivable,” encouraging residents to heed evacuation orders. According to The New York Times, the warnings — paired with memories of those other recent storms — seemed to have worked, leaving Big Bend-area towns “eerily empty.” Even the local Waffle House, a business widely recognized for making its own assessments of hurricane risk, was shuttered on Thursday.
The NHC is experimenting with new graphics in hopes of better conveying risks outside of the classic “cone of uncertainty,” which illustrates the predicted path of a tropical storm’s eye. The center shared an image on social media showing inland risks from storms, not just those along the coast.
So if you noticed the NHC’s risk map for Hurricane Helene colored the entire state in a palette of watches and warnings, the reason why is twofold: Yes, the risks really are that widespread with this storm, but the agency is also trying to get better at telling you about them. And in the case of major hurricane like Helene, the more warning, the better.