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How do you solve a problem like the Nimbys?

Anyone familiar with the two steps forward, one and three quarter steps back world of the UK's renewable energy industry is unlikely to have been surprised by the past week, but that does not stop it being teeth-gnashingly frustrating.

Just a fortnight on from the release of the government's much-vaunted Low Carbon Industrial Plan and the familiar pattern of wind farm objections, Nimby protests, planning difficulties, and investment setbacks has returned.

The most high-profile slap in the face for the sector comes in the form of Vestas' plans to close its wind turbine factory on the Isle of Wight, despite the brave efforts of staff to oppose the decision by staging a sit-in at the plant, jeopardising any chance of redundancy payments in the process.

There have been plenty of suggestions that Vestas' decision to close the plant is shortsighted and that the government should step in to nationalise the facility. But while the issuing of dismissal letters inside a food parcel sent to the protestors was crass in the extreme, it is much harder to fault the commercial logic behind the decision to close the plant.

The factory was building blades that were being exported to the US. At the same time, the company has a plant in the US capable of delivering the same blades at lower cost. It makes sense from both a commercial, and indeed an environmental perspective for turbines for the US market to be built in the US.

Vestas did look at converting the Isle of Wight factory to produce blades for the UK market, but decided that the risk that demand for the new turbines would not be forthcoming was too high. Was this an unreasonable decision?

Well, the British Wind Energy Association is right to point out that up to 2,700 new wind turbines are expected to be erected by 2012 with more than 700 under construction and nearly 2,000 having secured planning permission. Meanwhile, the additional £1bn of financing announced by the government this week should ensure that those projects that have planning permission are indeed built.

And yet Vestas would be forgiven for arguing that it has seen such predictions in the past, only for the pipeline of new projects to be blocked time and again by local objections to planning applications, followed by long, winding appeals that in many cases ended in disappointment.

It could point to Greenpeace's recent report showing that between December 2005 and November 2008 Tory councils blocked 158.2MW of wind energy projects, approving just 44.7MW, while Labour councils fared only a bit better, rejecting 62.6MW and approving just 68.3MW.

If it wanted more timely examples, it could highlight the news today that the RSPB is to formally oppose plans for the UK's largest onshore wind farm on the Shetland Islands, after previously indicating it would support the proposal. Or the decision by RES to cut the number of turbines at its planned Minnygap wind farm in Scotland from 15 to 10 in an attempt to win planning approval. Or Ecotricity's recent appeal against a decision that saw plans for a 12MW wind farm in North Dorset rejected despite planning authorities recommending to councillors that the proposals should be approved. The list goes on and on.

It is horrible for the workers involved, but you can understand why Vestas has decided that it has had enough of operating in an environment where the market it serves is at the whim of a small minority of locally fixated Nimby protestors and popularity-courting councillors. If staff, trade unions and green groups want to protest against Vestas' decision, it is the government, and in particular wind farm-blocking councils, that should be the target.

The fact is Nimbyism is at the root of most of the clean tech industry's problems, and what's more, it will only get worse. The conservationist campaign against the proposed Severn Barrage is already gathering momentum, the anti-wind lobby is if anything getting more vocal and has substantial support on the back benches of a Conservative party that looks destined to form the next government, objections to biomass and waste-to-energy plants are increasingly common, and if the recent opposition to planned carbon capture and storage plants in Germany and the Netherlands is anything to go by, even this technology could be hamstrung by people worried about living above carbon sinks.

Thus far the response from the renewables industry has tended to be one of impotent rage. Talk to anyone involved in trying to gain planning approval for a wind farm opposed by local parish worthies and they are often engaged in a scarcely concealed internal battle to resist an attack of apoplexy.

They can't understand why - when surveys have shown the vast majority of people like wind turbines, when the reality of climate change means they are trying to invest in a project that is essential to the continuation of our way of life, when the government is pretty unstinting in its support for low carbon technologies, when the latest turbines are ghostly quiet and governed by stringent planning rules that keep them a good distance from buildings - small numbers of people complaining about changes to their view can effectively torpedo an entire industrial revolution.

But while it is always fun to have a bit of rant, it will never solve the problem - in fact, it tends to exacerbate it by making local opponents to wind farms feel bullied.

So what is the answer?

The first step has to be to understand the origin of the opposition to these developments. Opponents of wind farms like to dress up their objections in vaguely technical (and easily countered) arguments about the efficacy of wind and the damage turbines can do to bird life, but in most cases the root of the opposition comes down to visual impact.

The government recently undertook a major survey which found that the vast majority of people like the look of turbines, and almost everyone agrees they have more architectural value than a coal-fired power plant. But the vocal minority's opposition to wind farms is based not so much on aesthetic judgements but a deep-rooted conservative, with a small c, mentality (although given their councillors' record, maybe that should be with a capital C too). My guess is that opponents to wind farms simply don't like change, pure and simple.

So how do you win them round? The rigours of democracy quite rightly ensure that the totalitarian approach of telling them to lump it and evicting anyone who protests too loudly is out of the question. As a result, the renewables sector needs to get much better at the gentle art of persuasion.

Those who manage to secure approval for a wind farm tend to engage in genuine and lengthy consultation and engagement exercises with residents, while the practice of donating funds to local community projects has become increasingly prevalent. But such engagement exercises are only going to have limited success when faced with a deep-rooted fear of change.

Perhaps the answer is to be found in one of the few mechanisms proven throughout history to help people get over their fears: money.

My godfather lives near Sellafield. Not near enough to see it, but close enough to know that if anything ever goes badly wrong, his health insurance claim would make for interesting reading. As a teacher with impeccable left-leaning, anti-nuclear credentials and a life-long love of the surrounding countryside, he always said that he did not like having a power plant in the back yard, but he was fully aware that without it he would most likely be out of a job and an area with an already pretty precarious economy would be tipped over the edge.

Unfortunately, this economic rationalism will not work quite so well with wind farms, when you consider that once they are built, the employment prospects are pretty minimal. Consequently, the onus has to be on developers to make the economic case more explicit, and if that means paying local residents some form of reparations or annual stipend then so be it.

The financial rewards might still not be sufficient to convince those with an irrational hatred of wind farms, but I'm guessing their opposition would soon be drowned out by those who quite fancied the idea of the local wind farm paying for their holiday each year.

Brown's TED call for a global climate body is welcome, but will it work?

In his surprise speech to the Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) conference in Oxford yesterday, Gordon Brown said something thought provoking about climate change.

Actually, he was thought provoking on any number of topics, so much so that as the standing ovation began the Prime Minister would have been forgiven for wondering what his career prospects would be like if he could deliver all his speeches to an audience of liberal intellectuals and technology entrepreneurs.

But back to his thoughts on climate change. As part of a wide-ranging speech calling for the creation of new international institutions to cope with a world irreversibly changed for the better by technology and mass communication, Brown argued that there was an urgent need for a new global climate change body to oversee the transition to a global economy.

It is worth quoting him at length:

"Is it not absolutely scandalous that we have a situation where we know that there is a climate change problem, where we know also that that will mean we will have to give more resources to developing countries to deal with that, where we want to create a global carbon market, but there is no global institution that people have been able to agree upon to deal with this problem?

"One of the things that has to come out of Copenhagen in the next few months is an agreement that there will be a global environmental institution that is able to deal with the problems of persuading the whole of the world to move along a climate change agenda."

With less than six months to go until Copenhagen it would have been nice for the Prime Minister to pipe up a bit earlier about what he wants to see on the agenda, but he makes a valid if somewhat belated point.

The issue of how any Copenhagen agreement will be managed and enforced has been strangely absent from the negotiating process thus far, mainly because it raises dilemmas even more complex and contentious than the still unresolved question of shared emission targets.

Brown's call for a new institution has a certain base appeal. Just as the recently launched International Renewable Energy Agency was formed as a direct challenge to the International Energy Agency's perceived inability to take renewables seriously, it is extremely tempting to respond to the UN's failure to properly enforce Kyoto and the World Bank's abject failure to accelerate the roll out of clean technologies by basically telling them that "if you can't do it, we'll get someone else in".

But the question that Brown's speech begs is whether a new institution would prove any more successful than the current mechanisms for curbing carbon emissions?

A dedicated International Low Carbon Agency or UN Climate Change Programme would certainly increase focus on global warming, but its success would depend entirely on how much power it is entrusted with.

A new agency would require the ability to impose real sanctions on those countries that breach emission targets, creating an environment where failure to cut emissions is as embarrassing and damaging for a country as having to turn to the IMF for a bail out. Any international agency tasked with policing carbon targets, promoting sustainable behaviour, managing the carbon market and distributing clean tech funds to the developing world, would from day one have to be as powerful as the World Bank, the IEA and the IMF combined. In fact, we'd need an institution pretty much on a par with the UN Security Council - although given its recent record a Climate Security Council might have to be even more powerful than that.

This is not an unreasonable ask given the scale of the threat climate change presents, but nor is it a particularly realistic one. The US and China are simply not going to agree to an institution capable of imposing meaningful penalties on those who fail to cut emissions, and even if they do it's a safe bet they will be ignored.

So will Copenhagen be worth the paper it is written on? Would Brown's International Carbon Police make one iota of difference?

Well, yes and no. An ambitious and meaningful deal will be hugely helpful, driving investment, delivering legislative certainty, stimulating innovation and raising the profile of the climate change threat. Equally, a tough new international climate change body cannot do any worse than the current agencies tasked with cutting global emissions, and might just do a lot better.

But the global transition to a low carbon economy will only be realised when there is a near universal acceptance that this course of action is better and more cost effective than the alternative. Until there is agreement that a wind or solar farm will always make more sense than a coal plant, any international climate change institution will be ignored in much the same way that today's global bodies are ignored by those regimes who refuse to accept basic humanitarian values. Sadly, as Brown's speech made clear in references to Zimbabwe, Burma and Iran, international institutions alone are rarely strong enough to force governments to act in ways they do not want to.

This is the challenge faced by political and business leaders - to make low carbon a universally accepted economic model, a "no brainer" for firms and individuals the world over.

Institutions and international treaties will help in this process, but the real onus is on businesses to develop products and services that are not just greener, but unequivocally better than any alternatives. Ultimately, it is up to us, not institutions, to deliver the low carbon future.

How can anyone guess their energy bill for 2020?

I know that in terms of unpopular public statements sympathising with politicians is currently right up there with suggesting the music of Michael Jackson was a tad derivative, but I can't help feeling a bit sorry for ministers at the Department of Energy and Climate Change.

As the countdown towards its long anticipated renewable energy strategy enters its final days, the battle for supremacy between the various factions in the UK energy industry has escalated from its usual rats-in-a-sack level of viciousness to something closer to full scale warfare.

The CBI, ever quick to do the bidding of the traditional energy firms, has called on the government to downgrade wind energy targets and step up its focus on nuclear and carbon capture and storage, while the wind lobby has hit back with a series of reports suggesting the UK grid will cope just fine with a huge increase in wind energy. The solar and micro-renewables sector, meanwhile, was last spotted over in the corner of the room bellowing "don't forget about us" as loud as its little lungs could manage. The biomass and waste-to-energy guys would like to do a bit of shouting too, but sadly they don't like to draw too much attention to a technology that many green groups still equate with incineration.

The net result is that everyone will be disappointed by the government's renewable energy strategy when it is finally announced on Wednesday. All the various energy tribes will complain that there is not enough support for them, or that where there is enough support, as is likely to be the case for wind and nuclear, there is still not enough effort being put into streamlining planning decisions. The green groups for their part will once again claim, with some justification, that we do not need yet another renewable energy report - we need concerted action now.

Of course, energy and climate change secretary Ed Miliband and his ministers fully expect this reaction and will not be asking for any sympathy as long as they get a fair hearing. But nor will they get that fair hearing. In fact, if the tenor of the reporting over the weekend is anything to go by they will get the exact opposite.

Various reports over the weekend trailing Wednesday's announcements led on the fact that the planned increase in renewable energy capacity will result in a rise in average energy bills of between £200 and £230 a year. My immediate assumption was that the government had once again leaked the key figures ahead of the report, but according to DECC this was not the case and the projected bill increase of £200 bears no resemblance to anything to be found in the forthcoming report.

Leaving aside the question of where the £200 figure came from (and personally, I would not rule out a back of an envelope calculation), DECC knows that regardless of what Wednesday's report contains the main focus from the press will be on this issue of how much renewable energy will cost the average punter. The government will likely pander to the calls from Fleet Street with its own figures, despite the reality that such figures are all but meaningless.

The fact is that any attempt to second guess the impact of renewable energy investment on energy bills is couched in so many caveats and assumptions to be meaningless.

The suggestion that investment in renewables will lead to bill increases of over £200 by 2020 implies that we know what energy prices will be by that date if we don't invest in renewables. But this is an absolute fallacy. We do not know with any real confidence how energy prices will behave next year, let alone in ten years time.

If those who reckon oil supplies will peak some time around 2015 are proved right then by 2020 soaring oil and gas prices could easily mean that average energy bills would be far higher had we not invested to increase our renewable energy capacity. Or what price the 2020 Kremlin turning off the taps and blocking gas imports to Europe, sending fossil fuel prices through the roof. Similarly, breakthroughs in solar energy technology or a spike in the price of carbon could manipulate the price of energy up or down in ways that no one yet fully understands. Or the government's proposals for green home loans could actually work, leading to a huge reduction in energy demand and a commensurate fall in average bills.

We do not know with any confidence how much a renewables based energy mix will cost by 2020, just as we do not know how much a fossil fuel based energy mix will cost. Anyone who says otherwise is lying.

What we do know is that all households and businesses would be wise to invest in energy efficiency as a matter of urgency, on the grounds that energy bills will rise under both a do-nothing scenario and a renewables investment scenario. The difference between the two scenarios is that under the do-nothing scenario the planet cooks and energy costs will eventually rise indefinitely as fossil fuel supplies dwindle, while under the renewables scenario not only will energy prices eventually plateau (the wind and sun are, after all, free) but we will also realise many associated economic and environmental benefits, such as reduced carbon emissions, increased job creation and improved energy security.

It would be nice to read a headline in the papers on Thursday morning explaining how new wind farms could actually help lower energy bills and improve energy security, but sadly there is more chance of Ed Miliband announcing the new strategy in the Commons with Michael Jackson's Earth Song playing as an inspiring backing track. Now that would definitely get reported.

Coral tragedy heralds corporate catastrophe

Whenever a big story breaks about the dire straights in which the natural world finds itself, it always sparks something of a debate at BusinessGreen.com's Central London bunker (actually, that's a bit of a lie; there aren't many of us so it tends to be a debate carried out entirely within the confines of my head, but you get the idea).

The question is one of whether BusinessGreen.com, as a dedicated business news website, should report on news that is almost entirely focused on the perilous state of the rainforest, Arctic sea ice, or in the case of this morning's papers Australia's Great Barrier Reef.

Does the news that scientists now firmly believe global warming will lead to the inevitable destruction of the Australian coral reef within 20 years really constitute a business story?

As a rule, we decide against reporting on such stories, not because they do not have an impact on businesses, but because those impacts are several stages removed from the actual destruction of natural habitats. Unless firms are directly causing or being directly affected by the changing environment, the business angle is too opaque to justify the story's inclusion on the site.

And yet, the more these reports of environmental disaster surface, the more obvious it becomes that this editorial decision downplays the way impacts on the natural world invariably lead to impacts on the business world.

The idea that the environment provides services for the economy in the form of food, water, soil, clean air and forests is not new, nor is the realisation that it is all but impossible to put a financial value on assets that are essential in the truest sense of the word. But as climate change leads to the rapid deterioration of these environmental services the extent to which they provide the foundation of economic activity becomes painfully clear.

Taking the inevitable demise of the Great Barrier Reef as just one example it is relatively easy to trace massive commercial and economic impacts from the destruction of this unique habitat.

First up, the Australian tourism industry was worth around $85bn last year, providing nearly four per cent of the country's GDP and employing close to half a million people. This might be slightly unfair on the country that gave us Kylie Minogue, Rolf Harris and Neighbours, but not many of the international visitors who injected over $22bn into the country's economy were there for the culture.

Deep green environmentalists might regard it as crass to talk about economic costs when we are faced with the destruction of a uniquely beautiful habitat, but it is worth noting that the death of the reef can be talked about it in terms of job losses as well as species losses. The sad truth is that when the reef goes, people will lose jobs and communities will suffer as one of the main sources of income for Northern Queensland disappears.

Some economists would argue that tourist dollar would simply migrate elsewhere and the net impact on the global economy would be pretty minimal, but there are other economic impacts that are similarly easy to envisage.

As any marine biologist will tell you, coral reefs provide a key link in a complex marine food chain that would be irrevocably changed by its removal. No one knows for sure what impact the death of coral reefs would have on fish stocks, but it is unlikely to represent good news for a global fishing industry already facing up to dwindling supplies.

Moreover, coral reefs provide another critical environmental service by buffering coast lines against tropical storms. With global warming already likely to lead to an increase in the incidence of such storms the Queensland coastline could find itself increasingly vulnerable to such storms just at a time when it needs the reef's protection more than ever.

And then there are the soft benefits.

As David Attenborough put it in a speech at the Royal Society yesterday, "anybody's who's had the privilege of diving on a coral reef will have seen the natural world at its most glorious, diverse and beautiful".

A whole generation of backpackers and tourists had that privilege and in many cases it left an indelible imprint on them. It is impossible to quantify the financial value of this sense of wonder (and what's more, you would never want to try), but it is not too esoteric to suggest that access to the natural world makes people healthier, more relaxed and arguably more motivated in their day-to-day lives - or at least it always has done for me.

Regardless of what your hard-nosed, old school business exec thinks, the natural environment's contribution to a happy and healthy workforce has considerable economic value.

On balance, we will probably continue to eschew direct reports of environmental destruction in favour of those green stories with a more explicit business angle - after all there are so many hours in the day and you would probably grow bored of reading an explanation of how environmental services effect the wider economy every time you clicked on a story about habitat damage.

But the next time you do read reports of disappearing rainforests, melting glaciers or dying reefs it is worth remembering that they represent an economic as well as an environmental tragedy.

Childhood reminiscing and the Carbon Reduction Commitment

Do league tables really work?

Obviously, as a means of determining whether one group of men is better at kicking/throwing/hitting a ball than another group of men they are nonpareil. But when it comes to more important issues, such as our health, our children's education, and now our efforts to tackle climate change, does publicly ranking organisations' performance really drive improvements, or does it just demoralise the losers?

As the son of two teachers growing up in the nineties, the merits of league tables, which were at the time being introduced for schools across the UK, was a source of considerable debate around the Murray dinner table.

My parents were forced to take a fair degree of professional interest in the annual league tables, often resulting in pride one year and dismay the next as their schools' fortunes fluctuated.

They were also painfully aware that any improvements that the publication of league tables delivered were at least partly offset by the iniquities inherent to the naming and shaming of struggling schools.

There was always the fear amongst my parents and their colleagues that the publication of the league tables would create a self fulfilling prophecy that further opened up the gap between the best and worst schools - a situation that many education experts believe has subsequently come to pass.

In essence, pushy middle class parents would make sure their children, who were statistically more likely to deliver stronger academic results in any case, got into the schools near the top of the league table. This would in turn make it easier for those top schools to maintain their position, while also providing them with a stronger position from which to apply for additional funding for facilities, equipment and the like.

As a rule, my parents schools probably benefited from this arrangement given they were always pretty well ranked in the league tables and received consistently good inspection reports, but that did not stop them questioning the wider merits of the league table system.

Moreover, there were similar question marks hanging over the efficacy of the league tables themselves.

My father was head of a relatively small primary school, so in some years the whole school's position in the league table would be determined by a group of just 12 or so 11 year olds. In such a small group pass rates could change dramatically from year to year based on the performance of just one or two pupils. The school could jump up and down the league table from year to year based on a minute change in its exam performance.

More than a decade on the government appears to have finally acknowledged some of these concerns and has just set out a new set of proposals to ensure school league tables are based on a wider set of criteria than straight exam results. But that does not mean that its love affair with league tables is over and fears are now mounting that the same problems associated with school and NHS league tables could soon afflict the government's Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC).

As has been widely reported, the Carbon Reduction Commitment will not only require firms to report on their carbon emissions and energy use, it will also rank them in a league table demonstrating which organisations have performed best and worst.

The not unreasonable hope is that those that end up at the bottom of the league table will be shamed into taking action to curb energy use, while the system of financial bonuses and penalties that accompanies the league table will also provide firms with a fiscal incentive to cut their carbon emissions.

But will it work?

The problem is that shame is a funny thing. I don't want to reveal too much about my own moral compass, but public condemnation tends to have two diametrically opposed effects on people. Some will act swiftly and decisively to rectify their mistakes, others will decide it is not really worth the effort and embrace the "no one likes us, we don't care" philosophy beloved of football fans.

It is easy to envisage some of those firms languishing at the bottom of the league table deciding to take the financial hit and ignore any condemnation that comes their way. We could even see self-styled mavericks such as Ryanair's Michael O'Leary revelling in a poor carbon rating and using it promote his opposition to green taxes and climate change legislation.

The government plans to combat this by steadily increasing the size of the bonuses and penalties paid through the CRC. But such a move only risks a scenario already familiar to teachers across the UK, whereby those organisations that need the least help receive an extra boost, while the poorest performers are penalised still further.

Moreover, as with school league tables, the system will only work if the rules governing the league are beyond reproach and accepted by all parties. This is certainly not the case with the CRC at the moment with high profile companies such as BT warning that the legislation's credibility is fatally undermined by its failure to recognise investments made in renewable energy technologies. The government will never successfully shame companies into action, if those languishing near the bottom of the table can point to reporting rules that make the whole exercise worthless.

The basic premise of the CRC is admirable, but there are plenty of potential pitfalls awaiting it when it comes into force next year and it will be interesting to see how widely the new league tables are supported.

It might run counter to the capitalist principle of rewarding those who perform best, but given the main aim of the CRC is to cut emissions across the entire the economy there is a strong case for a completely different system of rewards whereby it is those that end up at the bottom of the league that receive the extra money they need to invest in energy efficient technologies.

Such an approach would seem weird to those used to the winner-takes-all mentality of European sports leagues, but it would also be familiar to anyone who follows US sports and their annual draft system, whereby the teams that perform worst get first pick on the next wave of promising players from the college leagues.

Of course, the government would be reluctant to seen to incentivise failure and is unlikely to change the CRC at this late date, but it will have to keep a very close eye on whether the concept of league tables helps or hinders efforts to cut carbon emissions.

After all, the results of the Premier League each year do not really matter in the grand scheme of things, but the success of our efforts to cut carbon emissions, and educate our children, does.

Treasury's climate court battle shines spotlight on growing legal risk

Well, I hope they got a no win, no fee deal.

I don't like being cynical (it's more of a congenital thing) but I would not put any money on the new coalition of green groups successfully suing the Treasury for failing to consider the environmental implications of the Royal Bank of Scotland's carbon intensive investment practices when it pumped billions of taxpayers money into the bank.

The Treasury may well technically be in breach of government rules through its failure to give even a cursory nod to environmental considerations when it bailed out RBS, while its failure to subsequently rein in the bank's carbon intensive lending should certainly be added to the ever expanding list of craven ineptitude that characterises the whole sorry saga.

But it is easy to forget that things were just a tad fraught on that weekend back in the autumn when one of the UK's largest banks stared into the abyss, and it is extremely hard to imagine the Treasury being successfully sued for saving the bank from collapse. Apologies once again for the cynicism, but the Establishment tends to win these types of arguments.

But that is not to say the case is without its merits, and regardless of the eventual result it provides a high profile reminder of the increased legal risks all carbon intensive businesses (and the governments that support them) now face.

Any business guilty of environmental degradation already runs the risk of embarrassing and costly legal action, but as climate change really begins to bite that risk is only going to get more and more acute.

It is not hard to imagine that existing environmental and human rights legislation could be harnessed to make a case against the worst carbon emitters, with the world's climate refugees lining up as highly emotive litigants.

Carbon intensive firms might be able to amass the best corporate lawyers money can by, but decisions such as the US Environmental Protection Agency's recent ruling that carbon emissions constitute a health risk only strengthen the hand of potential litigators, while the simple reality is that, win or lose, any such cases would represent a PR disaster for those firms involved.

You do not need a PhD in media studies to work out who will be the public relations victor in a battle between a homeless Eskimo and a global oil behemoth.

This increased risk may not be enough to stop firms engaging in carbon intensive projects, nor may it be enough to stop investors funding environmentally irresponsible practices.

But it is certainly an issue all business should be aware of and it also provides yet further evidence that low carbon technologies enjoy a much lower long term risk profile than polluting alternatives.

After all, you are not going to be sued by a South Sea Islander who lost their home, their worldly possessions, and their country for investing in solar panels.


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