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QuestionerBurlington Northern hauls a lot of coal. You point out in the 2013 annual report that its profits could shrink if coal burning was curtailed. And then there is the reinsurance business. How do these and other Berkshire investments align with your understanding of the risks and opportunities posed by climate change? I mean, if you own a railroad that's carrying a lot of coal, it'll carry a lot of coal for a long period, a very long period, but it'll probably carry less at some point.
WarrenI think that's very likely too. But I get all these questions for people and something that want me to fill out lots of forms and everything about, how it will affect our insurance business. It just doesn't operate in that time period. I mean, we are not making, when Ajit and I talk about what we'll charge for catastrophe insurance, you know, whether it's hurricanes in Florida or whether it's earthquakes in New Zealand or whatever it may be, the year-to-year change in probabilities on that are, at least in our view, extremely low. I mean, it doesn't come close to being anything that affects your prices in any material way in any given year. And, you know, we will continue to develop alternative sources of energy. We'll continue to use coal in our coal generation plants. until the utility commissions under which we operate tell us that we should do something different. We have no choice about them. We incidentally have no, I mean, we're happy to carry the coal, but beyond that, we are a common carrier. I mean, we might love to turn away chlorine or ammonia or something like that because of the dangers in carrying it, and we can't, we can't get compensated adequately for that. But we are a common carrier, so I don't think in making an investment decision on Berkshire Hathaway or most companies, virtually all of the companies I can think of, that climate change should be a factor in the decision-making process.