 I think we all had wonderful conversations about lunch. We're going to pick up that theme of connecting and conversation in the next panel. Hello and welcome. My name is Mariette DiCristina. I'm the Dean of Boston University's College of Communication, as well as a member of the Climate Communication Initiative here at the National Academies and really excited about the Climate Crossroads Initiative. I'm really pleased to be able to moderate this panel this morning and looking forward to the discussion points that we'll have today. I also want to just call out how terrific the morning sessions were on comment, and even though their sole focus area wasn't around productive conversations, we got a lot of good tips, things like valuing different ways of knowing and benefiting from trusted messengers in communicating, in translating for your audience to outcomes that they understand in honest communication about where we are and how we got there and to learn to listen really, really well. I'm going to try to do that at the panel. I hope you will as well, and then bring your questions a little bit later. So similar to the panel before lunch, each of our panelists is going to offer some brief opening remarks to get us started, and then we'll have a conversation. We'll also leave time for Q&A with the audience, both in person and online. And don't forget to use Slido if you're online, and we'd really love to hear your questions as well. If you are in the audience, by the way, please make them questions, and also please do your best to speak up like I'm trying to do in the mic, just because for some of us it's a little tougher to hear depending on where we're sitting and our ability is to hear you. And again, we'll have staff to feed those Slido questions in, and I will go back and forth when it's come time to take questions. So let's dive in. As we all know, Climate Crossroads is launching at a time of widening political and social divisions, and then having productive conversations about what we do to address the climate crisis in both public and policy spheres can be challenging. Our panelists have been working to understand and bridge these divides, and we'll explore their insights during our conversation. I'm going to turn to Matt first. Oh, you know what? Please forgive me. I forgot to tell you all about who these great folks are. So let me do that. So today I have with me Matt Nismith, who's Professor of Communication, Public Policy, and Urban Affairs at Northeastern University. Welcome to you, Matt. Linda Langston of Langston Strategy Groups, joining us virtually. Oh, pardon me. Linda Langston of Langston Strategies Group. Hello. Spencer Nelson, Managing Director of Research at ClearPath. And to my far right, your far left, Sonia Agarwal, Chief Executive Officer of Energy Innovation. Welcome to you all. So now I will turn to Matt. Sorry about that, folks. Matt, you've been a long time scholar of the science of science communication and public and policy dialogue about climate change and served as senior editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Climate Change Communications. Tell us about your perspectives about the importance of dialogue-based approach to communicating about climate change. Right, so I was inspired by this morning's panel because I thought there was some great sophisticated thinking among the physical scientists about public dialogue and public engagement and moving society forward to address climate change. And as a social scientist, I've been studying science technology, environmental politics, and journalism climate change for about 25 years. And not only that, nearly as long as I've been working with different organizations like the National Academies and the American Association for Advancement of Science. And two reports that are likely to be useful to you as follow-ups for this panel is a report that I co-authored in 2017 called Communicating Science Effectively, which is a consensus study report on science communication. And then a AAAS report I wrote called Scientists in Civic Life dialogue-based approaches to communication, which came out in 2018. And so I've been from the start of research on science communication, it was just really getting started in the late 90s and early 2000s when I started in graduate school. And I've always kind of had a little bit of difficulty with the term the science of science communication because I think it says that communication is a little bit more precise than we actually make it out to be in our research. So there was a body of comprehensive research. And in that research, as I wrote in the preface to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Climate Change Communication, what we've been really good as social scientists in doing is figuring out why people disagree about complex science and technology-related political choices like climate change. But figuring out the way to build what was termed this keyword that keeps coming up over and over again, the political will on behalf of systematic change on climate change. We don't really have the answers to that. As I kind of evolved in my thinking and through experience and research, that's why I arrived at this idea of public dialogue because thinking about the complexities of where society needs to go is a super messy process. And when I talk about public dialogue, that means it's a two-way exchange of thoughtful conversations and the trading of expertise where the recipient of communication is just as important that it's experts as it is the public because experts don't have all the answers and they need their assumptions and their beliefs about the world to be constantly tested and challenged not only by members of the public but also by other experts from different fields. But public dialogue also then fits within this idea of democratic governance. How do we think about moving forward on climate change in a way that involves early inclusive and democratic governance of decarbonization choices and making ourselves less susceptible or vulnerable to climate risk that we often think about as climate adaptation. Andrew Revkin, who is in the audience today in his writing and it is sustained what blog and video conversations, he's done a really good job of kind of breaking things out in terms of what is climate change in terms of energy decarbonization and making ourselves less vulnerable to risk. The one thing that I'll then finish with then is and we'll come back to these themes that kind of teed up for you is when we approach climate adaptation, right? We start with public dialogue, right? Experts and organizations, they understand that they don't know what's going to make a particular community less vulnerable and they understand that they have to have early engagement and conversations also to not only learn about solutions, adaptation solutions or actions but also to get public buy-in. But when we think about decarbonization and building out energy infrastructure, the massive energy infrastructure that we need, we're still working along a 50 year model of plan, announce and defend. Without any early public governance or input on where to build a transmission line, a massive new transmission line project or a new solar or clean energy project. And that's a problem. And as we move forward, that's increasing, we're already seeing the kind of the canary and the coal mine in various places like Northern New England around transmission projects or offshore wind on the East Coast. And we need to rethink how we plan and decide energy projects in the future. And also we can come back to also the role that I think in an unhealthy way that decarbonization scenarios are playing. So much Matt made some excellent points, I think about different areas we could target as well. And a nice segue to Linda. Linda, you've held a number of positions as elected county official in Iowa and other roles where you've had to help communities come together and address challenges related to resilience and natural disasters. Love to hear your reflections on what you think we should be thinking about related to productive public and policy conversations. The challenge of course is trying to get this in in seven minutes, but part of it is figuring out what are the common values of your community and how do you begin to pull people together? I would tell you, I was very gratified by the conversations we had this morning because there was a lot of talk about public engagement. I would tell you, based on the community I still live in that there's a lot of contention, particularly at the school board level, who would have known that that was the place where we were going to have so many people engage. But I would also say that in the future we're going to see a lot of efforts or response to what's likely to happen with local tax revenue because there are many places that as a result of climate change are going to lose their tax generating properties. And no one, it's not to say that some tax assessors don't know it, but I'm not sure that many people in the public understand what it might mean to lose up to 40% of your tax revenue and whether or not you can sustain yourself as a government. The insurance and the reinsurance industry are both beginning to take pretty active roles in response to climate crisis. Many of you may know that in California some insurance companies have began to pull out and I think the reinsurance industry it might not be too strong to say that they are a bit alarmed by what they are seeing. But all of this brings me to a question that I often ask academics and that is did you vote in the last election? It may seem like a trite conversation, but yet what we know in this country is that somewhere between 60 and 70% of people vote in a large election, like a general election. But if you look at city and school board elections it can be somewhere between 10 and 20% of the electorate vote. So you have a lot of people who don't vote and they don't vote for a number of reasons. They don't vote not always because they are apathetic but rather because for some people they actually don't know the process, they don't understand it. So to be civically engaged you actually have to have some understanding of how the system works. I was always fascinated by my constituents who called to talk to me about federal tax policy over which I had absolutely no control. I was also interested to talk with them about their tax bill and my first question was did you vote in the last school board election and they would say, why ever is that important? And I said, do you happen to have your tax bill handy? Yes, great. If you will look, your school board taxes constitute somewhere between 40 and 45% of your tax bill and the city that you live in then constitutes another 30% perhaps more. So tell me the city you live in and more often than not I would come back and say, well, in the last school election there was a bond issue and the city voted yes for the bond issue, the schools. And so consequently your taxes have gone up. I have the privilege of being on the board that sends your tax bill out, you collect your taxes but we do not set the entirety of the tax policy. For most people that was a completely new idea. They had no idea. So I think that there's some opportunities for conversations and my work leading the Resilient America Roundtable. We did work in five different communities across the country and the resilience projects that they undertook were very much driven by that community and we found that those projects have been very engaged and in many ways they continue on. So I think that it's important to do that and I will finish up with a couple of examples. First of all, I wanna let you know that when I first ran for office the day after my primary election, the headline read wins election, loses house. My house flooded in a flash flood in an area that had never flooded before which should have been my memo from God because six years later the community of Cedar Rapids went down in a pretty epic flood and I happened to be chair of the board. And then as if I hadn't had enough of that I also had my neighbors home next to us started on fire which impacted ours. And then lastly about three years ago as a volunteer I have responded to a derecho. So my colleagues at NACO call me the disaster queen. I'm not sure it's a moniker I want to continue. But what I will say in regards to local engagement is we have to find ways to have discussions about difficult topics in a way that lets our egos go. And I know Spencer is gonna have some stuff to say because he's doing some work in Iowa that allows us to be curious about the other person. We have set the table for othering. We have set the table to not belong. And as humans we long to belong and sadly we long to have another. And that's not productive for these conversations that we need to have broadly. And so you and your communities know the people that you likely should advocate for and support running for local office. Because these are the people that will make the policy decisions at the local level. And they are not always easy. I have actually had a conversation with President Joe Biden with him telling me it would be my great privilege to never serve on a planning and zoning commission ever again. He started his life as a county commissioner and he's right. I would, I thrilled I don't have to do that anymore. Although I was stupid enough to serve on the city planning commission. These are important things to think about how, what will drive your community where you live. The research you do is epic. It is so important. But it is important how you follow through at the local level. Thank you. Thank you, Linda. I love that call to be curious and to, you know, engender community. Thank you, Spencer. Clear Path is an organization that looks for common ground. Speaking of what you were just talking about to address decarbonization. And the work you do in industry, national labs, policymakers and other stakeholders. You've also worked on the Hill with Chairman Lisa Murkowski on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, leading the committee's clean energy and climate activities. Please share your thoughts on how we can have productive dialogue around climate solutions. Thank you. It's great to see you all. It's great to be here. I'm really glad that this is a big part of today's discussion for climate crossroads. And I'm happy to talk a little bit about how productive conversations can be had on the federal legislative perspective. I'll see if I can add a little bit in there on the local level too. But I think y'all did a good job of covering some of that. You know, ultimately, bipartisanship is something that we have to have and that we can have for clean energy and climate change. So I want to talk a little bit about, you know, what Clear Path has done, but more importantly, what are some of the circumstances that allowed us to have so much bipartisan success over the last couple of years, maybe Sonia will also weigh in on some of this too. You know, ultimately, the United States has to be a big part of the climate solution. But the speed and scale that we're facing, which we talked a lot about in the earlier sessions, requires a lot of public-private cooperation. We need the private sector to achieve the speed and the scale, but we need the public sector for having the right incentives. But one of the challenges that exists is that, even if there are sufficient incentives available, you know, if you want to incentivize the right level of investment on the right speed, you need to have politically durable incentives. Project developers need to know that that policy is going to still be around throughout the useful life of the facility or at least until they recover their investment. And that really points to the importance of bipartisanship. You know, bipartisanship, whether it's a Republican-led, federal government, Democratic-led split, and this goes for state legislatures as well, ensures that you have that strong confidence that policy is going to stick around and it's not going to be held up in litigation, like we saw with policies like the Clean Power Plan. So if you kind of look back at some of the bigger pieces of clean energy and climate policy, a lot of those were not actually pushed for with a climate lens, right? The Federal Power Act Energy Policy Act of 1992, 2005, ESA-07, you all might not know all of these pieces of legislation, but these are all pieces that were primarily motivated by some type of energy crisis. And for another big piece of legislation, the Recovery Act from 2009 that was motivated by an economic crisis. So, you know, until recently, we've actually seen that it's been mostly motivated by some type of challenge, not by climate. And that's been changing over the last couple of years. And we've seen real bipartisan action that has been to a large degree motivated by climate. And there are three big pieces of legislation that have been enacted over the last two and a half years that pit that mold. The Energy Act of 2020, which was signed by President Trump and under Biden administration, the Infrastructure Investment Jobs Act and the Chips and Science Act, all of which were bipartisan pieces of legislation that included a number of different authorizations for clean energy technologies as well as very big investments. And what's really interesting when you look at what led to those, it was coming from many different perspectives. It was not entirely driven by climate change. It was not entirely driven by defense. It was a different piece of all of those. So, in large part, democratic support for those pieces of legislation came from concern over climate change, but Republicans were deeply involved with those pieces of legislation as well. They were maybe more motivated by geopolitical concerns, economic development concerns, but you don't have to frame everything as part of the climate crisis or the need to get to net zero by some particular date, as long as you're finding the right messages that work for the audience to create the coalition to build a piece of legislation. And we've seen that for all three of those, there was an effective building of a coalition over a longer period of time to allow it to happen. And another very important consideration for productive legislative discussions is that for all three of those, both Republicans and Democrats were involved in discussions together from the very beginning. So, it wasn't a case of a bill was put out, already written, and then the other side was asked to get on board. It was developed on a collaborative basis and a lot of trust was built from the very beginning. And I'm really struck by some of the parallels with what you all mentioned around developing projects where communities are not gonna be excited about a renewable energy project that's already negotiated and planned out in secret behind closed doors of a county or something. They're gonna wanna be part of that process. And the same thing goes for legislation. It's going and talking with other folks across the aisle and saying, what are your priorities? What are my priorities? And the more that we can do on that bipartisan basis, the better. And I think we can follow that recipe for additional bipartisan progress. So, involving both sides from the very beginning, identifying clear coalitions that can support a policy, that can be a coalition within Congress, that can be a coalition from outside, from advocacy groups or industry. And then also trying to make sure that whatever policy you're pushing is going to have different axes of support beyond climate. So, clean energy policy has tremendous economic development benefits, geopolitical benefits, et cetera. And I think there are clear opportunities for bipartisan progress in Congress over the next year and a half in this Congress and in future Congresses. And a few places where I see a lot of opportunity going forward include industrial decarbonization innovation. Number two is trying to have partnerships for better exports of clean energy technologies with a lot of developing countries and thinking about how we can reinvigorate tools like the Export-Import Bank or the Development Finance Corporation. And finally, permitting reform, which if you're in DC, you're endlessly about it. I don't need to go too deep onto that, but I do think there's still an opportunity for making that happen. But for each of those, we need to make sure that we're engaging both sides from the very beginning and not just showing up with a policy and asking for someone to sign on. So, I'm a big supporter of bipartisan progress. We've seen that we can do it under trying circumstances. I think we can still keep working on that and we need to always be looking at it from the very beginning. So much, Spencer, really loved that. Very practical advice as well. It makes me feel very hopeful and seeing the progress is terrific. Sonia, thanks for waiting so patiently. I'd like to turn to you now to hear your perspectives from your current work as well as someone who has very recently worked to bridge divides to find common ground in your former role as special assistant to the president for climate policy, innovation and deployment in the Biden administration where you helped to build the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure law over to you. Thanks so much. And I'm just really happy to be here with you all and also with everyone who's listening in for your time and attention, which is just an incredible gift. So thank you. So I also wanted to mention, I'm sorry, I'm not able to join you all in person because I know that this is such a fantastic group that the academies have pulled together and I had a chance to listen in on some of the earlier conversations today and I think it's just an incredibly important project that you all are undertaking with great expertise weighing in. So thanks. I would love to build on everything that you all have already said, Matt, Linda and Spencer. I think to me the most important point here is that we are in such a special moment because the solutions for climate change are finally available at scale and cheap. And I think as Spencer was just saying, it's about finding the messages that work for the right audience, that work for the right partners to build the coalition and support durable policy to get all of those solutions deployed as quickly as we can. And we're really in a great time for that now because those solutions that reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, they also deliver all kinds of other benefits beyond just the greenhouse gas emission benefits. So whether that's economic benefits, health benefits, equity benefits, labor benefits, business and innovation and modernization benefits, security, resilience. I mean, the list is pretty impressive. And I think that we not only can, but we should talk more about all of those benefits with the people that we are trying to work with to get these policies passed and projects off the ground. And we don't even have to emphasize the climate benefits if that's not what's really resonating with certain of our important partners. So I think the other opportunity we have from the fact that the same solutions to our climate crisis can also deliver all of these other societal benefits, it means that we can recruit leaders who have historically been focused on economic security, supply chains, justice or trade initiatives or projects to work on climate initiatives since they can now be one in the same. And all of those realms are seriously affected by climate change and the very same solutions are really applicable to all of these challenges. So what is that? It sounds all very theoretical, right? So what does it look like in practice? One great example from the last couple of years is the Inflation Reduction Act, which builds on the bipartisan legislation that Spencer talked about just now. So he talked about three other bills that have been passed in the last couple of years that are incredibly important. The Inflation Reduction Act was not a bipartisan bill, but it did take a different approach than we have in the past on climate policy because it's really an economic policy that puts workers and communities at the core and it also fundamentally changed America's trajectory on climate. So before President Biden took office, we were on track to reduce economy-wide greenhouse gas emissions by about 25% below 2005 levels in 2030. And after the Inflation Reduction Act, building on the other policies that we just talked about, we're on track for about 40% reductions below 2005 in 2030. And it's worth pausing because that is just a profound shift. We're just 344 weeks away from 2030 and to change our greenhouse gas emission trajectory that much in such a short period of time is a real win for the climate. And I think we should all feel really good about that. So how did we get there? I would say, I think it's really worth noting that we discussed the potential for a carbon price for decades and that is not the policy that delivered this particular climate win, right? So instead, it was a series of policies that were designed from the beginning to Spencer's point in conversation with the people who could benefit the most from adopting these policies. So it was a broad range of stakeholder groups. It was about investments in clean energy and clean industrial processes in better land management practices. And the new programs were really designed not only to just address our greenhouse gas emissions, but again, to reduce our energy bills. And we can finally do that with clean energy because of the rapid cost declines that we've seen over the past decade. So it's a really, again, a special moment here. The policies in this package were designed to increase our energy security and build resilient supply chains, encouraging manufacturing of these critical technologies and equipment here in the United States. They were designed to reduce asthma risk and other health risks in our communities. They were designed to promote equity with at least 40% of the benefits flowing to communities that have been left behind by federal policy in the past. Labor was at the table from the very beginning of this package. And the policies were designed to increase the number and quality of jobs in the clean energy sector. They were designed to make it easier for businesses to deploy clean energy, to deploy clean industrial processes and better land management practices. And so we really had an opportunity to bring a lot of different people together that might have had different objectives coming in, but could all see themselves benefiting in this package. And that's thanks, again, to the availability of the solutions that we now have and not a moment too late. But we are now able to make sure that our climate policies are delivering on all these other priorities at the same time. So just I'll wrap up here in a minute, but all of this sounds a little bit too good to be true maybe. And I will tell you that, you know, it did take some work to get this package together. It was all about trying to identify the big levers for greenhouse gas emission reduction in each economic sector. And then we had to ensure that those policies included provisions that we'll deliver on all of those other priorities at the same time. And that was, you know, there's sometimes a bit of attention. How quickly are you moving forward with deployment of the zero carbon technologies versus, you know, are we including provisions that really bring everyone along and make sure that the jobs are high quality, that the supply chains are shifting, all of those things. So those are tensions that exist and need to be balanced. It took a concerted effort to design the policies in ways that would deliver all these additional benefits. But I think it was totally critical to getting the policy across the finish line. So we talked to probably thousands of stakeholders to build this package. And that I think created waves of additional support when it came time to vote. So of course we're not done. This bill was a lot of carrots. The administration is now working to update standards sector by sector to help ensure that people actually take advantage of the great climate solutions that are now available and cheap. And I guess I'll just conclude by saying, again, we're just in a special time for climate action. And I mentioned 2030 is 344 weeks away. I have a little countdown. It's not a lot of weeks. And that means there's more urgency than ever for action at scale. And we know what to do to meet our climate goals and the solutions are attractive to a huge range of stakeholders if we can be smart about this. And now we just need to do even more. And I think that the way to do it is to do it together. And that's what's so great about this conversation is we're trying to figure out how we can do it better together. So I really appreciate being here. Thanks, Sonya. I appreciate the call to answering this special time in climate. And now I'm gonna turn to the panel to have a moderated conversation with all of you. And I wanna encourage you to rather just maybe go in a row all the time to jump in where it feels appropriate. And Sonya, maybe we, because I know it's hard to jump in when you're joining remotely, maybe we start with you quickly if you don't mind me picking on you first in your experience. And then for the others of you based on your research, what are the best opportunities for creating spaces for productive dialogue about climate? And what are the conditions that make that possible? Sure, so I can kick it off. There are so many great answers to this question. And I already heard some really insightful ones from the other panelists in your opening remarks. But for me, it's all about starting with the research, which I hope also resonates with the Academy is where are the tons? And then who is your audience? Who are you trying to partner with? So we are wanting to focus on trying to make progress on the things that will make a big difference on overall greenhouse gas emissions because we are just running out of time. And then work hard with the analysis and research on the front end to figure out who all will be influential in making decisions about where we go on these major decisions. Get to know them, look them in the eye, sit down with them, begin to understand what they care about and how we can work together to actually achieve objectives that may not be 100% the same, but have a ton of commonality. And then I think, you know, again, with the research that we have now, it is easier and easier to make explicit the benefits that our partners also care about when we're talking about, you know, either adopting policies or doing projects that reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. So really look to the research for that kind of case-making and also just listen, listen to what matters to the people that you wanna partner with and really put yourself in their shoes and think together about then how we can achieve all of our combined objectives. That seems to me, you know, it just starts with empathy and being real with another human being to try to understand what everybody is just trying to get done. So that's where I would start. Thanks, Sonya, very much appreciated. Others, let's chip in. Go ahead. Sure, so, you know, I was on the faculty of American University until 2014. And so I was a frequent participant in these types of meetings. And I moved into sort of the policy wonk circles of science, technology and climate and energy policy. And give a lot of talks about science communication, but a year since through different reasons. Like I've become much more interested in the particulars and the social realities behind the language that we use and the models of the world as a scientific community and meritocratic class. So one of these I talked about earlier, a lot of this actually dawned on me when I was doing a project where I was looking at the politics of carbon removal and the role of communication and carbon removal. And I started looking at decarbonization scenarios coming out of the 2018 IPCC report. And so we've kind of set ourselves up with false expectations about what we can achieve relative to the decarbonization on a particular timeline. You know, part of that also is the political decision to set the 1.5 degree target coming out of the UN meetings, which no one thought was achievable and was sort of even there's a political Europe report article about how Kerry's negotiators, they just agree to it symbolically but no one believed it was achievable. Then it became real with the 2018 report. And then we started running at the national or international level decarbonization models to move backwards from when a net zero goal would need to be reached in order to meet this 1.5 degree target. As I mentioned earlier, where public dialogue and communication is what we need is we need a lot more forums where we can talk critically and in a way that's grounded in social reality about the language that we're using, the targets that we're setting and a diversity of experts can challenge each other's assumptions in combination with people who are locally rooted. Many of us in the meritocratic class were ruthless people talking in mathematical abstractions about future goals and then trying to then impose those goals on people who are rooted to particular landscapes and ways of life, right? And don't think about the world in terms of mathematical abstractions and a very different set of values and goals. And so the harmful process that the characterization models are playing right now is that if you look at even the front slides of the Princeton model, the assumption is that people, they said these models are based on the assumption that all individuals respond to incentives and act in rational ways. Well, as a social scientist who also studies the history of social science, that is a pre 1970s model of human behavior. That's before, you know, Daniel Kahneman and in behavioral economics, situationism, research and social psychology. That's just a useful fiction to run a model because they can't model how human behavior really works. The other useful fiction in the model is that this is front and center in the Princeton deck of slides that there will be low political friction in deploying, well, there's nothing in US history of that scale or Western Europe that's ever been low political friction, especially today. And the final piece of that is that in order to make the model's work is almost all of you probably know is that at some point in the future we'll have to deploy massive levels of carbon removal technology that don't yet exist. And also have a land use scale that is beyond what we can really imagine, right? So that the competition for land use which itself is a high political friction we're already seeing that in building out offshore wind and political transmission lines in places like New England. The competition and the debate over land use to include carbon removal plus clean energy generation plus transmission, plus pipelines to bury carbon removal plus the goal to set aside 30% of land for conservation which is also a goal, right? Also to have land for enough water and land for agriculture is beyond the scope of the imagination. And so we have to have some reality testing about the language and the models that we're using about the future. How are we imagining the future? What is the political implications? The invisible political force where then, what we have is public sentiment in the United States when we look at national surveys and polls this is like waves in a shallow pan as Andrew Revkin wrote a few years back back at daughter blog, right? This is public sentiment. This is not crystallized public opinion. People say like 70% of Americans say they support solar and wind, right? But they're not being asked and they can't possibly imagine, right? What the scale of land, how their cultural landscapes, right? And what they're familiar with what they have intergenerational attachments to that are a way of life, right? How that will change how that will have to change over the next 10 years and beyond, right? The only way, right? We have to, we've had this type of deliberation among the meritocratic class and stakeholders in the Beltway but it hasn't happened across the country and every state, every region has its own political culture its own geographic and historical cultural landscape the entire state of New Hampshire is a designated national heritage site, right? So when they propose to build high transmission lines that are above tree tops, right? Bigger than you are familiar with, right? That then bordered the white national forest that activated every possible stakeholder group and you had something like 70 townships in New Hampshire voting against the project, right? So when said earlier, Mike McCracken said well, the only way to do this is to bury the transmission lines and I think he's right the problem is that with the system that we have of setting goals and then setting up bids, right? Putting in the tax incentives in for the private sector to step in which are international capital, international banks international multinational corporations, right? That are doing then behind closed door deals with conservation groups about land use and then announcing the project and then trying to defend it, right? That's a recipe for disaster, right? And so no amount of like persuasion or messaging, right? Is going to be over be able to overcome the legitimate local resistance to that type of institutional structure, right? And so there's no as a communication there's no communication solution for that. The solution is democratic governance. We have to start the conversation now and early and figure out what are the how do we reform our institutional arrangements, right? So we can arrive at democratic decisions at the regional level because transmission lines cross states and within states and at the local level where people going back to the beginning to founding this country have always been concerned about procedural justice what is the process and subsidence justice, right? And James Madison was writing the US Constitution as I talked to my students about, right? And he's setting up our federal system of government where there's where there's shared sovereignty between states, localities and the federal system he suddenly arrived at this insight. He said politics in America will always be a constant argument a never ending argument, right? There is no political will James Madison and the other framers designed our government to prevent uniform political will, right? That's a bad thing if everyone agrees, right? And comes around that's a recipe for what you know, people fought a war, right? A war of independence, right? Against a foreign king, well, English king, right? They wanted to have local control to do that and then federalism was a compromise to do that. But, okay, I'll stop there. Thanks Matt. Other thoughts on how to maintain the argument? I think sometimes, you know, oftentimes I'm the local official reminding, you know when I served on FEMA's National Advisory Council saying this will never work locally to your point. And that often surprise along with we are awash in information. So my conversations with FEMA staff were okay I'm going to give you some small thing and I want you to go find that in your system which is what you expect me as a local to do. If I want funding, if I want to program I have to go find it. And I want you to find that in under 15 minutes. No one was ever able to do it. Now I will say FEMA systems are better than they have been, they're working on it. But even you as researchers for all the work you do if you move slightly out of your field and even with the help of Google and AI you may not be able to find the deep information that you want. We have so much that the average person who's taking their kids to school and soccer practices and whatever they are not paying attention until you tell them that they're going to run a high transmission line through the forest or in their backyard there's going to be a solar array panel. So we have to begin to think about how we have these meaningful conversations that are I think driven by some amount of storytelling. We have to think that storytellers it's an art and that historically storytelling has been how we moved even if it was in a small tribe to a larger group to some regional federation. We oftentimes have done that with storytelling. We oftentimes did this within our churches. A lot of these places they don't exist anymore in the same way. So we have to think about not just the goals that we want to get to but the realistic ways that we can engage local people on saying, yes I want to do that. I'm interested in learning more so that people own it themselves because I think for way too many people the concept of decarbonization is not something that is real to them in their everyday life. Now, do I need wind energy just to switch on my lights? Might be closer to a reality. So how do we begin to have and we can't scare people? Lucy Jones who wrote the big one is I'm a big fan basically said we cannot scare people about crisis. It doesn't work. It doesn't get us to the behavior that we want. So we have to begin those mutual conversations. There's a lot of great content here across all three. I'm trying to think about what would be additive. I think trying to build where there's already economic momentum or the right coalitions in place is always very helpful from a policy perspective. One example of this that I think a lot of people are not quite as aware of is the American Innovation and Manufacturing Act that was passed in 2020, which authorized a drawdown of hydrofluorocarbons, which that piece of legislation, which is now being implemented by the EPA is expected to reduce about 900 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent over the next few decades. And that is a, it's a top-down regulatory policy that was enacted under a bipartisan basis through Congress and is now being implemented by a new administration. And the reason that that was able to get done was that there was the right alignment of coalitions and economic incentives because these new types of replacements for the hydrofluorocarbons that we were phasing down, HFOs were manufactured in the United States. We had them readily available. Most of the benefits from the manufacturing that would go to American companies. So it was a lot easier to go in the direction of that climate solution. And it was not an easy process. Even in that case, there was still took a couple of years to actually negotiate how that drawdown would happen. But the thing is that if you can have the right alignment of political incentives and economic incentives so that everybody wins, you can get a lot of things done. And I think that applies on the federal level, but it also applies on a local level where you're trying to think through what is the right technology choice for a specific geography. And not everywhere is gonna be a great location for advanced nuclear. I work a lot on advanced nuclear, but there are some places that are gonna be really great. And if you look at the decision from Pacific Corps to build a nuclear reactor, they went through a process where they asked several different communities that had closed and coal plants who wants to build this nuclear reactor, who wants to support this in their community. And they picked one of them from four who were excited about that. And you have to think through what's the right application for your specific community, and you have to go as much as you can with what is what's supported economically and socially. Thank you, really appreciate the insights and perspectives. We've a few more minutes before I'll be turning to audience questions. So we've heard a lot of really helpful perspective in context now, it's time for some advice. So as we launch climate crossroads, what advice would you offer to the national academies about creating opportunities for dialogue and or how we communicate more generally as a non-partisan institution to support productive conversation in a politically divided country? Spencer, do you wanna start since you had to end last time? Yeah, I think the fact that the academies is a non-partisan organization, I think is really crucial, gives a lot of credibility across DC and I think that could be sometimes difficult to maintain with a topic like climate change that can be much more politically charged, but bringing research that's based in evidence and based in science is going to be incredibly helpful. And I think there are a lot of folks on the hill and there are a lot of folks who are also in more local communities and states who don't have the resources to do the analysis themselves or they're interested in seeing that. I think that that's very helpful and if there are partnerships with local universities to try and demonstrate how climate science or energy technologies apply to a certain community, that type of semi-extension based work would be very helpful because there are a lot of places that are interested in learning more but they don't have the capacity to do so on their own. So I'm excited about the climate crossroads from that perspective. Other advice you'd like to share? I think that anything that we can do that engages places and parts of the country that we don't normally engage because it will be important for a broad array of people to be aware of this and to be engaged by it. Some of which might not be the academic community but could be leveraging perhaps associations that have contact with people on the ground. I would note that I found it personally, I was thrilled but in the ARPA law that went forward, I felt in actually a certain part of the Trump administration, the Trump administration called local officials in in a way that had not ever been done before. And it was very, very different. And people were gratified and happy to come and they actually came on a bipartisan basis because a president was saying, I'm gonna send my staff and we wanna talk to you and we will listen to you. I will say that the Biden administration did that actually even before he became president because when the ARPA act moved forward for the first time in history, money went directly to local governments. And that was a huge shift. And we learned a couple of things. One, people are saying, yes, I could use this money and I could apply it. There were some companies, cities and counties that were, they were frozen. They were like, oh my God, what will I do? What will I have to do? And essentially said no to the money, which may be to their everlasting disappointment, but it suggests that your tension line between federal state and local government is a very live round. And so if we can help explore that tension line in a way that allows, again, more fruitful conversations to take place. Really quickly, if you last, you could don't just, well, I wanna jam in one last question if we can, go ahead. So yeah, there's two wonky terms from the science and technology studies literature. One's anticipatory governance and the ones that co-production of knowledge. So what does that actually mean in practice? It means, for example, that with the decarbonization models there's interesting papers out now that are looking at the faulty assumptions of existing models and saying, okay, well, in the modeling process itself, right, you have to have a greater diversity of experts and stakeholders participating in the actual modeling of what decarbonization looks like, right? And what the time scale will happen because in Europe they're seeing that these decarbonization models, the lag between actually what they're predicting and what actually happening is way off for reasons, high friction. Another model of anticipatory governance, Karen Akerloff is here in the audience. She's a researcher at George Mason University. She's done some phenomenal research on early engagement and governance around adaptation planning. In particular, if you look up her website and papers in Annapolis, Maryland where she finds is she brings together local citizens who are then listened to experts and expert advice and have educational information and then have to deliberate about what adaptation would look like in Annapolis. What happens is they shift from their national mental model, right? That might be aligned on the left-right spectrum, right? And they replace that cultural identity or worldview with a local identity or worldview where everyone in that room now shares a common identity rather than one that's politically oppositional. Universities land grant universities in particular have to and are playing a central role. They have a unique capacity to do this from public extension to the type of problem solving local state-based research that they're individually researched that they do. One of the great models for doing anticipatory governance in combination with environmental science is the George Mitchell Center for Sustainable Solutions at the University of Maine. Their model is, okay, they're looking at title power off the coast of Maine. They're looking at floating wind turbines off the coast of Maine. You have civil engineers, you have environmental scientists working on the design and looking at the impacts and then you have social scientists doing interviews with local residents and stakeholders about what they think about the social, political, environmental implications of that technology. So the social science research itself, it's a co-development of that technology and knowledge about that region. And it's also a way of getting by and trust. People see procedural and substantive justice being satisfied, right? We just need to populate and include more of those forms of anticipatory governance and co-production of knowledge. And the final piece is journalists have to do this as well, right? Andrew Rebkin is the pioneer in doing this, right? He is, and along with some of the other great science journalists of his generation, they are skilled at asking critical questions about the particulars of the assumptions behind things like decarbonization models. Andrew Rebkin was doing this daughter calling them interesting thought experiments, right? And then he would put together a round table of experts from different perspectives than a new paper that's getting a lot of fanfare and a lot of hype in the press. What do you think about this thought experiment about how New York state could go 100% renewables by this date, right? And then doing that type of critical journalism. Too much of journalism now as Rebkin talks about has narrative capture, right? And we have to think about how can we help journalists, right? Break free of that narrative capture because that's an important part of democratic governance. And I'm sorry. Yeah, as a journalist I really hated cutting you off. But I just want to get to, you know, we're going a little bit over time and I want to try to run this and tell you any last advice from you for the national academies about what they should be doing in this space. And then in a minute I'd like to turn to audience questions and I want to remind you all that please make your way to the mics in a minute and those who are online, please ask your questions to the Slido queue so we can incorporate them. Thank you. Just in one minute I would say just at the front end of designing just such a very cool program as this that crosses all the academies. I think really spending some time to stare at the data about where our greenhouse gas emissions are coming from will help us kind of filter between climate solutions that are going to make a big difference if this is a climate focused effort and those that might be more marginal because I think that we have opportunities to spend our time and resources focusing on those solutions and building collaborations and better dialogue and partnerships with different stakeholder groups really focused on trying to get those things to scale quickly that we know are really capable of delivering large scale reductions. So just starting with this big picture to try to understand what the priorities are based on what matters most to the climate and then finding those topics of interest in building programs around those rather than starting from kind of the bottom up with the issues that may have the most general interest but are perhaps not on the critical path to success. I think spotting the difference is just so critical given how short our timeline is to solve this giant challenge. And there's plenty of work and great partnerships and connections and dialogue and progress to be made on those issues that are kind of going to really move the needle on overall greenhouse gas emissions. So I would encourage the program to start there. I appreciate your emphasis too, Sonia, on finding those topics of interest and we touched on a lot of them during the panel today. I was gonna ask you a separate question about that but I think in the interest of time I'd like to follow up with some of the audience questions because I see some folks lining up. If I could start on this side and then I don't see anybody on the other side but I'll go back and go more generally. Now I see people going there. Please go ahead, please tell us who you are and then ask your question. Thanks so much. Okay, can you hear me? Okay, my name is Jackie Nunez I'm the founder of The Last Plastic Straw and I'm an Agassi and Engagement Manager for Plastic Pollution Coalition. Close to the mic, thanks. Okay, and I'm here to plant the seed about the connection of climate and plastic. And I often tell kids that divesting from fossil fuels is saying no to single use plastic. It is the climate crisis you can see, touch and feel. It's a polluter at every stage of its existence. It hits on health, it hits on environmental justice, gases, greenhouse gases, it's a major contributor to that. And there's a disconnect just like the straw and why I chose the straw is literally in front of our noses on your tables and out there in the lobby. These are just simple things that we can do that actually hits on all of these subjects that we can work together when we talk about stakeholder engagement. So I'm just inviting you guys to, I'm here. I wanna look you guys in the eyes. I wanna make these connections. And I do have hope. I think this is something that's really good and to help push it, the climate conversation and make some big strides really quickly once we can get rid of, especially seeing these plastic and all that. Thanks a lot. Do you have a question about that? Well, the question is a suggestion and also the question is a lot of the conversations is always about energy. And there is a lot of energy being made but what is this conversation happening around plastics because I haven't heard it yet. Are energy conversations happening around plastics? Well, just you guys talk about but is climate conversations happening around plastics? I think it's very much engaging from one of our panels earlier today in the health world. So we do know that plastic is now entering everybody's bodies with a much higher degree of frequency. So a good thing to keep in mind. Let's go to this side please. Hi, McCrack. One of the experiences I've had over the last decade is identified what I think is a real gap in communication that I'd like to get your comments about. I've been in a collaboration with a business executive where my business executive is very interested in dealing and very worried about climate change. And what we realized is that our communication about what the situation has been is very different. Climate science generally tends to be want high credibility, it tends to be cautious, it takes averages and other things. And so what the IPCC is presenting are really what everybody agrees on and stuff and it's sort of the common central average. What I'm told is taught in business school for businessmen to become businesses to be resilient is to prepare for the worst plausible outcome. The run on the bank, the 100 year flood, our military being capable to do conflicts in the Pacific and Atlantic basins at the same time. And so what is wanted for due diligence studies are estimates of what are the worst plausible outcomes. IPCC won't provide that, scientists won't provide that because we can't give that information with high confidence so we don't talk about it, we talk about the central values. And so the due diligence studies that are being done on investments are not, they're being told to pay attention to the science, they put in the central values, they should be putting in the worst cases, this issue of extremes and increasing intensity. And there's a real gap between what the science community is providing and what the business community needs and what I think would create the urgency in the business community to do much more than they're doing. Are you asking if the panelists agree with that gap? I'm curious, how do we overcome this gap in some sense? I would just note what I said before that there's a difference between sort of public perception which I think is very rarely moved by worst case scenario but taking real issues that turned out to be the far side and talking about how do you plan for something similar? And I certainly understand business worst case but I would tell you that I was speaking to a small business woman and I was asking her what her emergency plan was for her family. We had talked about businesses for a good while and I said, what about your family? She said, Linda, I don't even know what I'm fixing my children for dinner and you're asking me where it is we're supposed to meet after a disaster. And I said, actually I am Heather and you could see this look come over her face. So, we do need to change the dynamics of conversations so that people know that this is not an ethereal research problem. It's actually a very realistic problem that we're seeing play out all around the world. Maybe just one thing to add. I think there was some really good research on the distribution of whether impacts so whether that's temperatures or precipitation or whatever and the shape of the curve of that distribution was flattening, right? And the extremes were becoming the norm. That was something that I think was talked about by the climate science community easily 15, 20 years ago. We wrote a paper about it about 15 years ago talking about just that, the extremes become the norm and how do we plan for extremes becoming more normal in our policy, in our infrastructure building, in our businesses. I think another great place to take a look is the insurance industry. And there are a number of climate modelers at a very, very detailed level who supply information to these insurance and reinsurance industries about where we think these things might be moving in the future in terms of the frequency of climate impacts. So I think it is, while you're totally right, I think it's not as much of a part of the conversation as it could be. I think there are some great threads to pull on if you wanna kind of help to bring that more to the fore. Thanks, honey. Let's go to this side of the room, please. Andy Revkin, 40 years on the climate beat. And the last thing we need is more stories like the stories that I wrote through thousands of them. My question for each of you is to envision an answer to Jigar Shah's plea that he made on my sustained webcast last year. He said, he's now running the loan program with tens of billions, if not hundreds of billions of dollars and loans ready to go on the energy side and there's more money on the infrastructure resilience side. He said, look, government can't order you to electrify your bus fleet. You have to do that. And he said there's 19,500 towns in America, communities. So my question for you on the panel and for anyone in the room and for the National Academies which is sort of a centralized thing is how do we do the distributed thing? What is it that you distribute? I know Raj, earlier there's been lots of little fragments of this so far today and it's wonderful this meeting is coalescing around this. It's not about storytelling for sure but what would be the skill set or who isn't in the room? Online, Facebook, YouTube, Google, what's their role for enabling people with the data they need, the mapping they would need to have better zoning. So who's not in the room? What are the organizations, there's schools everywhere across the country and everyone of those 19,500 communities but how do we empower those places? So I live in a city of 14,000 people, it was founded in 1640 at Newbury Fort, Massachusetts and moving from the Beltway and living in Dupont Circle up to now a small city on Merrimack. I've come to understand things I didn't before even though I've studied things for a long time. So much of this, we know this kind of abstractly like so much of the distribution of the benefits of the financial incentives and the grants will be determined by disparities at the local level in social, civic and financial capital. So my city of Newbury Fort, very small city government, they have a great grant writer and the former mayor was going to like Bloomberg's city summits, right? So she became completely engaged with climate change and so they became very good at getting state grants and federal grants to help them improve infrastructure and also at the same time, the state of Massachusetts then was offering grants for adaptation planning. So they've been early adopters but that is a high civic capital, social capital, SES community, right? The people that will lag behind will be two types of communities, ones that lack that capital that are on the lower end of that capital and socioeconomic status and then other communities from by way of political culture and history, they don't see the advantages or the benefits and they're wary of federal government help, right? It goes all the way back to the founding of the country, the difference between the federalists and the anti-federalists. Each region in the country has its own political history and region, right? We know that from the South, it's not just red versus blue, right? That's a modern artifact that things, every political region will have a different orientation in terms of communitarianism versus libertarianism in the Southwest, right? There's a reason that New England has really nice town greens and town squares, right? It's a communitarian, egalitarian political culture. It's very different from the South and the Southwest. Those will be the political cultural differences. What the answer to that is, the answer is not that experts move into these communities and do it for them, right? We need to think about, again, it goes back to interdisciplinary governance, co-production of knowledge and public dialogue, right? It's almost like a Saul Alinsky model of organizing, right? We need to figure out a way that community decide what their priorities are, right? And help empower them to achieve those priorities, but not control them, not direct them, right? Not to be top down and technocratic. That was the mistake. That was what the entire environmental movement and the progressive movement was defined around and the native consumer movement in the 1970s. They're trying to get away from the centralized top down technocratic decision-making of the Cold War. And the last thing, a little thing is like, again, we think about these sound bites and these pieces of language that then map onto the faulty mental models about how the world works and how we achieve social change. One of those is political will. But the other idea is that we solve these problems simply by reforming the permitting process at the federal level, right? I can't think of like a greater recipe for political conflict and high conflict, right? To take away the right of states and towns to decide their landscape future and to have a say in decision-making. That is a recipe for revolt, particularly around urban versus rural tensions that are already extreme and have existed since the start of this country. I would take it a slightly different route, not in a disagreeing way, but just I think the US is at 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions right now on an annual basis. Going forward, we'll be in hopefully an ever shrinking share of that. So it's really about thinking through how do we make, how do we make everything as so cheap and ubiquitous from a clean energy perspective that you would never even consider doing something that was going to be a high emission choice at least on a large scale. So I think it's really about how do you drive down the cost of both individual technologies and larger systems as much as possible. So no one would ever think about it in a different way. And I think that comes down to a lot of investment into some of the research and development, but then really scaling up the manufacturing capacity of those different technologies to continue driving down the cost. Because ultimately all of the emissions reductions that we're going to need are either going to come largely from other countries or maybe through carbon dioxide removal. So it's really about how do you make it so you would never even consider doing anything other than a low carbon activity. From this side. So this is a question from the online portal and it's very much along the lines of our current conversation. So from Maria Angelica Deed. Climate change is a national issue but has to be addressed together with local and regional plans and policies and knowing that government is divided, party and power can change every four years. And as we've noted, some of this is built into the design of our government. How can solutions investments and addressing the issue be taken out of the political rhetoric? And I would add, if they can't or shouldn't be taken out, how do we move forwards in that case? Well, the reality is that most city elections are in fact non-partisan elections that may or may not play out to be true. But I think fostering and encouraging people to step forward into leadership. There's a lot of people who won't run based on what's happened to other people who have run and I speak way more of the political landscape at the local level. So in your town, in Massachusetts, you have a mayor who had a vision who was able both to hire a grant writer and to go places. So I think that that is still consistently necessary. And in spite of what Andrew said about storytelling, I think it's important for leaders to have the ability to comprehensively lay out a vision or engage a community in building a vision. And doing it that way, I think makes a huge difference. And so when I was early involved in this subject because climate change was not a welcome discussion, it's certainly in the middle of the country where I live, we talked about resilience because no matter what we do with decarbonization, no matter what we do on these issues at the end of the day, how are we going to build safe, equitable, thriving communities, resilient communities that are able... And so we have to change the language. And for me, it doesn't... You and I have had these sort of nascent conversations based on being on this panel. How do you do this today? And that is we've heard it repeatedly through the day listening, listening, asking good questions. How do we invite people into these conversations? That I think is most important. We go over to the side. Paul Hanley from the Climate Judiciary Project of the Environmental Law Institute. And I want to pick up a little bit on what Mike McCracken was saying. Just know that most of what we've been discussing on this panel particularly is about finding alignments, political alignments, one way or another, listening to groups and trying to thread our way through the solution doing that. And that seems to me to be absolutely essential and very powerful. But occasionally, in fact, more than occasionally, that's unsuccessful. And yet, it's important to get the project to move forward to, at least in the eyes of the advocates of the projects. And so, they will go to court. There are legal cases and that's evidenced. There's growth in this. The reality is that sometimes the efforts you're talking about don't work. And courts hear cases. And that number of cases is growing very substantially. So, it struck me as you were talking that there's another constituency that you might want to be thinking about. And that's the judiciary. These are people who are in extraordinarily powerful positions who can be and want to be educated outside the classroom, the courtroom, in official kinds of judicial education programs and otherwise want to know more about the realities of climate change, the objective, unbiased facts that they can then bring to bear. And they can bring to bear when they're making decisions. So, my question is, really, a simple wonder if you think that the judiciary might somehow fit into this conversation about developing your other conversations with groups in society. I saw a thumbs up. Matt, did you want to? Yeah, thanks, Paul. I mean, I think a couple of things. One is, if you look back in history, back to the 1970s, in fact, in relation to a really big battle over transmission lines in Minnesota, there was a proposal to start something called the Science Court. This was this idea that different parties to a conflict like in Minnesota would bring to a panel of experts, not judges, a decision about the benefits and risks of a project. And then that would be a binding decision. Of course, that didn't go very far. You can go back. There was a lot of coverage of Science magazine, things like that. There's a great book written about the transmission line in Minnesota. One of the things I would say that an important part of democratic governance, we don't want judges to think like scientists. We want judges to think like legal scholars and to apply the great norms of skepticism that legal scholarship brings to debate. So there's an interesting, they were talking about worst case scenarios earlier. There's interesting recent court case, which I have to read more about. Andy Revkin, I think, did something about this, not sure. But there's some good coverage about the Lobsterman Association in Maine, winning a court case against the federal government on rules on catching, on taking out lobsters, where the decision by, I think was either by the EPA or NOAA, was based on a worst case scenario. And the judge reasoned, well, there's no nothing that says that this should be a decision based on worst case scenarios. We also have this debate between RCP 8.5 and RCP 4.5. Scientists say RCP 8.5 is useful for their modeling, but it's not useful for policy because it assumes a world that will never exist, a world of completely dependent on coal. And yet, if you look at, there's a recent study that looked at news coverage of climate change, I think in 2020, where the studies that were getting the most amount of headlines were not only just from a few journals, but were all based on RCP 8.5 studies. This is driving, in part, the climate emergency narrative and other things about climate securitization and the reason that we have to suspend democracy. We need to have states of exception that get around things like lawsuits and things like that. My philosophy is that this is a messy process, and we have to let democracy play its way out. There's no way we can technocrat this. Yes, of course, engaging in educating judges is really important. But when scientists talk to judges and think about the legal profession, including lawyers and attorney generals, they have to look across the table and hear as a peer expert. Here's an expert that has as much authority and expertise as you do. And in fact, actually, the way they see the world and reason about your evidence and ask critical questions about it can be helpful to you. And often these court cases that turn things down like projects. If you go back and read about the Seabrook Nuclear Station, I'm a proponent of nuclear energy, but the more I read about the construction of nuclear energy plants and how companies were doing environmental impact statements, how were they doing this planning, announce and defend process. If I was a local sit in the community in Newbury, Fort Seabrook, I would be at those meetings, asking critical questions. This was a mirage that they were doing. There was just a lack of public accountability and oversight on that. And it was the court system and active citizens, who today we would call NIMBYs. They're rational people who are misinformed and denialist, not in my backyard, who don't want to build these projects. But the same institutional processes and how we build energy projects today and cite them and build them are the same as they were in the 1970s. And the same processes about distributive justice and procedural justice that apply to oil and gas pipelines also apply to transmission lines, right? We see them as different, right? The people on the ground where it's affecting their communities, they don't, and for good reason and to limited reasons. Thanks. I'd like to see if we can fit in one more question I see been waiting patiently there. So much, is my mic on? Okay, hello. My name is Sharonda Allen. I'm an author, historian, scientist, social philanthropist, environmental steward, climate reality leader, nonprofit founder and leader and educator. As an African-American woman, I am not very well represented in this room or on your list of panelists for this summit. We have a major gap in the fight for climate justice and environmental justice. There are major barriers for underserved and frontline communities to survive on earth. Through my nonprofit Operation Grow, I engage youth all over New Jersey in service learning. Could you all describe what kinds of safeguards you already have in place to close these gaps and dismantle these disparities? Or what are your capabilities for those of you who are willing to work with an authentic grassroots group and individuals like myself to remedy these issues? Thank you, I appreciate your question. I would just say quickly, the reason that we have redlining, reason that we have such disparities and vulnerability to risk is that when these decisions were made 50 years ago, 60 years ago, we lacked democratic governance. We lacked inclusive participation in governance. And in the city of Boston, under the new mayor and their Green New Deal for Boston, you can look to Boston, for example, again, a lot of growing pains, a lot of lessons to be learned. But how she staffed her government there and the programs that they're instituting, how they're prioritizing different projects, one of the things that we can start to do, again, models for doing this type of collaborative co-production of knowledge and disciplinary governance, inclusive governance, is we can look at those places that are early adopters. And we need to have more people representing African Americans and other people of color. For you to say that Latino America is not the same as African Americans. And African Americans are the most hit with all of this. And as a professor, one of the things that's been a prime focus of my work over the last 10 years in teaching students is to integrate seamlessly across my curriculum and my syllabi, which has not been there before and it's still not in the literature and as an editor of a journal, right? To actively integrate different perspectives from the norms into the literature and think about climate change and the environment in relation to communities that have not been thought about in the past. And I have students do projects on redlining in Boston and to do community service as well. This is also a way that land grant, and I know land grant universities, if you look at some of the work at Cornell or Rutgers, we have a chair of the department here from Rutgers, right, who can talk about this. And I don't know if you don't know them, you guys should connect after the panel. I think that the challenge is that there's got to be a requirement or a commitment to far more intentional work in this arena. So as part of the National Academies, there's the Gulf Research Program and part of the work they've done is looking at the inclusion of people, generally, yes, people of color but African-Americans in particular. And I found it a little troubling as a grant reviewer I read some grants and that was a particular focus of this grant and there was no conversation about at the university what is the makeup of your team? Are there black people? Are there white people? Are there women? Are there men? And so for me, if that wasn't there, then that was not a viable project. It was not one I was going to grade well. And I think we have to have people like yourself who are bringing it up. The cohort of people we need to do this work beyond academia and moving out into implementation is an employment wonder if we address it and we engage people on coming into the profession of building climate resilience. And they're people of color. The reality is if you look at the southern tier of our nation, there are some of the most endangered communities there and we need engagement. Well, I'm a 501c3 and I can receive the funding and we don't even need to go through any of that if those people don't qualify doing the work. And that is a barrier. There are articles from, I can't think of the organization, but they talk about the fact that African-American led non-profits are the least to be funded, but yet do the most impactful work and we're on the front lines. So the bottom line for this right now, send the funding this way and I can make miracles and it's real black girl magic. You would see it promise. I would encourage you to check out Lauren Alexander who heads up the golf research program who is a hydrologist and a woman of color. I appreciate your comment and what you're saying. I would love to chat with you after the meeting as well. Thank you. So we have two minutes left. So I'm giving you all the 30 second challenge and for folks who didn't get a chance to share your ideas or your comments, please do make sure to add those to the Slido. I think the QR code is still on the screen. It is and we will read them all and maybe even get a chance to pick them up in future panel discussions. In fact, I know we will. I don't know why I said maybe. So in 30 seconds, maybe a sentence or two, what is one thing you would like everybody in the room to take away from your remarks today? Go. I said earlier that there's key words like political will that map out the faulty mental models. If I want to say another thing to eliminate from your lexicon, nimbyism. I mentioned earlier, it means that people are rational. They're operating their own self-interest. When they have legitimate reasons why they might oppose a project, if you look at a hashtag energy Twitter and if you look at some journalists, this catch word, this meme, nimbyism is this abstraction of misinformation and irrationalism blocking net zero goals. David Gellis, New York Times. My big story for New York Times climate, how plans for Rivian electric truck factory in Georgia became a vortex of nimbyism. Thanks, Matt. I just have to say, well, all right. So then if you look at Ezra Klein, I love this weeds on neighborhood defenders, the nimby movement, how to better understand them. Matt Glacius, we're looking at like 30, 50. That was the wrong thing. Thank you. I'm so excited. Can you come and see Matt at the break? Until three. Please go ahead. I would say always be willing to ask curious questions, listen frequently and language matters. Thank you, Spencer. Bipartisanship is totally possible and it's absolutely necessary and you get there by asking questions and listening carefully. Thank you, Sonya, last ones to you. Great. I would say we are in a special moment for climate action. We know what to do and we're increasingly winning the opportunity to do it. Follow the tons and know your audience and emphasize the benefits of climate action in terms that your audience will actually care about. Thanks so much. Well, I have to say that was a really productive conversation around productive conversations. Thanks a million to our panelists. We'll next go into the break until three o'clock when we have the next panel. See you there. Thank you.