 Josh, just start off, talk a little bit about the role of the Office of Climate Change, Sustainability and Resilience, you know, when it was created and major function, that sort of thing, so we can weave that in. Yeah, absolutely. So the Office of Climate Change, Sustainability and Resiliency was actually created by voters. It's one of the few offices that's sustainability focused it was actually created by will of the people. That was in 2016. It was created the same year that Donald Trump was elected president. And so you had this divergence in Hawaii, moving, you know, that the federal government was pulling out of the Paris climate agreement, while local government and was focusing more on climate change and and the impacts and the, you know, the real threats to an island community that people recognized at a population level and decided they wanted to dedicate a actual crew. You know, a dedicated office with staff on probably the most pressing threat to humanity of our time. And so I was hired in 2017, when the office formally got started. And we've been able to build a, you know, really efficient core group of folks that are dedicated to climate adaptation to carbon pollution reduction to disaster preparation and recovery. In the three years between 2017 and now, which really helped lay the groundwork for, you know, some of the response to the COVID and other threats we've seen to the island. Yeah, so how did those two things impact each other, the climate change in the COVID-19? Was it mostly in terms of preparation? So there's a myriad of ways that they intertwine together. I'm sure you've had folks talk to you about how the same, you know, market forces around, you know, going into new areas, disturbing new forest to get product, you know, emissions that are associated with that that are causing the climate crisis, actually have exposed humans to some of these, you know, pathogens that are in more remote areas of the globe. And we've seen that time and again, so there's, there's sort of the root causes of climate, you know, the climate crisis and COVID are in the same, you know, exploitation of resources that really have been previously out of bounds for the human populations and away from them. But obviously now, they've sort of intersected again, and our office was at the forefront of that. You know, our staff in the office served in the Emergency Operations Center, both for climate threats, Hurricane Douglas, which missed us by a, you know, by an inch. And at the same time, we were already sitting in there because of the COVID pandemic. We had people that were staffing, you know, different elements of the Emergency Operations Center that got stood up by the city and county of Honolulu to respond. So this is one of the longest activations of a Emergency Operations Center ever because of COVID that continues on to today. And then you also have these compounding threats that our climate generated, whether hurricanes or, you know, large rain events or whatever, that sit on top of that as a baseline sort of stressor. And that's really what resilience is all about is being able to sort of handle and be flexible in the face of multiple threats, which we're seeing more and more of in the 21st century. Now, did you see those, and now I'm talking about the climate change. Did you, have you documented or seen that those effects in Hawaii? Oh, absolutely. You know, we've seen probably seven inches of, you know, sea level rise in different parts of the country. Here it's a little bit less. But the impacts, you know, even from that small amount are already beginning to show up. You know, you've got underground parking areas that are constantly wet because the water table is beginning to push up through the ground. So as sea level rises, you actually also have the water table rise under the ground on an island. And so, you know, in some places they talk about, oh, we'll just build a sea wall, you'll be able to, you know, you know, keep the rising ocean at bay. Well, that's not the case in an island environment where that, you know, that water table is rising up through the porous rock underneath. So you can't build a wall to keep it out. We're seeing that already. We're seeing, you know, the rain bomb, a huge event. The most rain in a 24-hour period that has ever hit anywhere recorded in the United States happened on Kauai. And that was in 2018, I believe. And that same rain bomb event hit East Honolulu. And this is just a matter of, as the climate warms, the atmosphere can hold more water and it can dump more water at one sitting. And so we've, you know, just in the three years that I was there, you're beginning to see more and more of these events, the hurricane paths starting to come closer and closer because the cold water in the Pacific Ocean is beginning to retreat northern. And so the cold water used to force the hurricane south of us in the islands. But in the last 20 years, they've been coming straight across the Pacific right at us. And just for the grace of God, we haven't been hit yet. They veered to the left and to the right so far. But God of expect in the next decade that we're not going to be so lucky. How did your preparations for climate change events, I'm assuming that's a great deal of what you were working on. How did that dovetail with COVID-19 came? Yeah, well, so I mean, the whole idea of resilience is this ability to survive, adapt and thrive, regardless of what shocks and stresses come your way. So whether that shock or stress is a pandemic, or it's a, you know, natural disaster, or it's an economic downturn. And a lot of the same sort of muscles are need to be strong in order to respond to that. So, you know, we had laid out a plan, an Oahu resilience strategy, right from the day one when we came into the office. And it turns out that, you know, we identified 44 actions in that plan that we really needed to do to make our island more resilient. A lot of that focused on climate, but a lot of it focused on economic diversification. A lot of it focused on food security. You know, those are the things that really manifest and come to the fore whenever you have any kind of stress or shock that hits the island. And that definitely happened with COVID. And so we actually had, you know, some things that we could pull right off the shelf and deploy in the face of COVID. And I can talk about some of the specifics. Yeah. So, so a couple of things. First, when we first came in, we recognized that we didn't have any kind of long term disaster recovery plan. And it's something that every jurisdiction should have. And so we went out and in the office we recruited in a fellow from Tennessee actually who had worked for FEMA, worked for the state disaster management entity there. And had him come in and start laying the groundwork for hazard mitigation programs and projects to draw in more federal funds to really protect on the climate side against flooding and that sort of thing. But then he started laying the groundwork for sort of a long term recovery plan from any kind of disaster. And so thankfully he was in place and I had built a lot of relationships. And so he is the emergency coordinator for the mayor's office. And so we've been able to just slot him directly into the emergency operations center and make headway in the In the Oahu resilience strategy, we identified that our economic development office was anemic compared to what we really needed in terms of having a more diversified economy, not having all our eggs in tourism basket, right? We had lived through the recession and post-911 when tourism nosedive, and it was really a strain. And so we thought there had to be some sort of more robust effort at the local government level to do economic diversification. And man, we're living through it again. I mean, I wish we would have done this thing five years ago and started the ball rolling. But what we were able to do is immediately take that off the shelf and say, hey, if you were to make a more robust economic development office, here's what it would look like. Here's the kind of skills you would need. Here's the programs you could stand up. And that went into action right away. So we were able to utilize CARES funds that came from the federal government to basically implement this resilience action that we had identified and was going to be a sort of a longer term endeavor, but stand it up right away. And it's amazing. I mean, the team over there at the new Office of Economic Revitalization has managed essentially about $80 million of CARES funds to get it out into the community. And when they do that, the idea is don't just put a band-aid on a bullet wound. The idea is to actually lay the groundwork for a more resilient economy. So instead of just buying canned food to hand out at the can, you know, at the food drives, when people are suffering, it was go and work with the farmers on the ground who are suffering themselves because they couldn't sell to the restaurants because there was no tourists in the restaurant. How do we get the local farmers to repackage and do the logistics around getting their product to the food banks? And we used CARES funds to do that. And that way you sort of have a, that's what resilience really is. You're getting double bang for the buck. You're not just, you know, taking a siloed approach and saying, okay, we've got COVID. We got to get feed people because unemployment is the highest in the nation in Hawaii, which it is and remains. How do we take those funds and actually get two for one? How do we make sure that the farmer stays employed, the person that needs that food and their family gets local healthy food, fresh food, and which also drives down your health costs over time, right? If you're eating healthy food, that kind of thing. Eliminate some of the spam in your diet. Yeah, I didn't want to say, I didn't want to say spam because I didn't want to offend anybody, but I mean, that's essentially the, you know, buying, creates a spam from Minnesota doesn't help anybody here in terms of a local economy. And so this idea of how do you get to sort of a more, you know, holistic, local based economy. This is one of those few times where you can pivot and do it because COVID really stripped bear all of the inequalities, all of the different economic dynamics, you know, the differences between the haves and the have nots. Around climate, COVID really accelerated trends that we were already seeing. And so you see now the oil, you know, corporations and companies are in a tailspin. I mean, you saw, you know, crude oil futures were selling below zero, because there was so much oil in the pipeline and no demand for it that people were just paying to get rid of it for a time there. And those are the kind of dynamics that you see interplay between, you know, our need to get away from fossil fuels, and then COVID sort of accelerating, you know, this, this problem that we had with the commodities market and fossil fuels. So we're going to see an 8% probably drop in carbon emissions because of COVID this year. And that's because less people traveling, you know, less manufacturing going on, etc. We can't have huge economic disruption to get carbon reduction, right? We need to decouple carbon emissions from economic performance and there's some cities that have really done that well. You look at San Diego, you know, you look at Seattle, where they've been able to like drive their carbon emissions down, while their per capita GDP has actually gone up. And that's what every city in jurisdiction needs to do in order to remain resilient in the face of climate impacts to come. You, it sounds like you see both climate change as in COVID is like basically twin disasters. And also there's going to be a lot of twin disasters. I hate to say it that way and I don't mean to make light of it but, you know, there is a great study out of UH, University of Hawaii, that basically said the likelihood of having multiple disasters occurring to any one population at any one time goes up like five times by 2050. So you can imagine, you know, and the work there looked really a lot of climate focused disasters right like a heat wave with a, you know, with a flood event that's dumped on top of it or a hurricane transposed on a, you know, a drought. Right. I mean, you have these kind of compounding events, but pandemics are going to be one of those. And so I think there's going to be need for local jurisdictions to be able to handle sort of fight a two front war I think the military has planned, you know, since World War Two for a two front war, how do you fight two front war. We're going to have to fight two front wars against multiple cascading, you know, disaster events at once. And COVID has just been a year long sort of run up to that. It has provided a postcard from the future around what are these multiple disaster events going to look like and how do you cope with them at one time. Like you were saying before you get special problems in Hawaii like saltwater intrusion I'm assuming is an issue and you know just rising. Remember that Camilo Mora is the scientist at UH that did the compounding events like the multiple disaster events and pandemic might have been part of it so you might want to check it out he's really good he's been in the New York Times and stuff. But yes, so there's multiple threats to an island society that don't happen to other places. There's also multiple benefits to an island society. When you think about COVID one of the reasons that we've been able to stay well below the national average is geographic isolation, right. The other thing is that as an island community. I think, and I deeply believe that we have a more of a we first rather than me first mentality. You know mask wearing here is almost universal. You have to know, you know, if you don't, if you don't directly have somebody in a care home or works in a hospital, you know, in your family, you're going to know somebody that knows somebody because it's a small tight knit community. And so there's this sense of, I got to do my part in order to protect people that I know and love that are on the front lines. And I don't know that that necessarily happens in other parts of the country I mean we've seen sort of the disregard for the seriousness. Oh my God, I don't even get me started. Actually, I mean, I do think this is a really important point which is, I actually believe you can try to draw a straight line from the campaign for climate denial that the oil corporations manufactured over decades right the sort of skepticism, don't trust the science, you know, these the scientists don't know what they're talking about here's some alternative information. And that's between that and the distrust around COVID and the vaccine and science, because you've laid this groundwork for almost a half a century now 50 years, you know, billion dollar campaign to get people to not believe experts to not believe the science, you know, be skeptical about that Oh, you know that 99% of scientists might say that but here's 1% that doesn't, you know, and this false equivalency between, you know, the fake. You know, manufactured studies and science. And that really makes a difference when you when you think about how do people react to to scientific back to authorities, you know saying that we need to do this for the betterment of our of ourselves and our group. There's this built in skepticism now that I think draws directly from the same underpinnings that led to a skepticism about climate change led to the skepticism around COVID. You were talking about essentially what I what I call the sort of politicization of science. And you think that's COVID 19 to sort of compounded that problem or run into that politicization. Yeah, I think, I think COVID has not only sort of ridden the coattails of the science, you know skepticism and denial around climate, but it's also accelerated it. So you have folks now that are completely tuning out of any kind of normal, you know, media channels and tuning into these narrow sort of siloed ones that are probably the same echo chamber that's, you know, denying the realities of climate impacts denying political realities denying, you know, science and disease realities around COVID. And once that happens, it's very difficult to get populations to come together how they need to, you know, both COVID and climate are all hands on deck, kind of issues and problems. And when you say all hands on deck you really need all hands you right you need every single member of that population to come together, sacrifice a little for the benefit of the whole. And when you've got, you know, significant proportion of the population that just doesn't believe in the underlying facts and the science around, you know, a pandemic like COVID or a, you know, natural disaster looming like climate change. It makes it really difficult to pull the pieces together that you need to to write it out, and we can. And I mean, that's, that's the real message of, you know, the office as well as all the work we've done in community is, you know, island communities have been resilient for thousands of years and they, you know, been through storms they've been through droughts they've been through, you know, lack of food and hardship, you know, crashing economies. And when people pull together and try to, you know, make something out of nothing. You can actually soften the below and you can actually make a lot of progress, but you got to have that pulling together piece that's the social cohesion part of resilience. That's far more important than infrastructure being built. I mean, I think, I think our default right now is, you know, how do we build more green infrastructure or how do we elevate roads or, you know, how do we get this vaccine as quickly as possible. You know, for COVID, but the reality is, everybody tells us, it's much more effective for everybody to wear a mask right now than to try to roll a vaccine out right it's that social behavior I take care of you you take care of me. And it's the same with climate change. Anytime there's a hurricane when there's a tsunami, when there's flooding, the neighborhoods that tend to bounce back the fastest and recover are not the ones that have the most financial capital, necessarily. They are the ones that have the most social capital. So where neighbors know each other, they trust each other, they take each other in they provide for each other afterwards. Those are the neighborhoods that bounce back fastest. And does that translate into, because I've heard of this, you know, individual versus community or trying to get individuals to take responsibility for the wider community. Does that have a parallel in terms of getting people to in terms of climate change to say use less energy or, you know, think about more solar or commute to work and, you know, in, you know, in public transportation set a car or something. Do you see that as an important factor. Yeah, I mean, I think if you look at the parallels between, you know, some of, like Korea, and some of the other Asian countries and the way that they were able to China, the way they're able to basically stop coven and its tracks. And be able to open back up again, you know, financially. A lot of the reason that they're able to do that is folks, they're accepted a lot more restrictions around their individual, you know, freedoms right. I want to wear, I want to go without a mask just because I don't want to that that sort of selfishness around that individual action actually has an impact on everybody. And I think that's the same for climate. Actually, I mean, I don't want to, you know, have a more fuel efficient car because I want to be able to have the biggest, baddest engine and burn as much fuel as I want. And that is the natural corollary to, you know, what do we need for the population, and our children and our grandchildren to stay whole and have a livable planet, often comports directly with what are the individual actions that we're willing to take. Am I willing to change out my light bulbs to LEDs, right? I mean, we've seen from the highest office in the land, you know, a president that continues to talk about the crime of low flow toilets. Right. And it's like, look, this is the most basic thing is to make sure that the appliances in the plumbing that we buy uses little resources as possible, so that others may simply have resources, right. And so it's that level of sort of I'll do whatever I like and don't tell me what to do that begins to gnaw away at the infrastructure of resilience and sustainability for folks in the end. And because of COVID-19, I mean, a lot of budgets, whether you know, federal, city, local budgets have really been hammered, the university budgets, has COVID-19 on a financial side crimped your efforts at all in terms of dealing with climate change? Yeah, to a certain extent. So our office did a mandatory across the board 10% budget cut just like every other city and county entity did in 2020 to try to help make up for the loss of revenues. But where the most, you know, challenges come is really about being able to integrate and meet with people. You know, part of the basic work of any sustainability and resilience office is going out and educating folks, listening to folks, having those community listening sessions, and making sure that we're all on the same page. And in terms of what we know the science to be, what we know is coming, what we got to do, and then picking up that sort of local grassroots ground truth knowledge from the community around ways that we can adapt to climate change and getting that feedback to see what policies would be the most effective. And we were, so you're getting, yeah, from the community there telling you how to adapt and deal with climate change? Oh, absolutely. I mean, you know, you can do all the science you want in terms of sort of like I'll look at, you know, rainfall patterns or flooding or elevation or whatever from a topographic, you know, across the island look. But until you actually talk to folks around, you know, what have you seen over the last 20 years in terms of flooding in your backyard? Where does the, you know, where does the runoff tend to go? Is there, has there been a change? What does the erosion rate look like in your area? What is your preferred alternative to adapt? Because there's many ways to adapt. You know, especially with the beach erosion and the sea level rise we've seen, some communities may want to just give up the beach. They may say it's not worth it for us to have a beach. We'd rather have this road here, so we're going to elevate the road and just let the beach disappear. Because if you don't move back your infrastructure from a rising ocean, you know, coastal area, you will lose the beach. Obviously Hawaii, we kind of depend on our beaches a lot for cultural purposes. I mean, everybody here, you know, you have your first birthday luau with your baby, you go to the beach, right? You know, the highest per capita amount of people under one roof, you know, per square foot in the nation, the place that you go to recreate to get outside to see people to blow off steam is the coast, is the beach, right? So we've lost 25% of our beaches over the over the last 40, 50 years. And so where are people going? They're going to narrower and narrower strips of beach that are the public area, even while these seawalls are going up to protect, you know, private estates along the coastline. And obviously the other big side of that is tourism. You know, our economy depends to probably a greater extent than it should on people coming and visiting our islands and they don't come here for just the my ties, right? They come to experience the natural beauty of the place, to experience the culture, to go to the beach and with every passing year, we're having less and less beaches because of these dynamics around armoring the shoreline. But that said, that is a community specific kind of, you know, question that we have to answer. How do you guys want to do it? Do you want to, you know, take out these facilities, move back and keep your beach wide? Or would you prefer to just give that up and keep this, you know, baseball park that's right up to the beach? You know, what are those community tradeoffs? And you have to get that from the local community. Otherwise, you're not adapting in the way that they want. And then that becomes another issue because you really want to, we are all going to have to change. And so really the question is, how do we change together and who makes those decisions around the change? You want that to be as locally based as you can. Well, once again, thank you for taking the time. It's been great. Wonderful interview. I'm looking forward to seeing the finished product. I'm interested myself. Me too, actually.