 Hi everybody, we're going to get started. Thanks everyone for coming out tonight and raving the weather. My name is Abby, I'm Board Chair for Sustainable Resilient Longmont. And I'm Karen Dyke, I am also on the Board of Sustainable Resilient Longmont and I chair the Renewable Energy Subcommittee. Yeah, so this event tonight is to talk about climate change and also renewable energy and what you can do to make a difference and make a positive impact in our community. We have three speakers here with us and I'm going to be introducing them all one by one as they before their presentations and then at the end there's going to be a panel and an opportunity for everyone to ask questions. So we do have some index cards that are on the table, the check-in table and then feel free to grab one. There should be some volunteers passing those out throughout the event too. So it's a really great chance to learn about the latest in climate science data and also what the city is doing. We're really lucky to have our utility director, David Harnbecker here with us tonight to be sharing with us that information. And so I'm really, really excited to see everyone here. Thank you all again so much for braving the storm and coming out tonight. Yeah. I'm shocked at how many people came out. We thought we might only have five people so thank you. Jim drove from Boulder to speak and it took him an hour and a half. So a trooper, yeah. Yeah, so now I'm going to introduce our first speaker. So James Butler is a director of global monitoring at NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder where he has conducted research in climate forcing and ozone depletion for over 30 years. In his current capacity, Dr. Butler oversees the nation's continuing measurement of atmospheric constituents that affect the world's climate, including greenhouse and ozone depleting gases, aerosols and surface radiation. Dr. Butler's published works address the distribution and cycling of gases in the atmosphere, their production and consumption by the ocean, their exchange across the air sea interface, their distribution in polar snow, and methods for their analysis. He is a regular contributor to international documents on stratospheric ozone depletion, atmospheric chemistry, and global warming. I'm so pleased to welcome here with us tonight for a presentation called carbon dioxide climate change and human civilization. Where to next? I'm Dr. Jim Butler. Thank you very much. It works. People can hear me. My voice as I get older, it gets softer and softer and softer. People used to tell me I never needed a microphone because my voice projected so well and now it's kind of turning into a whisper, but that's okay. I can live with that. How many of you have seen me give a presentation here in Longmont in the last two years? For those of you who have not, if you are curious, a little more curious about carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and have some other questions, feel free to ask those afterwards because I have some other slides to take up of it, but I'm going to sort of step through some of the things I've shown before and then I'm going to take it to the next steps as to what we should do. I love giving presentations here in Longmont. There's not that many cities, there are several, but not that many cities have made commitments like Longmont to going for renewable energy. I really applaud that and I hope over time that this can become something more prevalent in our society. I think the thing that drives it in good part is the fact that it's cheaper, which is nice, but it's also the right thing to do and we see that in many places. Okay, so let me start with my first slide. You've all seen this. Anybody that have never seen this? I'm sure you've seen it in newspapers and all of that. This is the atmospheric record of CO2 in the atmosphere. You can see it started from 1957. That was Dave Keeling at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Started that record. NOAA picked it up around 1970 and we've been running it since then, but that is the iconic record of CO2 at Manaloa, Hawaii. Manaloa is tropical source in the middle of the Pacific. It's a good representation of global average concentrations after everything's all mixed out from the various cities and croplands and all of that. It looks good. Interestingly, yesterday, carbon dioxide was 413.56 ppm and you might laugh at that 0.56, but we know that it's actually good to 0.56. We measure it very well. It's one of our best measurements. One part in 8,000 is our certainty on the number. But anyway, when you see that, you can see the wiggles here. These are seasonal changes as it wiggles up and down. Every spring, the plants suck the CO2 out of the atmosphere, every fall, they put it back in again. But this growth rate, this increase is what we're going to be talking about here, and that is driven largely, almost exclusively, by fossil fuel emissions, about 94% of it. So when you're burning coal, burning gas, burning oil, and they all produce CO2, and that ends up in the atmosphere. It has a very long lifetime in the atmosphere, it's thousands of years unless we find ways to accelerate that, which is another discussion we can have. This just is a diagram of the sources and sinks of CO2. You can see that there is some uptake by terrestrial systems. There's some uptake by the coastal waters, but for the most part, you've got fossil fuels and some agricultural practices and some land use practices that make CO2 go up. So that's the big picture. So why the big fuss? We've all heard that CO2 goes up and down over time, and it has. You go back 800,000 years, it's from several ice cores, they're all identified up here, but I'm not going to get into that. The more recent parts are better representations because samples sort of get corrupted with time as they go down. The glaciers are still shifting and shuffling and mixing things up a bit. You can see that it goes up 100, about 100, and down up 100, down 100, up 100, down 100. It's really good in here. You can see that very clearly. So it's going from 180 parts per million to 280 parts per million. The bottom here, where it's 180, is called ice age. That is when North America, much of Asia, much of Europe is discovered with glaciers about a mile thick. And up here, these are called interglacials. And that's when, basically, it's just like today. You've got grass, trees, flowers, and birds, and all that stuff in your mid-latitude northern hemisphere. So why the big fuss? Everybody's worried about why CO2 is going up. We've seen it go up and down before. For one, these are 100,000-year cycles. And what we just did in the last 100 years is this. We just shot CO2. If you look at this, from going from here to here, it looks almost about the same as that, but this is a lot faster. And I'm going to show you that on the next slide. But this is shot up within about 100 years to well over 400 BPM. It's gone over 100 BPM higher than it was during this last interglacial. And why is that important? Well, put it this way. How many people here have our physics majors? I know I've got a scientist here. Scientists? Anymore? Oh, good, you've got scientists here. OK, great. So that means you've taken physics. How many people have taken physics in high school? Oh, God, we got it. This is great. OK. Physics is, I call this, physics is 0.1, physics A, 0.1A. The temperature of a planet out there in space, this great spaceship we're on, is a function of three things. How much energy we get from the sun? If the Earth was out there where Pluto is, it'd be really cold. If we're up where Mercury is, well, we wouldn't have an atmosphere, we wouldn't have an ocean or anything, because it'd be really hot. But we're happening to be in a nice location where we get energy from the sun. How much of that is reflected back also determines that. So it's reflected back by clouds. It's reflected back by ice, snow, and those kinds of things. And then finally, what do you have in the way of greenhouse gases in your atmosphere? If we had no carbon dioxide in the atmosphere today, we would have no water vapor in the atmosphere today. And what that would mean is that the temperature of our planet would be zero degrees Fahrenheit. So not very good for sustaining life. Everything's frozen. Nobody's going to live. Nothing's going to grow. It's not going to work. Good news is we have carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And when it's at 280 parts per million, it provides a wonderful environment for us. So if we add lots of greenhouse gases, it's going to get warmer. And we've added 30% more carbon dioxide and 30% more nitrous oxide and triple the methane that was around before the Industrial Revolution. So keep that in mind, that we have added this stuff. And now something's going to happen. The planet's going to get warmer. And the difference in that warmth is going to be something like the difference between an ice age and the current interglacial. But it's going the other way. So it's going to leave us with something fairly scary. So let me go back to this. This is human civilization right there. That's it. That's everything we know and that we've ever done for art, literature, et cetera, invent the wheel, build cities, build roads, develop medicine, science, art, everything. Right there, all at CO2, around 280 parts per million. Sort of stabilizing, steadying on climate. Why can that happen? How does that happen? It's agriculture. It comes down to agriculture. Hunting and gathering is an awful way to make a living. You take a lot of energy. Pretty much whatever you ate today, you're going to need to go out and find something and kill it to eat tomorrow. And it's going to take all that energy. You just don't get anywhere. But when somebody figured out agriculture, there was time to think and time to invent that wheel and to build those roads and cities and build off itself. Human civilization. Oh, by the way, I put that up here. I think I did. Yeah, I was just pointing out. Yesterday, yes, it was 413.56. That's what it was yesterday. You can check it on our website. We have that. Turns up every day. So there's this civilization. There we are. And let's blow it up. Let's go back 20,000 years instead of going 800,000 years. Here's the last interglacial. Where's the last glacial? I'm sorry, the ice age. So here's the last ice age. With CO2, we're taking 20,000 years. Oh, 15,000 years. You can eyeball it. 15,000 to 20,000 years to come up from 180 to 280. And we just took it from 280 to 380 in less than 100 years. So that is big. And now we're waiting for Mother Earth to respond. Mother Earth is going to do things that Mother Earth does when you jack up the temperature. It's like an electric blanket. How many people have ever used electric blanket? OK. How many still do? That's the same thing. I don't do either. You all know if you're laying it, you've got it comfortable. You're setting it up two or three. It feels great. It's like, well. And if you turn it up to nine, you don't get hot right away. It's later that you get hot. And then if you find out you can't turn it down, it makes you really unhappy. You start sweating. It makes life miserable. Well, that's essentially what we've done here with carbon dioxide. It is the thermostat on our electric blanket. OK. So that's carbon dioxide. 10 to 15,000 years of CO2 to 180 to 280. 100 years to go from tuna. And so that's a lot faster. And Mother Earth has yet to even respond. What's interesting, I'd like to play with this a bit, this is 20,000 years, a lifetime of a human. Because humans did exist during this ice age. A lifetime of a human was like, what, 30, 40, 50 years? He didn't even make it 100 years. It's a very small fraction of that. So that human would see very little change during his lifetime. But what we've done is jack this thing up. And now our children and grandchildren are going to see change, even if we stop emitting today. That's something to think about. OK. So how does Mother Earth respond and reflect this? One of the things is precipitation. It's been predicted through IPCC. And one we'll be showing you here are observations, not the models. We'll show you one page as a model. These are all observations we've seen. So over the last 100 years or so, you can see that there's been the sudden rise, since about 1980, of extreme events in the United States. You can do this for any place in the planet. I'm making it in the United States. Anyway, I've actually got plots that are in English units. So that doesn't help see people do too. One of the things I didn't mention about CO2, carbon dioxide has gone up 100 parts per million in the atmosphere since I was born. So many of us here can say it's just that, too. So it's all happened in our lifetime, which is really kind of scary. And so you're seeing this now. So you start to see the expression happen around the ladies. Here's sea level, 1920 to 2020, 100 years, on a eight inches, nine inches. And if you're living on the coast, and you see peaches disappear, you see a lot of changes. Malibu, by the way, they've seen the place we're rotting in now, they're rotting faster and faster. San Francisco's having issues at the moment. And Malibu's having huge issues. And they're going to have to go out of work. So this is only eight or nine inches. We haven't had any major glaciers slide off of Manor to complete it yet. That's what's going to happen eventually. Right now, that's just due to a thermal expansion of the sea water going further. Average Arctic sea ice extent. This is another one of those things that would have a very positive feedback. It's not a good thing. It's a positive feedback. But you see that it's gone. It's dropped from roughly three million square miles just under three million square miles down to two million square miles. That's one third of the loss. And then we measure this in September, which reaches its minimum each year. And you can see all this water here. It gets exposed. It wasn't exposed. It was still in the air, and now we've got it on. All of that water going back to that one slide that said the temperature of a planet is a function of three things. The ice reflects the light and sends it back to outer space. It does not eat the planet. Radiation from the sun comes in. It's the ocean that sets it up and warms the planet. So now we have sections of the ocean. Once we're reflecting, we're now absorbing sunlight. And then it's going to cause additional complications of forming change of ocean currents. And it will change the temperature of the planet. It will accelerate the warming. But here's another one I'd like. This is the heat wave characteristics of 50 large US cities starting in 1960. So we're not going to go back as far. From 1960s here, the length of a heat wave lasted about 20 to 23 days. And within 50 years, the length is now 60 or not on average. So this is where you can see where they're hitting. They're hitting a lot of places in the south, east and west. But all of that has grown considerably. Change in the length of seasons is the size of the dot. So this big dot like this says that this season has gone up 60 days longer than it used to be in 1960. So there are more heat waves happening. We see this, it's all very clear. What else do we have? This one's interesting. It's a little harder to pick up. It's a drought severity index. And when it's negative, that means things are getting drier and staying warmer. And you can see going back 100 years, there's a lot of variability in this record. If you stand back and look at the purple line, look at the trend in this window, this window, you can see that it's tending towards more drought. And the low here is lower. His right is lower in the load lower into 1930s dust ball, which is fairly extended, but there's another issue. You can see that we're actually sliding this down. And the predictions are that's going to continue. And probably my favorite is billion dollar disasters related to climate and weather. And we have them listed here. There's winter storms, there's wildfires, tropical cyclones, all these good things. And these are the number of billion dollar disasters that happen in the United States. So if we look at the 1990s, I think are we at? In 1980s. So in 1980s, you can see the average is about three billion dollar disasters per year. And if you go to the 20 teens, if you will, it's more like about the average of around 12 billion dollar disasters per year related to climate and weather. And what are they? Look at the green one, the severe storms. They're a little bit, but they became bigger and bigger and bigger. They pretty much dominate that whole thing. And that is totally consistent with predictions of climate change that were made back in 1990. I was listening to one of my colleagues on NPR the other morning going into work. And he was pointing out, he was being interviewed again about the IPCC assessments. And he said that, you know, back in 1995, we predicted that there would be many more fires in Australia, that there would be more fires in California, that there would be long and extended droughts to Colorado Riverwood drop, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, we got all that. They got it right back then with what we knew in 1995. We've learned a lot more since then, but it hasn't changed a whole lot. So these are significant. These are the kinds of things that kind of get society moving. It's gonna cost us to do nothing. It's gonna cost us a lot to do nothing. So I think people who are trying to deny climate change or avoid doing something about it, saying, well, it's just gonna go long, it's gonna be expensive. So the goal should be, I would suppose, to try to reduce those costs. And the way you reduce those costs is to address the issue. So this is one prediction. These are not observations. This is from the latest IPCC document. But if you look, I've got three sections here. One is observed, this is what we see today in increases in temperature, degrees Fahrenheit, over the United States. And you can see that today there's places that are largely one degree above what it was. Back in, I'm trying to think what the baseline year was. I think it's an average of the 20th century. But we're about one degree above that. And it's places where it's two degrees above that. And then if you go down to the mid-21st century, we have two scenarios. One is RCP 4.5. I can show you another slide on that if you're interested. But it's basically, it says, everybody tries to do something and we do it, but not good enough in reducing the greenhouse gases. It's tantamount to what was agreed to in Paris. If everybody did what they're gonna do in the Paris Agreement, this would be a scenario what happened. So far we're failing in that department. And the higher scenario is business as usual. Let it roll, black carbon junkies and go for it. So these scenarios, you can see that you can see RCP 4.5, that the contiguous United States, a lot of it is getting into three degrees Fahrenheit above average. And Alaska is already looking pretty bad. This scenario is just worse. More of it extends further south. And then finally get down to the highest scenarios. And this is very scary. That'd be by 2100. That's the world of our grandchildren's children. So we need to think about it in those terms. So that's the projection. So we've got things to do if we wanna stop this from happening. And there are some drivers, and I'm gonna give you some really positive information. I love this plot. I just saw a case in a report that came out last month, January 19th. So that would be one month ago. It was from the World Economic Forum. You know, the folks in Davos that meet every year in Davos, there's this report that comes out ahead of time. So this is the 2020 risk assessment report. And they look at these things very carefully. And I know you're not gonna be able to read these. Don't worry about it. I'm just gonna tell you a few things and you can probably follow the bouncing ball. Some of these things are economic that are drivers that they worry about causing damage to the global economy. What's the risk? And this is based on likelihood of chance. And then they'll do another one on impact. But just looking at the likelihood, these are the top five. There's about a hundred in their list. So they pick the top five. And this is done in a very mathematical logical way with about a thousand participants of major movers and shakers, CEOs from large corporations, government leaders, and people from various NGOs, international NGOs around the world. It's got a decent fraction of US players in it, but a lot of these are multinational corporations. So it doesn't matter what country you're in. These are the moving shakers, the guys that really drive the economy of this world. And women, sorry. But anyway, if you look at this from 2007 to 2010, and this is the first and this is the fifth. And remember there's about 95 down below them. Economic drivers are the big ones. They have things in here like oil price shock and various things I can't even read from here. But those are all in there. The societal things are in there like, again, I can't read it. It's a lousy slide, but I couldn't find any other way to do it. But okay. The next five years, going up to 2010, 2015, yeah, from 2011 to 2015, you can see that environmental is starting to show up as concerns of risk to the global economy and likelihood of occurrence. When you go up to 2020, these are the movers and shakers. These are economists. These are businessmen. These are government leaders. They are not scientists. But they're saying that the highest risks to global economy is all green. You go back all the way through here, there's nothing that is all any one color. And you can see the progression, how green has gradually built its way into here as the biggest concern to the global economy. There's a lot of reasons. Some of those are on those slides I showed you and there's a lot more. So what about impact? Which ones are gonna have the biggest impact? Initially, it's pretty heavily economically driven. Then the same thing. Three out of the five are environmental. So what is the most likely problem to happen? What is the one with the most impact? Well, let me see. Number two is called climate action failure. And they write it up in the report very nicely. If any of you want to find this report, all you have to do is, I think I put the website up on one of the slides I jumped through, no. Yeah, and yeah, if you Google W-E-F like World Environmental Forum and say risk 2020, and it'll get you the whole report, it's actually a good read. But climate action failure is the number one in terms of impact. That's resonating among our movers and shakers of the global economy today. And some of the others here are not unrelated, like extreme weather. Well, that is the result of climate action failure. So you can also, we like to say that risk is probability times consequences, so that's likelihood times impact. So you do a plot like this and you get the ones that have the greatest risk. Climate action failure right up here, extreme weather right here, biodiversity loss, human caused environmental disasters and natural disasters. And natural disasters are, they include fires as natural disasters. And again, that's driven by climate change. So really it comes down to failure to act on climate is a big deal. A lot of that thinking came from the IPCC special report on 1.5 degrees. This is when they had the Apparatus Agreement, the whole thing was to go to two degrees and scientists started looking and thinking about us and I ain't gonna work. I didn't think two degrees was good. I don't even think 1.5 is good. But the idea is that they're saying that's the best that can be done. And if we're gonna do that, we have to take action within the next 10 years. We have to start taking serious action in the next 10 years everywhere in the world. So this is why the global movers and shakers are concerned. This one I like too. It's a little confusing and messy, but all you have to do is note, these big dots are the young people, the younger ones, the up and coming movers and shakers. These are the old guard, guys my age. So they are, who's most concerned here? It's the young guy, the young people. They are, for every one of those things, for every one of those categories, the young people are the most concerned, but especially with the environmental part. They are, they have a huge stake in this. Why? Because it's their children and their grandchildren they're concerned about. They're worried about keeping jobs in a world that starts to collapse because of climate change. That is a fear. So let's take a look at this IPCC report. We've been doing reports since 1990 and every one of them, every one of them has made the same point that we got a problem and it always comes out. We know it better each time but we aren't changing a whole lot. It's still a big problem we have to address. We've been great if we addressed it in 1990. The special report on 1.5 degrees says the best we can do is hold warming to 1.5 degrees within a century but we must act progressively, which I just mentioned and this sort of comes out of scientists. We have to understand the system itself too because feedbacks like that melt, breakdown of the summertime ice over the Arctic are going to have influence and we don't understand those as well as we should. So there needs to be a lot of research to get that because if it's gonna be worse than we think then we need to know that so we can act faster. We don't act. We don't influence policy makers to do that. Okay, so we're in a car and if you're driving along in your car and it's a great day, you got top down, freezing your hair, you're accelerating, it feels good as a Mustang and putting your foot to the floor and you say, oh, there's a cliff ahead. What's the first thing you do? No, that's the second thing. What's the first thing you do? Take your foot off the gas, right? So first thing you do, foot off the gas. Okay, I'll get to that in a minute. The second thing you do, put your foot on the brake. But now you've got this car, you're just taking your foot off the gas from accelerating, slamming on the brake and it's gonna want to skid, flip, turn, whatever and that cliff is getting closer. What do you do then? You try to manage it. So that's all you can do. You're gonna try to manage it but there's a lot of things that go with that. So what's the climate equivalent here? First, put off the gas and stop putting CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. What Longmont is doing to try to go with renewable energy is one way of doing that. If everybody in Longmont bought cars and they were electrical powered and made sure that those cars were being charged by the renewable energy, in other words if the city of Longmont was 100% renewable and you drive home and you plug it in, you are charging your car with renewable energy. There's no CO2 going into the atmosphere as real to your car or as a result of anything you do in your house. That is foot off the gas. All of those things are foot off the gas. How much time do I got left? Okay. Second, and this is a tough one. Find and execute ways to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. The best way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, Mother Nature does and that's photosynthesis. It's a great tool to do that. It may not or it cannot bring all of the CO2 out that we've put in. So there have to be other ways and I can tell more about that later. It's exciting. I really like those ideas and when I retire from working for NOAA to doing observations and that that's what I wanna do. I wanna start working on that because that's an exciting area. And we need to address inevitable impacts through adaptation and that means things are gonna happen. It's gonna get, we might have a serious drought here and it affects our water supply. We're gonna be ready for that. We may have dust bowl conditions starting somewhere. We could have floods and a number of things. We need to think about how we're gonna manage those things as they're inevitably gonna hit us. So here's the questions for you. What steps can we take to get our collective foot off the gas? The more things that we can do on local levels, on state levels, business levels, whatever. Microsoft, by the way, just made a commitment 2030 that are gonna be carbon negative. So they're gonna be operating by the way, running big computers is a huge consumption of energy to be able to do that entirely off renewables as big. So businesses can do this, states can do it, local governments, individuals. Second question, what steps we put our collective foot on the break? Olin Farms here has this carbon sequestration festival every year where they try to bring farmers together to look at ways of farming in such a way that stores carbon in the soils. That's a good thing. And then how do we manage this cleaning vehicle? And by the way, the longer you wait before taking your foot off the gas and putting on the break, the less likely to succeed to manage that vehicle before it goes over. So another thought. That's why the IPCC said 10 years. We don't have it all resolved in 10 years. We have to be well on our way, though. And what can we do locally and what can I make a difference? And that's the question for you guys. So I'm done. Little time for questions before, is that right? Questions and answers afterwards. Okay, all righty. So then I'm done. All right, thanks. So previously, I just wanna finish introducing David. Previously, before I came to Ligmat, he was the director of the city of Aspen Utilities and Environmental Initiatives for nine years. And in that role, he oversaw the city's water and electric service portfolios, hydroelectric operations and environmental health, climate action and sustainability. And in 2015, David led his team at Aspen Utilities to become the third municipal electric utility in the nation with 100% renewable energy portfolio, which is a key community goal. And he's also worked at Excel as the new business manager for the Boulder, Colorado region where he was a member of the smart grid city implementation team. And he's had earlier roles at Colorado Springs Utilities in the city of Ligmat. David holds a bachelor's degree from Colorado State University. He serves on the Platte River Prior 30 Board and is vice president of the Colorado Association of Municipal Utilities. So we're really excited to have you here tonight with us to bring this conversation into what Ligmat's doing to achieve our renewable energy goals and what you all can do to make a difference. So thank you so much for bearing with us for their technology. And it's my pleasure to introduce David. Well, thank you for that. And I'll just go ahead and get jumped right into this. And so again, I'm Dave Hornbacher. I'm with Longmont Power and Communications. And today I'm here to talk about our pathways and partnerships to 100% renewable energy. So here in Longmont, we've always had a pioneering spirit. In fact, we've been doing this since 1912. So from the original days where we had horses and trailers and an awful lot of individuals climbing poles, building a power line from Lions, Colorado to Longmont, Colorado. And we started off as 100% renewable. So this is a picture of a hydroelectric plant in Lions, Colorado that is still in operation today. And then as the community grew, our agriculture community grew, so did we as Longmont Power and Communications, providing the needs of this growing community as well as when we get into today. And those needs have changed, they've become very diverse. The needs for energy in everything we do in life and also for the reliability of that energy has become paramount. But I think over the years with that pioneering spirit, we have always thought big. And we'll go back into that more. And so who are we? Now, this is just a scene over on Pratt as we have some of our crews out at night repairing a damaged pole from a vehicle. But here's some important things. We're community-owned, we're local, we're accessible, we're a municipally-owned electric utility. We have a staff of 75-ish skilled and dedicated. 66% of our budget goes to the purchase of energy. And we are the third largest municipal electric utility in the state of Colorado. We're also highly reliable. So we actually have four nines of reliability, which says a lot, especially when you have a mixed system that's overhead and underground. Because of overhead, you've also got a lot of storm issues, trees, branches, squirrels, animals, things of that nature. And we're also a great value. And so we're very, very low rates. We're, in fact, among the lowest in the state of Colorado. Part of that is how well this utility has been run for decades. And part of that is our wholesale energy provider, Platte River Power Authority. And so those things come together. And that, to me, is that's a great stepping stone, something that we can leverage as we go into the future. And a little bit more about us. We really were people. We're doing different things. Here you can see some of our staff up on a pole doing some overhead and underground work. We're part of, I'm sorry, we're also part of the community. So this is just an example at one of our facilities where we're hosting a local school and some of their training that they're doing for safety. You know, you'll see us in your local parades all lit up just being part of this community. And this is our community. Well, in one of their other more flavorful events. But the real key is that, you know, we are people, just like everybody here, we're very dedicated. We're engaged, we're bold, we're passionate, we're progressive and talented. And so this is just a great group that is really working on our mission statement. So this is our mission statement for Longmont Power and Communications. It's our dedicated innovative team connects the community. So it's very important where we are part of the community. We're here for you. You know, we get our direction from each and every one of you and specifically from our city council. And we're offering affordable, reliable and environmentally responsible electric services. So that's sort of who we are. That's our basic mission. But I think what we really wanna talk today about is our vision. And so our vision statement is we are a power for life. There's more here. But we have been providing power for this community since 1912. That is, you know, several generations of folks living in Longmont. So your great-great grandparents may have come to Longmont and gotten power from us. We're also power for everything we do in life, just even as the event we have here tonight, driving home, especially if you've got your electric vehicle turning on the lights, you know, maybe relaxing to some TV or so. But we're also, this is where we're going. We're empowering our community's transition to a sustainable, carbon-free energy future. So this is who we are. And we've really, really morphed here in the last couple years from a traditional utility just providing the basic services to we're really looking to the future and how can we be part of that future and in fact drive that future. So I'm gonna show you just a little bit about our organization. That's generally what we look at. We've got four main areas from the left to the right, power, delivery, electric engineering, energy strategies and solutions and internal services. But more specifically, it's very strategically aligned. Our mission, our primary mission is really being strongly delivered by that power delivery in that electrical engineering side. So that makes sure our mission is there, that we're delivering it. Our internal services is part of the support that gets things done. And then this, this is new. So as it was noted, I started here in August of last year. And one of the first things that I did was looked at the organization, looked at where we're going and then made some thoughtful changes to how we were organized. And we recreated this area which is our energy strategies and solutions. And so this is a really high-power team that we've assembled that is really looking to the future and how do we get there and what do we do? So that's the part that is not part of a traditional utility. And we are very fortunate to have a progressive community that we live in that supports that type of approach. So we're gonna ground ourselves a little bit. This is the 2016 greenhouse gas emissions. And what you'll see from here is that half of these emissions is in the electricity sector. So that's huge. So you can see if you can affect the electricity sector you can make a big impact on our greenhouse gas emissions. The other thing I want you to notice in the yellow on the transport, 16% of that is road. Air is 13%. So that's like travel, DIA, it's sort of like our impact. But road is 16%. And then if you look down there in natural gas, again, you've got commercial and residential but there's natural gas. So when you talk about beneficial electrification and how you can affect the greenhouse gas, you can see that not only is 50% of it here in electric but you've also got another 32% that is coming out of those two areas that you can also affect. And just bear in mind as this becomes greener in theory this part of the pie gets smaller, right? Cause it's more green, more green. But at the same time, if you're starting to transform these areas and these areas into electrification, electrification might look bigger but frankly, the pie is gonna get smaller and smaller. If the pie represents our greenhouse gas. And so if you're on that road and you're trying to figure out where you're going and you can't quite tell what's ahead of you, what's behind you, just know it's long and winding. We need to be working on creating our future and that really comes from more innovative choices. So let's talk about some of those things. This here is a graph of energy delivered to the city of Longmont over a one year period. Left side is January, right side is December. This is sort of the summer season. And so the upper line, that's the peak. This underneath, that's the ultimately the amount of energy consumed in the city. So if you were thinking of this graph, maybe as your speedometer, this is sort of the speed that you're driving at. And you can see in the summer, you're going, these were miles per hour, you're going 180 miles per hour and come winter, you're dropping down to 120 miles per hour. And your odometer is gonna keep track of every mile that you went. And so that's sort of how to look at those two things. But you can see the peak is how the peak is, significantly higher than your base. And what you need to drive, what you can drive from that is that if you've got certain resources that are providing energy throughout, how do you feel that part there? How do you feel that variable change? What types of things do you essentially have offline or idle or unavailable that you need to be able to ramp up, bring up and go with that curve? You know, what does that look like? And that's one of the challenges. But this is our opportunity to, is to work to change that curve, to flatten the top of it, to make higher use of the resources that we have. Let's look at it more specifically as a resident. So this could be your household. Thank you. This could be your household from basically in the early hours of the day to noon to six, seven o'clock, eight o'clock at night. So you can see here that when we come home, we're using a lot of energy. And again, back to that scenario is if we're trying to have resources to produce this energy, you can see on a daily basis, we've got to double, triple it every day for just a few hours to make sure that we're able to do everything that we enjoy today. Then just imagine too, if you have that electric vehicle and you drive home, park it right about here and you don't do anything else other than just plug it in and there's no other programming in and it immediately starts to kick in and charge too, also. Also, that peak becomes higher and higher. And so as that peak grows or gets higher, it becomes harder and harder to have that task of getting to 100% renewable energy. You're having more and more resources online to meet these moments in time. And so as consumers, as a goal to get to that 100% renewable energy, this is some of the things that we can work on that we can affect and that we can change in very thoughtful and measured ways. And as soon as we start to keep it from growing, flatten it out, that creates more opportunities to get to our larger goal, which was 100% renewable, which was really to the big goal of reducing our greenhouse gases. So if our goal is 100% renewable energy, there's really a set of what I'm calling integrated electric resource systems. So there's not a singular pathway to our 100% renewable goal. It's gonna be a combination of these things and I'll just go over them briefly. They include the policies and the rate structures that we have. So you might have noticed that on that first Platte River, I showed the summer season. Well, we actually, and that's when a lot of energy is consumed, we now have summer and non-summer rates. So again, summer costs are higher. The rates reflect that which also can encourage more conservation and efficiency. We also have innovation and emerging technology. Things we can't even begin to think about today that may or may not be in the lab that we hope to get out and that will contribute. We have renewable energy from Platte River and I'll provide a little more detail on that. We also have AMI and intelligent grid. Do we understand, are we measuring what we're using? We'll also have distributed energy resources, beneficial electrification, and the built environment. So this is a graph that we'll be using repeatedly to talk about as we work on different programs, where do they fall in and how do they ultimately affect our goal there? So let's talk about Platte River a little bit in renewable energy and who is Platte River? Platte River is community owned. So back in the 1970s, the four cities of Estes, Loveland, Fort Collins, and Longmont created Platte River Power Authority. And Platte River Power Authority is the authority that provides all the wholesale energy to these four cities. So we're very fortunate to have that type of direct connection with our wholesale provider because that also means that we have a lot of influence over the resources that that wholesale provider uses. And these are just the many resources that they come through. But let's look at our pathway to 100% renewable. Sort of the timeline is 2018 to our goal of 100% renewable by 2030. And we've sort of got in the white the past, and we've got sort of the shades. And what I think of is if you're looking in your crystal ball into the future, you can sort of tell things that are just sort of in the next couple of days and next month, maybe the next year or two. But once you start to get out beyond that, it becomes a little fuzzier as to how well you can see and specifically what those are, and even harder on to the future. But we have a lot of marks along this path. So we have in Longmont, we had a mayor's proclamation, and we had 100% renewable energy resolution in 2018. Most recently, right towards the end of 2019, we had a climate emergency resolution and a climate action task force that was started. Concurrent Platte River did a resource diversification policy. We've got two main things going at Platte River right now, the Distributed Energy Strategy Committee and the Integrative Resource Plan that some of you may have participated in. And those are ultimately some of the pieces of the puzzle that will help guide us into this future and get us towards our goal. These are things that are coming online at Platte River. 150 megawatts, you saw the big picture. We were peaking about 180 megawatts just for Longmont, and then you have the other three cities on top of that. So they're bringing on 150 megawatts of wind, another 22 megawatts of solar, bringing on some battery, and that weem up top, you may have seen the article a few weeks ago, that's the Western energy imbalance market. The idea there is if that can go, we have the better ability to trade renewables across greater expanses, basically from the West, bringing solar this direction, from where we're at into the East, bringing wind back to the West. And so those occur at often different times of the day, and it might be a way to balance those peaks that we have. Now, if you go a little bit further, so based on the energy delivered just to Longmont, right there as we hit 2021, it's 50% renewable. As you go out a few years, a few other things, there's gonna be additional solar coming on in two years. And so here are some of the knowns, and then the rest of it, we're gonna fill into those blanks as we move forward. But just energy delivered to owner communities in 2023 with this being online is about 60%. If you look at all the energy generated by Platte River, that is actually 41%. And so I wanna bring those two things up because you'll have different topics around that. What are we bringing in as a city and what are we doing as an owner of Platte River Power Authority? We're also part owners in a coal fire generation in Craig. So the first unit will be closed down by December 31st, 2025. And the second one will be closed down by 2030 or a little bit earlier. So these are some knowns, but it's back to the integrated resource supply and some of the other strategies that are gonna start filling our pathway to that. So let's talk about distributed energy resources for a moment. So what are those? Now we know them as energy efficiency. So there's really five main components. Energy efficiency, so those are most recently, that was probably where you got rid of some of your incandescent bulbs and put in, maybe went with compact fluorescent, now you have LEDs in there. But there's different ways that you can save energy. It's also demand response. Now this is a little different. In the past, we've talked about demand response with say an air conditioner. We've got all these air conditioners turning on at once. We need to manage that so a few shut off and they cycle. This, if you push this to its nexus, several years out, this is where you ultimately get into the symbiotic relationship between your load and your resources, where say for example, you have all these electric cars plugged in ready to charge and you just know you've got this big wind starting to brew up in the northern part of Colorado and into Wyoming. You've got all this renewable coming online. But that moment, you would turn on all those cars that start charging as you drive that additional renewable energy into your system and out to those devices. And so that's a way how you actually start to make a relationship. Right now, all our relationship is response. You turn on the lights and something kicks on and you get energy. It's also distributed generation. So we think of that mostly as solar here. We also have distributed energy storage. So you're seeing more and more of that, things that you can buy online and put in your house and beneficial electrification. And so those are sort of the, you're gonna hear more about those durrers. I mean, it's just, it's what the industry's playing is starting to be. So I wanted to make sure you were aware of it. So what can we do? We have efficiency works through Platte River. Have you had your home, did you do a home energy audit yet? What a great starting point. It's very, very low cost. The majority of the cost is picked up by the four cities and they will come in, they will audit your house, they'll give you a report, they'll do thermal imaging, they'll crawl on your attic, they'll do all these different things. So if you haven't done it yet, that's a step that you can take. You know, when you look at our community, what is the potential? Are we utilizing our potential? Is there an opportunity for more solar in our community? Shall we be creative with our solar? This is a sort of a solar tree. So I mean, solar can be art, renewable energy can be art. Oh, and look, we can also take action. So are we prepared? So we're actually a solar friendly community, which really means it's a set of measures you have to go through that lets other solar providers know that we've got policies and practices in place that help promote solar energy. And this is something forthcoming that we'll be talking to city council about is commercial benchmarking. So if you look at just even in this picture here, you just see the mass of commercial buildings here and no different than you look at your miles per gallon on your car. You know, ultimately we can also go with a rating on a building which will help make you informed decisions. How about electric vehicles? Are we ready? We're actually at the city working on an electric vehicle readiness program. We fleet, we've made some, we already have some electric vehicles in our fleet and actually for this year, any vehicle we're replacing that wasn't, didn't absolutely have to be a pickup truck. It's all EV, so that's all we're bringing in on our fleet for public works and natural resources. We talked about beneficial electrification. Are there opportunities to start either on new installs or commercial retrofits when your water heater dies? Can we go to something else? Can it be an electric water heater? What are the policies and procedures and incentives that maybe needed to get you there? And then storage. There are so many choices out there right now. It's sort of an evolving area, but you've got the Tesla garage up there, Mercedes Benz, you've got other places that have these things. You can buy something from REI that you could bring home, but there's some different things that are out there that we as individuals may be considering or we as an organization may be helping with each and every one of you bring this into our community. But now, if I were to ask you, what did last month look like? And you just go, all I did was work. I worked, worked, worked, worked, worked. Well, currently our electric meters take a measurement once a month that tells you sort of like that sort of scenario I said with the car. All it's gonna tell you is how many miles did you drive over that month or kilowatt hours? It's not gonna tell you how you used energy, when you used energy. It's hard to make an informed decision when that's all you know is all you think of is all I did was work. And when, so there's just one measurement per month. But when you look to really tomorrow, what did you do that month? Well, you went to the park with your dog and swam in Connie Motapool. Now you went to an event downtown. This is starting to really describe what did your month look like? How did you use your energy? Maybe you went on a bike ride. And so we will be putting in an advanced metering infrastructure and that infrastructure can give you 2,880 data points every month once every 15 minutes. So now you can actually start understanding how you use energy. And maybe in this month, maybe you were even doing something else perhaps you're even going to city council to talk about clean energy for all. And so, there's a significant difference in describing what your month looked like and how you used energy that this metering system. It'll have customer engagement. You can look and view your bill. You can look at an energy dashboard. You can actually send yourself alerts. If you're starting to use energy at a higher rate and you'll get an alert on your phone or on your computer. So there's a lot of ways that you can start using that we as individuals can start using that data. And same thing, not just that, but as a utility, we can enhance the services we provide the reliability. We can see if that transforms overloaded before it blows and you have an outage. We'll go replace that with just a simple note on your door that here's the plan day that we will be by and we'll provide that service. It's great opportunities. Now I'm gonna roll into some other actions that are going on right now that I wanna make sure you're aware of. We talked earlier about the climate action task for something that was put in place through city council in November, December of last year. Well, it is actively going right now. It had 120 day timeframe and April 8th. That's when the report is out. And so once that report is out, I fully anticipate that there'll be a lot more actions, questions, things that we can be doing as a city government, as the electric utility and as individuals out there. So we're really looking forward to sort of this next steps not defined yet, but what a great another set of templates that we can have coming forward. And these are the main areas that are gonna be in the report. It's building energy efficiency, renewables, transportation, adaption, land use, education, outreach. And it's not being done in a vacuum either. It is looked at from an equity standpoint, from governance plan, evolution and adaption. Oh, and that is, let me back up for a second. So those are the other elements that the report has. And so with that, there are some flyers in the back that talk about getting involved in climate action. And so what this does is it has also the website. So if you wanna learn more, sort of track this, see the information that's coming out, this gives you a great opportunity for that. And so sort of in closing, I just wanna thank you for your time today. And I'm really looking forward to what, you know, how we can work together. And so we talked about how we thought big, you know, we've always thought big and we've done great things in this community. So I just want us to each also think about not just imagine together what we can achieve tomorrow. And so I look forward to a continuing relationship with sustainable resilient long month and hopefully with everybody in the room and together we can achieve our goal. So thank you very much for your time. Thanks so much, David. I have to switch the computer back over. Everybody wants to, if you have questions, maybe Rachel, can you pick up any questions people have? Start handing your cards in towards the center. In Virginia, they'll come around and pick those up. Okay, well, I think many of you in the room know a little bit about Karen, but I just wanted to introduce her briefly. So Karen is secretary of the board of sustainable resilient long month. And she also leads the sustainable resilient long month renewable energy committee. And she retired in 2013 and we're so lucky that she moved to Colorado to be closer to her family. Prior to retiring, she worked as director of nursing in Lincoln, Nebraska. And for the last few years, she's been very involved in environmental issues. In 2013, she's trying to be a climate leader with climate reality. And as a longtime Sierra club member, she's also very active with that organization. So we're excited to have Karen with us tonight to talk with us about solutions and what you can do to make a difference. All right, is that coming up? There we go. All right, well, this is just a quick ending to this. And so thanks for the two prior speakers to give us information on why we need to do something, what the city's doing. Now we're gonna talk about the grassroots level and you as individuals. So what can you and we do? So to do everything, we need everyone. You know, this is something we can sit out. Not everyone can do everything, but everyone can do something. So why do I do this? Because she deserves a future. This is my youngest granddaughter. She's about 10 years younger than my other grandchildren. And I really worry about her future and about what that might look like. So that's why I do what I do and I'm sure you all have family members or someone you're concerned about. Look at those eyes. So what is SRL doing as a grassroots organization? We have, these are our main areas that we work in. So we have a zero waste committee. There is a city council meeting coming up on March 31st. And as part of that, the waste division is taking information to the council and it's always a good opportunity to go and see what they're working on. And so we'll be there supporting, continuing to look at composting and recycling. The Renewable Energy Committee, we did this event, we do events throughout the year. And Platte River Power Authority, you just heard David talk about them. They do have focus sessions where they come out and listen to members of the community. And they are going to be here in Longmont, March 4th. David forgot to mention that. So, you know, here we go. And so we do have information about that. And if you didn't get that, it's at an event center that's like 17th and main and I didn't even know there was an event center there. So we have information out about that. The other thing we've done for many years is Earth Day. And our Earth Day is centered around educating our youth on the environment. And it's really kind of fun. Somebody brings in mud and they make like seed balls and we had the raptors there last year and there's always really fun things to do. Last year we had our first National Drive Electric Week. It was successful beyond our wildest imagination. We thought we might get 30, 40 people. And what do we have, 500, 600? Somewhere's in there. It was a lot of people showed up. We had 60 people bring their EVs. So it was lots of fun. And we'll be doing that again, September 27th. And then every year in late fall, we have our sustainability awards. And it's really kind of a good time for us to reach out into the community and see what people are doing and who we can reward for that. So what can you do? That's what we're doing. What can you do? First of all, be active, educate yourself. I think coming to events like this is a good start. You can volunteer for events like this or tabling at the farmer's market or join a committee, you know? If not with this organization, with another organization you're with, be on a board. We are seeking board members right now. Watch the legislation. There's a lot of legislation in our state right now that has to do with how we move to beneficial electrification and items like that. So it's a good time. Vote. You know, anybody that you vote for should be good on working on the climate. We don't have any time to mess around. We have to have somebody who's gonna work on the climate. And I always said when I was working, I worked so many hours, I couldn't volunteer. But if you can't volunteer, you can donate. You can maybe write a check. Doesn't matter how much. So there's a lot of things you can do. Here's some personal actions you can do that are really pretty easy. We need to get rid of plastics. Plastics are made from fossil fuel, primarily like the ethane and some of the other things that come from fracking. So let's get rid of it. I don't know when we decided that we had to have liquid soap instead of a bar of soap. I think it was the advertising industry, right? That's been about 10 years ago. You can use a bar of soap and not use all those wasteful things. The same with shampoo, you can get shampoo bars. Don't use plastic bags when you get your groceries. You use them for five minutes and they're in the landfill for a thousand years. So knock that out. Also the, oh, I have to talk fast. Mesh produce bags instead of the plastic ones that are hanging up there. Bees wax wraps or reusable silicone wraps, glass storage containers, lots of things. If you do the little things, you're influencing other people. So it might seem, you know, using a straw can't be that big of a deal, but sometimes just telling the waitress, you know what, I really don't use straws and maybe they'll stop offering them so much. Bring your own takeout containers. I'm not good at that, but I can do that. Watch for the city's programs. They'll be rolling out a lot of stuff and we're gonna need to be educated on that. Compost and recycle, change your light bulbs. And eventually we're gonna need to maybe be into smart technologies like the technologies that turns down our thermostats. I have a juice box for my electric car so that the city's watching when I'm charging and how much I charge. So eventually they'll be able to control when I charge. So there'll be a lot of that coming. And I got a really good deal. I don't know if the good deal's still out there. We need to also do the big things. And David talked some about water heater or furnace appliances. You can get electric. I happened to move about five years ago into a home that's all electric. So this is the type of heater that I have. It's an air exchange heat system. Consider getting an electric vehicle. This is my electric bolt. Consider rooftop solar. And I don't know, there's a lot of discussion about whether or not how many people we want with rooftop solar and so, but consider that. That's one of the things. And so that's part of the electrify everything. So David mentioned the efficiency works. Sometimes there's also some rebates through Boulder County and there are programs called Energy Smart. So either one of those systems or organizations might be a good place to get some rebates on like an electric water heater, moving to electric water heater and such. And so we can also suck some carbon out of the air. This is my front yard. Plants, plant veggies, trees and flowers. It makes our world more beautiful than that green lawn, I think. And so we can work to some regenerative agriculture that's all coming. So that's me. Thank you, and I think we're gonna move to our question and answer session. Thank you everyone. Thanks so much, Karen. And I'd welcome the panelists to come back to our table up here. And if you do have a question, Rachel is collecting cards in the back and I actually wanna take that opportunity while we're in transition here to introduce Rachel, who's our first staff person who we hired last year or a new program coordinator. And also I see, I just wanted to recognize any public officials who are here with us tonight. I see Council Member Joan Peck here with us tonight. And so, and then we also have other SRL board members here with us tonight. We have Tracy Burnett here with us this evening and Missy Nicoletti. So we're, thank you so much. And we are a small but mighty local organization. That is the latest description that someone used for our organization that I just loved it, so I had to share that. Okay, so welcome panelists back to the stage here and you all should have microphones. So the first question would go to Dr. Butler. Can you please speak to the possibility of, I believe it says biochar is a viable local approach to carbon negative geoengineering? Can't see anything. Biochar. Yeah, biochar is the whole concept for those who do not understand that is that you grow something using photosynthesis to take CO2 out of the air. Then you basically use various processes to make that into a chart, like charcoal. And then you can burn that and that's carbon neutral. If you bury it, it's carbon negative. You gotta bury it deep though. If you bury it just shallow, it'll ultimately come back again and get back in the atmosphere. The idea is to get CO2 out of the atmosphere and not have it return. But if you're gonna use energy, you need to use energy, you can grow things and develop biochar and then use that as a fuel and that's carbon neutral. At least that's not putting CO2 in the atmosphere in the long run. Nobody is gonna solve this whole problem with one approach. Many approaches are necessary. So biochar is one of them. I endorse any approach. Somebody thinks it'll work. So long as the math is done you recognize that it's gotta be carbon neutral or carbon negative. I think a lot of suggestions that are made are not necessarily, they haven't done the math. You have to be careful with that. Thank you very much. This one is for David, Mr. Humbacker. Are there power requirements for 2030 adjusted for future population growth? So are your numbers plodding out? I think maybe some folks in the audience saw the recent article that called Longmont, you know, one of the United States biggest boom towns. So are you forecasting population growth? I think that is what that question is about as far as what the demand is gonna be. So I guess the answer is. That's all right. Oh, okay. Got it. So the answer would be yes. And it's part of its population growth but also we talked about how through beneficial electrification we're probably gonna see a whole lot more electric energy coming on. So even if you didn't have any population growth just with that alone you're gonna have an increase in that energy usage. Concurrent with that though if we have ways to conserve and become more efficient if we can flatten the curve and make those things work together that's what gets us to that nexus. But the target is clearly 100% renewable in 2030. And so what we're trying to do is manage the growth and also create new tools to reduce that or to flatten that and make that load curve a little easier to provide energy to. Thank you very much. And back to Dr. Butler. Can you explain carbon sequestration? I think this one is for you unless any of you have this could be for any one on the panel if anyone has an answer to that. Yeah, well carbon sequestration is essentially you're removing CO2 from the atmosphere and you've got to find a way to put it somewhere that it doesn't get back in the atmosphere. Again, that's just the same process. So there's a lot of ways to sequester carbon. If you can, like I said with biochar you can grow it and they can bury it very deep and down some coal mine. Another thing is if a power company could capture the carbon dioxide coming out of its stacks and compress it and push it back down into the ground that would be another one as long as it was put away for a long time. Another way of sequestering carbon is to grow plants and that's often how that term is used. And that's what Olin Farms, as I mentioned earlier and others around here are working on is to develop techniques that builds up the organic content of carbon in the soils. Those soils tend to be healthier in the over long run and the long run require fewer pesticides actually require less nutrient addition. But there's a lot of experiment that needs to be done on this. USDA is putting a lot of funds into it. But if you can do that, that's a way of removing CO2 from the atmosphere, building a healthier soil and it will pretty much stay that way. Again, either you're limited in how much you can take out but it is a useful approach. It's one of many other approaches that can be used. So it could be, if you think about it humans put in every year, the last five to 10 years, 10 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere in the form of CO2. So just the carbon in the CO2 is 10 billion tons a year. A billion tons is hard to imagine. I can say it's a cubic kilometer that probably doesn't help you a whole lot. But if I told you it would be the equivalent of 7,000 Empire State buildings of pure graphite including the rooms being filled with graphite, the whole 7,000 of those, that would be 10 billion tons of carbon. Another way to look at it is I could build a wall between, let me see, Tijuana and Brownsville, Tijuana and yeah, down to Brownsville, Texas. That would be somebody who wanted to build a wall that I understand. You could build that wall out of one year's emissions and that wall would be the width of a football field and the height of a football field. So if you stand a football field on end and move it from Tijuana down to Brownsville and pack it up with graphite behind it, that's one year's emissions of carbon. It's a lot of carbon. So to get that out of the atmosphere and put it somewhere, it's a big deal. It takes a lot. The biosphere right now takes about 2 billion tons out of the atmosphere every year right now. And it's doing it just the natural system. So if there's a way to enhance that system, you can maybe kick that up to three or four. Four would be good, but that would be difficult. But still, there might be ways to do that and those are things we're looking at, sequestering carbon, getting it put away some ways so that it can't come back in the atmosphere. Okay, great, thank you. So this is something our audience may have heard about as well. What about the 65 degree temperature in Antarctica last week? I guess that would be a Dr. Butler question. I can tell you where that was in Antarctica. It was on Palmer Peninsula, which is typically warmer anyway. So it's not like a big leap. If you go to the South Pole where we have our instruments operating, the summertime temperatures are minus 20 to minus 30. That's the summertime. And that doesn't get up to 65 degrees because they're sitting on two miles of ice, just like North America was back during the last ice age, by the way. But yeah, Palmer Peninsula is the one that that little point that curls up off Antarctica and comes up near Chile. I don't know if that's the tip of South America there. So that area, there's a lot of ocean and other things that can help warm it. But still, 65 is pretty high for that area. And it's not something that penguins are particularly used to. And there's a lot of penguins out there, a lot of seals and that. But it's driven probably by ocean currents and granted, the oceans have gotten warmer. So that's part of the whole thing. But that's alarming. I will say it's alarming, but it's not as alarming you might think. It's not like all of Antarctica is turning 65 degrees, yeah. Thank you. Okay, so back to David for a question about residential solar here in Lombard. The question is currently, residential solar homes are charged. It says $21.40 monthly to be hooked up to the grid. Residents in Boulder do not have that charge. So why are Lombard home owners penalized for this, let's see, using part of the sustainable future compared to non-solar home owners? So could you tell us about that? Sure, sure, that's a good question. So the comparison wouldn't be necessarily Boulder, but Excel Energy who provides service to Boulder, Colorado. And with that, you might not be paying a charge there, but you are also probably getting a lower value for every kilowatt hour you produce. So here in Longmont, you're getting basically a one-for-one at retail value for that. And so there's a slightly increased, a slightly higher charge that covers the other expenses with that are necessary with basically being the host for that energy. Because basically as you produce the energy, if you aren't consuming it right at that moment, it is going out under the grid and we're having to manage that at the same time. In the middle of the night, you saw what that graph looked like for your home, even this time of year at six o'clock at night, you're drawing that energy back from the grid, but you sort of put it in and put it out. And so essentially we've become the battery storage at this moment in time. Thank you. There's also a question about AMI. Does advanced metering infrastructure need 5G or can it be delivered through optic fibers underground? So it's not, it doesn't require 5G. It does have a communication network that basically talks from meter to meter to meter. And then after a certain number of meters, so to speak, talk and communicate, then they go into the fiber optic system and are delivered back to the, basically to our main hubs. Okay, great. Thank you. I have one more question for you. What's next for the city fleet to be fueled with our renewable natural gas? Are other cities asking questions about RNGs and Longmont experience? Yeah, that is a good question. So some of you may be aware that recently there's been a change at our wastewater treatment plant. And so at that plant we used to have methane, a byproduct of basically the treatment facility was flared off and so burned in the atmosphere. So sort of like thinking of it as a small smokestack going up and what instead is happening is that it's harvested, compressed and then is used to power the fleet that is actually doing the waste services. So as you see the trucks rolling through your neighborhood, it's truly powered by you. I'm not aware of, but anyway, I haven't talked with folks specifically because that's not in the area I work, but absolutely that's something of interest and it's really pushing the envelope forward and it shows another way of what communities can do. So even if they don't have their own electric utility, you know, that's all off grid. They can make a difference. Okay, and then this is from the same person. Is there an effort to get, community says micro grids or mini grids, it says here 350, 300 to 500 homes established in Langmont. Are you looking at that at all? So we are not specifically looking at that right now. As we get the AMI in online, we'll be able to discern exactly what those particular areas are. And AMI is really sort of like a foundational gateway tool to a whole lot of other things. So once you understand your load and then as you add some of those other tools we talked about, possibility of additional solar or different types of storage or even electrification, that's when you can start looking in more discernible areas to see how much you can actually produce within areas compared to consumed. But I would say that was more on that near horizon sort of the middle green color on the chart. Okay, great, thank you. So this one is for Dr. Butler. Let's say we could build massive carbon dioxide scrubbers. What would we do with all that captured or claimed carbon dioxide? Well, we could build a wall with one year's emissions. Then we could, the next year we could separate Alaska from Canada and then three more years we could finish off Canada. That'd be my five year plan. That's a good question. But what are cars made of nowadays? What are airplane bodies made of? The newest airplanes, it's all carbon fiber. Best bicycles out there are carbon fiber. There's a lot of, we could build buildings out of carbon fiber. If you take carbon, what's another form of carbon? You got graphite, can anybody think of any others? Pure diamond. If you put a little pressure on it you turn it into diamond. You can build buildings, roads, et cetera with that if you wanted to do that. And it would take a lot of energy but there is, when you start thinking about renewables there's a tremendous amount of renewable energy available across this continent. It is unbelievable. You could power the electrical grid of this country seven times over from a fairly small patch in Arizona. I can't remember the size of it but it's like 100 kilometers by 100 kilometers or something, not that big. Power of the entire company's electrical grid seven times over. So if you think about all of the sunshine landing in the Southwest you think of all the wind going through Wyoming and Montana and if you've never been to Wyoming, believe me there's a lot of wind. And up in through Canada and places like that there's so much we could harvest if we wanted to. So there's gonna be plenty of energy available and we haven't even talked about geothermal. The potential for geothermal is infinite. The earth is, if you have the earth it's about this big, about say a meter wide. The thickness of the atmosphere would be the two sheets of paper thick. The depth of the ocean would be one sheet of paper thick. The depth of the crust would be about four sheets of paper thick. The rest of it is molten rock. The mantle, the core and all of that stuff. Tremendous amount of energy if you can reach down into that. And there's places where purchased to the surface that's when we go out to the hot springs on the other side of the mountains and things like that. There's places where it comes up at the surface but there's other places we could get to that. If we chose to do that for our energy. So there's plenty of energy available. We could do things like compress the carbon that was captured with that extra energy if we designed it carefully. Do I see that happening tomorrow? No, but sometime down the line, those kinds of things. So yeah, we need to do something with that carbon. There's other ways to remove carbon and I'm trying not to monopolize here. My favorite is I was explaining a lunch today with a couple of companions. It is called accelerated earth system weathering and it's basically it is getting rock. If we stopped emitting CO2 today, it would take several thousand years for Mother Earth to remove that CO2 from the atmosphere. She'll do that and she'll do that mainly by weathering of rock because the rock goes into solution in the ocean and then it reacts with the CO2 that's in the water, neutralizes it to a bicarbonate which stays in solution and then has, that way more CO2 has to come in from the atmosphere to go in the water. That's why it's a slow process and but it goes on. But we can accelerate that with things like electrolysis and other forms of energy to put that in there. To make these, to make rock, a silicate rock or a carbonate rock go into solution and then move water over that or whatever. There's a lot of thought behind this. A lot of these things have already been done in laboratories. They need to develop demonstration projects and move those forward and we can start removing CO2 from the atmosphere. If we remove it at, oh, if we remove it at, we could take 100 years to remove it, it'd be fine. That'd be a lot faster than Mother Nature. And if you're doing that then you're taking it out at roughly one and a half PBM per year. And that would be a significant drop, see it drop that fast. Right now it's increasing at two and a half parts per month per year. Wouldn't be nice to see it being removed at one and a half parts per month per year. And so it would gradually get us back down there over somebody's lifetime and we'd be back to where we could sustain civilization as it's always been. Thank you very much. I just would welcome the audience to give one more round of applause to our panelists. We have an expert panel here with us tonight. I have a question for Karen though. I love the idea of electric vehicle day. You got 500 people at that thing? Yeah, yeah, it was amazing. So this is a good time of year to go after the, what do you call it? Corporations want to donate money. This is the time to hit them up. General Motors makes your car, the Bolt. And Elon Musk, he spends money on all kinds of weird things. And I imagine that they have parts of their organizations that are ready and willing to make donations to certain things. If you could have a prize or something like a, like a drawing for a free Tesla or take the Chevy Bolt. But I think, you know, if you can get that many people the first time you do something like this, if you had a card like this Draftle, and I'm sure there are people who will be ready to jump on that. And it'd be the producers of the cars because you could just set it up for all kinds of great advertising for them. Sponsored by, you know. Anyway. All right. Anything, do you want to add Karen or? No, I think, you know, when we were doing it last, when we were working on this last year, you know, we had no idea what it would even look like. So we haven't started, we have a date, I think. I don't know if Boulder County or we're gonna be at the fairgrounds again. Yeah. So, you know, there's so many moving parts when you do an event like that. We had to do things like get porta-potties. And so it would be a lot more excitement to work on getting Tesla to give us a car. Yeah. Oh, it's an announcement. Okay, yeah. We have time for a brief announcement from an audience member, Lynette, who also is part of our Gresters Organizing Environmentalist Movement in Longwatt. Thank you. Do you want to? Do you want to run out? Thank you, everybody. Next month, March 26th at the library at 6.30 is a movie on Symphony of the Soil. It's put on by the Longmont Sunrise Movement. And it's a lot about what we're talking about right now. It's how to keep our soils healthy. It's gonna really be a good movie. So I hope you'll all attend. There's pamphlets, little flyers back there if you want to take one. If you want to sign up to attend, you can sign up there too. Thanks. Lynette's one of my partners in crime with getting the climate emergency to City Council. Thanks, Lynette. All right, so I just want to thank again, one more round of applause for our amazing panel. We are so fortunate to have you all here with us tonight. Thank you very much. And then I just wanted to thank a couple of people too. We have some amazing volunteers involved in our organization. We have some members of the Renewable Energy Committee, Planning Committee here with us tonight, Judith and Virginia in the back. And also Erin and Trista are a resident sound engineer and timekeeper who really help us make our events more professionally organized. So thank you all so much. And I also want to thank Langmont Public Media for recording this so that we can get it out to more people. We will be sharing that link on our newsletter and our social media and our communications or website as well. So look for that. And if you're not signed up for our newsletter yet, we do have that sign up sheet outside. So really just thank you all for being here tonight. And I hope everyone can get home safe. This is just such an inspirational event to me to think about the big picture of what the problems are and also what is being done at the local level to address those. And I'm feeling really positive right now. So I'm just so thankful to all of you for being here and joining us for this event. Thanks so much. Thank you.