 Welcome to Hawaii, the state of clean energy on Thanksgiving Day. I'm your host, Tim Mitchell, and our underwriter is the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum, which is a program of the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute. I'm very pleased to welcome our guest who volunteered to come on the show, Matt Geyer, founding member of the Hawaii Environmental Change Agency's Agents Organization. Well, the name of our episode is pretty catchy. It's environmental whack-a-mole. I'm sure you are all attracted to that catchy title, and that's why you're dialing in. And of course, the hashtag is carbon cashback for the win. So what's about all this carbon cashback? Well, we'll be finding out about that. So we're going to be talking stories today about carbon cashback and how both the environment and Hawaii residents benefit from it. It's a win-win scenario. So Matt, welcome to the show. Thank you. And I think we have, if you have that first slide up, you can talk to us a little bit about the Hawaii Environmental Change Agents. What is it and why did you set it up? Yeah, Hawaii Environmental Change Agents was started last year sometime as a way for organizations and individuals to coordinate their efforts, their environmental efforts in the state legislature and in other areas. And it's really, you see all those different, you saw those different organizations on the screen. Yeah, right. Are those separate organizations and programs or are they all part of your organization? They're all run independently. And so we just use the Hawaii Environmental Change Agents as a means to organize our efforts and really try to leverage the communication between each task force and leverage all our different abilities to amplify the efforts amongst these varying environmental efforts that are all, they're all really linked together in one way or another. So why don't you just run us through the list of your agents, Matthew, and just maybe a very short word on what they do, just so we identify all your change agents here. Sure, yeah. I'll give a very brief description, which doesn't do the many justice, but I try to give you an idea of types of things each task force is working on. So decarbonization of transportation, for example, would be working on electric vehicles, mobility, decarbonization of buildings will be working on things like efficiency and building standards. Clean power task force is looking at things like the renewable power standard and how we're generating our electricity more sustainably. Carbon cashback is what my favorite task force is working on. The carbon cashback will discuss that. The oceans task force is looking at things like sunscreens, getting into our reefs, grain fishing, cesspools. We have the green fee task force is looking at a visitor green fee constitutional green constitutional amendment, looking at putting an amendment to the state constitution, give everybody the right to a clean, healthy environment and our two newest task forces environmental producer responsibilities, looking at things like the plastic waste we're generating and how we can get the producers of that waste to be to take more responsibility for it. And then we have carbon sequestration, which is looking at ways we can sequester the carbon emissions in the soil with forests, things like that. So Matt, how are you funded? Is this out of your own hip pocket or I mean, it costs money to put up websites and do all this outreach. So how are you funded? Well, amazingly, we've done it all out of our hip pockets and so the very minimal expenses we have, which is really just owning a zoom line and a website. We've just kind of all pitched in here and there, all the other people who participate just kind of throw in whatever they can. And that's been more than enough to set up a website as well as keep a zoom line running. And that's that's really all you need in this day and age, which is amazing to set up an organization is you need a zoom line and website. And people who want to know the most important capital is volunteers, right? The people. Right. So, did you do the website yourself? Because I visited it and it was really good. That's a very good website. I thought. Thank you. I did a fair amount of work on the website. It was a collaborative effort, though, amongst several of us. Okay. Let's go. Let's go to the next slide and let's kind of set the scene a little bit and talk about global warming and what the current situation is. Sure. I imagine most people watching this know this already that climate change is a big problem. This is a slide. You've probably seen something similar like it did before. And in fact, most people already believe that climate change is a big problem caused by fossil fuels. There are of course some people who say, I don't trust the science. To me, that's like, well, we all believe in science, right? Every part of every day from medicine, electricity, if you're going in a building, you're trusting that that building isn't going to collapse on you, your car doesn't blow up when you get it. If you're flying in an airplane, the food you eat, you know, it's every part of every day. So, if you're saying you don't believe the science, you're saying, well, I believe all this other science, but I don't believe this one particular thing related to climate change. And I encourage those folks to really examine why you're not trusting these specific scientists when you're trusting all these other scientists in your day to day life. I think the next slide really kind of illustrates it. I mean, if you look at this graph, how about walking us through the graph? And what are we seeing? I mean, I see all the red on the right. I see the blue on the left. So that red can't be good. Yeah. If you look at that, it's a temperature, right? The temperature changed from, you know, say the 1800s to now. And the earth is a living system. The birds and the bees and flowers and the trees and the glaciers and the seas. The human body is also a living system. And there's a wonderful analog between the temperatures that you might experience in your human body and the temperature increase in the planet. And so from this graph, you see like a one degree Celsius rise higher than what might be considered normal. And in Fahrenheit, that'd be about two degrees hotter than normal. So you imagine if your normal body temperature is 98 degrees, imagine you have a fever of 100 degrees. And you're at that point, you're starting to feel uncomfortable, but you're still able to function, right? And that's kind of where we're at now. We're experiencing some problems, but we're still we're still hanging in there. And so we hear a lot of this about, say, let's stop the global warming at 1.5 degrees. That would be three degrees Fahrenheit. So that's a fever of 101 degrees, where you're not really doing so great. But if you rest and recuperate, you should probably be able to recover. And so each half degree of Celsius warming is another degree of Fahrenheit. So if we get another degree on top of that, we'd be at 103 degrees Fahrenheit fever. And it's time to call the doctor. And that's similar to the Earth. If we get to 1.5, scientists say we'll probably be able to rest and recuperate from this. If we get to three degrees hotter than normal, it's we're going to have very, very serious problems. Well, just looking at the graph, like a simple sailors approach, it looks like it's accelerating as opposed to kind of like a steady state going up. It's almost like not quite exponential yet, but it's getting there. It's really worrisome and it just means we need to really take this problem seriously. So let's go to the next slide and talk about COP 27. Which is I think it's just shutting. It's just closing down or this week or last week. So first of all, what is what does COP 27 mean? What is it? Can you explain to our viewers how often they meet and what are the who attends and what are the outcomes? I've given you a lot of questions in one sentence, but let's work our way through it. Yeah, so the council of parties, they've they've been meeting. I don't think they've had 27 actual meetings. I'm not sure the history there, but it's roughly once a year, right? And it's all the all the countries getting together, basically, and saying how how can we deal with this climate issue problem? And the UN Secretary General there, he's the head of the United Nations. Antonio Gutierrez, he's he's had some very serious remarks, not just here, the COP, but in general. And and this is not the type of remarks that you expect from coming out of the United Nations, like you are on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator. You don't expect to hear these this kind of blunt language like humanity has a choice, cooperate or perish. And the fact that the head of the UN is speaking so bravely, so directly, so bluntly just really illustrates how serious the climate situation is. So what are the typical outcomes of one of these conferences? What do they come up with some kind of a document to say, hey, we're going to do better and by how much are we going to do better? What's typically the outcome? Essentially, they they come back with a lot of promises and organizations will say we're we're promised to do this or we've agreed to do that. Unfortunately, it's it's up to the individual countries to actually. Do something and actually actually make a change in that country's behavior. So it's been less than stellar results so far. But, you know, there's we got a hope for change. And it's you know, you got to start with the language and saying that you will change. And then the people have to start holding their own countries responsible for the promises that they make during these kinds of meetings and agreements. So basically, the promises or resolutions are unenforce unenforceable. And I guess you just have to shame people with strong language like the UN Secretary made to like push people to ask their political class to really get after it and do something. Exactly. So do you have any opinion on how effective they are so far? Have we actually taken any action at all? Or is it just all talk? It's talk is important, but we do need action. I am hopeful that, you know, with stronger language and this all this talk does help people to start to think about how we might solve these issues. And as as things progress, I think that we'll see that some of this language will end up getting enacted into legislation in various countries and hopefully start to make a real difference. OK, so let's talk a little bit now about environmental whack-a-mole. So very catchy topic that you what what is it? What do we mean by this? And what is there a theory behind this? Right. So we just saw, you know, the climate change problem primarily caused by fossil fuels. And one of the issue of dealing with fossil fuels is that they can be used in so many different ways. And currently, we've been trying to address emissions sector by sector. So, for example, with transportation, we're trying to convert to EVs for the electric generation. We're we're trying for solar panels, etc. Unfortunately, and there's a lot more sectors than the moles that I put on this slide. But unfortunately, you know, the fossil fuel companies have this amazing track record of finding alternative uses for the projects for their products. So despite, you know, all the EVs, the solar panels that have been putting up, you know, despite people trying to live simply so that others may simply live, despite doing all that, we see global greenhouse gas emissions just going up and up and up steadily every year. So and the reason is, you know, if we figure out a way to use less fossil fuels in the transportation sector, we we whack down on that mole. The fossil fuel industry says, no problem, we're going to make more plastic. We're going to make hydrogen with it. So it's like a game of whack-a-mole. You whack one down, they sell their product in a different way, in a different fashion. And and that's that's why this one of the reasons why this is such a tough problem to get a handle on. Well, the other thing is, you know, you make more efficient cars, you get more miles per gallon, but then people think it's OK to drive more. So I remember it was 2008 when we had the big oil crisis here. You know, a transportation of Hawaii went down like about 25 percent. People are just not traveling on the roads because the price of oil was about one hundred and forty dollars a barrel and it was really expensive. And when oil price went back down, it didn't snap back all the way. Actually, I think the statistics we got with the policy forum was that we gained about 10 percent because people had enough time to change their habits and woke up a little bit and said, this is dumb going to the store just for a gallon of milk. I should combine trips, you know, that kind of thinking. And so so we gained a little bit, but that's kind of like how I would describe whack-a-mole, perhaps. Yeah, it's a I think it's a powerful visual because you can kind of see how despite making all these progress in changes in your transportation that they there's always another outlet for this fossil fuels. And the one thing is that any every amount of fossil fuel oil that is extracted from the ground ends up in our environment in one form or another. It's either in our air or water or soil as plastic, as carbon dioxide, as all these poisons that are in our land. So you have a solution potentially called carbon cashback. So let's let's spend a couple of these slides explaining how it works. This is like this is the key message we want to get out, I think, today. Yeah, so carbon cashback is pretty simple. Essentially, if you are a company, you are importing fossil fuels into the state of Hawaii. There will be an additional fee to import those fuels that will be gradually increased. And the money collected from this fee will be returned to Hawaii taxpayers in the form of the dividend and thinking back to the moles on the last slide. So you're increasing the fee on fossil fuels. There's nowhere for the moles to pop up if you're doing it directly to the fossil fuels, right? You're you're applying a gentle pressure, firm pressure to all the moles directly. And that will decrease our fossil fuel use across all sectors, you know, fairly, equally, predictably. So so in practice, how does that work? I mean, what is a carbon cashback mean? What is that a check or is it, you know, money? Who gets it? Yeah, a dividend check would be distributed to Hawaii residents, taxpayers, just like folks have probably received if they've received a paper check recently, a pink check from the state of Hawaii, or they might have gotten it directly deposited in their account for three hundred dollars due to the budget surplus last year. So just like that, getting a check in the mail and it's it's going to reward residents for making sustainable choices. So you have another slide. Your slide seven really kind of explains how this works. So let's pop that up and run it run us through the logic here. Yeah, so there is there's really two possibilities that can happen. And this just illustrates one of the possibilities if you apply a fee on fossil fuels. So the importers of fossil fuels pay the fee. They pass down this fee to consumers of fossil fuels, which reduces the demand making renewable energy more competitive. But at the same time, we're giving the money back to the people. So the people then have the choice. Do I want to spend my money on fossil fuels, which have increased in prices slightly, or do I only use that money to maybe try to make a transition to using less fossil fuels? So it's a way of rewarding and encouraging folks to change to a more sustainable way of living without punishing them. And so the other possibility I mentioned isn't on a slide here. One possibility is that we charge a fee to fossil fuel producers and they instead of passing that fee just decide to pay the fee out of their profits. And given that the price increases on fossil fuels recently and the gas pump recently, that is another possibility. And environmentalists don't like to talk about that, but it is another possibility. And I think it's it's an OK thing, too, because in that case, what's happening is people are low income families are just simply benefiting from this. And it also sets a floor price on the the price of fossil fuels at the consumer level. And in reality, those are the kind of the two extreme situations where either the cost of this fee is passed down fully to the consumer or the cost of the fee comes out of fossil fuel companies profits. And in either of those extremes, you see it's a win for the environment or it's a win for the people. The reality is it'll be somewhere in the middle and it'll be a combination of those two wins is what we'll experience. So how big a check is does everybody get the same size of check? So if I'm a wealthy guy, I get $100 and as a person at a lower economic level, get $100 as well. How do you make that equitable? Yeah, if you look at the next slide, the you hero study that was done. So let me back up a little bit. A few years ago, several years ago, this idea was presented to the state legislature, hey, we should, you know, put a fee on fossil fuels, give the money back to the people. And the legislature said, go study it and they spent a hundred and some thousand dollars studying this at University of Hawaii. And the result came back showing that if this was done, greenhouse gases would be reduced significantly. Greenhouse gas emissions pollution would be reduced significantly. And low income families, especially, but low income, middle income, even to the upper middle class, just about everybody will financially benefit from this program. So and that was assuming that all the money was passed back equally to every resident of Hawaii, regardless of whether they're wealthy or not. Now, some legislatures have legislatures have expressed interest in simply passing this back to, say, the bottom 60 percent or the bottom 80 percent of income earners in Hawaii. But even if it is passed back to all residents, a low income families benefit the most because if they say, you know, potentially they could be getting a check of a thousand dollars a year, say, from this, a thousand dollars more than any expenses they'd be paying for any increased costs. If, you know, you give a thousand dollars to someone who is barely squeaking by, that makes a much bigger impact on their well being than giving a thousand dollars to someone who is making a hundred or two hundred thousand dollars a year. Well, that that makes it easier to figure out, you know, you don't have a bunch of people fighting amongst each other for the size of the check. It's like totally equal. So and like you said, it has a greater positive impact on lower economic levels than it does on the higher level. So that sounds like a good thing. So what's the status of legislation right now now that you've done the study? What's next? Are you guys going to submit legislation this year again and try to get it get it through? Yeah, so we have submitted legislation trying to be as similar to the U Hero study as possible so that the legislators would be able to reference that study as far as what effects the legislation would have on the state of Hawaii and so far, I think last year we got through the Senate and the year before that we got through the House. We are we're going to introduce again and hopefully this will be the year that it passes because we don't have time to wait five, ten years to keep, you know, hammering on the door of the legislature to say we need this to happen. We need we need this to happen now and hopefully this will be the year that it happens because Hawaii is very unique in that we we create a lot of progressive legislation which is then seen by the rest of the world and copied by other states and hopefully this legislation will be passed here in Hawaii copied by other states and eventually pass on to the nation in the world. So I just have a quick question. What was like the main you got it through the House? You got it through the Senate? Why do you think it stalled after that? What was the big objection that they had that generated the study? I think any any bill that. Is affecting fees or the economy? There's there's always a lot of pushback and legislators want to be very careful in analyzing it. I. I don't know, honestly, I think it's just it's a new concept to folks. It takes a while for any new concept like this in general to get through the state legislature, we're hoping to accelerate that as quickly as possible. And we're trying to do as much outreach to the legislature as we can to to talk to as many to many folks there to to get this idea, to get the wheels started moving to see how important this is, how necessary this is and how it's a really beautiful, elegant solution to just collect an increasing fee and give it back to the people to let them spend it how they wish. So so presumably you here, oh, did you know did they go out and do a survey of people and and ask them what they thought about it? And what was the feedback on that? I am not sure right now about that. You got me on that one. You're stuck. Sorry, I wasn't trying to get you. OK, well, let's move on then, so I won't get you. Let's talk about carbon pricing in twenty twenty one. So maybe you can tell us what the slide is talking about. All right. Yeah. So as I was mentioned before, we would be leading the United States. You can kind of see a big gray area where the US is. This all the colors here in the slide represent places that are doing some sort of carbon pricing, whether it's emissions trading or cap and trade type programs. So there's there's a lot of interest as worldwide in doing some sort of fee on carbon to address emissions. And but in the US, you see there's again, there's a lot of gray there. Hawaii could be the first state in the United States to implement a carbon cash back or carbon fee and dividend type legislation. So once again, we could be leaders as we've been the leaders in many other types of legislation to. Well, we do have a barrel tax, which has been, you know, was had a lot of had like I think a blue planet did a survey and like 95 percent of the people supported the barrel tax. But of course, it hit just as we were going through one of our financial holes. And so the legislature, I think, gobbled up about 65 percent of it. I'm not sure if that's the exact number. Went to the general fund and of course, it never came back. So so this would be on top of that. And actually, the barrel tax has been pretty good. Some good results out of it. That's been used for what it was there that the 40 percent or so is being used for what it was intended to in the first place. So this would be on top of that. So Hawaii is progressive. We did have a, we do have a form of a carbon tax already, which is a good thing. So let's go on and talk about jobs. So we'll talk to us about the jobs that are still associated with this. Right. So when we found, when we started increasing our solar energy here in Hawaii, we've seen an explosion of solar jobs. And there's no time that was more evident than last year when the certain bill came across that was going to hurt solar jobs in Hawaii. And we saw all these solar contractors and workers out there protesting that bill. And that really just showed how many people are employed here in Hawaii and depend on clean energy jobs. And it has been shown time and time again that solar jobs are better, longer lasting. You're keeping the money locally instead of exporting fossil fuel money to wherever the fossil fuels are coming from. And so we've seen solar employment double from 100,000 to over a quarter million jobs in 2021 from 2011. And even in Hawaii, despite we're still, we've got a lot of solar here, but it's still growing. I think two or 3% in 2021 alone, it was growing despite everything else going on in the world. So it's really a really, really great thing to switch to a more sustainable way of living. There's job growth, there's cleaner air and we can hopefully start to get a handle on climate change. So how can people talk to you? Let's pull up the last slide and how can people get in touch with you, Matt? Yeah, again, Hawaii Environmental Change Agents was formed so that organizations and individuals can start to help out. And there are all these task forces here, but there's room for more task forces. If you are an individual who is really passionate, you saw my email was there or hawaiechangeagents.org, visit that, check out what the task forces are doing. They can all use help, pick one that you are passionate about, join, sign up and they will be glad for your help because we're a completely volunteer-run organization. So we depend on all of our wonderful volunteers to get all this work done. And presumably also to submit testimony when the legislation actually comes out, obviously you want them to support that legislation and that's a pretty easy way, pretty easy process they have now. It can all be done online. You don't have to appear in person. But from my experience, testimony, not the canned ones where it's just like a form letter, but if you sit down and write your own version of what you think, that has a lot of impact on legislators to let you know what you think. It definitely does. I was in testimony a year or two ago and a legislator completely canceled it, just completely canceled a bill because no one showed up to testify on it. And he's like, I thought people were passionate about this, but apparently not. And so he just completely shut it down. So it is important to testify. It does make a difference. And yeah, if you wanna learn how to help out, that's where you go, HawaiiChangeagents.org and we'll get you set up with all that. Well, Matt, thank you for your passion and for stepping up to the plate and out of your own hip pocket and getting us all organized. We all appreciate it. So we're gonna have to leave it there or we breeze through our whole 30 minutes. So you've been watching Hawaii, the State of Clean Energy on Think Tech Hawaii, talking story with Matt Geyer, founder of the Hawaii Environmental Change Agents Organization. And so today we've been talking story about carbon cashback program that is being proposed this year again to the legislature and that both the environment and all Hawaii residents can benefit from this. So thank you so much, Matthew, for all your hard work. And thanks to our viewers for tuning in. Once again, happy Thanksgiving everyone and Aloha. Aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechawaii.com. Mahalo.