 So, this is the session called Ready for 100% Manufacturers Getting to Zero Carbon, which is actually a very timely session because coming up into Climate Week we had 90 different multinational corporations announcing net zero goals, which is really significant. So I want to start by introducing myself, and I'll do this because people may come in, but I'm a known quantity in Vermont. So I'm Deb Markowitz. You may have known me years ago when I was Secretary of State, served for 12 years, then was appointed Secretary of Natural Resources, served for six years under Governor Shumlin, and I led the state's efforts on climate change, both with respect to resilience, post-tropical storm Irene, serving on the President Obama's White House Task Force on Climate Preparedness and Resilience. But I also participated in many of the regional efforts on climate change, served on the Board of Reggie, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, participated as a board member in the Transportation Climate Initiative, worked with colleagues on air pollution that goes between states, the interstate air transport collaborations and coalitions. After leaving the state government, I lucked out and got a job with an organization called Ceres. How many of you have heard of Ceres? Okay, few of you have. So Ceres was founded 30 years ago in the wake of the Exxon Valdez spill. And the belief at the time was that businesses really could do it differently, rather than just thinking about profit that businesses could actually do really well if they also thought about their impact on society, their impact on the environment, and that's when the whole idea of this triple bottom line started being part of the business conversation. And those of you who've been in Vermont a long time know that coming out of that were some leaders like Seven Generation and Ben & Jerry's and who are both now part of the Unilever family, and Unilever still is one of the international leaders on corporate sustainability. In any event, fast forward 30 years later, Ceres now focuses on a couple of things. One really impactful piece of what we do is we move investors to influence companies to be more sustainable. And then we also work with companies who want to lead. So in terms of our investor work, we have about 170 institutional investors. In a coalition with some others, we actually work with some of the largest pension funds in the world and together represent about a third of the invested wealth in the world. And those leaders, those pension fund leaders and asset manager leaders, strategize about how as owners they have an obligation to influence how businesses behave, how these big fortune 500 businesses behave. So one of the most significant engagements is it's climate action 100. Have any of you heard of climate action 100 plus? Okay. So it's a coalition of investors who focus on moving companies. And just this climate week, Amazon, for example, did you all hear about Amazon making its huge announcement to become carbon neutral, which is very complicated for their business model. And that came out of an engagement of these major asset owners saying, hey, you've got to do something different. And you know what? It wasn't actually just the asset owners. It was also their employees. The Amazon employees started saying, we want change. In any event, as in addition to working with investors, we then work with some of the leading companies who want to get ahead of the curve. And what we do, and you know, it's like the apples and the Coca-Cola, Starbucks, Walmart, Levi Strauss, Nike, Target, some of these very big businesses who want to make bold promises but also want to be able to keep those promises. And so what we do is we work with them to help them, first of all, step up their ambition, set up science-based targets so they know what they're heading for, and then help them look at their entire operation and supply chain, transportation, fleets, the whole ball of wax to think about what will it take to get to zero carbon. And then we get them to be public about it so that there's some transparency and accountability. And let's just step back for a minute. I mean, you're all here because you all know just how important this is, right? To get to zero carbon. Climate change poses an urgent threat to all of us, our families, our businesses, the world. It's an existential threat. And we also know that the impacts of climate change aren't equally distributed. If you think about where the impacts are going to happen first and most, it's going to be in the Southern Hemisphere, it's going to be in our communities here in the United States that are poorer and less able to be resilient and respond. And I believe we're all here because we agree that we've got a collective obligation, a moral obligation to scale up our action so that we can prevent the worst of what's likely to happen from happening. And you all have seen, I'm sure, the IPCC report and have followed the conversations after the Paris Climate Accord was signed about how we need to make some serious changes in how we live in this planet so that we keep warming to 1.5 degrees C or less. And that's a hard reach, right? That's not going to be easy. And I was a regulator. And as a regulator, I realized that there's one piece of the pie that regulation can do. But this problem is not going to be solved just by regulation. At every level of society in every sector, we have to step up. And businesses have a very important way to contribute because, for example, we have some leaders in the room in renewable energy. We know that renewable energy is scaled because businesses invested in it. These are the innovators, right? Do you think about Tesla and how the innovation of Elon Musk spurred a whole industry of electric vehicle innovations and innovators? It matters. And so we also, like at Ceres, we think a lot about climate risk and risk to businesses, risk to shareholder value long-term. But we also think about opportunity. And renewable energy, for example, is an area of opportunity. And it's an area of opportunity. There's climate risk, there's climate opportunity. And for businesses, that really is at the forefront of it. And let's take a minute about renewable energy and the transition to renewable energy in this country and the world. Over the last decade, renewable energy from wind and solar has gone from being really expensive and the early adopters did it, even though they were going to maybe not make the same kind of money they would make with a fossil fuel arrangement to being the cheapest source of new energy production in the United States. And for example, even in the plain states, that's like Northern Texas, like oil country, coal power coming from that area is $30 megawatt hour. And wind from that same area is $20 megawatt hour. I mean, it's a significant, significant difference. And so it's not surprising that even with a president who has announced the end to the war on coal, blah, blah, blah, blah, there's been more closures of coal plants during his term than the whole final term of the Obama administration. And that's because of innovators coming up with technology. It's because businesses are buying in so it can be scaled and become affordable. And that's part of getting to net zero or you see net zero to absolute zero and what that could look like. So if you think about the drivers in many areas of policy, it is the business is saying, we aren't going to meet our goals unless you green the grid. That's part of what happened in Texas. If you want Amazon or Google to come to your area and they've made these pledges, you have to green your grid. So leading, government leads, but business really plays a very important role. And there are some national efforts to or international efforts to bring companies together around pledges. So there's under the climate group coming out of the Paris Climate Accord, there's this we are still in effort. And as part of that, there's a renewable energy. It's an RE 100. So it's looking for, you know, 100 of the biggest companies to sign on for 100% renewable energy in some cases by 2030 in some cases by 2050, depending on the business. And already over 200 major global companies have signed on to these pledges of becoming 100% renewable. And in fact, Unilever, that's back to Ben and Jerry's and Seven Gen, have already achieved this and they operate on five different continents. I mean, they're all around the world and they've already achieved their 100% renewable energy goals. So, you know, there's been a lot that's been done, but it's not always easy to do, right? It is definitely takes corporate commitment. And we are lucky to have with us, Bram Klepner of Danforth Pewter. And he's going to talk to us a little bit about why they're taking this kind of leadership to get to 100% renewable. And I would say that, you know, there are changes that are happening. And we'll hear the case study from Danforth Pewter. You know, first of all, there's a business case to be made. We'll hear about that. You know, when power is falling, as I had mentioned, solar price falling. It's also being driven by investors, which is kind of the business that I'm in. We know that investors really care about this and they're driving change. And it's driven by customers. Customers are happy to be buying products that aren't contributing to the climate crisis. And then, of course, it's driven by innovative business leaders who are mission driven beyond just the mission of making money. And you may, how many of you have seen the statement from one of the large business groups, it wasn't the business round table, right? The national business round table. Saying, hey, we're in a crisis. It's time to recognize that as business owners, our obligation isn't just to our pocketbooks. It's also to our communities and to our world. I mean, that was really remarkable. And many of the businesses that signed on are matching action to those statements. So I'm interested to hear about what Danforth Pewter is doing. And let me introduce Bram. And Bram Klepner, he, since 2011, led Danforth Pewter from declining sales and losses to double digit growth and profitability. He oversees Danforth becoming the world's first 100% solar powered Pewter workshop. Bram previously spent 10 years at Ben and Jerry's where he co-led their first anti-global warming campaign. And he served on a bunch of different commissions, including the Vermont Tax Structure Commission, Vermont Medicaid and Exchange Advisory Board. And he's currently on the board of the Population Media Center working worldwide to resolve the interrelated problems of women's rights, the environment, and population. And locally, I like this the best, he's part of Change the Story, which is a group of male leaders working for gender equity. So Bram, you want to come on up? Thank you. And I think for many of us, climate change is fundamentally a moral issue with the very basic moral principle that if you have a chance to reduce or prevent another human being from suffering, you have a moral obligation to do so. And global warming is causing a great deal of human suffering. Anyone you know who is suffering from chronic Lyme disease who is bit by a tick in Vermont is a victim of global warming. Thirty years ago, no Lyme disease in Vermont. The climate heats, it doesn't get cold enough in the winter for them to die off, and people are suffering. And that's the tiniest example. You know, every heat wave where a dozen people die, thousands and thousands more have suffered. And we are at the very tip of the iceberg of the human suffering that global warming might impose upon our brothers and sisters in Vermont and around the world. So first and foremost, it's a moral issue. However, as Deb said, there are also good business reasons to care about this because our customers care about the environment and they care about suffering and they are happier to buy from a company that's actively doing cool stuff to try to save the world. And our employees also are proud of what we're doing. And, you know, being proud of the place you work in the corporate world is a fairly rare luxury and makes a huge difference in the quality of your life if you're proud of the place you work. So with sort of all those reasons, the business reasons and the moral reasons, Danforth Pewter made a commitment some years ago to get to zero fossil fuel use. And I wonder if anyone in the room knows what Pewter is. Man, you get bonus points. For starting out by saying no lead, total bonus points. Yeah, so that's very good. Pewter is an alloy. It's mostly tin with some anemone and some copper and some other stuff in it to make it do exactly what we want. And Danforth is a sweet little company down in Middlebury and we design and make jewelry and holiday ornaments and oil lamps and all sorts of stuff. And by the way, working on biofuel for oil lamps haven't gotten there yet. We have a workshop and office and two retail sites in Middlebury and a bunch of other stores scattered between Maine and Virginia and we're on Amazon and we do custom design work. We make holiday ornaments for life is good and bottle stoppers for whistle pig whiskey and stuff like that. And about 20 employees in the workshop in fulfillment, 15 in the office and another 60 scattered around our retail stores. This is our campus in Middlebury. The building, the gray building on the left is our retail store and our workshop. The white building to the back is our office. That office building is a 100 year old railroad warehouse. It's right along the tracks in Middlebury. It is spectacularly energy and efficient. And the gray building we built, but we built it 30 or 35 years ago. So between those two buildings, we've got five furnaces that use heating oil and propane. So we sort of do everything. We dream up cool stuff. And then we have talented artists who make carved little sculptures, which we use to make molds. And then we pour liquid molten pewter into the molds. And we also put discs on a lathe. And let's see, given our tech problems, I'm not very confident that this video will work. But we can try. It changed colors. That's the first step. Yeah, it's over here. But look, we're going to make this work. Drag it over. Yeah. It's going to be a miracle. Can make that bigger somehow. Anyhow, this is a disk computer going on a lathe. This is a room temperature process. It's like casting a pot on a potter's wheel with a couple year apprenticeship. You can magically make a disk computer, turn into a bowl or a vase or an oil lamp. Are you trying to maximize it? A lot of equipment uses a lot of electricity and a lot of old equipment. That lathe is 100 years old. This is classic industrial era equipment. Yeah, that's good. And those are molds. Pewter melts at a relatively low temperature, so you can cast into vulcanized rubber, which allows us to make all the stuff. There's molten pewter heated up in a casting pot, poured into a mold. And it comes out of the mold. And there you've got whatever it is that you're trying to make. So there are some of our energy uses. The just close that window. Yeah, there we go. Excellent. So we started looking around and figuring out how we get to zero fossil fuel use and started. So we made an inventory of all the places that we use fossil fuel. And I'll say one quick thing about how I think about energy use. Net zero is an excellent first step. Net zero carbon emissions. However much carbon you admit, you do something else to absorb the same amount, the atmosphere is no worse off. But I'd say it's just a very first step, net zero. And getting to absolute zero, which is zero fossil fuel use, is an important next step. And then getting to zero emissions beyond zero fossil fuel. Biomass is a lot better than fossil fuel. But you're still lighting stuff on fire and putting stuff into the air. And I think getting to the point where we stop burning stuff down is an important goal. So we heat our buildings. As I said, five furnaces using heating oil and propane. We have our manufacturing. The casting pots use propane to melt the pewter. And we use a lot of electricity. And we've got our electric use. Then there's a bunch of stuff that we don't have as much control over. You know, we're in Middlebury. We have employees scattered between Orwell and Starksboro. They drive a long way to work. There's no public transportation. It's an aging workforce for whom biking is not a viable option. You put together a van pool and their commutes go from 30 minutes to 90 minutes, so that's not viable. So figuring out how we sort out the employee gasoline is not perfectly clear. You know, we're a small, poor, rural manufacturer. We cannot spend $30 million and buy 60 Teslas and give them to all our employees who drive a long way. But maybe we can lease two Nissan Leafs and give them to the two employees who drive the farthest. And maybe the next year we can lease two more Nissan Leafs and give them to the next two employees who drive the farthest. And maybe we can do some clever financial engineering so that the employees and the company both end up with more cash in their pockets at the end of the year than they would have without the program. So we'll find a way. It's not perfectly clear, but there is a path. The heat for our buildings, in our own buildings, Mark was up here. We had him come down to Middlebury. We designed an engineer to heat pump system to keep our buildings warm. We were going to do phase one this spring, but we ran out of money so we couldn't do it, which was disappointing, but a temporary setback. We'll do it next spring, assuming that you all do all of your holiday shopping at Danforth this year. Thank you. That is awfully nice to hear. And then there's our supply chain. We get our pewter from a foundry in Rhode Island. And the guy's a great guy. I have not told him. We'd love him to go to zero fossil fuel use yet, but at some point we can have that conversation. And the FedEx truck that shows up, we're tiny. We have no influence with FedEx, except it's not that hard to call up the FedEx district manager and say, listen, we're doing this cool thing to get to zero fossil fuel. So the first time that FedEx gives you an electric truck to test in a cold weather environment, can you put it on our route? That's not a request that's going to be met with anything, but sure. I was driving down here this morning in a zero emissions vehicle, let it be noted. And I saw a school bus. And I said, oh, there's a great application for electric vehicles. They only drive 20 miles a day, and they sit all night, and they sit during the day. And they're big, so you can put in a lot of batteries. So I think let's move that up the priority list. Prevent our kids from breathing diesel fumes and make the roads quieter in the morning as well. Anyhow, it's listed there. There's a long supply chain all around the world. There are 10 mines in Malaysia where our 10 comes from and copper mines in Brazil. And once we get our buildings in Middlebury sorted out and our employees sorted out, we can sort of start talking to the landlords who own the buildings we lease space in and say, hey, we went to zero fossil fuel in our buildings in Middlebury, and we'd love to sit down with you and put together a plan for your building, and we'll share what we know. And so forth. So we are not going to run out of work to do on this issue. We have lots of good partners. As I said, Mark in the middle came down to Middlebury and engineered and designed a heat pump system for our buildings. Green Mountain Power with net metering, Efficiency Vermont has been through our place. Both Middlebury and UVM are excited to help businesses with projects like this, and they have lots of smart students who really care and who are willing to do lots of research and work for free. And so here's our plan. Build a solar farm to get our electricity clean. We did that. Next is switch our furnaces to heat pumps. I mentioned that. You know, those casting pots, you saw that big pot with liquid pewter and it's heated with propane. There are electric casting pots. And I said, great, this is easy. Every time one of our propane powered casting pots flames out, literally, we will replace it with an electric one. Started looking into it and they screwed up the design of the electric casting pots. They just don't work right for some fairly simple reason. So I called up the manufacturer and said, look, we want to go to electric casting pots, but your thing doesn't work, so fix it and we'll buy from you every time we need one. And the guy said, oh, you know, it's a dying industry and there's no money to be made and we're not going to put any money into redesigning a thing that we don't sell any of anyway. I said, shucks. All right, we'll redesign it ourselves. So we're redesigning and re-engineering these things. And I sort of had a long conversation with the guy about if I deliver these components to you, can you put it together and make it work the way we want it to? And they somewhat reluctantly said yes to that. So we're going to sort that one out. Figuring out, as I said, some way to get employees to stop using gasoline and to talk to the landlords that we have places in. I had to throw in a picture of our solar farm because I think it's the most beautiful solar farm in the world. Solar trackers engineered by all earth renewables, financing provided through the state and through Green Mountain Power and the net metering program. And it all works swimmingly. So just going to end with two questions. What are you guys doing to get to zero fossil fuel use that would be helpful to me? And what else should I be doing? And that's what I have to say. Thank you. That was a great case study and also really honest. One of my big takeaways is that leadership in this regard really, really matters. And when we think about emissions and the challenge for businesses, we think about the three different kinds of emissions that they talk about globally in this field. One is the scope one emissions. That's the stuff that you are directly responsible for, like your buildings and kind of the inputs, the direct inputs to your business. And then the scope two is sort of the indirect, which would be your employees driving to work. And so you're addressing that. And you don't really have the scope three. Scope three is often like how what you produce gets used out in the world. So one of the things we also heard in this case study is that leadership matters. You've got good control over scope one, what your inputs are. You can make investment choices. But when it comes to thinking about two and three, it's a little bit trickier. And thinking about your employees, I thought that was a really, didn't you think that was a really creative idea to think about how do you address the fossil fuel that's used as your employees come to work and being realistic about, we don't really have the mass for the mass transit for buses or even carpools. It adds too much time to the day. So I would love to hear just a little bit more about this. Have you started to really develop this idea of funding electric or is it just in its nation stages and have you talked to employees about it and gotten any feedback? So it's still pretty early. It feels like there's a logical progression of stuff for us to do and getting rid of our furnaces is first or next I should say. But I have talked a little bit to employees about it and they're skeptical about whether they'll be able to get to and from their homes up on the side of the Starksboro Mountain with an electric car in the winter. So we'll sort of feel our way forward and find the people who are psyched to try it and when they see how much, when other people see how much fun they're having in their electric car, maybe they'll be more enthusiasm and maybe some other solution will present itself over the next couple of years as we're hammering it out. Yeah, this is a time of real innovation. So there's a little bit of leap of faith, whether you're at Danforth or Amazon, there's a piece of sort of that big Amazon plan that is also figuring that Federal Express and UPS are gonna have to at some point have electric delivery vehicles which means that the auto manufacturers are gonna need to start manufacturing them. So I was also really interested in how you were thinking along those lines and really understanding your ability as a business to influence your service providers and their own sort of fossil fuel using behaviors. Yeah, I think, I mean a lot of it is just how you make it fun for them, right? If you go in and bang on a desk and say, you gotta get rid of your gasoline and diesel, then they'll say, we don't need your business, you're tiny and no one cares about you. And if you say, hey, we got this cool project and we'd love to partner with you on it, it's a very different approach. And I bet that's the same thing actually with the employees. Hey, we've got this cool thing who wants to volunteer for the leaf lease. I bet there'd be more hands up that way. Are there any questions or comments from the audience? Yes, up here. An inverse carbon tax. So yes, I do know that program and that's a very cool program. Do you wanna describe it for folks? You can probably describe it better than I can, so I will let you do that. Yeah, I used to work for all our three newables and we had a program that I think is still going where an employee can earn up to $6,000 and the amount they earn depends on how much energy they use. So you start with 6,000 and you take off 15 cents for every kilowatt hour your house uses and you take off for how much gas your car burns, how much natural gas or propane or oil your house uses and typically an employee would get about $2,000 if they're average use. Some of the employees who've invested in more sustainable options may earn $4,000, $5,000. If you're completely net zero, you can earn $6,000 a year. Sounds like a great incentive, really great incentive. So it's a way to engage employees and one of the things we've observed internationally is that employees really want them, especially want to be part of organizations that are going net zero, especially the younger generation. Millennials are unlike folks our age. From the start, really expect to have their work and their workplaces align with their own values and mission and so to attract workers these days, aligning incentives, but also aligning the mission of the organization is really critical. And so have you experienced that and enthusiasm from your staff? You know, the young guy you saw in the video working the lathe likes to race dirt bikes on the weekends, so he's not very enthusiastic. Although I have been pitching him on the fact that Harley just did the first production electric motorcycle and the acceleration is spectacular on electric motorcycles. So I've been pitching him that he'll have more fun when he converts all his dirt bikes to electric. I have to confess, we have a motorcycle also in my house and it's fossil fuel-based recreation and it's time for electric. You know, as Jen said, we can't wait for the natural life cycle. You can replace yours before yours dies. You can replace it with an electric Harley and you can be really fast and silent, which is even cooler. Yeah, there was another comment or question? Yes. Working for a city, I find inspiration by turning to other cities and talking to them and finding out what's going on. And I'm wondering, as a small manufacturing facility, who do you see as your peers, Fran, in Europe, so who they are and what they're doing and how do you find inspiration among your colleagues? And for the recording, I'm gonna just kind of repeat that, and which is, the question is, and this is Jen Green saying, as a city, she gets inspiration from other cities and communities and wonders who your colleagues are, who are you taking inspiration from in the business world? You know, it's you guys. You know, I remember walking into Sun Commons place in Waterbury the first time and going, man, this building does not have a furnace. That's so cool. And someone mentioned the leadership that after sort of electric cars went almost nowhere for a very long time. You know, Henry Ford and Thomas Edison worked together on an electric car, but it kind of went nowhere for a very long time and General Motors did their EV1 thing in 96 and that came and went, you know, because there was sort of no commitment and no vision. And, you know, then Elon Musk shows up with a great deal of vision and a great deal of commitment. And money to burn. And lots of money and, you know, sort of the typical amount of mental instability that goes with visionary genius. And it kind of changes the world. And so, you know, I do look to companies local and national that are sort of shaking free of the old way of doing things and saying, hey, we don't have to be stuck doing it the way we've done it for the last 100 years. Just to add in on to that, one of the reasons why Climate Action 100 Plus and we're still in and CA, you know, the RE100 and the EV100 efforts, these collaborative efforts are so important is it sends market signals to the manufacturers and the innovators who we depend on for our solutions, right? You're not gonna be able to become 100%. Well, it was actually a great story with your, I wanna say it's the pot, the cauldron, the melting cauldron, what do you call it? We call them casting pots, but melting cauldrons were appropriate for Halloween. Exactly, the casting pots where, you know, unless you've got an innovator who's willing to make a casting pot that could be electric, you're not gonna be able to achieve your goal. And so, there was a very important collaboration that's been around now for many years, which was a business coalition focused on renewable energy. And together, they were able to scale the whole market so that the prices came down for all of us. Right now at Ceres, we have a new collaboration for electric vehicles and it's called CIVA, the Ceres Electric Vehicle Alliance where we've gotten some of the biggest fleet owners to join us to begin to have a conversation with the auto manufacturers. So that is like Federal Express and Amazon and just think about these national and global companies that rely on transportation to get their jobs done. And they're together gonna be working to talk with the auto manufacturers to say, hey, we need medium duty trucks. We need delivery vans. We need to have, this is what we need in them and if you make them, we'll buy them. We'll commit to buying them so that you can invest in the retooling that needs to happen in order to produce them. So it's kind of a part of a circular economy, right? You've got businesses that come together to aggregate demand and that spurs innovation that then allows the businesses to achieve their goals. But again, it's leadership first. It's business leaders like Bram saying, this is what we're committed to doing and we're gonna be innovative. We're gonna demand you to innovate. We're gonna do what it takes to achieve the zero emission goal. So there's a question in the back. Yeah, just a comment and a question. So I work at some common and I think just to point to the kind of transportation issues. We have something like 70 vehicles that you see buzzing around the state as well as the Hudson Valley. And we just made the commitment to sign this EV pledge that we put on the EV signed on, Green Mountain Power signed on. And what that says is that we go EV first in all available options. So it was an opportunity to say, we're gonna lean into this. It was kind of a top-down decision as we know that we need to change, we know that we drive too much and we have to do this. And so I think that was an exciting thing that we saw some common leadership do. And so that was just kind of my first point as there's an opportunity to lean in. Some people don't like that decision. Some people aren't ready to drive EVs but we're gonna do it anyway and we're kind of creating a community of those who do drive EVs to kind of support those who are kind of learning all the infrastructure and apps and stuff like that. So just as another example of kind of fleet conversion. The second point is you mentioned the business round table comment, which I thought was cool. What I thought was cooler was that D-Lab and the B-Corp community came by after and said, yeah, we're already doing that. And asked for some teeth and some more specifications of that business round table commitment. And I think my question for you, Doug, is how do you use commitments like that to then turn that into action? Yeah, that's a great question. So for the folks recording, the first comment was about making an EV commitment and sometimes getting ahead of employees. So committing to all new vehicles or changing a fleet to electric vehicles can be challenging in part because not all employees are ready to make those changes and it is a different way of driving at somebody who's had a leaf and had a headwind once coming to Burlington and to my surprise, needing to pull off in Williston to charge up when, you know, because of this unusual headwind and otherwise I would not have made it to work. And, you know, it's a different way of being aware of driving. And so it's a change. And then the second, the question part was yes, the business round table made this really great statement. And then the B-Lab responded by saying, hey, like we've been doing this already. This is an organization of four benefit companies and they are the early innovators when it comes to sustainability. And so the question is, how do organizations like CERES hold pledgers to account? And one of the things we do is we benchmark. So we, you know, our investors, so the way our investors think about this, it's really actually kind of interesting is they think about risk because, you know, when you're managing a pension fund, like how many of you have a pension fund? You all do, come on, you all have a 401K, right? Do you have money invested for retirement? Okay, maybe it's not a formal pension fund, right? For those of you who have money invested, like do you know where your money is, right? Do you remember that ad in, I don't remember, when I was a little child, do you know where your, it's 10 o'clock, do you know where your children are? And it's the same idea, do you know where your money is? Do you know what you're invested in? And you may be surprised to know that you're invested in things that maybe don't match your values and your goals, right, for the world. And so a lot of pension funds, a lot of asset managers take a look at what they're invested in and they wanna know because there is a climate risk. So you can picture, like investing in coal, that's kind of a bad investment, right? When you're investing for your retirement, it's the long term, right? And how many of you think coal is gonna be like making a lot of money at the time you retire? No, it probably is not. No matter whether there's a change in administration or not, right? It's just not, it is just not economically competitive. And it will continue to not be economically competitive and there will be a change in politics and there will be policies in place saying keep it in the ground. So there is a risk to your portfolio if you're invested in fossil fuels, if you're invested in coal. And so we talk about it that way with investors, right? So how do you minimize climate risk to your portfolio? In addition, are you investing in companies that have physical risk from climate change? Like where are their plants? Are they, is it in parts of Florida that's gonna be underwater in just a few years? Like how are you protecting your investments from the risks of climate change? And then how are you taking advantage of the opportunities of climate change? How do you switch your investments? So part of doing that means that as we do this, make these arguments, we benchmark companies. We say, okay, here are these, it's mostly S&P 500, it's the big companies. How are they placed? What is their climate risk? And so as we benchmark companies for risk, then it allows our investors to engage with them to talk about what the company is doing to minimize their risk. So when you take a look at the statement, the signed by the business round table folks of big companies, that gives us an opportunity to say, okay, you've signed on, what are you gonna do about it? And there are some things we look for. We want their internal corporate governance to change. So for publicly traded companies, right, that are run by boards, we wanna make sure that salaries are aligned with whether or not you're achieving your climate goals. I don't know if you do that in Danforth, but you're probably small enough that that's not necessary. But you can picture in a big company, in a big corporation, if you don't align salaries with performance metrics related to these pledges, well, maybe they're just not real. So that's one thing. And we want transparency and we want disclosure. Like if, and there's lots of, there's a number of different disclosure metrics or there's different organizations that help with corporate disclosure. And so we, so that's the other piece. So we wanna know what you're doing. We wanna see that there's leadership. We want it to be tied to corporate governance. So there's a question on the side here. Hi there, yeah. We're a wholesaler for electrical supplies and we have a beautiful solar, right? Just like you guys. And there's a lot of things that we're noticing that we won't be able to completely transit in employees, gasoline and things like that. Have you guys looked at the carbon sequestration? Like, for instance, buying or working for us, for instance, or actually actively sequestriners carbon offset the emissions that would be created if you can't transition over for some of those things like your furnaces for instance? Can you repeat the question? Yeah, I'll repeat the question. The question is, for the stuff that you can't transition to zero fossil fuel right away, has Danforth or are we in general looking at sequestration? So no, we're not part of a sequestration program. I'd sort of say in general, the more trees we can plant and the less fossil fuel we can use, the better. So planting trees is a great thing to do. I don't, as I said, net zero is a great goal and getting to absolute zero is the next step beyond that. I don't think we should let ourselves off the hook of trying to get to zero fossil fuel use because we've got a great tree planting program. You know, it did occur to me that one way to solve this problem would be to reforest the Sahara, which it was a forest 5,000 years ago. So I wrote Bill McKibbin and I said, hey, I got this thing sorted out. Like we just built a bunch of nuclear fusion plants along the North Coast and the West Coast of the Sahara and we use that to desalinate and we use that to replant the Sahara and it's gonna be great. And he wrote back and said, you know, it's not quite that simple because it turns out that when the Sahara's forested, there's no sand blowing up into the air that's filtering the sun. So actually the world gets hotter when the Sahara's forested than what it says. And it's been, it's gone through cycles. But in places that have been deforested that should be forested, you know, that have been artificially deforested and can be artificially reforested, I think that's a great thing to do. So internationally is when these big, you know, Fortune 500 companies are making their plans and their commitments, carbon offsets are often a piece of it, but it's our perspective that it's the last piece. So it's for those things for which there are no other solutions or it's in the interim while innovation is still creating those solutions. And I would suggest that, you know, I don't know how many of you followed the latest IPCC land report and that was a report from the United Nations talking about the role of how we live on the landscape and its contributions to climate change. And one of the big takeaways from that report is that what we do on the land contributes to climate change, but also we're not gonna solve climate change without making changes. And that there's not a way forward without, for example, really focusing on reforestation. There's not a way to solve the climate crisis without changing how we eat and our farming practices. So it's a but for proposition. And so there is actually a very important role for offsets because it is a way to begin to finance some of those changes that really need to happen in order for us to be successful. So I would say it's absolutely a piece of the pie, a piece of the puzzle, but it is should not be the excuse for non-action where you can otherwise reduce your fossil fuel use. You know, I would just add everyone freaks out when you start talking about population, but we also can't sort out climate change until we stabilize the human population at a level the planet can sustainably support, which, you know, it's like three billion people or something, right? Like, and we're at eight billion. So, you know, we got to get rid of five billion people. And that's why people freak out when you talk about it. You know, it doesn't mean you got to ship people to Mars like Elon wants to do. But it does mean you have to reduce average fertility around the world and let the population naturally decline to a sustainable level. And, you know, as I said, it's a huge part of the problem that, you know, more or less everyone is afraid to talk about. So, let's find some courage and talk about that as well. Any other questions or comments? Anyone here who was really unhappy to hear that because you want to be a grandparent? You can be a grandparent. Just limit your number of grandchildren to four instead of 14. Well, it's, this is a really important piece of the conversation, right? The role of businesses in getting to net zero and helping us solve the climate crisis. And I think the big takeaways that I've gotten from Bram is the first thing you do is you try to avoid using fossil fuel wherever you can. Like, what is the, well, first of all, actually the first step is to acknowledge that you've got a challenge, right? And to take the leadership and set the goal. And then in setting the goal, you take a look at your operations and you say, okay, where do we become more efficient? Where do we change our operations? How we operate or change out our equipment so that we're no longer using fossil fuel or where we did? How do we, so, how do we reduce our emissions? How do we mitigate? Like, what do we do to make the changes? And then you have to embed that strategy throughout your company, right? At all different levels. And at that point, you start looking at those other scope two, scope three emissions. Like, okay, then how do you influence the people that you rely on in your supply chain? How do you use your influence to help your employees be part of the solution as well? And so I think that's outstanding. You know, it's a huge, it's just a huge commitment. And I think we should all thank Bram for his leadership and congratulate him. And I'm looking forward to seeing you back here and how many years should we give you? Three, four, five years to see how far you've come. We'll make progress every year. Good, thank you all. Thanks everyone, thanks very much. Thank you, Deb.