 All right. I am going to launch YouTube live right now. That's loading and I'm going to open the doors and we'll just definitely quite on set. And we're live. Welcome friends. We'll get started in just a moment. And we have to put tonight's links into the chat box. We'll get started in just a moment. We'll put the links in one more time. And notice that one wasn't live. So these links will contain library information, library news, as well as links to tonight's author. Right. I'm going to open and get started and I do live in a San Francisco so you can hear the horns and the sirens. So pardon the noise. Thank you all for being here. We appreciate you joining us in our virtual library and coming out tonight. We are here to talk to author Andreas Corrales about his book, Climate Courage. First up, I'll give you some information on some library news. First, we want to do a land acknowledgement. The San Francisco Public Library acknowledges that we occupy the unceded ancestral homeland of the raw, mutational only people who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco peninsula. I recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland as uninvited guests, we affirm their sovereign rights as first peoples and wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders and relatives of the wrong community. And in the link that I put in the chat box there's a list to a great reading and resource list to a lot of Bay Area organizations and a lot of books and collections that we hold at SFPL on first peoples and particularly the raw mutational community. Tomorrow night, streaming live, our Department of Environment partners with our mayor to celebrate climate action, pardon me, in SF, and it will be a panel of local activists, artists and business leaders, and there'll be sharing stories of hope and progress towards a healthier and more equitable San Francisco for all. And I'll put the link into the chat box as well, but it's also in the document. And then some upcoming library programs that we have are on the same page for November and December, and on the same page is a bi-monthly read where we encourage all of San Francisco to read the same book. There's been going on for almost 10 years. We have author Deborah Miranda and we'll be reading her book, Bad Indians. Deborah Miranda will be in the virtual library on December 17 of Friday afternoon at 2pm. And the book club will be the following December 20. So every bi-monthly we have an author and a book club on a shared read. And this book is really great and you should be able to find it at any of your open library branch locations in San Francisco. Or get the book. On December 11th, we have a panel and it's a partnership with the San Francisco Girls Choir and they are doing a opera run or choir run through the years 2022 focused on the book Tomorrow's Memories. Tomorrow's Memories is a Filipino diary and a Philippine ex-woman's diary and her experience in Hawaii and California and her migration story. So come check that out and they're going to be doing events all over town. We are the launch of the book club. I think it'll they'll come back and do a performance. The Girls Choir will be in our beautiful caret auditorium. Speaking of the caret, we're honoring our last poet laureate Jack Hirschman on Sunday. There will be a live film screening in person. The caret is a gorgeous setting if you've never been there plenty of room to spread out. And there will be a director and producer conversation. On December 13th, the virtual library, the amazing author feminist rebel Dottie Bellamy along with a panel and they'll be discussing the re-release of her book, The Letters of Menaharca, and be re-eved. So come check that out. It's sure to be an exciting evening. I'm going to tell you about two more events. On Tuesday, December 14, we take the library out into the community at the Oasis Bar downtown San Francisco south of market in the champagne room or we'll be hosting Mallory O'Meara talking about her latest book, Girlie Drinks, A World History of Women and Alcohol. So come down to the Oasis with us. How fun does that sound, right? And we love Zizba. So this is one of the oldest San Francisco journals of letters and writings and art. And they will be joining us for issue number 122, the inter-transnational issue. And we'll have a panel of four writers who are featured in issue number 122. All right. I think that's enough library news. That's plenty, right? We have sfpl.org slash events. You can find all of our amazing events there. And I didn't even touch on like what the business department does, what's the history department does. We do a lot of virtual and starting to do in person. So please check this out. Tonight we have Andreas Corrales. He is the founder and executive director of Revolve, a nonprofit organization that empowers people around the country to help nonprofits in their communities go solar while raising awareness about the benefits of clean energy. He is dedicated to clean energy advocacy, an Audubon Together Green Conservation Leadership Fellow, and an open IDO climate innovator fellow. And tonight Andreas is going to discuss his book and there will be time for Q&A at the end. Please use the Q&A function of Zoom. And YouTube friends, welcome as well. You can put your YouTube questions in the chat and I will bring those back to Andreas. And without further ado, Andreas, take it away. Thank you so much, Anissa. It's a pleasure and an honor to be here. Thanks everybody for tuning in. As Anissa mentioned, the name of my book is Climate Courage, How Tackling Climate Change Can Build Community, Transform the Economy, and Bridge the Political Divide in America. Sounds like a tall order, doesn't it? It may even seem a little bit out of reach given how, especially the last part about bridging the political divide in America. I'm sure all of us here in San Francisco feel that pretty palpably. We have within our bubble a very progressive group of people that live here that are working on issues like climate change and other social justice issues. And certainly over the last two years and much longer than that, we've seen a growing divide in America where it almost seems like there are two different worlds. There are two different sources of information that people are living by. And so there really is a sense of division that can seem almost impossible to bridge. But what I write about in the book is that actually climate change, oddly enough, even though at the moment we look at climate change as a divisive issue, and there are historical reasons for that, which I'll talk about. But the truth is that I actually believe climate change and particularly clean energy solutions can be a bridge that can help bring together this sense of division in America. So first, in order to sort of take a look at this issue, we have to kind of take a step back and see how it is that we got here and how it is that we need to move forward. And really the big impetus behind writing the book for me was that I work in the clean energy space. I, as Anissa mentioned, I'm the founder and executive director of a clean energy nonprofit called Revolve based here in San Francisco. And I've been working in the industry for over 15 years. And I actually am a lot more optimistic that we are building momentum towards the just clean energy transition towards transitioning away from fossil fuels and into a sustainable and equitable clean energy future. I'm a lot more optimistic about that than a lot of people that I interact with. And I started to ask myself why. And the reason is that not everybody is really aware of how much momentum we have and how much progress we're making. You know, we see a lot of times in the news how bad the climate crisis is. And it's really bad. There's no denying that and there's no getting around that. And it's getting worse and we see it not only in the news, we see it right here in the Bay. We see the fires and the smoke, you know, people having to flee for their lives. We have, you know, across the country this year we saw, you know, record breaking storms, record breaking hurricanes, droughts, floods, all sometimes happening at the same time. You know, so we are very much in a place where climate change is front and center. And at the moment it seems as if our leaders and our international leaders are not really able to make much progress. And there's a good reason why, you know, fossil fuel industry dollars in our political system, right? There's not much denying that. I talk about it a decent amount in the book. You know, what we have is a history of fossil fuel, you know, moneyed interests in politics, not only in politics, but also in the media and also in the advertising and marketing campaigns that were designed to misinform us for decades. And I'll talk a little bit about that. So in order to back it up, we need to reframe the narrative around climate change here in the United States if we're going to be able to make progress. Because right now we're sort of at a standstill. There is, you know, half the country that's voting and, you know, pushing their elected officials to act on this. And there's also a lot of folks that are not. But that doesn't necessarily align with their views on the issue so much as it does with their political alliances and allegiances and what they think is within their, you know, what someone like me does, what my, you know, political affiliation allows me to believe and act on. So, so let's start there. We, there are a lot of myths around this that have been propagated. One is that we don't have the solutions that we need, right? People on both sides of the political spectrum often fall prey to this myth. They think that, you know, it's just too bad that clean energy is not yet scalable or is not yet developed enough for us to switch to that's not true. And I'll talk a little bit about that. We're also under the belief that it's going to cost too much in order to do so, even if the technology was available. And, and so, you know, we're not going to be able to make that sacrifice. That's also not true. It's actually much more cost effective to run our societies on clean energy and use sustainable practices. We're told that we are too divided. And this is actually, I think the crux of, you know, the findings for me in the book is that actually there's a lot more consensus around climate change and particularly around the solutions to climate change than most people realize. And ultimately, I think, you know, one of the biggest takeaways for me is that we are often, even if we care about climate change and we know that it's a problem. And we know that it's a problem and we know that this is the decisive decade where we have to act and we have to act swiftly. There's still this sense of what can I do? What can I as an individual do? Or what can we as a community do? You know, what can little old me do when this problem is global in nature? And we see, you know, our elected officials, you know, in Congress, you know, chopping down the climate legislation that's put forward. We see, you know, at the United Nations, COP 26, the conference of the parties recently in Glasgow, that the largest majority of attendees were fossil fuel lobbyists, right? So it's no wonder that you see a very watered down agreement coming out of the international negotiations. So we're in a difficult position, but that does not mean we should be disempowered because if we take on a pessimistic, cynical, disempowered narrative, then we're really stuck. Then there's really no movement, right? So the climate courage, what do I mean by climate courage? I mean that we need to find within ourselves the courage to take action and to look beyond what are very real obstacles and very real roadblocks. And we have to get involved with our communities and try to create some momentum and try to create solutions that are benefiting others that can build momentum, that can get bigger groups of people to adopt. And that's how we can build from the ground up the types of solutions that we need. And interestingly, what I want to point out is that it's not that we're going to completely solve the climate crisis, you know, one solar project at a time led by community groups, which is part of the work that we do at Revolve. But what we are going to do is change the narrative. So Bill McKibbin, who I talk about in the book and who was kind enough to blurb the book, you know, often talks about we need to shift the zeitgeist, right? We need to shift the cultural narrative. We need to shift the story that we tell ourselves that climate change is a liberal issue, you know, championed by Al Gore and Hollywood celebrities and conservatives. Don't share that and that, you know, we're split. And so we're at loggerheads and there's no moving forward. That's not true. And in fact, a large portion of the book is dedicated to looking at the examples of people, particularly conservatives, particularly Republicans that have taken action that have found their climate courage, despite the fact that it's politically sort of against, you know, what their peers are doing, and that have found that success that have found common ground, because the more we can tell those stories, the more we begin to change the narrative. And the more we change the narrative that creates a political opportunity that allows us to bring our divided country together. So how do we even start that? How do we get the narrative to change? Well, let's start with a quote from Bob Inglis. Bob Inglis was a former congressman from South Carolina, who is Republican, and he lost his seat in Congress because of his stance on climate change. He was convinced that climate change was real. He got to go visit Antarctica and other parts of the world where he saw the impacts on the environment, and he realized we needed to do something about it. And when he took that stance, they voted him out. And he has a really important lesson that I think those of us who are in a liberal or democratic bubble might not realize that how what we're saying and how we're presenting this information is received to people who don't share our political views. So this is from the chapter reframing the narrative on page three. It says, what happens often when the left is talking to the right about these issues, it seems like it's coming across as, quote, we know better than you do. You're a bunch of hicks from the sticks. We're so much smarter than you are. We've got scientists who tell us this and that we'll design a regulatory system that will fix things because we can't trust you to make good decisions and quote. That's one way it comes across and it's offensive to conservatives. So let's just stop there for a moment and reflect on that. What I take away from what he's saying is that it's not that conservatives are disagreeing with the science or disagreeing with the reality of climate change or even the solutions. It's that there is a knee jerk reaction to the type of offensive way that it's coming across the way that the message is being received this sort of, you know, sort of elitist. Like he says, you know, we're better. We're so much smarter than you are. We've got scientists who tell us this and that there's a there's a sense of arrogance that comes across to people who don't share those political views that he's describing here. And we as messengers around climate change need to learn how to better reach who we're talking to, and we can't just keep talking within our silo. We have to reach across the aisle. We have to, I'm sure, you know, we all just had our Thanksgiving dinners. I'm sure there were plenty of, you know, uncomfortable, if not awkward political, if not outright heated political conversations that came up at your dinner tables. I hope that didn't happen. But, you know, oftentimes it does, right? So how can we as messengers who are saying, look, climate change is not going to care whether you're a Democrat or Republican. We have to figure this out together. There's no other option. We have to come together. We have to learn how to be better presenters and communicators and learn how to to create that shared trust and so that we can engage on this issue. Now that brings me to Debbie Dooley. Many of you, you know, may have heard about Debbie Debbie is a tea party Republican. In fact, she was one of the founders of the tea party. And back in 2008, she was living in Georgia. And she wanted to go solar. And she wanted to put solar panels on her house so that she could be self reliant. She could be off the grid. She could generate her own power. She could get us off foreign oil, etc. Because again, there's a lot of shared benefits around solar energy that appeal to conservatives. And so when the utility Georgia power tried to tax her for going solar, she felt that this was a front or a violation of her rights as a an independent homeowner. Why couldn't she put solar panels on her roof and generate her own power? And so she actually reached out to an unlikely ally, which was the Sierra Club. And they formed what was called the Green Tea Alliance, right? So from the Tea Party, it went to the Green Tea Party or the Green Tea Alliance. And that was the Sierra Club working with the Tea Party on fighting this anti-solar legislation that was being pushed forward. And these anti-solar rules are being put forward by the utilities. So this is an example of where the values align. Independence, wanting to generate our own power, wanting to be self reliant, wanting to create a livable planet for our future and our children and our grandchildren. This is something that cuts across party lines. You know, we have to maybe choose some better messengers than, you know, a former Democratic vice president. You know, we need to choose messengers that can appeal to the values of people on the opposite side of the aisle. And we can develop our own abilities to become those messengers, but we have to learn how to do that. And so that's what she talks about here in a chapter called conservatives forging a path. This is a quote from her, she says, I talked at the Tea Party convention and said, government should stop picking winners and losers. I got thunderous applause. People are really receptive to the right message when you lay out the facts. I've been attacked by Koch brothers affiliated groups. Some said I was a fake Tea Party person. I just laugh. I'm a conservative. There's no way that you can paint me as a liberal, even as a moderate. I'm not a right wing conservative, but I'm extremely passionate about alternative energy. I'm a grandmother. I became a grandmother in 2008 with the birth of my grandson who's the light of my life. I want him to have a clean world. I want him to have parks and green space. I don't want him to have to worry about terrorist attacks. I don't want him to be able to, I want him to be able to breathe clean air. I want him to be able to generate his own electricity if he so chooses. If he says I want to generate my own power and be self sufficient. I want him to have the ability to do it. She then goes on. I write duly knows that conservatives have been quote brainwashed for decades into believing we're not damaging the environment end quote. So when she speaks to conservatives about the benefits of renewable energy, she approaches the issue through things she knows they care about. Energy choice, energy freedom and national security. So, so my point here is that there are, you know, what I go on to say, you know, on that later that page is, I think that's pretty good advice for the rest of us too. When we're speaking to an elected official, a neighbor or a family member, can we first find common ground? What common values do we share? What perspectives and points of view do we have that are similar? We use shared language that speaks to those values as we discuss or support support for climate solutions. While it may seem trivial, one of the most important things we can do as Americans who are concerned about climate change is talk about it more. Making it okay to talk about something is the first step toward more toward more shared understanding and hopefully more collective action. What do I mean by that? Catherine Hayhoe. Dr. Catherine Hayhoe is the chief scientist of the Nature Conservancy and a one of the world's leading climate scientists. She actually has a bestselling book out now called Saving Us, which I highly recommend. And she also was kind enough to write the forward for climate courage. And she has also given a great TED talk about this exact topic about talking about climate change. And she says that the most important thing we can do as individuals in the fight against climate change is talk about it more. Talk about it more. She goes out, she points out that currently only 14% of Americans say that they talk about climate change. And if they're not talking about it, why would they care about it? If they don't care about it, why would they take action on it, right? So we actually have a problem here where the vast majority of Americans are concerned about climate change and they do care about it. But it's become so taboo for us to talk about it, just like politics, religion or money, et cetera, that nobody brings it up. And so if nobody brings it up, it's not on top of our minds. We don't talk about it and we're not bridging the divide. If we were talking about it more every time we see the unusual weather, which of course we're seeing all the time. Every time we saw that, if we were bringing that up, we would find out pretty quickly how much consensus there is even across party lines. And once there is a common understanding of the consensus about moving forward, well that changes the political dynamic rapidly, right? That's where things really change. Abraham Lincoln said, without public sentiment, nothing is possible. With public sentiment, everything is possible, right? So that's really the political reality that we need to change. Now, how much consensus is there? I mentioned this was one of the myths that we think and we've been told to think that this is extremely divisive issue. Let's break that down a little bit. There are, you know, this is study data that comes out of Yale's School of Climate Change Communication. And their surveys, which they do regularly, has pointed out that 67% two-thirds of Americans say that climate change is personally meaningful to them. Two-thirds of Americans. 73% believe that it is real and caused by humans. They understand that it's real and that we are the cause of it. 73%. So almost three-quarters. And here's my favorite. If you take nothing else away from this talk, let it be this. Bring this up tomorrow at the water cooler or the virtual water cooler as it were. 85% of Americans are in favor of 100% renewable energy. Let me say that again. 85% of Americans are in favor of 100% renewable energy. Pause for a moment. How many issues do 85% of Americans agree on? In fact, there was a study that came out around the same time that said only 83% of Americans believe in democracy, which is a troubling statistic, especially given what we've seen over the last few years. The point is that clean energy actually has more broad support than being a democratic, being a democracy as a political way of organizing politics. So that should actually give us a lot of hope because if we lead with clean energy and we talk about the benefits that it really provides to us and it gives us a rallying cry that we can use to bridge the political divide, well, that all of a sudden changes the political narrative and the dynamics rather quickly. So what are those talking points? How can we get the good news out? Hey, guess what? Clean energy is better in all these ways. Well, here are a few. Mark Jacobson, who is a professor of symbol engineering at Stanford University just down the road from us here in San Francisco. Him and his team have mapped out what it would take to get to 100% clean energy, particularly from wind, water, and solar exclusively in the United States. And in fact, they've mapped it out all around the world. And what they found was that when the United States gets to 100% clean energy, we as a nation, the citizens of the United States will save a trillion with a T, trillion dollars a year on energy bills. We will save a trillion dollars a year on our energy bills by going 100% renewable, right? That should get people's attention. That's a lot of money. It's a lot of savings. And of course, that's counter to all of the myths and the narratives that we've been told by the fossil fuel industry for decades about how expensive and costly this will be. How about the next statistic that came out of Mark Jacobson's team? By switching to 100% renewable energy, we will create a net increase of 2 million new jobs in the United States, 2 million jobs, right? Solar energy is the fastest growing job sector in the economy. It's 14 times faster than the average growth of jobs, right? It's 14 times faster. There is currently, this is again going to be a mind blowing statistic, there is currently two times as many workers in the solar industry alone as there are in the entire fossil fuel electricity generating industry, right? So all of the coal, gas, oil that is used for electricity, if you count up all those workers, there's actually twice as many people working in the solar industry today, not after the Build Back Better Act gets put into place and we start creating jobs today. There's that many more workers. So these are the types of arguments when we hear, oh, climate change is going to be a job killer. That's BS. It's the opposite, right? Clean energy is a job creator and we need to be talking about that all the time. How about industry? We talk about what is going to hurt industry, also not true. Of the top six highest valued companies in the world, five of them are already 100% renewable energy powered, right? Companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, right? These leaders, who we trust with a lot of running of society as unfortunate and problematic as that is, have seen the writing on the wall and they have already converted to 100% renewable energy. And yes, partly it's because a lot of companies, a lot of businesses today have a strong environmental and social governance sort of policy. But the other equally important piece is that they recognize that this is a financial liability if they do not switch, right? That the cost of fossil fuels are only going to go up. The ability to lock in a low electricity rate through renewable energy is the best business decision. Dale Ross is one of my favorite examples from the book. He is a mayor from Georgetown, Texas, which is a conservative area and he is a conservative Republican. And yet he's also an accountant. So he looked at the numbers and this was a few years back, back in 2008. What he saw was that if he signed up for 100% renewable energy in Georgetown, that he would save the city a tremendous amount of money over time. And so when he did that, Georgetown, Texas became, after Burlington, Vermont, Georgetown, Texas became the second city in America to be 100% renewable energy powered. This is a conservative mayor in a conservative city in Texas, right? So let's not fall into the trap that it's only places like San Francisco that can be progressive with clean energy. It's only states like California that can push the envelope on clean energy. That's not true. We see countless examples and I highlight many of them in the book. And this is the type of work that we really need to be focusing on. The Department of Defense has been telling us for years report after report comes out pointing out that the Department of Defense has made, has listed climate change as the top threat threatening our security around the world year after year. Faith communities are starting to come together across evangelicals, faith groups of all different types, denominations and people of different political backgrounds are coming together around clean energy solutions. We're seeing entrepreneurs who are driving clean technology and making it one of the fastest growing sectors as I mentioned. And here's another really important piece is, again, back to how do we get involved? How can we take action against all of this efforts and momentum against us? And actually, let me put a pin in that for a moment. I'm going to get back to that, what can we do in the communities in a moment? But let me talk a little bit for a moment about what do we have against us? Why is it that if there's all these positive facts about clean energy and climate change solutions, why do we still have this narrative? Well, let's go back to the 1960s when President Johnson had his scientific team put together a report on this concept about global warming. And back in the late 1960s, the president of the United States and his top scientific advisors knew almost to a T very accurately how CO2 emissions would rise over the next 50 years and basically predicted what would happen in terms of the temperature. They were very accurate. The government has known about this for over half a century. And yet we're still, you know, Joe Biden, you know, as much as he has been one of the most vocal climate change advocates that we've seen in the White House, just a few weeks ago after coming back from Glasgow, opened up more oil and gas drilling than any president in history. 80 million acres of oil and gas leasing was just announced in the Gulf of Mexico. This is just years after the deep horizon oil spill. This is just months after oil spills that we've seen in Southern California. That's still happening. Okay, so, you know, let's be real about the hold that the political sort of infrastructure is under by the fossil fuel industry. Now, at that time, the American Petroleum Institute, basically the lobbying group of the trade association of all the fossil fuel industries got together. And in their 1970s meetings, they basically realized that, look, if this gets out, because they had their own scientists who were studying the effects of climate change. And they were very clear that we understand that CO2 will increase the temperatures, which will increase sea level and all of these negative impacts. And rather than changing their business model, letting the public know what their scientists were finding, what do you think they did? They did the same thing the tobacco industry did. They spent millions and millions of dollars on ad campaigns, misinforming the public for decades. And in fact, they used the same consultants, the same advertising groups that the tobacco industry was using. They were using the same marketers at the same time. You could picture it now. You could picture your sort of madman, you know, kind of setup. And these advertisers had their fossil fuel misinformation campaigns and their tobacco misinformation campaigns that they were running at the same time. They literally used the same playbook. So this is what we've been up against. And basically what the American Petroleum Institute decided was we are going to sow doubt in the minds of the American public, which was very much what Big Tobacco did. The science isn't clear on whether cigarettes caused tobacco, whether cigarettes caused cancer. And that was the same messaging, the same line of attack that they used on climate change. And of course, decade after decade, that was amplified by conservative media pundits, by politicians who were in the pockets of the fossil fuel industry. And I want to point something out here. Again, I mentioned Joe Biden going back on his promise when he was on the campaign trail that there would be no new oil drilling in the United States on federal lands when he was president. And of course, now we've seen the opposite. It's the largest in history. Back in the 2016 election, there were the three top recipients of fossil fuel industry cash were number one, Ted Cruz, which makes sense, being Texas Republican. You know, sort of in the thick of it. Number two was Donald Trump at just over a million dollars. And number three was Hillary Clinton at just under a million dollars, meaning the fossil fuel industry didn't take any chances. They put basically the same amount of money in the coffers of the Trump campaign and the Clinton campaign because they are able to buy influence. And that's how, unfortunately, our political system works at the moment. So now, all of a sudden, my talk just got a little bit less empowering, right? That feels pretty scary when you reflect on that, when you reflect on the impact and the influence that fossil fuels, which is talk, you know, Bill McKibbin refers to it as the most profitable industry in the history of money, right? That's what we're up against. How can we take action outside of that stranglehold? And to me, it's at the community level. So, you know, I want to talk about what I think is a really powerful, you know, sort of concept and important for us to sort of think outside of the box of how we've traditionally thought about our action on climate change. Tell me if this sounds familiar to you. You watch a documentary about climate change or you listen to a program and you go, my goodness, this thing is crazy. We really have to do something about it. And then at the end, there's a list of, here's what you can do as an individual, you know, put more air in your tires, eat lower on the food chain, you know, bring a tote bag to the grocery store, you know, use compostable straws, right? It's at a recycle, right? Ride your bike more. All of those are incredibly good things to do, right? And obviously here in San Francisco, we're probably among the leaders in the country on that, right? I mean, we've, you know, San Francisco allows us to, you know, power our homes and offices with clean energy. It allows us to compost, right? So we're obviously, you know, we have this incredible, you know, sort of system of bike lanes, right? You know, our buses run on clean electricity. So there is a very important piece of the puzzle, which is our individual action. But I think what most of us intuitively know is that I can change my habits and go, you know, zero emissions all I want, but that is only going to have a small impact on the broader scale of the problem. And that is what we need to address. And so you can feel very disencouraged and disempowered if all you're doing is individual action, right? Now, what about the flip side? The flip side of the coin is we're told to get involved politically, go to a march, call your senator, email your congressperson, sign this petition, right? And, you know, we really need to focus on every four years, you know, making sure that we get the Democrat in office. Well, again, look what I just described, right? President Joe Biden, you know, ran on being the climate president has already opened up more fossil fuel oil and lease oil and gas drilling leases than any president in history, more than Donald Trump, right? So, okay, yes, we obviously need to be getting politicians who care about climate change in office, but there's limits to what they can do as we see. So where does that put us? Well, to me, the answer that I outlined in the book is between those two ends, right? Between individual action and between waiting for our elected officials to solve the problem for us, there is a middle path, and that is at the community level, because at the community level, we can join forces with our neighbors. And we can create projects that are beneficial to our neighborhood, to our community, that are appropriate for our locality. And we can show real success. We can show that there's a real benefit. And it also helps that we're not doing it by ourselves, that we're working with others, because when we work with others, we realize that, hey, this is solvable. There are solutions here, right? I mean, again, San Francisco, John Muir, the father of conservationism, was an advocate who got together with a club, which ultimately became the Sierra Club, and advocated to protect the Marin headlands from becoming developed. Thankfully now, we as San Franciscans can go for a hike in this beautiful area right over the bridge, right? That idea of protecting wild lands spread across the country and spread across the world, right? We were the first country to establish national parks, and that concept has now gone around the world. In fact, one of the most exciting prospects that we have in the climate fight is that there's now an international agreement trying to get 30% of our wild lands and marine areas protected, meaning in a protected park or reserve by 2030, right? It's called 30 by 30, right? So again, think about that. John Muir found his climate courage, got together with his community, rallied to protect a little piece of land and think about the impact that that had over the course of the world. Speaking of the Sierra Club, I'll bring up a much more relevant example, which again to me demonstrates the power of community work and community-based solutions. So there's now a campaign at the Sierra Club called Ready for 100. And what Ready for 100 did is they trained volunteers around the country to advocate for 100% clean energy at the local level, whether that was their city, state, or county. And they were so successful in just a few short years at getting elected officials to commit to 100% clean energy that now one-third of Americans live in a place that's committed to 100% renewable energy. That's the power of community. It was the power of a handful of volunteers in each of these areas taking that step and making that a reality. So this is also the work that we do at Revolve. We train volunteers who we call our solar ambassadors. And of course, for those of you listening that are looking to get involved, I encourage you to look up our volunteer opportunities at revolve.org. And what we do is we go out and find local nonprofit organizations and we help them go solar. So our volunteers are actually getting together with a group of friends and convincing local nonprofits to put solar panels up. And they walk them through that process and they celebrate that ribbon cutting and they get that story in the news. And thus, we are creating new narratives. We are showing that clean energy as possible. For example, here in San Francisco, some of you might know a nonprofit called Project Arteau. It's been around for over 50 years and it's an artist live in community and studio, right, in the mission. And we just put solar panels on Project Arteau. We also put project we also put solar panels on other avenues. The food grocery cooperative out in the outer sunset right by Ocean Beach, right. So and that was just a group of volunteers getting together and making those projects happen. So you and your community can help a local nonprofit go solar. You can help create, you know, improved bike lanes. You can help a community garden get started. You can help, you know, a clothing swap and those types of things while they may seem small. If they're successful and you do a good job telling the story, then guess what? Then your neighbor is going to want to do the same thing. And then the next neighbor is going to want to do the same thing. And then the next city in the next town and it goes from San Francisco to the next city and so on and so forth. Until you start to have a movement across the country of communities becoming empowered to implement local solutions that make sense to them. And when you get a critical mass, that's when we change the cultural narrative and that's when we can really see change. So that's my talk. This is my book, Climate Courage, How Tackling Climate Change Can Build Community, Transform the Economy and Bridge the Political Divide in America. And again, thanks so much for tuning in. I look forward to chatting with you now about it. Thank you, Andreas. There's definitely some questions in the Q&A if you want to take a look there. Some of them are thank yous and some, um, yeah, there's quite a few. There's some simple ones and some complex ones. I'll let you, I'll let you jump in on those. Okay, great. All right, well, let's just start here at the top. This is out loud. So I heard a radio, this is someone asks, I heard a radio story about a farm in Boulder, Colorado who filled their acres with solar panels and continued to grow a solar garden. Not only producing energy but saving water, they ran into issue with local government issuing permits. It sounds like an amazing route to go. Are you aware of this farming style and why, when, how do we get big government and local government to change mindset? Great question. Yes, there is actually a number of examples of farms that are co-managing their land with both solar panels, sometimes also with wind turbines, as well as growing crops. You know, in fact, there are some crops that are particularly good to grow in the shade of a solar array. And this is, you know, again, in fact, actually I write about this in the book that of the top 10 states that produce renewable energy in per capita, in proportion to how many people they have in the state. Eight of the 10 are red states. Eight of the 10 are Republican states. And whereas this is basically a lot of states in the Midwest. This is places like Minnesota, Colorado, Texas, Kansas, Kansas, Nebraska, right, places with massive amounts of wind. And that's where farmers are saying, hey, wait a minute, I can grow my crops, I can do what I've been doing, and I can also create this entirely new earned revenue strategy for my business, for my farm. And yes, there is a tremendous amount of red tape around getting solar implemented. And because we don't have a national electricity policy, it varies state to state, which makes it even harder. And, you know, this is something I talk about in the book. There is, we're also up against the fossil fuel industry fighting us at the local level. So there's a group of hired guns called Alec, the American Legislative Exchange Council. You guys might be familiar with them because they fight on a whole host of issues from gun control to clean energy. And they're literally going into, you know, cities, towns and counties with drafted legislation that the fossil fuel industry has written, and their professionals going in fighting for these fossil fuel protecting policies. So we are, you know, a colleague in the movement, a professor at UC Santa Barbara, Dr. Lea Stokes wrote a book called short circuiting policy, and this book outlines in great detail, the number of, you know, policy fights that happen at the local level that make it difficult, you know, with the red tape for getting projects permitted. So that is a big fight. But again, the more stories, the more positive news that clean energy can get, especially when it's benefiting the community. Right. So again, with Revolve, we only solarized nonprofit organizations that benefit the community. So when those stories get out there, it becomes much harder for, you know, regulators to, you know, hurt the industry when they see how much benefit it's creating. Okay, let's see. Okay, I work in Texas, New Mexico, oil patch for the time being, there was an ExxonMobil internal meeting. In regard to their upcoming schedule, there is more work in their upcoming portfolio than ever before it was very sad to hear. That's true. Yeah, they are, they are, you know, the fossil fuel industry is, like I said, among the most profitable industries in the world, they're still doing very well. I will say, you know, an exciting bit of news was that a few months ago, activists through a very clever sort of way of working through the corporate channel were actually elected to the ExxonMobil board. There were two climate activists that managed to finagle their way onto the board through voter, through shareholder voting. And so there are ways of chipping away at this. You know, we also see Shell was recently found guilty by the Dutch government of climate crimes and are now being fined and now being penalized for that. So we're starting to see the cracks in the armor of the fossil fuel industry and it's important that we continue to fight that. I'm a wind energy major at Texas Tech University, which is where Catherine Hayhoe teaches, as I mentioned earlier, I'm getting ready to start a full-time environmental policy position with Stratically Energy, a renewable energy company headquartered in Durham, North Carolina. I recently finished your book and really appreciated the fact that you brought up specific policy positions. I found that we tend to talk around specific policy within renewable energy, within the renewable industry. I also appreciated your remarks on money within politics. Thank you, sir, for that comment. I appreciate that. I'm glad you like the book. And I think one of the things I'll mention that I think is really exciting is that, look, here's somebody who's majoring in wind energy at Texas Tech University. When I was in college, and I'm sure many others would agree, there weren't programs. It wasn't an option to major in wind energy. When I started, I was an econ major, and when I would talk about writing my research papers on solar energy, I always laughed at. And so even in a short amount of time, that has come a long way. So it is really important that we're all educating ourselves more. Let's see. What sort of permits were required from sites like other avenues? That's a great question. So basically what happens in that case is, we worked with other avenues to determine that, yes, we wanted to set up a, in that case, it was a 32 kilowatt solar installation. It was our largest at the time. And we would then apply for permitting through PG&E, as well as through the city of San Francisco. And so you have to get your building plans approved. You also have to get an interconnection agreement approved before you're able to build and turn on your system. Thankfully in San Francisco, and of course there are also rebates, so the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, at the time it was even better, but still offers very strong, in fact some of the best in the country rebates for solar energy for homeowners and businesses and nonprofits. So we are in a particularly lucky place to be, but that's again only because of the advocates that worked so hard, the organizers that worked so hard for decades to change the narrative and the political landscape here in San Francisco and in the rest of the state. But in many parts of the country that's not there yet. And that's because we haven't turned on enough people. We haven't gotten enough people excited and going down to rally and to push their legislators and hold them accountable. There's also a question that just came in through the chat, Andreas. I can read that to you if you want. Sure. Andreas, you've done a brilliant job with this subject. And in your book, I was, I was unaware that John Muir was, or John Muir was responsible for saving the Moran headlands. I have never heard that and wonder the accuracy. Huey Johnson, Marty Griffin, who is now 100 years old, have always been the heroes of saving the Moran headlands. Can you say more about that? Yeah, you know, I'm sure there were, like I said, it was it was a group effort, right? Obviously, you know, as I mentioned, it was, you know, people coming together from the community to protect that. But yeah, I mean, there is a reason why it's, you know, Muir Beach and, you know, Muir Woods, right, is, you know, John Muir started the Sierra Club, you know, here in the Bay Area protecting the Sierra Nevada mountain range, and particularly, you know, the areas in the headlands as far as I understand. And again, I'm, you know, absolutely, you know, sure that the people you mentioned here, you know, played a pivotal role in that as well, if not, you know, a leading role. But, you know, point being that, you know, John Muir is sort of credited as the first sort of pioneer of this concept of putting land aside, you know, without development. You know, again, you know, Hedge Hedge, you know, Yosemite, right? I mean, Yosemite was the very first, you know, protected what was at the time wilderness area in the country. And again, in the world. And that was because John Muir sort of had a strong relationship with Teddy Roosevelt, the president at the time, and who was also an avid conservationist. And they were able to partner to, you know, put aside Yosemite because of its, you know, incredible beauty and majesty that they agreed on, right? And then you had, you know, that became a trend that became this concept that then you had Yellowstone become the first National Park. And then obviously Yosemite became a national park later. And then we created the national park system. So, yes, I'm sure there's a lot of rich history around the headlands and the organizing that went on involved with that. And we're seeing that people can, when they get together, make things change. Thank you. And then there's just a couple other questions. One, I love this question because, you know, do you think SF will ever break free from PG&E? Break free. Well, I mean, we've actually, in a way broken free already. You know, for those of you that are, you know, familiar, we have a program in San Francisco called Clean Power SF. And most, and actually all of you have been automatically enrolled in it unless you decided to opt out of it. And what Clean Power SF does is while we use PG&E's power lines to deliver power to us, what we've actually done is created a, what's called a community choice aggregation program, which means that we have a independently run body that's with people who are voted on from the city that go out and procure clean energy for the residents of San Francisco. So we are actually already, you know, by default, 100% clean energy powered here in the city. You know, and we're not paying that, we're paying a portion of the bill to PG&E to deliver us the power. But the bulk of our bill is actually going to Clean Power SF, which is buying power, again, actually from, you know, Hetch Hetchy, mostly the hydro power there, which came about because of sort of John Meir and the conservation efforts. Of course, John Meir was opposed to flooding Hetch Hetchy, you know, creating the dam and the hydro power, you know, subsequently. But with the point being that, you know, we have positioned ourselves away from PG&E and in fact, that concept of community choice aggregation, which I talked about in the book, was started in Marin, the Marin Energy Authority was the first community choice aggregation program in the country, pioneered by, you know, our contemporaries just over a decade ago. And that, you know, Clean Power SF followed soon thereafter. Now there's East Bay Community Energy, and you have community choice programs across the state of California, and other states are following suit. It's a perfect example of what I'm talking about. When the community members get together and decide, hey, let's see what we can do to change things, you really can. And even breaking the hold of, you know, PG&E, which is the largest utility in the country. So, you know, we're not completely off of PG&E yet. And, you know, who knows what we have in the cards, but there is opportunities and growing ability for community members to sort of take our power back in our own hands. So to speak. Interesting. I don't think a lot of people know this about Clean Power SF. I mean, if you can stick around for two more, we have two more. Clarification, no, let's see. Will the expansion of solar power require the displacement of people from their land in order to construct new solar farms? Definitely not. No, that would be unjust and completely preposterous. And that's really unimportant. I'm glad you brought that up because there is an important piece here, which is that the clean energy future that we are working towards needs to also be an equitable future. It needs to be a just future. We need to make sure that the communities, particularly communities of color, particularly poor communities, disenfranchised communities that have historically bore the brunt of the fossil fuel industry. Places like Richmond, where, you know, they're in the shadow of the Chevron oil refinery and have experienced, you know, pollution for decades, right, higher rates of asthma and cancer and all these things. We need to make sure that the communities who have been on the front lines of the environmental justice atrocities that have happened are the ones that benefit first and most from the clean energy transition. So that needs to be an important component of whatever clean energy policies and, you know, actions that we take. You know, thankfully, again, we have seen, you know, President Biden has made environmental justice a strong piece of his plan, right? They have this EJ-40, which is to say 40% of all new investments, or 40% of the benefits of all of the clean energy work that they do is going to be focused on historically environmental justice communities. You know, again, there's difference between what's said and what's happening. So, you know, we'll see. But no, there's actually, you know, so much solar power. I mean, you could put solar panels on, you know, a few square miles, you know, in the desert where, you know, not displacing anybody that could power the entire world if you were able to, you know, ship it everywhere, right? So the point being that solar energy is everywhere on our rooftops. You know, there is plenty of space where people do not live, where wildlife will not be affected, and solar panels are only getting more and more effective, which means they'll take up less and less space. So no, there shouldn't have to be, you know, any impacts. There should not be any negative impacts on communities with the types of just, you know, clean energy transition that we're trying to achieve. Excellent. And one last question from our wind scholar. Do you see a, do you foresee an influx of renewable energy lobbying in the near future? I hope so. I hope so. And I think that, you know, there has been some successful efforts. So for example, you know, right now, as I'm sure many of you have been following the budget reconciliation bill, the Build Back Better Act, is sort of held up in Senate by a certain Joe Manchin, who, you know, is the largest now recipient of fossil fuel dollars in Congress, who has a $5 million stake in a coal brokerage. Within that, there has been a tremendous amount of climate and clean energy support, and, you know, particularly around tax credits, which have been one of the drivers of the clean energy industry over the last decade or so. We have had these investment tax credits from the federal government. And, you know, while a lot of other policies haven't gotten through, those have. And part of that reason is because there is more bipartisan consensus. As I mentioned, you know, eight of the top 10 states when it comes to clean energy per capita are Republican states. So you've got a lot of, you know, you've got businessmen and women from Kansas and places like this that are saying, Hey, I really like this investment tax credit. I like this wind energy business or the solar energy business. And that's, that lobbying arm is getting stronger. And, you know, we have, you know, we have the SIA Solar Energy Industries Association, which is an incredible trade association, fighting across the country for this. We have within California, we have CalSA, the California Solar and Storage Association, which has done a tremendous job. They actually just a few weeks ago, we've been here in California. We are, again, under attack from the investor owned utilities to, they're trying to kill solar, as they always do, right, because it undermines their business model. And CalSA was able to organize 100,000 petitions signed 100,000 signatures on their petition, which is a massive number to go to the California Public Utilities Commission to tell them to fight against this, this, you know, trying to kill of the killing of the solar industry. So, so there is more lobbying, there is more effort coordinated around this, but again, you know, we're pretty outmatched by the fossil fuel industry at the moment, but that is is going to change. And I want to point out, you know, one thing, you know, one of my local heroes from San Francisco is a woman named Reverend Sally Bingham. And Sally, I talk about in the book, she's actually one of the priests at Grace Cathedral. And she's most notably the founder of Interfaith Power and Light, which is a national effort to coordinate. I think they have over 30,000, maybe even 40,000 members at this point congregations of different faiths around the country who have joined the fight to lobby for clean energy and for climate solutions, and also transform their individual congregations, many of whom we've helped go solar, working together, right. So this is the type of story, you know, this was, you know, a woman who was driven by her own passion by her own conviction by her own faith, and was able to lead a national movement that's had a tremendous impact, right. So again, it's figuring out how can we bring together our community and do what's possible in our realm to really make those changes happen. Andres, that's awesome. And actually, Reverend Sally Bingham is on the call tonight and viewing the program. And we thank you both for being here. And thank you for answering all the questions and staying a little bit over time. I know our library community does appreciate that. And folks, I'm going to just close out with a screen share again so we look a little professional. Andres, we appreciate you being here tonight and library community as always we love you and appreciate you for being here as well. You can watch this again on YouTube and you can pick up that chat that I sent in the links for everything tonight. All right, friends. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Anisa. Thank you, everybody. Take care.