 Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to our briefing today about relief and housing assistance for COVID-impacted communities. I am Dan Bresset, the Executive Director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. ESI was founded in 1984 on a bipartisan basis by members of Congress to provide science-based information about environmental, energy, and climate change policies to policymakers. We've also developed a program to provide technical assistance to rural utilities interested in on-bill financing programs for their customers. Before we begin today, let me acknowledge that our briefing today is the latest collaboration between ESI and the Energy Efficiency for All Coalition. EFA unites people from diverse sectors and backgrounds to collectively make affordable, multifamily homes, energy, and water efficient. The four national partners that comprise the coalition Elevate Energy, Energy Foundation, National Housing Trust, and the Natural Resources Defense Council also support efforts across 12 states and brings together the Network for Energy, Water, and Health in Affordable Housing to develop innovative and collective solutions to increase access to healthy and affordable homes. If you'd like to learn more about EFA, you can visit the coalition online at www.energyefficiencyforall.org. On behalf of everyone at ESI, it is a privilege to work in partnership with EFA and share the good news of energy efficiency, multifamily housing affordability, healthy homes, and strong and resilient communities and equitable communities, even when we're dealing with a lot of bad news in so many places. Thanks very much to our EFA friends. Our discussion today will focus on relief and housing assistance for communities impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Along with our EFA partners, we have assembled a top-notch panel of experts and practitioners who will discuss housing affordability, public health, and energy efficiency from community, state, and federal perspectives. As a reminder at the outset, if you miss anything today or you would like to revisit the presentations later, everything we produce is available online at www.eesi.org. And while you're there, I hope you'll take a moment and sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter, Climate Change Solutions. While the planning for this briefing came together, the severe weather taxes in other parts of the country has presented an awful reminder of the precariousness in life that can threaten, with little notice, our ability to stay warm and healthy. And for too many of our neighbors, that precariousness is much more blatant. It sits right out in the open, whether it takes the form of staggering energy burdens, no-win choices between warmth, food and medicine, housing discrimination based on race, ethnicity, or economic status, or unhealthy indoor air quality and unsafe water. For these neighbors, their struggles were there before the big storm and very real, although much less apparent, based on the news coverage. As we hear our panelists present, the discussion will be purposefully relevant to the nationwide crises brought on and made worse by COVID-19, but also by the regional crises of extreme cold and a vulnerable energy grid. And the solutions you'll hear about will be relevant too, from programs that help families keep warm to basic energy efficiency improvements that make our homes healthier and happier places to live. Before I introduce our panelists, let me mention that we'd be glad to take your questions today as we go to help inform our discussion. If you have a question, you have two options to ask it. You can send us a message on Twitter at EESI online, or you can send us an email, EESI at EESI.org. And now it is my privilege to introduce our first panelist. Katrina Metzler is the Executive Director of the National Energy and Utility Affordability Coalition, a leading organization in the fields of public policy and advocacy for energy and poverty issues. Members of NEWAC include utilities, non-profit organizations, energy assistance programs, trade associations, and tribal organizations. NEWAC currently serves more than 200 member organizations that span the nation. The organization bridges the gap between states, social service organizations, and government to empower them to work together and learn from each other in times of energy and poverty crisis. Welcome, Katrina. Thanks for joining us today. I'm looking forward to your presentation. Thank you so much. It is an honor to be here, along with my co-presenters, especially Tony Reems, who I fan girl on Twitter on a pretty regular basis. So thank you for having me, and thank you to EESI and EFF for organizing this event. It couldn't be more timely and relevant, I think, today. My part in this presentation as an advocate for financially struggling Americans is to describe the very real human impact of current events on energy security for those who are most vulnerable to temperature extremes. We're in the middle of a crisis that I believe that our grandchildren are going to learn about someday in history class, and it is largely up to the 117th Congress how history is going to write that story and whether it is a story of tragic failures or daring achievements. We've been fighting the novel coronavirus for over a year now. It's been over a year. I know everyone is tired, and your offices are under a great deal of pressure. But I also have hope that because you're here today, there's a chance to turn this around and put the health and safety of our country first by funding programs like the U.S. Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP. And that's what's on your screen right now. For those of you who might be unfamiliar with the program, LIHEAP is America's cornerstone energy safety program. We provide flexible funds to states to improve energy affordability and prevent or address crisis situations. It's federally administered by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Administration of Children and Families Office of Community Services. It's a block grant that was established in 1981, and that was under the Reagan Administration. Over the years, we've enjoyed bipartisan support for the program, and we continue to do so. That's probably the reason for our longevity. We'll be celebrating our 40th year this year. Because it is a block grant, that means Congress appropriates funds annually. This is where you all come in. It is not an entitlement program. The difference being, with programs like SNAP, for example, as the need increases, funds increase proportionately. With LIHEAP, we have an annual appropriation. And even if there is a line around the block for services, when the money is gone, it's gone. So advocacy becomes very important. And conversations like these become very important to continuing that funding and making sure that people are taken care of. The normal federal funding for LIHEAP is about $3.7 billion, and that's enough to serve about 6 million households. And we'll talk in another slide about what percentage of households that actually serves. On the next slide, you will see that one out of three households that are helped by LIHEAP went without food for at least one day in the past year. One thing that's been underscored by the current crisis is the intersectionality of food insecurity, housing insecurity, and energy insecurity. So this statistic is from 2018. I think it's important to know that people are not making choices between things like driving through Starbucks or brewing a pot of coffee at home. They're making life or death decisions about necessities like food or utilities and which one they can afford, medicine or utilities. On the next slide, you'll see that three out of 10 households that received LIHEAP also reported that they had to use their kitchen stove at some point in the past 12 months to heat their home. I know that's a jarring statistic, and this is before the pandemic. I'm sure you've all heard about the dangerous temperatures and the uncommon weather patterns that are plaguing much of the United States right now. I have been constantly texting and checking in on my friends and our members in Texas to make sure that they're okay, and many of them are without power and have been since Sunday. So please keep them in your thoughts. If you picked up the Washington Post this morning, you might have read this paragraph. The cold has killed the young and the old. It has claimed the lives from southern Texas to northern Ohio, and authorities expect the toll to rise in the coming days with frigid weather lingering hundreds of thousands without electricity and millions without clean water. That's the situation we're in right now. This is what we have to address. 47 people have died since Sunday, and that number is certain to grow as first responders make it out to homes to do wellness checks. Sorry, that's my dog. Welcome to working from home. This is a crisis. It's a crisis within a crisis, something that we've never had to deal with before, and I don't think anybody expected the temperatures to be what they are this winter. On Monday night, a mother tucked her son into a heap of blankets in Texas. The family had no heat. It was 12 degrees outside, and Christian Pineda never woke up. He was 11 years old. On the banks of the Ohio River near where I grew up, two elderly women died of hypothermia. One was 77 years old, and she'd lost power in her home. Her family couldn't reach her because of the storm. She was someone's grandmother. She was someone's neighbor, and she'd managed to survive the pandemic this long, and now she is gone in the cold. On the next slide, I have some data that's really relevant to the current situation. I wanted to make you aware that the LIHEAP program has received some supplemental funding to help out with all these economic repercussions of the pandemic. 900 million last April in the CARES Act was given to LIHEAP to address the enormity of these utility arrearage problems, and at that point, we really didn't know what we were going to be dealing with. We have a lot more knowledge now and a lot more information, which is what I've tried to provide on the next couple of slides. Need is estimating that 15 to 20 percent of residential customers are at least 60 days behind on their utility bills, and I know some of my co-presenters will have a lot more detailed information on data and research about the issue. We're trying to walk and chew gum at the same time in the pandemic, so gathering information about what's happening as it is still in progress. That's been a huge challenge for those of us who are program and content area experts. I have to believe that if we had additional funding for LIHEAP, maybe we would have been able to do something about what's going on across the country right now. Maybe we would have been able to establish warming centers in areas where there was still electricity or provide generators and blankets, emergency shelter, but we will never know because LIHEAP emergency contingency funds haven't been appropriated for 10 years, not since 2011. There are a variety of reasons for that, and some of them are valid and some maybe not, but after reading the news, I'm adding that to my list of funding priorities, and I wanted to bring it up today. Emergency contingency funds for LIHEAP were designed for times just like this, and I think we need to reconsider putting that back in the budget. Electric and natural gas arrearages, the last bullet point on this slide, those are expected to reach $32 billion. Actually, they've already hit that at the end of last year, and they're still going up by about $987 million every month throughout the pandemic. So, based on the analysis by NIDA, $32 billion by the end of 2020 and continuing to rise, that is a number that is hard to fathom. So, I tried to think of a way that we could make this more visible for you, and on the next slide, you will see that $32 billion, $1 bills if they were laid end to end would circle the earth 128 times. That's the arrearage issue that we are challenged that we are dealing with right now. And so, when we see those arrearages piling up month after month, and we know that unemployment and our vulnerable households are becoming more vulnerable and people who are living paycheck to paycheck are now falling into vulnerability, that is why it's so pressing for you to hear presentations like this and understand that issue so that you have the information that you need to do your job very well and ensure that funds are directed in a way that protects the health and safety of your constituents. On the next slide, just a few more statistics from the data part of my presentation. One and three, the most important one on this slide though, I want to leave plenty of time for my co-presenters to talk, but the important thing is I think one and three households being behind on their utility bills in some states. That's incredible. So, when we look at and ask for LIHEAP, it's really difficult to judge how to make an appropriate request to deal with the enormity of the issue. So, working together with partners like we have on the call today and also at the community level, our government agencies, and trying to understand the intersectionality of these issues and how at the grassroots community level, we can address these households. The same households are suffering, you know, from a lot of these same issues and it is really up to us to do our very best to serve them. Having the next bullet point down that 22% of utility customers reporting that they've reduced or put off expenses for basic needs, that's a significant increase over what we normally see and that should worry you that they're putting off basic needs like medicine and food in order to pay their utility bills. In addition to that, we have layered on top that schools are virtual and 42% of the labor force is working from home full-time. I've heard a lot of talk about access to broadband, but you have to have access to power in order to ensure that education is accessible for millions of children at home right now. I wanted to speak just briefly to shut off moratoria. It's possible that some of my co-presenters will talk in more depth about this and I'll leave it to them to justify a national moratorium which has been an ongoing topic of conversation in policy and legislative circles. I personally think that LIHEAP is the answer. I think that this is a human needs crisis and LIHEAP is meant to address human crisis. The flexibility of that funding makes it well spent and also I think the fact that we've been around for 40 years and we have a robust network of providers who are ready to hit the ground running and do what they do best and help people makes it a program that should be considered for funding in the next in the next bill. The moratoria protect access to energy but they really don't do anything to help pay the bills when they inevitably come due. So this is back to the arrearages and watching those numbers climb and climb month after month. They don't make homes more energy efficient but LIHEAP can do that. We are the largest provider of weatherization which is an income eligible residential energy efficiency program and that helps the aging housing stock that a lot of our folks live in. It lowers their energy bills we can replace appliances with more efficient ones for people who could never afford those necessities any other way. Our request to you is ten billion dollars in supplemental LIHEAP funds and that sounds like a big number until you consider what the arrearage totals are looking like and the crisis that we see across the country based on weather right now. We have we have hopes that the 4.5 billion that was proposed by the house will be picked up and that through reconciliation we can expect at least that much for help with LIHEAP. 50 percent of whatever we get would be used to pay off energy debt for the for up to 4 million households at $10 billion or 50 percent of current bills for 7.7 million households who need help between now and September 30th. We have some resources that you might be interested in. One of them this is pulled from our website and we are actually updating these today with FY20 information. We just got it the household information on LIHEAP. This pulls in numbers from each state LIHEAP director on how funding was spent and on whom it was spent each year and we dropped that into a one pager and we have it accessible on our website at newac.org by state. So I picked Texas and for obvious reasons but the one number that I wanted to point out to you it's so small you probably can't see it but there's a red band on the left hand side page and it says that we were only able to reach 7 percent of eligible households in Texas in 2019. That's one of the lowest ratios in the country and that's what the current level of funding is able to do in a state where people are even as we speak dying in their homes from exposure. This was before COVID before additional moratorium were imposed and I have to believe that that number is woefully inadequate. We can do better than that and it's directly related to insufficient funding for LIHEAP. The human element I wanted to include some pictures of our front lines so on this slide you'll see some of our folks performing weatherization and energy efficiency measures which can be done with LIHEAP funds again. There's a picture in the middle of someone sitting in something called an ice house and that's one of the fundraisers that our fuel fund providers regularly perform annually in order to raise money at the local level to support what LIHEAP cannot. So when we don't get the help from the federal government we work at the grassroots level with our partners to raise funds in as many creative and interesting ways as we can and literally they build a house out of ice and people sit in the house for 30 minute increments and people sponsor them to do so. Gets a lot of attention and so if you are in a state that sponsors a nice house when times are better you should go and check it out. It's a pretty interesting thing. We also will be in your neighborhood on the 24th of this month next week is LIHEAP Action Day. So you may have already received a request for an appointment from us. We will have advocates hitting the hill to tell you what the impact has been and their specific communities and how you can help with LIHEAP. I know we're saving questions for the end so I will turn it back over to my friends at EESI. Thank you. Thank you for that presentation Katrina thanks so much and thanks especially for providing us with such recent numbers about the situation that's really great that you were able to do that for us today. Thank you. It is my privilege to introduce our next panelist. Andronica Morris is the Executive Director of Housing NOLA, a 10-year partnership between the Greater New Orleans Housing Alliance, the Foundation for Louisiana and the City's Office of Housing and Community Development with dozens of public private and non-profit organizations working to solve New Orleans's affordable housing crisis. Andronica has established connections with community members, governmental officials and the media to successfully promote the agenda, the low to mixed income housing in the Greater New Orleans region, and many people consider our next panelist to be a key player in the rebuilding of that great city. Welcome to our panel today. It's our privilege to host you and I'm really looking forward to your slides. Thank you. Thank you so much Dan and I want to thank everybody at EESI for providing us with this opportunity to speak on this issue and to talk about this and I you're going to see multiple titles for me because I have a couple of hats here in Louisiana which is don't panic if you see multiple hats. So what I want to talk to you all today about is our new strategy which is around a housing guarantee which lines up with our concepts around put housing first. We want to make sure that we are guaranteeing housing because we think that that is what's necessary and vital to actually end the affordable housing crisis. Next slide. Oh, am I advancing myself because I missed that part. That's oh thank you. As Dan mentioned, I run Housing No Love. That is our 10-year plan to end affordable housing and we do that through a very complicated but very an ambitious set of goals and priorities including this, our annual report card. Next slide. The report card is incredibly important because we're talking about priorities and we're talking about how we achieve things and these are some of the victories that we've had including launching our fix the mix strategy which is our version of a mandatory inclusionary zoning. Next slide. And all of that is it's important to us because we know that housing is central and necessary to opportunity and that's why we talk about put housing first. We put this in those very explicit terms particularly for those of you or policy makers because that is what is required. As you see here, we've broken down why housing is incredibly important. These are things that people know. Where you live is how you have opportunities, how you have access to resources. We talk about the social determinants of health at nauseam. We hear people talk about the fact that your zip code is an indicator of where you can end up in life but we don't spend a lot of time talking about how people end up in that zip code about the actual housing. It is almost as if it magically happens and we look at all of these other indicators. Next slide. We talk about education. We talk about access to resources, transportation. We do not talk about housing. We do not put housing first and that is because of discrimination and bias. The way we think about housing now, the problems around it are rooted in very straightforward anti-black racism that is rooted in two stereotypes, the welfare queen stereotype and the worthy poor stereotype. We can demonstrate. We have had a flurry of authors do incredible research over the last few years who break down the systemic inequities that is rooted in anti-black racism that prevents us from moving forward even when we have good systems in place, even when we have rules in place because we have not unpacked that bias to address those issues and it stops us in the midst of this kind of pandemic. It has stopped us from doing the thing that is necessary which is put housing first. We have had a series of catastrophes in the last few years, in the last year starting with COVID that requires housing. COVID, we told everyone to shelter at home. We told everyone to shelter at home in order to avoid the pandemic but we have not done what is necessary to guarantee housing for all. Next slide. That is because we have not unpacked the biases. We see these numbers about home ownership rates dropping for African Americans after the 2008 financial crisis and we still have not done what is necessary to address those issues. Next slide. We have to deal with this. This is also rooted in the fact that African Americans and Latinos are also struggling with income or struggling with wealth. Next slide. Because home ownership is a key way for people to build wealth in this country but it is something that is disproportionately denied to African Americans and Latinos to people of color. We have seen again a flurry of research out there talking about how African American homes are actually valued as less by the general rule preventing them from building wealth. It is not a matter of we do not have enough money. That is part of it certainly but it is also a matter of our priorities. It is a matter of what we are spending our money on. This slide is incredible. It is done by our friends at the Atlanta Federal Reserve and it talks about how much money we are spending and subsidizing. We are subsidizing homeowners who make more than $200,000 a year more than any public subsidy program in this country combined. More than we are spending for tax credits. More than we are spending for section 8. More than we are spending for public housing. Putting those together we are giving homeowners who make more than $200,000 a year more housing subsidies than those groups combined. That is not a failure to we are spending the money on the wrong things. We are not helping the people who need help. We are not talking about housing subsidy in the notion of a guarantee while we are letting people who live in McMansions get housing subsidies. We need to talk about it in those terms. We need to talk about it that explicitly and that expressly. Next slide. We are not doing that despite the fact that these crises disproportionately impact low to moderate income folks. They are the essential workers right now. They are the people who are keeping us fed and watered while we sit at home getting Uber Eats and getting groceries delivered. Who are working in our stores? Who are repairing the vehicles? Who are driving those cars? People making minimum wage in some cases risking their lives and still not being able to assure themselves and their families that they can take care of them. This was a crisis before COVID. It was a crisis before the wildfires and the horrible wildfire season and hurricane season we had in the last year and it was before this polar vortex. If we had a commitment to house everyone to guarantee housing, we would have a solution. Katrina talked about what we needed and how it works. We need to embrace that. Next slide. We haven't done that yet. That's what we want to talk about here today. It's also a matter of the numbers. We are not thinking about this correctly when we talk about investing. I want to make sure that everyone when you go back to your offices and you think about the proposal for a $15 minimum wage and you talk about what the living wage is in a place like Louisiana. The unemployment insurance that was offered was $15 an hour in a state where the rental wage is $17 an hour. Where MIT's living wage says it's $23 an hour. So before we turn our noses up at $15 an hour and talk about how hard it is, let's make sure everybody is clear on what we're missing and how many people we are leaving out. And I'm certainly not negating a $15 an hour minimum wage. I think it actually will do a lot of the things that Katrina mentioned. It will allow us to stretch the subsidy dollars farther. It will allow us to help more people and it will let us if we have the will to prioritize housing and to put it first, it will allow us to reallocate those subsidies and make sure that they are more effective. One of the arguments might be against making sure that we end housing subsidies for people who make more than $200,000 a year. Could be well, you know, we don't have enough money to help everyone. Right now, SMS tell us that currently we have enough funding to help everyone in four people who qualify for public housing. So doubling the front for Section 8, doubling that resources and combining that with an increase minimum wage gets us closer than we ever have been before. Next slide. And we've been working on this here in Louisiana. I'm going to skip through these really quickly, if you don't mind, here in Louisiana and why that's so important and why it's incredible that we have to have these conversations. So next slide. We've had a myriad of natural disasters, you know, Lake Charles and New Orleans. Katrina, sorry Katrina, Hurricane Katrina is the, you know, the beginning of the modern disaster era. I'm sure you don't get that at all Katrina. And it is it has set the stage. And last year, we got an unpleasant book end with our neighbors in Lake Charles where they have been devastated. Next slide with a storm that has just put them on their backs and they're trying to dig their way out of it. That combined with COVID, it's a very traditional affordable housing crisis that they had where it was textbook gentrification. And again, the unwillingness to deal with the racial bias and the racial animus that stops us from embracing a put housing first strategy. Next slide. And we're going to, you can just keep clicking through these very quickly. We want to talk about why it's necessary to do these kinds of things in the Lake Charles area. The COVID crisis has exploded there as well. We need about, you know, millions of dollars to help stabilize folks. And I also want to be clear, I have to echo Katrina's comments about the fact that while moratoriums are helpful, we do, we cannot, we cannot, we absolutely cannot beggar these folks down with more debt that they cannot, they cannot dig their way out of. We have to guarantee housing by making sure we have the resources to cover it. We have to create housing opportunities and we have to use the resources that have been made available under this administration. Next slide. There has been a new executive order that would address FEMA of funding and make sure that it's 100% reimbursable. We need our local governments using those funds and accessing them and making available not just for victims of hurricanes, not just for victims of frosts, but for COVID victims who were evicted before these storms and before this crisis happened. We can do that. We need to be using this network of vacant hotels and vacant homes and apartments. Short-term rentals need to be made available to house vulnerable populations like the homeless, the formerly incarcerated, and again, people who have been evicted despite the fact that we have eviction moratoriums in place. I will disagree with Katrina on one thing. The one area where I think we need a moratorium as quickly as possible is for water. Most water is managed by our locals and while we, by our local municipalities, and that we need a moratorium on yesterday. We need it so that no one can deprive any American of water, of running water in the middle of a global pandemic. So I'm going to go ahead and wrap this up because we were going to take some more questions, but I did want to go ahead and make that point that we want to, because that about my own time, my damn, that we wanted to make sure that the message we left you with is that we need to put housing first and we need to be guaranteeing housing opportunities, making sure that people can be safe, stable through this crisis and the next. We can solve this. We have the resources being made available. We've got to make sure that there's home ownership funding, that there's funding for stabilizing renters, that there's money for keeping the lights on and keeping water going, and once we stabilize everyone, we can then talk about getting ourselves out of COVID and then making sure that we are prepared to not find ourselves in the same boat when the next crisis hit. Because what the last year has told us is that we live in a new disaster era. That is where we live now. There is nothing else to be done. It almost feels like the plagues of Egypt at this point, but it is where we live now because of climate change and because of, again, the systemic bias and racism that has permeated this country's history. This is where we are now. We have to acknowledge that and we have to do what's necessary to get ourselves out of it. Thank you all so much and I'll be around for questions later. Well, thank you for that amazing presentation. When I introduced you, I said I was looking forward to your slides and that may have struck people as awkward. That's a strange way to introduce. We have to remember, folks in our audience, I get a chance to see these slides before you all do. And so I knew what was in store for us. And so I was actually looking forward not just to the presentation, but to the slides for all that data. Speaking of slides, before I introduce our next panelist, I wanted to do two quick reminders. If you would like to go back, watch any of this or access any of the slides as well as written summaries, et cetera. ESI posts everything online. You can find us there at www.esi.org. If you are following along with us today, and I know many of you are, if you have questions for us, we'll get to the questions after our fourth panelist. If you have questions you'd like to ask, you can follow us on Twitter at EESI online or you can send us an email at EESI.org. And now speaking of Twitter, who according to Katrina has is a must follow on Twitter, is our next panelist, Tony Reems. He's an assistant professor at the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan. He is a multidisciplinary scholar with degrees in engineering and social science. And his research agenda seeks to connect the areas of technological advancement and policy process and social equity. His research extends environmental justice scholarship to focus on energy justice as well. He is currently exploring disparities in residential energy generation, consumption and affordability, focusing on the production and persistence of the inequality by race, class and place. And like I said, he is a must follow on Twitter, so hopefully he'll plug his Twitter handle and we can all catch up to where Katrina is right now. Tony, welcome to our panel today. It is a pleasure to see you and I'm looking forward to your presentation as well. All right. Thank you so much for that introduction, Dan. And it's amazing to follow Katrina and Andrenica. And great to be on the panel with Lauren as well. So I'm a fanboy of all three of you as well and EESI. Thank you everybody really quickly. I think my slide is up. I'm really going to talk today about energy efficiency. And again, I think it follows Katrina and Andrenica's discussion about energy affordability and the importance of place, race and class. And really thinking about how we can fund energy efficiency in an efficient and effective way. So on the next slide, I like to always show this question just because I think this moment, the syndemic as some of the public health scholars are calling it, really makes us think about what is a basic human right. And a lot of times I like to ask is energy access a basic human right? And if something like the pandemic and what's happening in Texas, the wildfires in California does not make us realize that access to energy is so important. I don't know if we'll ever get that. Next slide, please. And so I think both Katrina and Andrenica talked about this energy insecurity is not new. It has existed pre-pandemic. And for one of the first times being able to see this on a national scale with data from the federal government, looking at the residential energy consumption survey, we found out that one in three US households face some type of energy and security. And what I have here on the slide is those three areas that they looked at, whether receiving a disconnect notice, keeping your home at an unhealthy temperature or reducing or foregoing basic necessities just to try to keep your energy connected. And you can see that that varies temporally, right? Some people will experience it almost every month. Some people experience it some months and some people have, you know, one to two months out of the year kind of, you know, a blips in energy and security. But again, one in three US households face energy and security. Next slide, please. And I'm not a geographer, but I play one in my research. This also varies across place. And so we can see across the country that 28% of households in the Midwest experience energy and security all the way up to 35% when we look at our southern states. And on the left hand side, you can see just the veracity and the number of households that we're talking about that are experiencing energy and security and need to rely on the program like LIHEAP that Katrina talked about and why we need additional funds for that program. Next slide, please. But we must recognize that the pandemic did exacerbate this challenge. And so some colleagues of mine at Indiana University looked at how did the impact of receiving a stimulus check vary across people in their experience of energy and security. And we also found that there was disparity in the experience across racial groups. And so African Americans, 16% of African Americans experienced energy and security because of the pandemic, 19% of Hispanic Latinx households compared to about 9% of White households. And so there are some racial implications when it comes to who are the most vulnerable populations and how any shift in the system really impacts them differently. Next slide, please. So I begin this work during our last crisis during the economic recession of 0809. And I was doing my research and found this report from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. And this was how the executive summary of that report started in 2004. And this is where African Americans or U.S. energy policy is concerned. African Americans are proverbial canaries in the mine shaft. And so one of the things I want to talk about is this connection between race recognizing that our country still is very racially segregated and where people live and how that impacts things like energy efficiency. Next slide, please. And so we can see here if we take national consumption and we look across racial groups, the orange bar on both charts are kind of the national average. And inherently or on average, White households consume more energy than Black, Asian, and Hispanic or Latinx households. And I like to show this because there is some conflict between the way we approach energy efficiency across the country. Some of the goals are to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as quick as possible. And so to do that, you need to target the highest energy consumers. So inherently, in a strategy that targets the highest energy consumers will be biased toward White households and leave households of color out of being targeted for energy efficiency programs. On the right-hand slide is energy use intensity, which is a measure that allows us to compare apples to apples. And it allows us to take energy consumption and divide it by the square foot of home, recognizing that households of color often live in smaller homes and consume less energy as you can see on the left-hand slide. But what you end up seeing when you look at energy use intensity is that Black and Hispanic Latinx households actually consume more energy per square foot. So using more energy to heat the same amount of space when compared to White and Asian households. And that's a proxy for energy efficiency. And so if your energy use intensity number is higher, that means your home is less efficient. And so if we're targeting energy efficiency, we should definitely recognize disparities in energy efficiency across race. Next slide, please. And so again, I want to use a case study in Detroit. So snow on the ground here. It's really cold. Energy efficiency is very important. We look at what's happening in Texas and think about what could have been different if homes were more efficient when places are faced with these extreme temperature. And so the left slide is going to show this idea of racial segregation. And so the darker color areas are where you see more households of color. The right-hand slide here is that electricity consumption map. The darker areas are households that are consuming more consumption. And so I show this to demonstrate the importance of place and the importance or the disparity in the burden that certain communities face. And so what we see here is that communities surrounding the center city where you have most of your communities of color, the suburban areas are consuming a lot more energy, right? And we know where the generating plants are for that energy. And so they are located with more closer to the city of Detroit where you have most of your population of color. And so you have most of your higher income white households consuming the most energy, but your low income and communities of color hosting the energy generation being polluted by that generation. Next slide, please. And then when we try to understand where are the inefficient homes, we can see again in a lot of those areas where a lot of the energy was being consumed, the homes in those areas are a lot more efficient. And so you see a lot more yellow on the right hand side now out in the suburbs, but a lot more red in the area where you have communities hosting dirty generation, but their homes are less efficient. And so again, they're using more energy to heat and cool the same amount of space as the high consumers out in the suburbs that are living in the most efficient housing. Next slide, please. And if we try to understand how does this kind of imbalance between consumption and efficiency look across different socioeconomic groups, we can see that higher income households are consuming more energy, but their inefficiency goes down, right? So they consume a lot of energy, but they consume it efficiently. Areas that have more households in poverty consume less energy, but they're consuming it more inefficiently. So they're spending and wasting money on their consumption. Same thing with education. Ironically, when we looked in Detroit, there was not a lot of difference or statistical difference in consumption across households by color, and that's because it's cold for everybody. But you do see that significant difference when it comes to efficiency. And so areas that had more white households, the homes were more efficient in black and Hispanic communities, the homes were a lot more inefficient. And then the split incentive we see when it comes to renters and owners. So when you had more owners, people consumed a lot more energy, but again, consumed it more efficiently. And so renters are really struggling with living in inefficient housing as well. Next slide, please. And so now we're working on what does this look like across the country? And you can see in the winter areas are cold areas, a lot of energy consumed for heating. And this is at the county level, but when you drill in, you can see the disparities across the state. And again, I just want this as a visual that place is really important. And we should be thinking about implementing our programs in a place-based approach. Next slide, please. So some people could say, well, why don't households of color, low-income people just buy more inefficient technology? And this is a study that we did in Detroit looking at, if it's that simple, let's take something as simple as light bulbs. And so as you all are thinking about policies and programs that you can implement and to increase access to energy efficient technology, this study shows that access and affordability of something as simple as an LED light bulb is not equal across communities. And so we divided the Detroit area into four categories, ranking them by poverty. So from less than 10 percent poverty zip codes to more than 40 percent poverty zip codes. And so on the left, we were looking at in stores, if someone walked into a store in their neighborhood based on the poverty in that neighborhood, were they likely to find an LED bulb? And so if you look at the yellow bar going down, so in the higher income areas, about, you know, 91 percent of stores carried LED bulbs. But when we went to the high poverty areas, just over half of the stores carried LED bulbs. So practically, someone could go into a store and they may or may not find an LED bulb, but all of those stores had the least efficient incandescent bulb, which that's something we could all work on is getting rid of incandescent bulbs. And another difference was the price variation across these communities. And so you can see, take the orange bar on the right hand slide, the price for an LED bulb in the high income neighborhoods was much lower than it was in the high poverty areas. And what we found was the incandescent bulb price actually went down in the poor neighborhoods. And so if a person is facing poverty, they're in an area with greater than 40 percent poverty, and you find a dollar bulb versus an eight dollar bulb, you're more likely to get the least efficient, cheapest bulb. And that price to actually upgrade was two times in the poor neighborhoods that it was in the more wealthy neighborhoods. And people may ask why. One of the reasons is because the utilities were more likely or state programs were more likely to partner with the big box stores than small mom and pop or corner stores, which are not located in poor communities. And so an outreach with stores, I mean, we can compare this to the PPP program. If you don't have relationships with the people that are providing the funds, it's less likely that the people that depend on that organization will get the funds. Next slide, please. And another area or a gap that we can find is what we call the energy efficiency doughnut hole. And so we have programs that are for low income households and we have higher income households who have good credit that can actually, you know, finance their own programs. But what about the people in the gap, the people who make just, you know, too much money to qualify for 200% of federal poverty, but, you know, may have ruined their credit during the last economic recession. Where do they fit and how do we protect them? And so when we did the study in Michigan, we found that one in eight households are about 460,000 households fall into this energy efficiency coverage gap. This is another area where we can create policy that streams across the spectrum of income groups and qualifications to actually fund programs for people that are in that gap. We did a small pilot in Michigan with our Green Bank and one of our utility companies to say, how can we increase some energy efficiency or some low cost funding for those households? Because we know that they can't qualify for government programs and they could never do this energy efficiency themselves. So as we think about future stimulus and future programs, can we make sure that we are covering the full spectrum of households that need to retrofit their homes? Next slide, please. And so just really quick and conclusion. I wanted you to take away from this that there are spatial, racial and socioeconomic disparities and residential energy efficiency and affordability that I know Lauren will talk about, as well as even just access to technology. And so how do the programs and funding that we create address those issues? We know that place is important, that energy efficient homes or less efficient homes are spatially clustered. And so can we take a targeted community based approach to any of the funding? If we take Biden's 40% commitment to doing clean investment in environmental justice communities, recognizing that a targeted community based approach can help us overcome the unique challenges that communities face, but also increase participation and remove technology and other access barriers. Next slide, please. And I'm sorry I have to jump off because I'm presenting at another conference today, but please feel free to reach out to me and thank you to my co-panelists. I'm super excited to continue this conversation and thank you EESI for this opportunity today. Thank you, Tony. It's our privilege to have you today and good luck at your next presentation. I hope that goes well. Our fourth panelist today is going to sort of go even deeper down sort of the road on energy efficiency. And that is Dr. Lauren Ross. Lauren joined AC Tripoli, the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy in 2014 and has served most recently as the director of its local policy program. She's led research on the intersection of energy efficiency, affordable housing, and local climate action planning. Lauren lodged AC Tripoli's pioneering research on energy burdens, which we at EESI site very routinely. She has expanded the organization's work on municipal policy and provided new resources to local policymakers, building relationships with officials, utilities, and community groups across the country. Welcome, Lauren. It's great to see you today. I'm looking forward to your presentation. Great. Thanks, Stan. And thanks for that introduction. Hi, everyone. This has been an amazing panel. I feel really excited to be a part of it. And I thank EESI for the invitation to present. As mentioned, I'm Lauren Ross, senior director of policy with AC Tripoli. For those of you not familiar with AC Tripoli, we are a non-profit research organization committed to advancing energy efficiency as a leading strategy to tackle climate change in a way that works for everyone. And we work across sectors and focus on policy at the local, state, federal, and utility levels. Next slide. I'm going to see if there we go. Sure, if it's working. Could you go to the next slide, please? So I'll start today with a brief overview of the problem. I feel like much of this has already been discussed today, but I'll really hone in on the role of energy efficiency and the multiple benefits it offers in economic recovery and combating climate change. Next slide. Pre-COVID research from AC Tripoli has pointed to the high energy burdens faced by certain groups across the U.S. in both urban and rural areas. And when we say energy burdens, we're referring to annual electric, gas, and other heating fuel costs as a percentage of income. Next slide. We've replicated this analysis a few times now and each time find stark differences in energy burdens among low-income and non-low-income households. In fact, our most recent study, we found that low-income households devote three times more of their income to energy costs than their more affluent counterparts. Disproportionate burdens were also identified among those living in multi-family buildings, the elderly, Black, Hispanic, and Native American households. Next slide. And looking at median energy costs isn't always as helpful. So I present this figure here to show just how worse off some households are. So if you look at the right hand column, the orange bars, you see it shows for a host of cities that a quarter of its their low-income population devotes upwards of 15 percent to energy costs. That's a staggering amount. We typically consider six to be a high energy burden, three, four to be affordable. In many cities across the country, you're seeing well over 10 percent for the majority of its low-income residents. Next slide, please. So when we think about energy burdens, it's important to recognize that they aren't correlated with high or low rates. I think that's a common assumption. Instead, there's a number of physical economic policy and behavioral factors that account for such burdens. Tony mentioned a few of those reasons just a minute ago. But I'd also add to that list poor insulation, faulty HVAC systems, lack of investment in clean, affordable technologies, sudden and chronic economic hardship, and at times a lack of awareness about conservation measures. Next slide. And why does this matter? I think, as we all pointed out today, we're in the midst of an affordability crisis now and we see the negative impacts. But in general, there has been a host of real issues associated with high energy burdens, including poor indoor air quality, increased cases or instances of asthma, COPD, increased stress, risk of shutoffs, greater reliance on payday lending, and for many, this means an inability to build wealth. Next slide. So as I just said, I think it goes without saying that the pandemic and then suing health and economic crisis have really exacerbated challenges of energy affordability. Utility customers owe more than 40 billion in COVID-19 debt. And the need for assistance has also been made clear. Recent research suggests that moratoria on utility shutoffs and evictions led to reduce COVID-19 infections and potentially related deaths. So the need for long-term solutions, I think, has been also stressed along with the crisis. Next slide, please. So enter the role of efficiency. I'll start by referencing a recent op-ed by Paula Glover, the new president of the Alliance to Save Energy, where she referenced energy efficiency as an environmental justice strategy, saying she's convinced it's the best and most equitable way to address climate change. I think this is a useful frame for understanding the current housing and energy crisis and how energy fits in. And I'll again attempt to talk about some solutions today within that framework. Next slide, please. So we think about energy efficiency. We see it as a long-term solution to high burdens and a more affordable housing in the long term. Energy efficiency, especially comprehensive home retrofits, helps customers immediately with energy utility bill savings, but also over the long term in reducing energy costs and ideally reducing the long-term need for bill assistance. These investments also deliver well-documented health and safety benefits, such as asthma mitigation and thermal comfort. And here I have circled in red this donut graph here is an attempt to capture the amount of funding that goes towards bill assistance and energy efficiency as solutions to energy affordability. And here I try to capture what currently funds energy efficiency. And just a bit more on the health and energy nexus. I present this diagram here that depicts how energy efficiency can address common health stressors in a home and prevent certain illnesses leading to improved comfort, safety, and reduced stress. Next slide. I'll now turn to some of the opportunities that we see at the federal policy level. Next slide. So I want to start just by reiterating that we see energy efficiency as both an economic and climate strategy with both near-term and long-term benefits. Energy efficiency creates jobs now, reduces greenhouse gas emissions for years to come, provides immediate savings for consumers and businesses, and promotes long-term affordability. And in this way supports both energy and housing justice. Next slide. So I'll start with just some kind of more general thoughts on where we need to take federal action. I think first in terms of any federal aid bills we want to see funding for energy efficiency included and especially targeted at indebted overburdened households and also inclusive workforce training. Going back to the op-ed I referenced earlier by Paul Glover, only when we address where the savings are being achieved and who's doing the work will we really advance energy efficiency as an environmental justice strategy. We also want to see more coordination between bill assistance and utility debt relief and energy efficiency and weatherization. Too often we see these resources happening separated and non-coordinated ways and we think they can go much further if paired. And then lastly, state and utilities need better data and should be encouraged to identify and provide opportunities to increase access to energy efficiency, bill assistance and other support for indebted customers who are at risk of shut-off. And I think this also picks on a bit of what Tony was saying that we need to have a better understanding of who's most vulnerable. I think we've all alluded to this in a number of ways that the intersection of health and energy, understanding where we really need to target these resources. Next slide. So I'll now turn to more core specific federal recommendations that we easily have as an organization. First, we are advocating for increased support for federal weatherization assistance program. Currently about 30 percent of U.S. households or 39 million households are eligible for WAP assistance, but at the current pace only 2 percent are reached per year. Ramp-up is desperately needed and any relief effort should think ramping up steadily investments in weatherization. We also support the hopes for homes language that's out there. It's currently in a few places but hasn't been introduced as a bill in this Congress yet, but it would establish two initiatives to support residential energy efficiency jobs. It would support workforce training to advance their skills and home energy retrofits. And the hope training would qualify contractors to participate in the homes rebate program. The rebate program would provide long-term stimulus by incentivizing homeowners to make efficiency improvements, thus driving demand for a highly skilled local workforce in communities across the country. We also recognize and I think that is pointed out today too is that the multifamily sector renters are woefully underserved when it comes to energy efficiency. We've been supporting as in response that we have been supporting proposals that recommend two efforts to really compliment current weatherization assistance program. First we are recommending that through HUD grants are made to public housing authorities as an appropriation to the public housing capital fund. These funds would enable deep retrofits of at least half a million units and to leverage additional investments public housing authorities could be authorized to use these funds to contribute to energy performance contracting arrangements. And second for the other affordable rental units, those unsubsidized, we recommend federal grants perhaps administered through housing finance agencies that know the market well to affordable building owners to support upgrades. And then we also support moving on to my next bullet. We also support the inclusion of affordable financing to help households pay for costs not covered by grants. So very well could support the efforts I just referenced. But similar to what USDA offers rural electric co-ops that allows them to run tariff on bill programs with of course with strong consumer protections to allow for upgrades to be paid back attached to the meter and paid back over time in a way that still lets households accrue savings. And then lastly aside from these wide scale investments in whole home retrofits we like to see upstream efforts to make technologies that promise energy and emission savings in the short and long term more accessible to all. For instance we support tax incentives for manufacturers of heat pumps and for heat pump water heaters to make them more affordable to buyers in the end. So that's what we have in terms of recommendation and then I'll just say in closing with we need increased investment in single family and multifamily weatherization. I think Texas which maybe we'll get to in Q&A also I think underscores the need for whole home retrofits and other sources. So with these federal programs and other sources to revitalize our economy in the recession again not just saving households money but also creating jobs improving community resilience public health and reducing the wealth gap and energy and security. Thank you. Well thank you Lauren and thanks again to our panelists. Unfortunately Tony as he said have had to drop off today so he will not be with us for the Q&A but we have some great questions and I'm really looking forward to the discussion that we're about to kick off. If you have questions that you would like to send in we have about 20 minutes left of our program you can follow us on Twitter at EESI online you can also send us an email EESI at EESI.org and we'll do our best to incorporate them into the discussion. My first question I'd like to revisit some things that were discussed over the course of your presentations specifically as these public health and housing affordability crises are being made worse by the events in Texas by the severe weather and the power outages and sort of what people are enduring down there. Thinking ahead Katrina we'll start with you do you have any thoughts about how energy and water efficiency improvements in housing might be part of a policy response that comes after the lights are back on and after people have a chance to kind of get their bearings again? I think we missed the first part of what you said Katrina sorry about that. Sorry can you all hear me okay? Yes now we can. Okay good good so I've heard the Biden plan characterized as two-part rescue and recovery and I see water affordability energy affordability as being part of both of those pieces. I think that in the first part rescue like right now what we need to do is address the crisis and ensure that people are able to pay their bills and have access to energy and have access to water I mean that's the most important thing right now. I'd also like to see us redefine energy burden a little bit. I know my friend at ACEE went into the definition of energy burden but basically you're comparing monthly costs for utilities to monthly gross income and right now we have a serious or real age problem and I think that that should be addressed in energy burden. Additionally I think that it's worthwhile to look at expanding eligibility for programs like LIHEAP if there's going to be supplemental funds not as part of the regular program we want to keep that you know safe and the way that it always has been but there are a lot of folks who are struggling living paycheck to paycheck and our energy insecure. Their energy burden is significant and a lot of those are the folks who are the frontline workers who are you know doing Uber and three other jobs in order to make ends meet and keeping the economy going right now and our suffering. I feel like we can take this off their plate you know let's talk about funding solutions that help knock out some of those arrears and keep rates low for all right payers as well. So I do believe that through the the emergency by the way part of my energy efficiency strategy is to always have a cat on your lap and you can turn down the thermostat degree. The emergency rental and utility assistance program was in the omnibus last year is a good example of how housing and utility assistance programs are reaching out to one another and providing services together to make sure that we can address you know the family as a unit and the house as a whole and I think that's a really good partnership that's been so far very successful. Andronica and Lauren I'd love to hear your response too about how we might build in efficiency and housing affordability into what we do to you know prepare ourselves for the next you know bout of severe weather whether it's hot or cold. Andronica we'll start with you. Sure so again I'm gonna continue to beat the drum that we've got to guarantee housing we've got to say we're going to put housing first this crisis right now this cascade of crises demands that everyone be housed. So we've got to do that and then the long-term solution has to be what allows us to maintain that system for everyone who needs it. I'm not going to say housing is a right it is but we need it to be a guarantee and that requires a different set of levers and switches and it is an acknowledgement that we are not prioritizing the right funding and part of that guarantee means that you can maintain it that means keeping the lights on keeping the water running keeping the roof over your head making sure you keep the wind and the rain out. And so that is that's not as simple as I you know using that catchphrase but we've got to start by affirmatively committing to that and we haven't done that. We have we have not again we keep dancing around this in these last series of crises you've heard people anybody who's seen these horrific interviews with people they don't know where they're going to go they don't know what's going to happen there because they they do not believe that we in America are going to guarantee that every American can find and keep housing because we haven't done that that's why they're they have questions they don't they don't know what they're going to do they know because of COVID their options are limited and we have got to we have got to boldly and boldly state that. Lauren turn it over to you. Sure and and I'll continue in the line of thinking of that we need to invest in housing what we're seeing in Texas now what we'll likely see in other places both in terms of heating and cooling are demand surges that could potentially overwhelm the grid in Texas they overwhelm the grid efficiency is a great great demand side solution and especially when it comes to the southeast and what we're seeing in Texas these houses are poorly insulated we know that they lack a lot of efficiency technologies they rely on electric resistance which is inefficient and so I mentioned a lot about weatherization whole home retrofits that can significantly reduce energy consumption also have impacts on demand and save customers money right so I think that it's again the solution that that contributes to solving the larger affordability crisis and we're going to have to think about this as we experience the effects of climate change and extreme weather thank you very much for that the next question I wanted to ask about was we sort of over the course of your presentations there was a lot of talk about funding eligibility I'm wondering if you have additional examples in Katrina maybe we'll start with you again and we'll go to Andrenique after that and tomorrow you have other examples about how the federal government could be more supportive of the good work being done either existing programs or perhaps the development of innovative new programs at the state and local level to address the housing crisis the energy efficiency a lack of energy efficiency well in the on the best package in December for the first time the federal government implemented a water utility assistance fund and I'm hoping that that can be a model program that we can build upon it I don't think these problems have been amplified by the pandemic that they've always existed and they will continue to exist we know that recovery happens slowest for the people who are eligible for our programs and I also think that weatherization is going to be really important as we move forward with the recovery effort and getting people back to work and then also making homes more efficient more than 80 percent of like heap eligible families earn less than $20,000 a year so effectively the amount of utility bill that they can afford is close to zero given the other expenses so there will always be a need for the emergency component but to the extent that we can lower their bills and stretch the program dollars farther for crisis it just makes it you know more possible for us to help more households that are in need so I would say keep flexibility the one thing that I really love about LIHEAP is that it allows states to take a look at the resources that are available to them and what they have in their network and what their needs are and what their housing stock is and make decisions that are most appropriate for their state and their people anything that limits flexibility would probably be a bad idea right now and anything that enhances flexibility would be a good idea so as you're approaching policy decisions I would keep that in mind. Andronica? Sure so I would say this is a two-parter for me number one we've got to look at the definition of housing security right we use the very outdated 30 percent rule which is actually not rooted in any economic theory or anything that you can actually prove saying you shouldn't spend more than 30 percent of your gross income on your total housing costs while we can do the math and actually say yes it's bad if you're spending more than 30 percent of your total gross income on your housing costs you can't save you can't thrive you it's you're making really bad choices we know that that's a bad number but what's the good number what's the good percentage because we don't know what that is it's not I will tell you it's not 30 percent for somebody making $7.25 an hour spending 30 exactly 30 percent of that does not allow you to do any of the other things that we're talking about either so number one we've need we need a better definition of housing security we also need to talk about the fact that when we do these calculations even at 30 percent when we have programs like section eight and public housing and lie tech programs and we calculated exactly 30 percent utility calculations are wildly and and and and aesthetically inaccurate we use outdated substandard any inefficient utility calculations that do not allow for you to basically pay your utilities under that 30 cap so you you're in some programs like home ownership programs don't even allow for the calculate the inclusion of utilities in that calculations we have folks doing subsidized housing programs first time mortgage programs that make people cost burden because their front end ratio puts them exactly at 30 percent for their PITI and utilities are not included that person is cost burdened by the standards that we accept and so that's the third piece is that we have got to actually abide by these rules if it's going to be 30 percent including utilities why are we making people cost burden with subsidized housing programs why are we accepting that even though we know the first two sets of numbers aren't great why are we why is HUD why are our local housing authorities why are local municipalities our public our state finance agencies creating housing that violates those that the 30 percent rule why are we doing that why are we allowing that to happen why are we setting people up failure and what we are doing is we are reinforcing the negative racialized stereotypes around subsidized housing when these people fail because they do fail because we've set them up for failure all we have done is confirm the racialized stereotypes that black and brown people are lazy and don't want to work and and then we go well there's nothing we can do no one wants these programs no one wants us to invest more in these programs because they are they are being they are being managed to failure instead of success well how do I follow that I'm going to attempt to but I think both Katrina and Andronica are pointing or highlighting how big of an issue this is right and from where I'm sitting energy efficiency dollars aren't going to fix this and so when I think about eligibility flexibility and where to go from here to really get to scale through localities in states as well we need to think about how to integrate housing energy assistance energy efficiency and weatherization and you know I feel like Biden has set the stage there in terms of his whole government approach to climate change and we need to really think about how you know HUD works together with DOE to run joint programs to scale up the housing if we want to invest in housing you can't just do it with weatherization dollars we need there's other repairs you have to situate it within the context of public housing of a shrinking affordable housing stock and so I think we need to be these are big problems we need to be thinking about big solutions and one point that Katrina made was around flexibility I think states and localities there's obviously a really strong president there for you know administering grant programs for upgrading of housing for administering weatherization funds and we should look to them for some innovation and how to integrate programs more efficiently to think big I love the flexibility point I think you know an example of putting yourself in someone else's shoes right if I were that state or local stakeholder advocate program administrator all the flexibility I could get would be just make my life so much easier my ability to serve my constituents um we have I think time for one more question and Laura I think we'll start with you this time because you mentioned some work that's being done in rural areas around financing and so maybe we'll start with you and we'll go backwards this time to underneath and then to Katrina um do you have any additional special examples of how state and local efforts to improve the energy efficiency or water efficiency of housing are leveraging financing or perhaps our drawing on partnerships with the private sector that expand the ability of their programs to reach more people in terms of scale or maybe even in terms of scope sure I think I'll start with maybe the most notable example and I think a vehicle for getting funding out there and and um making use of existing channels in a lot of states um federal weatherization funding is um coupled with utility rate payer funding to run low income programs a lot of states have kind of a one-stop shop model set up so that low income um low income residents can go there for assistance not knowing behind the scenes where all the funding is coming from but a lot of times it is a mix of federal and um utility uh utility funds um I think that's a great one great model of how different funds are leveraged there's also states putting into that pot localities putting into that pot and then running you know in all in all support of low income energy efficiency um in terms of the urban or rural question um and then financing I think you know states have some states are running statewide energy efficiency programs I think there's um I haven't looked at the research lately but there you know I think rural areas do need more investment we know that rural households suffer suffer from higher energy burdens than urban households that um housing is particularly inefficient under invested in in rural areas um we also know that in rural areas there's not um access to um rate payer energy efficiency programs like there are in more urban areas the electric co-ops don't typically run those types of programs um or they run them at a much smaller scale um one and I'll end on this one model for um you know investing where grant programs are not available is the is tariffed on bill financing where um a utility invests in a investment efficiency and that and that I don't want to say loan because people say this is not a loan but the the investment is paid back from it's attached to the meter paid back by the customer in a way that still allows energy savings to accrue to the customer so the customer still gets savings while the utility recruits some of its investment the federal government does play a role there they often offer um low-cost loans to the rural co-ops that allow them to run such programs where these programs are in place they have strong consumer protections some models offer strong strong consumer protections and I encourage you if we're thinking about this at scale to look at those models one being pay-as-you-save model where strong consumer protections are in place because as was reiterated quite a few times today we do not want to overburden these households with that. Andronika do you have any examples in your experience of where either financing is being leveraged or public private sector partners are helping to deliver more services? So that's the easy one no. It's you know I'm in Louisiana unfortunately this is we've had a few interesting programs to talk about energy efficiency including you know solar panel taxes tax credits uh that was very popular but again these programs tend to aim themselves at the wealthier and more well off people you in order to benefit from a tax credit you have to have significant income in order to offset a tax credit it got exhausted and it got repealed so and and we we've been disincentivized using solar panel here in Louisiana with the recent rulings from our Louisiana Public Service Commission around net metering and on and on and on and on so this is why we've got to have these conversations and it's why we've been talking as a part of the EFA Coalition around our own version of Arab Spring or flipping Georgia Blue or whatever you want to call it here in Louisiana where we are right for this kind of conversation we need the community to stand up and demand better from our regulators this is not an area where we can have a heart to heart conversation with our utilities they've got to be directed to what to do thankfully they we are not as um as as deregulated as Texas but that is that is the that is the worst case scenario what we're seeing there and what we're seeing to our neighbors uh to the west is what happens when you pair uh deregulation and this this kind of attitude where it this is another capitalist venture and it's not people need to figure it out for themselves that's how you end up um not rather rising equipment that's where you end up not requiring that equipment be ready for something that yes is once in a lifetime but it is not unexpected again this is we are ground zero the Gulf states are the ground zero for climate change if it's not a polar vortex it is and it will be hurricane after hurricane after hurricane this is so again we we do need to see we and community are the only ones that activated and educated and engaged populace who understands the stakes and knows how to vote their their interests um and and is given the room to do that are the only way we're going to ever really see uh the kind of change that we need Katrina I think that gives you the last word I invite you to respond to my question or any of the other points that Andrenica just raised or even Lauren just raised well I think Andrenica has done a really beautiful job throughout this entire presentation of um helping to provide context for who it is that we're helping and um and I I'm recalling the slide that I had where it talked about um people who are using their kitchen stoves to heat their homes um we've all in our positions probably dealt with a lot of judgment for the people who we serve and I would just encourage you to think of it this way desperate people do really desperate things so if we can keep them from desperation then we prevent the dangers that we've talked about today um again there's cases of CO poisoning because people are trying to stay warm by turning on their cars and sitting in their car in Texas and um I mean they've burned their couches to stay warm it's it's really horrific and it just highlights the fact that um when you are desperate you will go to a payday lender when you are desperate desperate people take desperate measures to protect their families their kids you know um so to the extent that we can provide a lifeline for those families just to help them get back on their feet and right now the the type of poverty that we're talking about is very situational a lot of these folks have lost their jobs but we all believe the economy is going to come back they're going to be called back to work some of them already have they just need a hand to get back on their feet until things get better um so I also wanted to give a shout out you ask about public private partnerships um and I feel like our local providers the community action agencies the fuel funds the nonprofits are the maestros who know what pots of money are available they look at this house this home this family and they pull from whatever fund is necessary in order to serve all the needs of that family they are excellent at this that's a question that should that is best answered by a local provider because they know what they're doing they know how to um how to mine the resources in their community to help that family and yet there are always gaps and that's what we're here for we're trying to fill those caps and make sure that they have that flexible funding and funding for housing funding for energy efficiency um and they're able to um to get back on their feet the other thing that I wanted to mention was that LIHEAP is um the largest provider of weatherization and energy efficiency services that's where I come from and I truly do believe that that can be part of the recovery effort it does demonstrate an excellent public private partnership with us using private contractors for things like plumbing and electrical and um and also the insulation pieces it's a great way to have a mission-driven program that also improves the economy so I think that that can definitely be part of our recovery plan I know they're all out there our our weatherization books are trying to figure it out on the ground how to do PPE and stay safe while they're in people's homes but they are figuring it out um so I would like to see LIHEAP funded robustly in order to be a part of that weatherization moving forward in the recovery yeah well I'm I'm glad you you mentioned that because I think these programs LIHEAP and weatherization you know in particular are their economic development programs as much in many ways as they are energy efficiency programs the contractors the training um the the clean energy the elements of the clean energy economy that they support um and so thanks for bringing that up at the end um we are just about out of time and I'm going to just take a quick moment to once again thank a tremendous panel for joining us today um thank you Katrina, Andrenica, and Lauren, and Tony uh it was uh such a wonderful presentation um sometimes I kind of wish our presentations were a little bit more upbeat um but the truth is that we have a lot of problems facing us right now and um admitting you have the problem is the first step um and so I think having frank discussions like this um that can end on a positive note talking about solutions and talking about the great work that's being done is a great way to frame it and and not just from a messaging perspective but also communicating to policymakers that these problems are they're addressable and eventually they're solvable um but they take a lot of attention they take a lot of focus and they take a lot of time um and so getting started now in making these investments not just for the crises we're currently facing but to prepare ourselves for the next round which I think Andrenica you were saying we're in a new era of the frequency and severity of disasters uh and severe weather uh and and we know that it's going to continue um a couple other just final quick thoughts um one is just to I really appreciate the points that our panelists made today around sort of the income the racial the place-based causes and the effects of these housing affordability challenges and energy efficiency um I think you know Tony's presentation in particular um while with his his his donut metaphor and his maps as well as the other presentations um I encourage all of our audience to go back and take another look at those presentations um because I think that was something that really struck me today um and um helps me think about this stuff in a lot in a lot more informed way and then Lauren I think you were the one making the point at the end that energy efficiency is not just a climate strategy but it really ought to be the first climate strategy that we fully maximize and fully implement not just for emissions reductions potential but also because of its ability as Paula Glover says to advance environmental justice and equity goals um and uh I think we all agree with that thank you again to our panelists thank you so much to our friends at the energy efficiency for all coalition um a lot of work went into assembling this panel and we really appreciate this partnership and um it helps us communicate these important messages and solutions to our friends on Capitol Hill um I'd also like to thank all of the folks at EESI who helped make these briefings possible Dan O'Brien, Sidney O'Shaughnessy, Amber Todorov, Anna McGinn, Omri Laporte and we are currently hosting five wonderful remote interns Saline, Hamza, Jocelyn, Kimmy and Rachel and they all have a little bit to do with pulling off today's panel which I think was a great success and certainly a wonderful learning experience for me and a great discussion thank you to all of them um we're going to put up a link here in just a moment that it has a link to a survey I encourage you to take that and to let us know what you think and if you liked what you heard today obviously we'd like to hear about that or any suggestions for improvements because we take those very seriously at EESI but we are in the midst of just a um quite a run of briefings that are coming up next Friday I think at 2 p.m. we will be kicking off our second installment of congressional climate camp we're going to be looking at the emissions profiles of five top emitting sectors agriculture business or buildings industry transportation and energy generation and we're going to be joined by some wonderful experts who can help us understand not just the emissions profiles of those sectors but also the interplay between those sectors and how they contribute to one another we will also be noticing a briefing next week looking at energy efficiency and the business economic development opportunities um around um some efficiency appropriations and research and development programs because it is that time of year in Washington when we're all thinking about the next fiscal year um one last reminder if you have a moment in addition to taking your survey and hopefully dana we can put that survey link on the screen um while you're doing that we'd love to have you visit us online at www.esa.org we'd love you to peruse our briefing archive as well as all of our fact sheets climate change frequently asked questions we're about to launch one i'm giving a secret away here about conservation cores uh all sorts of great stuff coming down the pike and of course our newsletter biweekly newsletter and companion podcast the newsletter is climate change solutions the podcast is the climate conversation thank you so much to everyone uh we really appreciate everyone's attention today and again to our panelists uh thank you so much we'll leave it there and hope everyone has a great rest of your day and happy weekend i think we've all earned it thank you