 Aloha and welcome everyone to Hoyenergy Policy Forum's annual briefing. It's great to see so many of you here and I'm really looking forward to today's presentations and conversations. I'm Cherylin Wee. I'm an assistant specialist at the Public Policy Center, also co-chair of the Hoyenergy Policy Forum with my cabinet. The Hoyenergy Policy Forum is a program within the College of Social Sciences. We convene a collaborative group of over 40 stakeholders in business, academia, government and the community. And we're working towards information sharing and collaboration in order to inform decision making. So today we have all come together to present this annual briefing. Cherylin Moriwaki, Senator Moriwaki, I just want to take a moment to acknowledge and recognize you. Senator Moriwaki, who has led the forum between 2002 to 2018, thank you for all the great work that you've done in the energy space and we're really glad that you could join us here today. This year's theme, bending the curve, energy, transportation and climate change policy, focuses on aligning these policies with the needs of Hoy residents while acknowledging that there's a significant gap between our 2045 carbon neutrality goals and where we are today. So for this afternoon's discussion we have four guiding questions. The first is where are we on the trajectories, both short term and long term, and where do we need to be? Are we doing enough to achieve our clean energy goals that we have established? Is it even possible to meet our goals? And if so, what will it take? And then lastly, what about other pressing needs in Hawaii? We're going to get started and kick things off right away. I'm really honored to be able to introduce Governor David Ige. So on behalf of the forum, please join me in welcoming Governor Ige. Thanks, Cherylin, for that introduction. I did also want to acknowledge Cherylin Moriwaki who convinced me on several occasions to come and participate in this policy forum. I really do appreciate the University of Hawaii and the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum for your advocacy and I think most importantly for your commitment to collaboration and to engaging all of the stakeholders in our energy policy. As we enter 2020, Hawaii has much to celebrate as a leader in energy transformation. And much of that work is really due to many of you here in the audience. I'm proud to be Governor of the State of Hawaii and when I go up to the National Governors Association or Western Governors, I'm really proud of the work that we have been able to do together. I did want to thank the legislators who are here who had a big part in setting out a bold agenda for all of us. I'm really proud to be Governor of the State of Hawaii because I do know that much of our energy policy is driven by the core values that we share as a people. Most importantly, that commitment that we want to make our communities better and that we want to be part of the solution in finding a way that Hawaii can be a more sustainable and resilient community moving forward. As you know, we are a leader in several different ways. Hawaii was the first to embrace the goals of the Climate Alliance and we all know that the United States has kind of bailed out of that. Certainly there is a void and the U.S. Climate Alliance of which Hawaii is a part, a bipartisan group of states that felt compelled to step forward to ensure that the agenda of fighting climate change and global warming can be taken up by sub-national organizations such as states and other entities because we do know that in order to save the planet, those of us in the U.S. really need to lead the way. I wanted to welcome Ms. Amy Barnes from the California China Climate Institute. Thank you for your participation in today's session and also Jeremy Tarr from the Office of Governor Roy Cooper of North Carolina. I really appreciate your coming and sharing with us and sharing the things that you've done. I've had the opportunity and Governor Cooper has joined the U.S. Climate Alliance as well. For us chief executives in many states, we do recognize that action is needed now and climate change is a huge threat to the planet and most importantly that we need to take bold action to reduce greenhouse gases and carbon emissions as we move forward. I would want to note that I really believe that a big reason for Hawaii's success is the collaborative nature of our community and to organizations like the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum and again I thank you for being committed to engage all stakeholders, give everyone a voice and I think most importantly for being willing to raise the most challenging issues before us. Thank you for taking over for Senator Moriwaki. I know that you're doing an able job moving forward. I was also happy as you know last year the Legislature passed House Bill 852 which I was proud to sign into law as Act 122 which really created and reconfigured the state energy office and directed them to promote energy efficiency, renewable energy and clean transportation to help achieve a resilient, clean energy, decarbonized economy. After interviewing many and an extensive search, I appointed Scott Glenn to be the chief energy officer. Certainly there are a couple things that attracted me and convinced me that Scott would be the perfect person to lead the state energy office. He had served as my representative in the US Climate Alliance and has been very engaged on behalf of the state of Hawaii with those partners in the climate alliance and we were very early on one of the earliest states to join the alliance and Scott has been very engaged with the alliance of bipartisan states really understanding what each other is doing most importantly trying to create structures and opportunities that we can share information and most importantly help each other succeed. We know that climate change and global warming is a team sport it's not something that any one of us can solve by ourselves but most importantly it will take the collective will of all of us to make significant progress. You know I appointed Scott to this position because I felt that he would be the best for the office. He has been the executive director at the office of environmental quality control over the last several years and I've been impressed by his collaborative commitment to engaging all stakeholders, to taking on the tough issues and most importantly to be able to find solutions that allows us to move forward. You know when I first appointed Scott everybody said that environmental impact statements and all of the challenges surrounding our environmental protection would be one of the toughest issues to deal with and I'm proud that Scott was able to work with all stakeholders find common ground between environmentalists and developers and most importantly came up with a set of rules I think that balance the interest of protecting the environment with allowing sensible regulation that would allow us to move forward. I know that all of you are here to listen to the experts that have been assembled and I really want to thank you for your commitment to our clean energy future. The goals and challenges we see before us you know I'm proud of the progress that we made but I also acknowledge that there is much much much more work to be done. I look forward to working with all of you to achieve the goals that we all share to transform our energy futures moving forward and I did want to finally just thank the energy policy form here again once again for your commitment to engaging stakeholders for providing a forum that we can share ideas and best practices but most importantly to be a part of finding the solution of finding a way that we can all be committed to a renewable energy future but most importantly to saving our planet and stopping climate change and global warming. Aloha and Mahalo and thank you so much for all of those who will be here today. Thank you Governor Ige. I now like to invite Nicole Lohan, Representative Lohan, House Chair on the Committee for Energy Environmental Protection to say a few words. Welcome Nicole. Aloha was instructed to be brief so I will try to do that. So welcome to the Capitol. We're happy to host the energy policy forum here and this is one of a series I guess of events that the policy forum has planned this year so it's been I think a really active year for the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum and I want to thank them for all the work they put into organizing this and helping educate everybody. I also want to quickly thank my office manager Miley who's not in the room right now but she just did a lot of work on the logistics of helping schedule the rooms etc. So from my perspective these issues that we're talking about here today energy transportation and climate change policy are top of mind to some of the most important things that we have to work on this session. As we increasingly feel very real impacts from climate change here at home widespread coral bleaching events more frequent more damaging storms coastal erosion sea level rise and uncomfortably hot and humid weather. We have to explore every tool that we have to do our part to mitigate climate change to move faster on reaching a hundred percent renewable power generation and to transition the transportation sector from one that runs on fossil fuels to one that's powered by clean energy. The legislature in recent years has set really ambitious goals a hundred percent renewable energy zero emissions carbon neutral economy by 2045 net zero school energy campus and net zero energy school campuses sorry by 2035 and last year we passed bills to further energy efficiency to create incentives for the build out of electric vehicle infrastructure and the adoption of EVs for government fleets we created a reinvigorated energy office which the governor mentioned with a clear mission to support the state's energy and climate policy goals and we commissioned a study of carbon pricing policies to see how we might implement a carbon price here in Hawaii. You know someone said to me as we were talking out in the hallway that as they see it the legislature has really led on these issues you know in recent years that we've led the discussion and in passing these ambitious goals and have brought the administration and the private sector along not always willingly but I feel really happy to say that I see that really changing and I think that everyone's on the same page moving forward now from the private sector to the administration I think that the realization of how important it is to address these issues has really crystallized and it's exciting to see how much the momentum is picking up and how quickly we can move forward on this issue on these issues so this year we'll continue our work on these topics with a particular focus for me on trying to ensure that government agencies are doing the things we're asking the private sector to do so increasing efficiency of our own buildings trans electrifying transportation fleets developing resilient infrastructure and planning ahead for sea level rise and natural disasters you know Hawaii is the leader as I've we've all said several times now in energy and climate policy and we know that what we do here in Hawaii has ripple effects across the globe so we need to continue to lead on these issues so that we can avoid catastrophic climate impacts and you know hopefully that what we do here will inspire action in other places so I hope what everyone learns here today will help contribute to that work