 Welcome to Perspectives of Global Justice. This is your host Beatrice Cantelmo. Is climate change real or a hoax? In a 2013 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations body charged with reaching a consensus view on global warming suggests that scientists are essentially 100% certain that global warming is an occurring factor and 95% certain that it's a man-made process. President Trump's administration does not have a size-advisor and relied on climate change skeptics for guidance on energy and environmental policy issues. On March 28th, President Trump signed a sweeping executive order that calls for the Environmental Protection Agency to review the Clean Power Plan, which unites towards eliminating it. The new environmental executive order eliminates a metric for assessing the economic effects of the carbon dioxide emissions known as the social cost of carbon, rethinks how policy makers consider climate change, and encourages the US fossil fuel production along with new promises, new jobs, restoration of economic freedom and more prosperity for our nation. Hopefully the new executive orders will take years to be replaced. Until then, states can still continue to move toward clean energy, but they will lose major pharaoh incentives to do so. Lucky for the state of Hawaii, we have Blue Planet Foundation, which is led by a very experienced advocate in the fearless leader, Ajat Mikulina. Blue Planet Foundation is a champion organization that has created policies and programs to transform Hawaii's energy systems to clean renewable energy solutions. More than ever, Blue Planet Foundation remains committed to lead the way for global change by using awareness, education, advocacy, and a lot of love for the earth to remove the obstacles that stand between us and a future free from fossil fuel. Today's perspective on global justice welcomes guest Shem Lalour, Clean Transportation Director of Blue Planet Foundation. Well, welcome to our show, Shem. The address is going to be here. So for our viewers who do not know about Blue Planet Foundation, could you give us a little overview of this beautiful organization? Sure. So Blue Planet Foundation was founded back in 2007 by Hank Rogers. He's well known in Hawaii who's famous for developing video games such as Tetris and other games. He also owns a number of other companies. Blue Planet Foundation is a nonprofit that he started and our mission is basically to get Hawaii off of fossil fuels. And what was the main driver for saying, hey, let's switch gears. Let's not use fossil fuel energy anymore and consider green energy alternatives? Well, I think there's a lot of evidence, obviously, that climate change is happening and I think for Hank Rogers in particular, he became very concerned about the impacts of global climate change on Hawaii's coral reefs and on the shoreline due to rising sea levels. So we obviously as an island state, we are right in the line of fire for some of the major impacts of global warming. So Blue Planet Foundation is well known for its strong policy-making advocacy work and also a lot of programs that's implemented here in the state to make that happen. To might giving a little bit of an overview, a timeline since 2007 worked. We have been able to accomplish as a state. Sure. So like I mentioned, we were founded in 2007. We do a lot of advocacy, a lot of education. We've been advocating for incentives for the solar industry, wind industry. For several years, we fought to get a renewable portfolio standard that would see us to 100% clean energy. We actually got that pass in 2015. That was our bill. It took several years, but we got a pass in 2015 and that as most of the viewers will probably know, by 2045, all of 100% of Hawaii's electricity sector will be renewably powered. So that was a major landfall victory for us two years ago. Now we've kind of turned a lot of our attention from the electricity sector, which we've made a lot of progress to the transportation sector where we have not made a lot of progress, which also consumes almost a comparable amount, about the same amount of energy as electricity sector. We haven't made a lot of progress there and that's where we're really kind of focusing our efforts at this time. And so I'm so excited to have you here today so we can talk a little bit about it. Do you know on average how much percent of fossil fuel energy do we use for transportation for the state of Hawaii per year? Sure. So of our total oil imports, about 28% is used for electricity sector and about 27 or 28% is used for the ground transportation sector. The remainder is split between air traffic. Air is about 25 or 26% and then the rest is for military and marine and those kind of things. So the really two big chunks is ground transportation and electricity. Like I said, we've made a lot of progress on the electricity sector. We have a lot of work to do on the ground transportation sector. The other big piece will be aviation. That's a little bit of a difficult one for us to handle locally because aviation is much more of an international issue. It's not as easy for us to make changes on a local level but that's maybe a later project. So for now, really ground transportation is what we're relying on. It's nice to have that large long-term vision for transportation and aviation but for now with transportation, I hear that we have a new bill being considered by our senate. So HB 1580. For our viewers who have never heard about this bill, what it is all about and what are we trying to accomplish if we have it passed and implemented into law? Sure. So yeah, House Bill 1580, HB 1580 is a bill that is a little bit different from the one we passed in 2015 which was a mandate which is basically all of electricity has to be 100% renewable. This one, HB 1580 would set a goal to have all of our ground transportation powered by renewable power. It's not a mandate and the reason why we've strategically not done a mandate is because the electricity sector has a very limited number of actors. You have the utilities and a few other small set of power companies basically. With ground transportation, you have literally millions of actors. You have individuals who purchase cars and so it's a little bit more difficult to have a mandate and to have a body that could officiate over that. So we've decided to go with more of a goal, a target, if you will, that would have us 100% renewable ground transportation by 2045. Same year, same target year as the electricity sector but just a goal and basically what we're trying to achieve by this is to start getting everybody's mind focused on the same end game. We're not saying we're going to take away people's gasoline car though I'm sure there'll be some people who have a classic 1969 Corvette in the year 2045. We're not trying to take that away from people. We're not going to convert it into... We definitely could What we're going to do is get all the car dealerships to think okay by 2030, 2035 all of our cars will be electric that we're going to be selling. We want the condominium associations to start thinking oh we actually need to start developing a plan to install charging in our building because 2045 all the cars are going to be electric or hydrogen. So we really want people's mindset to change but we're telling them this is where we're going and we need to start planning for that and that's where we think the value of the target is is to really get everybody on the same page start planning the infrastructure that we need start planning all the little tweaks we're going to need to make in the transportation system and infrastructure that we need to do the sooner we start planning for those things the smoother our transition is going to be. Absolutely and I'm so happy that we have an urban planner in you as a background to be able to actually bring our state to that frame of our vision. I mean ideally that we could hit the moon but if we aim at the stars and get there that's amazing too. So where are we at in terms of our transportation situation for the state of Hawaii? Give us the good, the bad and the ugly. Well it's pretty bad and ugly is where we're at. We have pretty good geographical gifts in terms of sustainable transportation. We have limited driving range because we're islands. Our good climate should mean that we could walk and bike a lot and that we could even our electric vehicles perform well in warm weather. So in what we have in terms of geographical and climactic gifts we could be doing a lot. Unfortunately we've built cities and islands that are really dependent on the personal automobile which uses a lot of energy and a lot of space and because we've invested so much and built everything around the car we really don't have capacity and service quality in alternative modes of transportation like public transit, walking and biking and so we really have a long way to go. Basically about 80% of all the trips in the state are by personal automobiles and we just don't have the quality in alternative modes that we should have so we have to make a lot of ground there. And then we actually are doing quite well when it comes to EVs or electric vehicles compared to other states. Part of it is because we don't have because we have island states and we don't drive as far the range anxiety which is one of the major barriers to electric vehicle adoption has not been as big of a problem so we've had a lot of people that have purchased EVs the ratio is higher than most other states but we still have a long way to go still EVs just make up about half of 1% of all the cars on the road today. So for someone who wants to be more and align and really do that transition and say I wanted to buy an EV car I wanted to utilize public transportation more also the bike but then you have to consider the cost the initial cost aspect of buying a new car and now with the new executive orders that just being put in effect and that does not support green energy actually supports a few energy and then most of the state incentives that people perhaps would have to be able to do that transition may not be there what would be your advice for somebody to start with small steps so even to plan maybe 2-3 years from now to start transitioning more to that Well that's a really good question so as you mentioned the current administration we have in Washington is not one that we can expect to rely on for leadership on clean energy or clean transportation there's a lot of skepticism in the administration about global warming and about renewable energy and clean transportation technologies the good news is that the market where the market is developed both on clean energy like solar energy and wind and also for electric vehicles has advanced far enough where I don't think we necessarily need or I should say I don't think that the administration can really thwart the progress too much I think that there's also an opportunity because the federal government is not one that we can rely on to push forward the clean transportation and clean energy agenda I think there's an opportunity for the states to take a bigger role and that's one of the things that we're advocating for with the state legislature and with counties as well is that it's time for you to step up and take a bigger role so specifically when it comes to electric vehicles in the last five or six years we've seen battery prices drop from about $950 per kilowatt hour to about $150 so about five or six times cheaper in a five or six year period of time so electric vehicles most people traditionally they have been quite a bit more expensive than traditional cars that's becoming less and less the case so you can actually buy an electric vehicle for a reasonable price compared to comparable models that are gas powered and then the price of operating a car because electricity is a cheaper fuel than gasoline it's cheaper to actually own it so I think more and more every year it's no longer going to be a decision between driving a clean car and saving money I think they're going to be both in the same camp you can save money and save the environment at the same time and there are more and more electric vehicle models coming on the market especially this year we're kind of at the end of what we call the generation one of electric vehicles and we're stepping into generation two generation two vehicles really starting with the Chevy Bolt with a B we're going to see the driving ranges go from about 100 miles to well over 200 miles on a single charge and the prices are coming down to a very reasonable level so I think over the next few years we're going to see really an explosion of EV adoption in Hawaii and that's going to put a lot of strain on infrastructure so that's why we really think there's a role for planning at the state level and with the utility level how can we provide the infrastructure that's needed to support the huge influx of electric vehicles that we expect to see in the next few years right and I really look forward to those concepts and the planning aspect of it after our break which is happening shortly and yeah Hey everybody, that's Ian social media manager here at ThinkTek Hawaii thanks for tuning in sorry to break into your show if you're listening on the podcast thanks for listening, watching on YouTube we appreciate the subscription etc if you are a long time listener or viewer of ThinkTek Hawaii every day five to six hours a day streaming stuff that's happening here in Hawaii that matters to everybody worldwide basically there's a lot of stuff that we've got going on and we're excited about many of them 2017 is going to be really cool right now I can tell you that we are on iTunes where you can listen to all of this stuff now really excited about how that's going and we have just started on the street feature where we take a camera out to the street five to you guys out there and getting what people in the local community out what they want or are thinking about and sharing that with you we're really excited about all that stuff we're really excited about you guys watching and following us on all the social media sort of things, Instagram, Facebook Twitter, all that good stuff look for us, ThinkTek H.I watch us on Olelo thank you so much everybody here appreciates it welcome back to Perspectives on Global Justice this is your health, spirit, risk and telmo and we are going to start our second part of our segment on climate change and blue planet foundations green transportation energy so we were talking about the entire process of creating a vision but also the infrastructure for the much needed changes that we need as a state to be able to achieve our goal and to become less dependent on fossil fuel 100% goal of not being dependent by 2045 many states think that this is quite bold and unattainable what do you have to say about that? well I have to say that they're wrong there's a lot of skeptics about the achievability of 100% clean transportation and I think that our vision so blue planet foundation we actually run a program called STICH or the sustainable transportation coalition of Hawaii it's a coalition of a bunch of stakeholders that are interested in clean transportation and we are kind of administer the program so STICH we've kind of set out a two part vision of what clean transportation or sustainable transportation is by 2045 and the two components are first of all we envision that by 2045 half of all of the trips in the state will be by alternative transportation so walking, biking public transit other mobility options like Uber, Lyft or Autonomous taxi technologies which are being developed and a real scaling back of the personal automobile which takes a lot of resources energy and a lot of space and also a heavy reliance on the personal automobile has some real equity challenges for low income households and also for the 35 to 40% of the population that doesn't even have driver's licenses so we really want to see an increase in alternative modes and the quality and availability of them to that really reduce energy usage and also solve a lot of the traffic and equity issues that we have in the current transportation system and then the second part is as I mentioned before we talked about transitioning all the vehicles to renewable energy sources so I'm going to touch base on a very controversial sole issue for the state of Hawaii which is our rail road some people are adamantly against it some people say this is the only way to go so I would like for you to elaborate a little bit on where is the Blue Planet Foundation with the rail road and if you support or not what's your argument for against it so there's a lot of controversy around the project and most of the controversy has to do with the cost of the project so obviously it's very expensive and the recent increases in costs are alarming and our costs are very concerned ultimately though we really believe that it's important to have a very healthy mix of transportation modes and really the cleanest and most cost efficient modes of transportation are walking and biking so that's where we really that's the holy grail for sustainable transportation is walking and biking and to do that you have to build neighborhoods that are unbikable that means you have services and jobs within walking distance or biking distance of people's homes larger sidewalks bike lines and loads that respect the bicyclists the problem is you can't really build neighborhoods like that unless you have a really robust public transportation system so if you're thinking about public transit as just something that you add on top of something that's a accoutrement to our current transportation system then it's easy to understand why people are really upset about the cost of the project we like to flip that upside down and say no the public transit is really the backbone of our entire city not just transportation but also our land use we can't build walkable neighborhoods without a really robust public transit system one thing that a lot of people don't know is that our current public transit system here on Oahu the bus has really been at capacity since the early 1980s it's a little bit technical but essentially the main problem is that in urban Honolulu the buses get so backed up behind each other not so much the other traffic although that complicates things but it's really the buses are getting in each other's way and so the buses in urban Honolulu average about four to eight miles an hour it's very slow and so it's really difficult for the city to add more buses overall because all the buses get stuck in urban Honolulu the rail will really help that problem by clearing out urban Honolulu and really providing a very efficient way to get people in and out of urban Honolulu which will make it a lot easier to provide better bus service all over the island and there's really no way we can increase our current public transit capacity without the rail project but because it's expensive it really doesn't make sense to just build the rail and expect a very small shift from cars to transit you really have to because it's so expensive we feel that the city and county of Honolulu really should go all in so go big or go home actually go big not even go home there's no way back so what that means essentially is right now in Oahu about 6% of all trips are by public transit we think that number should be north of 20% right now about 76% of all trips are by personal model bill 45% especially trips coming into urban Honolulu and we really think that we can actually be able to say that the rail project can't solve traffic congestion we actually think it can it just depends on how many people you switch and the city and county has a lot of tools actually that can get people to switch from cars to alternative modes the rail is essential to make that possible but it's not the only tool in the toolkit right so let's talk about all the tools in the toolkit that people don't think about it so biking renting by the hour perhaps walking right so the way we think it's the best way to do it I think the best example of how to do it would be to look at a city like Vancouver so in the late 1990s Vancouver as a city set a goal to buy 2020 have more than half of all the trips in the city be by walking biking and transit and then they coordinated all their land use and transportation policies all towards that single goal so they built really high quality bike lanes they built high quality sidewalks they expanded their already fantastic public transit system and then they supported things like car sharing, bike sharing services and then all the developers when they came in to build projects the city required them to include amenities that made it possible for people living in those neighborhoods to walk and bike to grocery stores and restaurants and stuff like that so they had a really holistic approach and the city and county of Honolulu really needs to do that they can't really do that without the rail project because the limiting factor right now is our capacity in the public transit system most people don't realize that and so that's really something to consider what would you say to people who have 2-3 cars at home and say I'm not going to give up my car and I'm not going to use public transportation because I think there is a part of the reeducation and helping people understand the parks and the advantage of doing this switch what would you tell to someone who is very resistant to those kinds of changes I think there's a really I think there's a fallacy out there that's very common misconception that people think that culture or people's attitudes about cars is the primary thing that dictates their behavior and all of the data suggests that's not true so if you took 100 people from Honolulu and you stuck them in Tokyo or you put them in New York City you would find that almost all of them would be getting around by walking and taking the train the biggest single factor that dictates how people get around and the cost structure so if we build cities where it's possible and convenient to get around without a car people actually tend to switch pretty quickly the problem is it's really hard to make those changes it's really hard to improve bike lanes the King Street cycle track is a really good example the mayor has said several times that the most controversial thing that he's done during his administration has been the King Street cycle track even more controversial than the rail project that's because people are very resistant to anything that cuts into their vehicle traffic and that's understandable we've built a city where we have so many cars that we've taken every square inch of the street and so it's congested and it's contested space and so we can't really improve the bike network and the pedestrian network without taking away from the cars and so it's natural we're going to have some pushback and it's important that we fight back against that pushback because really there's no other there's really no other solution we can't continue expand the roads it's impossible and also I think that's the part of looking at other places that already have taken that leap and they're doing so much better than we are and say hey if they can do it so can we so we have a few minutes left for our show unfortunately but I would like to cover some of the activities that Blue Planet Foundation has planned for our day and also around green energy efforts for this month and the following month so what's exciting and what's happening in the coming weeks the biggest thing is actually next Thursday the 20th of April we're having a huge rally at the state capitol so it's our clean energy day it's a rally for 100% clean ground transportation we have 700 elementary middle and high school students that are coming to the capitol 700 are they coming from all over the state mostly from Oahu but there may be some from other islands I'm not sure exactly but we also have about 10 vendors that are going to be having those in the capitol rotunda so some of those are Hawaii bicycle and we bike share Hawaii a few others that just share information about clean transportation alternatives we're also going to have an electric vehicle ride and drive event so we're going to have a Tesla and a Toyota Mirai and a Nissan Leaf and BMW i3 and others that anybody who has a driver's license can come and actually test drive the vehicles it's going to be from 10am till noon and it's we're going to have some speakers represented Chris Lee and others are going to be speaking about clean transportation all this is basically building support and showing the legislators that there is a tremendous amount of public support for setting this 100% clean transportation target right well that's amazing and it's so wonderful that 700 children are planning to do this they get it they do they really do and any other events that you are scheduled to you know we always have a number of EV ride events around the state we don't have any planned at the time at the present time but we do about one every month and a half or so we're planning to do our electric island drive again this year we did one last September where we had individual EV owners basically drive through urban Honolulu in a caravan with flags that was for National Drive Electric Week so we're planning to do that again this September we have our annual fundraiser in September as well and we do a lot of community events throughout the year but those are the the big ones that's wonderful well thank you so much for being here and for being such an amazing inspiring leader to help us you know move to a new era of green energy you know for our state and hopefully a leader for the rest of the globe well welcome to Prospectism Global Justice this is Beatrice Cantelmo and please come back next Friday and check us out again a hui hou