 So, Congressman, thank you again for joining us tonight for our 30th anniversary for ESI. I know Carol and I are terribly excited that you're here. A couple words. Thank you very much. First of all, it's great to be here on the 30th, Jared. Thank you for your leadership and great to have you as a constituent. I look around the room, I see some other constituents. Yes! All right. You know, I have to say I'm much happier to be here than where I was 10 minutes ago on Capitol Hill. I thank all of you for your efforts, Carol. Thank you for your leadership. And as many of you know, this ESI grew out of what was originally I believe called the Environment and Energy Conference in the Congress. This is a bipartisan caucus, which was founded by, among others, one of my predecessors from Maryland's Eighth Congressional District, Gilbert Goody. So, Maryland's Eighth Congressional District sees itself as having a little bit of a proprietary claim on this important issue. But very seriously, I just want to thank you because the need for the work that you do is important, maybe more important now than it was 30 years ago. And as one of the co-chairs of the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Caucus, we're very proud to team up with you every year on the expo, proud to team up with you on the member briefing. And grateful to all of you for the expertise that you provide on very important issues. Scientific expertise, your public policy expertise. And we just hope that in all the hurly-burly and back-and-forth United States Congress, we will succeed together in breaking through the politics and make sure that the policy arguments and the science win out in the end of the day. And this is not a battle for one day or for two days. These issues are things that have obviously been worked on for a very long time. We've got a long way to go. But I am pleased that we're making progress slower than we would all like. But we're going to keep marching forward when it comes to energy and energy efficiency and renewable energy. And obviously there was some good news in the President's recent trip to China. And we're going to be working together to organize around that effort as well as the other efforts that bring us together. So again, happy 30th. Thanks for what all you do to help us in the United States Congress. And we look forward to continuing to work with you. Thank you. Thank you all. My name is Jared Blum. I have the privilege of chairing EDSI. And in addition to Congress in Van Hollen, we thought we would make just a few remarks and really suitably pay homage to this day. Thirty years ago, some very visionary members of Congress, John Hines, Gilbert Goody, and her own Richard Ottinger. Where are you, Richard? Where are you? Dick Odger, who's here today. I'll just answer back. All right. Creating something called the Energy and Environment Study Conference, which was not funded by any government funds, which was a nonpartisan forum for trying to create and give publicity to imaginative and workable ideas to solve environmental energy problems. And that mission has been in existence for the last 30 years. And frankly, we've done a heck of a lot. If you look at the records, just over the last 10 years, if you're familiar with our briefings, how many of you have heard of the EDSI briefings? Every one of you should be raising your hands. We've done the last 10 years 326 briefings. That's quite a lot. If you can do that math, even I can do that math, you know, 36. Yeah. 32. 32 a year. We're kind of jeered. 32 a year. We've also done, we had 97 white papers. And in addition to the work that we do, we're recognized as a superlative charity. You have a charity navigator, which rates all charities. We're a four-star charity for seven years in a row. We're also called a great, a member of great nonprofits. They gave us a 2014 top-rated star. So you're really talking about an organization that, on one hand, has an incredibly fabulous mission, and on the other hand, does it so very well. And the only reason we can do it so very well is the woman who's going to speak to you next. Yeah. We make no introduction, but I will tell you that for the 30 years of our existence, Carol has been executive director for 15. So you can count on the kind of success we've had because of her leadership. And Carol, I'd like you to make a couple of comments, if you will. Yeah, I think you're all here. We are EESI, our board, our staff, our advisory board who are here. I want to say thank you to all of you and to everyone who came, even though it was cold. But hey, there was no snow. There was no ice. And besides that, you had to know that there was also a Keystone boat that was pending, right? But in any event, we are so glad that you are here to be part of this whole celebration. And I think that it is really important that we kind of recharge our batteries as we look towards this next Congress, look toward the challenges that we all face. I think that at EESI we view this as a time when things are just as important now as what they were 30 years ago in terms of our mission and what we can do. We try to always look at things holistically, looking at how we can create synergies, bring people, ideas together to create practical solutions and therefore help move policy. And while there is so much that we can point to in terms of things that we have done and differences that we have tried to make over the years in terms of so many different areas that we have tried to tee up as issues that we see coming either before the Congress or issues that we think are ripening and should come before the Congress because they need the attention of national policymakers. As we've looked at that, we have always tried to look at who are the people that we should be talking to, that we should be asking questions of, to whom we should be listening. Whether it's at the state or the local or the national level, across all sorts of constituencies across every economic sector. We see that as being so critical in terms of how we do our work. Our briefings are probably the most visible part for so many people, but they are sort of the keystone of our policy work as we try to move smart solutions forward. And all of that work is dependent upon all of you and the relationships that we have developed in and we so appreciate working with everybody that is here tonight and the kinds of collegial relationships, the things that we have learned from all of you and so we really look forward to continuing all of that work in the future. And now I want to introduce one of our board members who has been a strong supporter of EESI and she brings a little bit different perspective I think in terms of having known EESI for many, many years. And that is Dr. Rosina Beerbaum and Rosina is flying back out tonight because she has to teach tomorrow. And of course Rosina and I first met when she was at the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment. And she was there for 13 years, she was there until, guess who, had it abolished. And then Rosina was also at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy for eight years and served one year as acting director there. Then became the dean at the School of Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Michigan after doing that for 10 years. Rosina is like an energizer bunny. I don't know how she does it. She's a force of nature. But she's led the Climate and Development Study at the World Bank. She was named to a GE at the Global Environment Facility Technology Committee. She's leading that. She was also named the World Bank's first fellow with regard to adaptation. She's been an incredible leader in terms of all of the IPCC work, the National Climate Assessment. And so, and on top of that all, she is on our board. So we feel so fortunate and she is here with us tonight and so I would like to ask Rosina to just say anything. It's about me, but I do want to say, EESI has been absolutely essential to my career for all 30 years. And whether I was working deep as a congressional staffer or when I moved to the White House and was trying to coordinate the S&T budgets of the nation and environment or now as an educator, and I think that that ability of EESI to touch people in all those different lives really speaks well to both their amazing breadth and depth. And I think of EESI as very, very broad. I mean, you reach across aisles, you reach across disciplines, you reach across time, but also it can be very, very deep and do amazing analytics for legislation that's pending. So this breadth in the staff is very unusual and it was probably way back. And I guess I would say sometimes there are no new answers but there are times when the answers are ripe. And so way back in 1988 EESI was saying climate change was an issue for the ages and that was what four years before Rio, which is my students often say because you were working on this before I was born but any issue that you were bringing this to the forefront then. But then sometimes there are these unique situations where kind of the stars align and you can make progress. And I think what we saw with the Farm Bill and the online financing of rural co-ops, you know, something that actually all came together, you've been working on that for years, the stars can align if you're there, if you're tenacious and if you work across the aisle and across time you can make these issues come to fruition. So I think of EESI as kind of nimble and stealth and enabling never in the limelight but building those kind of partnerships that are necessary so that when the time is right and you reach the much-overused term tipping point that they have helped it happen. And so Jared, I'm thinking about what you said. You know, if there have been, well, at least for the last few years, around 52 briefings a year and there are more than a hundred people that come to each of the briefings and if the average age of a staffer in Congress is 23 and they stay for three years and you've been here 30 years, you've educated ten generations. Amazing, amazing accomplishment. And so, you know, to the three weird parts of my life that all depended so much on EESI in the very first years I came as a congressional staffer to the late great office of technology assessment knowing only there were three branches of government and so then I needed EESI to help me figure out how to navigate this landscape of what is Congress and got really the tutorial I needed and essentially called Dick Ottinger and George Brown staff every week to figure out how to write 19 different acid rain bills that eventually turned into the Clean Air Act. You know, I'd say you worked on the Clean Air Act and the Farm Bill and climate change and air pollution just an amazing breadth of stuff. But then when I moved to the White House, you know, I needed a different kind of help which you guys also provided which was the very deep analytics into who would help with which budgets across the authorizing committees and then the appropriations committees and how to forge those kind of coalitions to advance global change research delicately with some steps forward and some steps back. So I needed deep strategic and tactical advice which you also gave. And now as an educator back out in the real world, quote, my students all have to read the EESI fact sheets and issue briefs. It's completely required. But here, you know, helping in this amazing way to generate, to help the next generation tackle these amazingly complex and interconnected issues. So I see you as helping with tactical, strategic and educating the lay public as well as scientists, politicians, vice presidents and presidents for over 30 years. So I want to thank EESI for all they've done. I hope the next 30 years are equally productive and thank them for really working in that difficult space of finding solutions that can advance the economy, that can advance the environment, that can advance national security and that can really help us leave a sustainable planet for the generations that follow us. So to the next 30 years, Carol, thank you for everything. Thank you so much, Adriana. And again, I want to say thank you so much to our board of directors and who were wonderful sponsors of tonight's event. So thank you so much for all of your generosity to make this happen. And I also want to say a special thank you to Dick because without Dick, EESI would not be here. He has been part of the lifeblood of this organization. He started the organization. He has been a steadfast force in the organization and leader with the chairman for so many years and is a very, very active board member today. Several years ago, we named our internship program for Dick because one of the things that is so important that he is continuing to do at PACE Law School with the energy project that he started there and that we see is so important. And Rosina mentioned this too, is in terms of mentoring so many young people through internship programs through our staff that it is truly a test of the generations. We have enormous challenges, but there are a lot of opportunities and I'm one of those people that thinks we've always got to look at the glass as being actual and that we have to move forward. That's right. So make sure those glasses are empty. There's plenty here. And so we must move forward and so play on.