 Good afternoon. On behalf of the Ford School of Public Policy and in particular the International Policy Center, it's my pleasure to welcome you to our eighth and final webinar for the North American Colloquium on Climate Policy Series. The North American Colloquium is an ongoing collaboration between the Ford School, the University of Toronto's Monk School, and the Centro de Investigaciones sobre América del Norte at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. I would also like to acknowledge the generous support of the Meany Family Foundation for making this year's programming possible. Today's event focuses on the politics, often at the local level around citing the energy infrastructure that is needed as part of a continental transition to clean energy. First, we'll hear from Sarah Mills, who will provide a U.S. perspective on these issues. Then we'll hear from Heather Millar, who will provide a Canadian perspective. And finally, we'll hear from Inigo Martinez, who will provide a Mexican perspective. As audience members, you can ask a question in writing using the Q&A feature on your Zoom control panel. During the Q&A, we will get to as many of your questions as possible, but apologies if we can't get to all of them. We may go about 15 minutes over time to accommodate as many questions as possible. And at this time, it's my pleasure to introduce Sarah Mills. Sarah Mills is a senior project manager at the University of Michigan's Graham Sustainability Institute, where she manages the Institute's climate and energy activities. She manages a grant from the Michigan Office of Climate and Energy to help communities across the state consider energy use in their land planning, zoning, and policymaking. Sarah also conducts research on how renewable energy development impacts rural communities, both positively and negatively, and the reactions of rural landowners to wind and solar projects and how state and local policies affect them. She is also a policymaker serving as the current chair of the city planning commission here in Ann Arbor. Sarah, take it away. Thank you very much. Let me get my slides up. All right. Thanks again for having me. So I thought I'd title this who's zoning out renewable energy and then is it a problem. I think actually I didn't know what Josh was going to read in his introduction of me but I think what I'll talk about kind of pulls together all of those bits of pieces that that he just mentioned. So, as the Biden administration and states are unveiling their plans for decarbonizing the electricity sector it's starting to dawn on people that those new renewable energy sources are going to need to go somewhere. Only are those wind and solar resource availability the place where it's windy, windy and sunny, not necessarily in the same place as existing fossil plants, but the footprint of the power plant itself is different. You can't just in most cases, decommission a coal fire power plant and replace it with the same megawatts of wind or solar. So there's a new study out from Princeton, looking at kind of, you know what sources are needed to get us to a decarbonized grid. And in that study, and it's similar in other studies the researchers estimated that 228,000 square miles are needed that's the same as this kind of hole shown in the middle of the US map. And that's the land area equivalent to the size of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, combined. Now clearly it's not all going to go right in that place right it's going to be distributed across the US. And so we're going to need to start building whole bunch of renewable energy power plants. State and local policies can encourage or require utilities to buy renewables that are built in most of the country, it's going to be local governments that determine whether they can be built. This map is from the National Conference of Conference of State Legislatures and shows which unit of government has authority over siting wind energy facilities in all but a handful of states the ones that are shown here in green. And it's either entirely up to local governments, those are the ones that are kind of in that yellow, or a combination of state and local governments shown in blue. Just as a fun aside and where kind of things start to come together. This map was actually put together by Jacqueline Khan, who is a soon to be minted Ford School MPP who interned this last summer at National Conference of State Legislatures. And it was actually funded by the same renewable energy support fund, which is funding the NAC. So again kind of tying everything together. NCSL doesn't have a fancy map showing siting authority for solar but as part of a grad class that I teach last semester, a group of students put together that information for solar across all 50 states. We've actually found the very same arrangement that it's largely up to local governments or some combination of local and state governments to decide where utility scale solar solar plants can be built. And while some communities definitely welcome wind energy development. The amount of wind deploy particularly across the middle of the country is a testament to that. It is not a universal reaction that communities want to host wind energy projects. And I would say that, you know, some believe that the falling price of solar and the solar boom across much of the country will lead to more community acceptance. But that's not always the case either. I could provide a whole nother lecture on rural reactions to solar utility scale solar and whether this is a wise use of farmland. But also, as noted on this slide, we've also seen pushback and restrictions on solar from a land use perspective, right here in Ann Arbor. And I would note that this is the city that has a carbon neutrality goal that is quickly approaching but I'm going to digress on that a little bit. That actually is going to come back a little bit and later on in the story. In response to some of these restrictive local ordinances some states are pushing to change citing authority and make decisions at the state level. So last year the state of New York moved citing authority to a state level office and promised a more streamlined process as a means of achieving that state's clean energy goals. So this year, there was a proposal in Indiana to limit restrictive ordinances, not on climate ground so much as the fact that these restrictive ordinances for renewables were hindering economic development. However, these policies are meeting with opposition, both in New York which has a strong history of home rule and local control over land use decisions, but also in Indiana last week that proposed bill died. In this context, I thought I'd share some research that I have on these local ordinances. Effectively, like the things combining all of this is to try to understand how pervasive and problematic restrictive ordinances are. And then secondly to see if there are patterns in which local governments pass restrictive ordinances. I think the call for this research is not novel. It's something that practitioners have been discussing for some time and I also some academics, but it's hard to do. In part because there are so many because of local control, there are a whole bunch of ordinances governing this, and we don't have a nationwide database of zoning ordinances that's anywhere close to comprehensive. And it's really hard to operationalize what counts as a restrictive ordinance, in part as you'll see because that can vary from place to place based on kind of some land use characteristics. In terms of solving the first of these problems. This is where my applied researcher hat that Josh was talking about the grant that I have with the State Energy Office, and my academic researcher roles collide. So as part of that grant with the State Energy Office. We're trying to help communities across the state set policies related to clean energy and as a planner. The key thing that I focus on is zoning. So, Michigan has a bunch of local governments, 1773 townships, cities and villages, and they all have the right to zone. But not all of them exercise that right. As you can see here on the screen, 74% do self zone. Another 13% joined together, either with each other or sometimes they have their county zone for them. And then 8% in the state of Michigan are completely unzoned it's a free for all. Not just for wind energy, but for all things land use. And then those numbers don't add up to 100 because we're still working through that Eagle Grant to fill in some of the holes that are on the map. For that Eagle Grant it was really helpful to collect these zoning ordinances so that we can see who's responsible for zoning, and then to better tailor our outreach to those who haven't thought proactively about clean energy. For that work we found that there are about 50% of the jurisdictions in the state that zone for utility scale wind, and 20% regulate utility scale solar. So through this database we have access to, at least for one state, the zoning data themselves. The second step was then to figure out how to operationalize what a restrictive ordinance is. And I want to give a shout out to two fantastic grad students who did a whole bunch of work interviewing developers and kind of triangulating what they were telling them with some ordinances of like what ordinance was in place in where projects were actually built. Effectively there's four key criteria that that determine whether an ordinance is restrictive height. So modern wind turbines are at least 490 feet tall. So if an ordinance has a height limit less than that it's going to restrict development at least most economical development of wind. A noise threshold is also something that's really important and kind of the level that was set was 45 decibels. A third criteria is shadow flicker so this is the impact when the wind turbine is between the property line and the sun and every time it turns it creates a shadow that runs kind of across the property. So for this we set, we considered ordinances restrictive if they had have had a limit that was less than 30 hours per year on a property line, but importantly didn't allow for any outs. So some ordinances say have that threshold but say that you can accommodate that through operational changes turning the turbine off when the threshold is met or by by mitigation factors such as planting vegetative screening. A really important factor for determining whether an ordinance is restrictive or not is a setback from usually from a property line or from a road. Most ordinances in the state of Michigan have different setbacks for different targets, and it is really really difficult to figure out what a restrictive setback is because what is restrictive varies based on how big the parcels are in a community. So for right now, we left that off we've captured all of it and documented and I'm happy to talk about it if you're if you're interested but we effectively don't consider setbacks in this analysis, which means in some ways we're probably being. Some ordinances that are restrictive through setback that are not captured in our analysis but you'll see then that's even more concerning. Okay, so to combine the two datasets, what the zoning ordinances that we have, along with reading them to see which ones are restrictive. We have 416 townships that have wind zoning. 190 of them, or 45% are restrictive from one of those measures. 140 are restrictive because of a height limit. 64 from noise 30 from shadow flicker these numbers don't add to 190 because some of them were restricted in a couple of different ways but you can see that the height limit is the most restrictive element here. The table is showing the average population density median income and Republican votes for those those townships with restrictive or ordinances, and those 226 remaining townships that have wind zoning ordinances that weren't deemed restrictive. So we just looking at it that there's not a huge difference between the two and if you run a regression, there's not a big difference there either. There's numerically higher population densities in the restrictive places, which you might expect because that those communities with higher population densities maybe less appropriate for wind development, but the median income and voting patterns are pretty much the same across these. However, if you go back to that math that I told you about there is about 8% of the state that is completely unzoned, where there is no land use restrictions in place. That's there's 126 townships that fall into that category, these townships have made the conscious decision not to restrict wind development, or any other land use for that matter. If you include them in the table, they are statistic there are statistically significant differences. These communities have significantly lower population densities, and they are more politically conservative. When you group these non restrictive communities and those together, the two last categories together and you run a regression, you can see that there are the political factors are really what's driving the control for population density and the and the and the links between population density and Republican votes but at the end of the day in communities with more Republican voters they are less likely to have restrictions on wind energy, even controlling for population density. So this gets back to the practical question, which is whether these restrictive ordinances are problematic. So consider how much land area in Michigan is governed by restrictive ordinance it's 22%. So it could be problematic, but it really depends on where those communities are located. So if they are in the windiest places, or those places with the best access to transmission and anecdotally I can tell you that some of them are, then it could be a big deal. There's still 27% of ordinances that of land area in the state that are under ordinances that are not restrictive. Another 17% of the land area in the state is completely unzoned. But what I think is an even bigger deal is this last line on this table, the 35% of communities that have zoning ordinances but which are completely silent on wind energy is land use. The reason that this is problematic is that in Michigan silence in a zoning ordinance is a de facto prohibition. And in going back to that class that I talked about, another group of students looked at this issue across the country and found that there's at least 24 states where silence in a zoning ordinance means a prohibition. So again, that's really bad news for solar, since 60% of the land area in the state is under zoning but under a zoning ordinance where they're where solar is not mentioned. To that and we actually got to funding from the Department of Energy solar energy technologies office to look more into this and see how you know what impact this makes because increasingly utilities in Michigan are going towards solar. And that grant includes expanding the zoning database to six more states in the Great Lakes region, evaluating the restrictiveness of solar ordinances, but also trying to figure out which ones are silent on solar. And what I'm really excited about is that for that grant is actually headed by an energy model or Michael Craig at U of M school for sustainability and environment to determine the impact that those restrictive and silent ordinances have on energy deployment and costs of energy within the context of and I would say from the practical speaking to the grant also has some research on how to encourage communities to proactively zone and outreach that will help hopefully help to increase the amount of proactive zoning for clean energy. So we look forward to questions and comments about this research when we get to the Q&A period at the end, but you can also send me any more that we don't get to. And I also included here on the link, the link to the website where those student papers and the other work that we do kind of in this vein is included. So, thank you very much. Thank you so much Sarah Wow what incredibly important and technical, but very important work you're doing with your students. Thank you so much for sharing that. Our next speaker is Heather Malar from the University of New Brunswick. Heather is an assistant professor of political science at the University of New Brunswick. She's also affiliated with the Institute for Science Society and Policy at the University of Ottawa and the Environmental Governance Lab at the Monk School of the University of Toronto which of course is our Canadian partner for the NAC. Heather studies Canadian provincial energy and climate politics risk perception policy learning and feedback and social acceptance of new technologies. Her work has recently been published in such outlets as Environmental Politics, Review of Policy Research and Policy Sciences. Heather. Thanks so much. I'm delighted to be here today and really grateful for the opportunity to present on some of the Canadian perspective. Okay, you can see everything. So my comments today draw on some of my own research on public opposition and contentious politics around hydraulic fracturing and wind development in Canada as well as some of the colleagues from the different research networks that Josh mentioned. And just to begin today I'd like to acknowledge that today I'm speaking to you from the unceded territory, traditional territory of the Willis DeWig. As a non-indigenous settler, my work on this territory is covered by peace and friendship treaties that were signed in the 1700s, which established terms of peace and relations between indigenous and non-indigenous communities on this land. Understanding the economics and the politics of treaty relationships is really important to understanding the politics of some of the around energy governance that we're talking about today. And I myself as a scholar, I'm sort of committed to this ongoing process of decolonization in my work on decarbonization. So the goal of my presentation today is to share some research with you on public resistance to energy projects in Canada and to identify some research paths for how we might better understand public acceptance of renewable energies moving forward. And to do that, today what I'm going to do is tell you a story about two provinces, two cases of energy policy making that have occurred over the last few years. So wind generation in Ontario and hydraulic fracturing in New Brunswick. And at first, these would seem to be completely different cases. These two provinces have vastly different political economies, they have different bureaucratic resources, and they have different positions within the Canadian Federation. And the New Brunswick case deals with fossil fuel production while the Ontario case deals with renewable energy. And as such, there's a vastly different array of actors involved in each case. And I do think that there's a great value in looking at the similarities between these cases. So while wind generation is obviously at the heart of many decarbonization pathways over the last 10 years in the US and Canada. Natural gas has also been lauded as a transitional fuel to low carbon futures and this is evident in the ongoing inclusion of natural gas and the IEA's global projections I noted that natural gas is on the rise. Globally, in the report that came out today, for example. Here I'm drawing on the work of energy scholars such as Kate Neville in Canada and Hilary Bode in the US and the research team positive energy, which tries to look across some of the political dynamics across energy sources with regards to public resistance. To see how we can learn more about the dynamics of these, these types of conflicts. So just to give you some background on each case. In Canada, the Federation is highly decentralized with regards to energy production. The Constitution in Canada provides Canadian provinces with jurisdiction over the majority of natural resource and energy developments, which makes provincial comparison really helpful in understanding the dynamics and the politics of the Canadian case. So to begin with Ontario. In 2009, the Ontario government was phasing out coal and to for electricity generation. And so, and also was dealing with the recession and wanted to promote job creation. And so they introduced a feed and tariff program, which was designed to foster the growth of wind and solar in the province. The design of the program was informed by consultation with regulators and other jurisdictions, including Germany, and the input of a network of renewable energy experts unions and environmental advocates. Despite the government's attempt to develop an evidence based regulatory framework, however, and to appease local opposition by including compensation mechanisms over 50 local groups mobilized rapidly against the program generating substantial negative media attention. The debate in Ontario was intense and prolonged, focusing on risk to human health as a result of electrical emissions shadow flicker noise and annoyance. Following the loss of a significant number of rural seats in 2011, the government overhauled the program in 2012 and faced with ongoing public resistance eventually scrapped the program completely in 2013, and then a subsequent conservative government in 2018, cancel the significant number of contracts that were signed with wind and solar under the under the fit. So moving east to New Brunswick. And in 2011, based also with economic decline, David all word, the premier of the New Bruns, the premier of New Brunswick at the time was optimistic about the possibility for economic development through natural gas production. And then some resources which was a US oil and gas company signed an exploration lease with the province and early reports indicated that the resource of shale and new Brunswick was relatively significant in terms of potentially providing energy source. Aware of regulatory problems in the US, all were informed and interdepartmental committee of natural resource and environment staff. So this group worked. They reviewed legislation and other jurisdictions. They consulted with industry experts, they reviewed the latest findings in environmental science and they developed a set of draft regulations. And then they went on a tour throughout the province and trying to get public consultation on the regulatory framework and following their consultation, the government introduced a new regulatory framework. However, despite the government's attempt to engage in public consultation anti hydraulic, sorry, anti hydraulic fracturing mobilization in New Brunswick was rapid with over 50 groups forming in the first two years, and they created a network of residents environmental advocates and indigenous nations against the practice in New Brunswick. The debate in local papers and on social media was intense and prolonged, and a salient narrative was that hydraulic fracturing what pose significant risks to groundwater and human health. And in September 2014, all were lost the election to a challenger, Brian Glenn, and in December 2014 Glenn implemented a moratorium on high volume hydraulic fracturing, which stands in the majority of the province today. There's been some concessions but it still does stand. So for most of you listening today I imagine that the dynamics of these cases seem very familiar. Illustrating problems of nimbyism failure to consult with indigenous nations pitfalls of media concentration and the success of environmental campaigns and shaping public opinion. I don't disagree that many of these factors play a role. However, my aim today for you is to just highlight three areas that I think are really important in understanding how climate politics and how renewable energy setting gets stuck at the local level. So my first theme is that risk perception among communities can exacerbate historical grievances, and this can lead to rapid public mobilization. So my research on hydraulic fracturing in Canada show in several Canadian provinces finds that public opinion is particularly attuned to what risk scholars have long called dread risks. These are risks which are perceived to be involuntary. They can be catastrophic, and they're unequivocal. And these dread risks are easily transmitted through social systems like wildfire. They generate increasing levels of attention and urgency and they're a lot like a rock cascading down the hill. So my understanding in the case of energy politics is that these threats to human health are becoming highly salient among the general public. And so this is very different than the classic energy conflicts or environmental conflicts around environmental damage to property or flora and fauna the sort of birds and beads resistance. And why I think this is important is that human health risks are much more likely to be framed as dread risks. And so the health frame can really impact the speed of uptake among the public, but also has really high salience in the press. And that can lead to much more intense and visible public contestation. In Groundswick we saw rapid and prolonged mobilization around threats to groundwater, and in southern Ontario, we saw ongoing mobilization around shadow flicker and emissions. And we do know that communities don't come to each new energy project as blank slate so despite traditional separation and, especially at the subnational government level in Canada between environment and energy. Citizens don't separate environment and energy. And so in New Brunswick in Ontario, there was this perception that health risks were being distributed unequally across space. And this exacerbated prior conflicts that communities have had by previous environmental policy failures, especially those experienced by rural communities. And this is even more salient for Indigenous communities in Canada who have a long history of experiencing environmental racism from the federal, provincial and municipal level government in Canada. So this leads me to my second theme, which is that policy and advice and expertise often fails to translate into effective public engagement practices. And this can generate ongoing political distressed. So just to return to risk perception for a moment, among policymakers, a dominant perception is that public concern and urgency can be addressed by reducing scientific uncertainty. And so, for example, in my research interviews with hydraulic fracturing regulators and bureaucrats, as well as elected officials, it was often sort of, oh, there's so much misinformation. And if we just had more information about the science of the practice that would sort of reduce this uncertainty. And they would express sort of irritation that scientific information was increasingly being used by different advocates in public engagement processes. However, I would say that all what I would draw attention to is that while regulators are highly aware of the sort of malleable nature of science, the desire to rely on it to reduce political conflict really runs deep. And so, in both cases that I looked at in my research, policymakers attention to the scientific and technical and policy oriented aspects of the case, made them much less attentive to the political dynamics of their of their public acceptance and some of the political aspects around values. And that demand for governments to engage communities in deeper joint decision making is even more crucial in Canada where indigenous nations have a constitutional right to consultation. So this brings me just to my third theme, which is that global investment chains in low carbon, as they lengthen the public desire for local control is only likely to intensify further. And these dynamics were evident in both the Ontario and New Brunswick cases in Ontario fit attracted a number of European developers, while swim in New Brunswick was a subsidiary of a Texas based oil and gas company. And in the Ontario case in particular, the provincial government deliberately remove local control over the citing process I think this is really interesting in the light of Sarah's research. And they argued that the elected officials argued that nimby is and would block policy implementation. However, in the research that I did with my colleagues at the environmental governance lab, we found that this was a move that had disastrous effects. And what happened in Ontario is that the opposition party was able to capitalize on the perceived failure of the fit to create and sustain a coalition against the subsequent cap and trade system, which actually eventually led to the termination of emissions trading in Ontario. So, so there are these really problematic feedback effects that that we've looked at. And finally, just a small note that local control doesn't always mean it doesn't always have to be a problem of compensation or dealing with material interests. One of the key findings of my colleagues did a comparative study of community dissatisfaction with decision making and energy projects in Canada and I really encourage you to go check it out it's called a matter of trust it's on the website. But it they one of their findings was that often local communities decisions are driven by values and principles, and that dealing with economic interests alone won't necessarily alleviate conflict. So communities make these decisions based on intrinsic environmental values, especially though if economic benefits are perceived to be as unequal or unfairly distributed and I think much of Sarah's work has looked at this as well. So to conclude what does this mean for public acceptance of energy technologies. Well, I think first we need to better understand the relationship between policy design framing public engagement and risk perception. For example, Chad Walker at the University of Exeter has done some really interesting research on the Nova Scotia case, and found that the design of community feed in tariff programs work to strengthen communities perception of both distributional and procedural justice. And I would argue that that these characteristics have significant knock on effects in understanding ongoing risk perception in communities. And second, I think that research that closes the loop between perceived successes or failures in public engagement and subsequent rounds of policy design can help illuminate some of the conditions under which renewable energy policy is more likely to endure. So what can governments learn from high profile cases of failed public engagement around renewable energy like the Ontario case. Does failure in one jurisdiction impact policy design and another. Conversely, how can public engagement successes build coalitions of support for decarbonization and my current research project on Atlanta Canada looks at some of these issues and I'd be happy to talk a little bit more about that and the project design in Q&A. But that's me for now. Together, that was fantastic and now we're going to take a trip down south to Mexico, and I introduced an ego Martinez and ego Martinez is a PhD candidate in political and social sciences at the UNAM our partner university. His research interests include the geopolitics of energy and natural resources, energy integration and regionalization climate change governance and the socio environmental impacts of energy infrastructure projects which he'll be discussing today. He has 15 years of experience in legislative work in the Mexican Chamber of Deputies, and he currently works as an advisor for Polaya, the Mexican environmental NGO whose director spoke earlier in our series. Since 2013 in ego has served as a tutor for the masters in energy and environmental policy program at the Latin American faculty of social sciences, also known as flasco. Please. Good morning. I'm going to share my screen. Could you see not quite yet but let's give it a second. Can the other panelists see it I'm still not seeing the slides. Oh, there we go. Perfect. It's okay. Yeah, looks good. Just wait a minute please. Okay. So, good morning. I'm very happy to be here with all of you. First, I would like to thank Joshua Bassesh and Professor Barry Ray for the invitation as well as Sarah Mills and Heather Miller for the presentation of the Canadian and US perspective on these issues. Finally, thanks to all of you that are attending the webinar. I will present some findings from the Mexican renewable energy and communities project, a joint collaboration between the Mexican to Mexican NGOs and the Latin American faculty on social science, the academic institution where I serve as a tutor and advisor. This was supported by USA. The project I will present today included information arising from 118 interviews related to the development of renewable energy project in the state of Yucatan, Chihuahua, and I was Calientes and meetings with key stakeholders, among other activities which led to a specific recommendations. The Mexican heat sector constitute 27% of Mexican energy related carbon emissions. This is nevertheless a highly cost effective sector to mitigate. Mexico has a vast diversity of renewable energy sources. Since the energy reform of 2013 2014 deep transformation of Mexican electricity sector has occurred. This has contributed to increasing the percentage of clean sources in the country's energy mix. At the same time, there have been growing conflicts around the use management and representations of citing many renewable energy products have been delayed or stopped. So one constant obstacle that treating the success of energy transition in Mexico is the location and construction of new energy and renewable energy projects. Although that social dimension has not been adequately included in energy governance. Business model used for planning and developed renewable energy projects keeps priority to technical and financial by ability but doesn't not sufficiently integrate the social impacts. Existing policy instruments do not guarantee inclusive and minimal meaningful participation and do not integrate the diversity of local actors and interest in decision making. This causing negative impacts to our largest scale renewable energy projects and in some cases, resistant and social conflicts. The consequence is that Mexico is not on track to comply with his ambition now international emission reduction commitments. Since the energy reform, new machine is news and new players influence new decision making spaces in Mexico. Consultation exchange and process of sharing social benefits search. Nevertheless, there is a lack of an adequate legal and regular theory framework. The plastics are neglected or incorporate late, both in sectoral planning and in the development of renewable energy projects. The consultation and participation instruments have been insufficient. There is a greater local actors demand to realize the benefits of the energy transition. At the same time, a wide social inequality at the national level and between regional regions existing Mexico. Rights violation and persecution and criminalization of environmental defenders persist in the country. The benefits of the energy transition have not been reflected in the communities. Millions of people still live in energy poverty conditions. In indigenous communities where many of the renewable energy projects are located, the condition of poverty is four times greater than in the rest of the country. All of these contribute to a growing number of social environmental conflicts. More recently, Amlos federal government new energy policy has been based on energy sovereignty and the strengthening of the national energy utility. Amlos has promote an energy counter reform, canceling or modifying the main policy instrument to promote renewable energy like actions and has not put an alternative in place. This leg and uncertainty has resolved as well in a stoppage of large scale projects with national and international capital. Now I'm going to briefly review the main instruments considered in the Mexican legal framework for public participation in renewable energy projects. First, social impact assessment is a prospective instrument that seeks to evaluate and generate information of the possible impacts of the developed energy projects in the medium term and how they will be mitigated. This will be developed by the promoters of the projects, who most recognize the indigenous communities that are located in the area of direct and indirect and influence. Some of its performance problems among others are as follows. Social and environment impact assessment are separated limited capacity to carry out an impartial evaluation. Transparency. The recommendations are not binding. All the above leads to simulated participatory practices. Public consultation. To obtain the authorization for the construction of the project, the proponent must present an environment impact manifestation. Potentially affected parties are allowed to request a public consultation meetings to obtain information about the project. Some of its performance problem among others are the follow. Law of clarity of the methodology in driving the process. Lack of effective mechanisms to make the information being public. Minister of environmental environments discretion to grant or not the consultation. The public consultation is designed to simply share information and does not ensure that the comments or disagreements of the interested parties are incorporated into the project. It is important to note that the energy federal legal framework doesn't consider the public consultation as a participatory instrument in the decision making process to endorse energy projects. Indigenous public consultation. Minister of energy must carry out necessary consultation procedures in relation to the development of the energy projects in indigenous communities. Consultation seeks to reach an agreement or obtain free and informed consent. Consultation must carry out prior to good faith, cultural relevance, transparency, accommodation and resentfulness and through and through six general phases. Some of its performance problems among other are as follows. Lack of clarity on the process and methodology for conducting the consultation. Uncertainty about who should be consulted when the consultation should be implemented and what information should be considered. There is a lack of institutional capacity limitation to ensure the operation monitoring and evaluation of the consultation. There is no interaction with other console instruments and between the energy and environment institutional exist. Share social benefits. Energy law identifies that projects developers most address the energy projects damage and compensate the communities. An agreement must be negotiated transparently between owners and developers. Payments can be through different mechanisms. Some of its performance problems among others are as follows. The form, kind or type of benefits that must be delivered is not defined. No instruments are established to ensure the benefits transfers. It does not state how the project should be calculated and evaluated throughout its useful life. Now I would like to briefly present you a case study related with the development of solar power in the state of Yucatan. Recent big flow of renewable energy capital to the state of Yucatan is due to its high potential irradiation for wind and solar energy. Also important is a deficit in energy production within this peninsula. The implementation of the nine projects allocated in the framework of the energy reform has been executing. A diagnosis perception document was carried out. Here are some of the findings. There is little participation of women in decision making process and a lack of adequate methodologies for approaching the communities. This is an ignorance of local culture practice and dynamics. Increased state tensions have surged as of the arrival of large development projects, conflicts from the definition of land use and from the purchase and sale of land increase. Poor coordination government entities persist. The lack of corruption and welfare and paternalistic practice of public policy are also presented as important institutional challenge. There is a need to carry out rigorous independent and scientific studies that demonstrate the true social and environmental impacts arising from the projects. On the other side, the case of the TICUL A and B solar project, we should be the largest photovoltaic plant in Latin America. This project intends to install 1.2 million solar panels in a total area of 675 hectares. The project will have different types of environmental and social impacts. There has been a bad implementation of projects consultation process. Regarding to the indigenous consultation celebrated on November 2019, the Mexican authorities did not fully comply with pre or free and informed in good faith and culturally appropriate nature of the consultation process. Regarding the pre or natural of the consultation, leases were signed before consent was given and the community did not have a significant participation in the preparation of the studies and manifestation of social and environmental impact. Regarding the free natural of the consultation, leases and payments generate conflicts within the community and a strong pressure for the granting of consent was also reported. Regarding the natural of the information, much of the information was highly technical and there was not enough time and space to discuss it extensively. The consultation was not culturally adequate, as they did not have a complete and adequate translation and interpretation into the Mayan language. The consultation was not warranted to be in good faith, since different complaints from different people were not attended. So in this case, actors perceptions tied with implementation results of renewable energy pure projects in Yucatán. As a result, as a result of the process and background show above a published document issue, a number of recommendations that will guarantee the active free and meaningful participation of local population in the in developing renewable energy projects in compliance with international standards. They are five pillars to take into account when developing a renewable energy project in a territory. Information must be transparent, complete, truthful, objective and timely, so that actors can reflect, understand and deliberate appropriately. Information must be based on data and specialized lab knowledge, but at the same time easy to understand to all parties. Two, it must take into consideration the plurality of interest and the diversity of factors and seek to ease educational and political organization process that allow strengthening the capacities and abilities of historically excluded sectors. Trust must be built, seeking consensus and defining agreements in an organized and respectful way, generated rules of principles of coexistence and having a person to facilitate the dialogue and the liberation. Four, free participation must exclude all forms of coercion, intimidation and manipulation. Five, the parties must be allowed to influence decision relate to their territory, to reach fair, equitable and good faith agreements. The document also includes a specific recommendation by a stage for developers, local people and government from the men from the emergence of the idea, prefacibility, feasibility, construction, operation and dismantling and closure. All of you are invited to review the complete document. Finally, for a just energy transition to combat climate change in Mexico, we must include projects of all scales and ownership, schemes to reduce greenhouse gases emissions, offering energy a low cost and reducing energy poverty. Generate local development opportunities, ensuring the creation of value for all parties. And address the needs of local communities and populations. Integrating cross cutting issues as transparency and accountability, territorial and ecological planning and reduce the power asymmetries between actors. All process and policies must be carried out with a focus on human rights, gender perspective and positive conflict transformation. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Inigo. In a moment, Professor Barry rave is going to kick off our discussion, but before I turn things over to him I just wanted to remind our audience members, especially those that have stuck with us for this long that you can ask questions of any of the panelists using the q amp a feature and just if it fits for a particular panelists just note that otherwise, all of the panelists will take an, we'll take a shot at answering. So, Professor Barry rave, please take it away. Thank you, Josh, and thank you so much to all three of our participants for these really interesting and thoughtful presentations. One of the things that we've been exploring in this webinar series and some ongoing work is when we think about North America and environment energy policy. The three countries as neighbors but largely hermetically sealed from one another because the politics are unique. The economics is so unique, unique, all the rest. In my mindfully talk about clean energy was just five years ago that presidents Obama and Kenya, and also Prime Minister to sign an agreement in Ottawa, calling for formal collaboration on clean energy. And then targets across the three countries over the 2020s, and a real partnership, not just to all do the same thing but try to find ways to do it together. Given all that's happened, and then we're on the verge of possibly major shifts in the United States and the Biden administration in these areas, evolving situations in Mexico and Canada. We really think of energy development clean energy development in these three countries as entirely separate from one another because the local politics is just so intense. And the nationalistic considerations are so strong, or can one envision and here's Sarah I'm especially mindful of what you talked about the sheer territorial expands in just the US of reaching these big targets even before we get to Mexico and that we could actually see formal collaboration across the respective borders across these nations in a meaningful way in terms of projects even transmissions other kinds of things or are we really looking at three neighbors going in, essentially independent autonomous directions. Any thoughts on that one at all. I'm in that where there are where there are physical connections right I mean there isn't there. My area is to tends to be great lakes, but I feel like one of the part pieces of discussion is like transmission between Canada and like by main right and accessing hydro in Canada so where there is a physical like tie between those electricity connections I think that's a no brainer that that you can't think about them separately because they are tied together. And I, I mean, at least most of the studies in the US about how we're actually going to decarbonize the electricity sector, and in turn the rest of the economy that we're pushing towards the electricity sector calls for more transportation. A lot of that I mean most of the like where they draw the fat lines on a map tends to be within the US, but I got to imagine that like, there could be lines going north and south. And so, I think that that's, I think that. Right now, it often are our electricity systems in parts of the country are islanded right like I mean we within the US like we have different parts of the grid, but that, especially in a more decarbonized system, I think that there's going to be even more interconnection. So this idea of thinking about it connected together across the continent seems to make more sense but Heather's nodding a lot so maybe she can correct me. I would just echo what you're saying, especially with trends, I think some of the politics of resistance to inciting is really important in what the degree to which some of those dynamics are applicable to resistance to transmission, I think Josh you even tweeted today about the resistance to the transmission line in Maine, which connects to a significant pillar of the federal climate plan which is to create the Atlantic loop, which is this loop connecting Newfoundland hydro from Newfoundland and Quebec over to New Brunswick and down through the maritime link in Nova Scotia so I think regional coordination between, which is already occurring to some extent in the Atlantic provinces and the northeastern states but I think we're going to need to move towards the sort of regional coordination, especially with Canada I mean as you mentioned, your work demonstrates so much of the Canadian grid is focused on more South energy transmission, I mean in Canada what we really need is the east-west connection in a much more meaningful way but I think and even just watching Inigo's presentation the dynamics seem so similar in terms of public resistance. Yeah Inigo, did you want to add because I actually noticed a tremendous amount, a surprising amount of similarity between some of the issues that Heather was finding in Canada and you and Mexico in terms of how local projects are received, do you have any thoughts about that? You do have to unmute yourself though. Yes, probably just to say that in these days there will be a meeting between North America leaders and it's a good moment to have it. So, finally it seems that Mexican President López Obrador is hitting President Biden's call on climate change. President López Obrador recently gives some signs that he finally wants to get more involved with climate change issues. In the U.S., for example, of stopping oil production to just comply with not importing gasoline. As you know, Mexico is a big, big importer from gasoline, especially from the United States and that is a big problem for us. And it's a sign of the energy independence in North America, but also it's a problem for our sovereignty since the endless visions. So that is good news and it's good news that in the meeting between leaders that will have in a few days, they could renew the commitments of North America as a ration of climate change for the benefits of all of us. Thank you. Thank you. So now we'll move to audience questions. First, a question directed to Heather. Her point about effective public engagement being very important, given that there was an attempt at engagement, public engagement in both of your cases. And more about what went wrong in the province's public engagement process and in hindsight, what would you have done or what would you have suggested should have been done differently? I think that's a great question. I think two things I'd like to highlight. One is, is that public consultation traditionally with energy politics is very much sort of an afterthought at the end of the planning process. I think more and more we're just seeing that communities want to be involved as an ego was sort of showing at the front end in the policy process rather than just the side of policy implementation. I do think that some national governments have to move away from the town hall format. We found that that format is particularly vulnerable to sort of just different groups throwing scientific evidence at each other. It's not helpful in terms of building trust. And so I think, and also I think provincial governments need to start to think about how they're providing capacity to proponents. I think that renewable energy projects proponents might be a bit better at consultation than traditional fossil fuels researched by Heather Castleton and Chad Walker out of a shared. They just recently published a piece on what do renewable energy proponents they could know about treaty relations they know very little. So spoiler. I think we need, you know, to build out some of those capacities so those would be my thoughts but I'm sure Sarah has lots to say and you go as well. We do have more questions so. Okay, Sarah because Sarah unclear whether you wanted to chime in or not. And I would only add that like, figuring out what is effective, like, if somebody can do that, that like gives communities an actual say, and diffuses the situation if somebody can figure that out like they should win them at a low peace price, because I mean whether you're talking about like provincial level, right, or, or the local level like trying to figure out what are the right engagement strategies at what point and how do you. I mean, I often say like, I would love to just push pause and give communities all the information that they can to like think about the fit of clean energy at strategically rather than respond to proposals. But you can't, it's difficult to justify doing that when we are not deploying renewable energy fast enough now like we have to increase the speed. And so it's I think that it's, but what the strategies are to like have effective community engagement I don't think that anybody has totally cracked that night. So, here's an interesting question that any of you can take a stab at. So there's been a lot of talk lately about a large percentage of corn being used for ethanol generation. So how do you view the relationship more generally between agriculture and new renewable technologies. My PhD is in farmland preservation. So I have so many thoughts. And solar is a really interesting one because the footprint of solar right like as typically practiced it's kind of a. Energy centric development rather than kind of stacked services right like there's examples of agrivoltaics of doing something agricultural underneath, but that's not kind of the norm. And I feel like there are, there are a lot of, you know, they're starting to be thinking about how taking. I did look up when you were talking about hectares because we do acres. The number of the size for the project in the UK team that was discussed was is effectively 1600 acres, which is about about what's being proposed in much of the Great Lakes region, like it's a lot of land. Thinking about I think a lot about local economies and what that does, like locally like it's, it's a new revenue stream for farmers but does it have impacts on them for, for the farmer who hosts the turbine, or the solar panels but does it have impacts on their neighbors. That's what this one element of this Department of Energy grant. But I feel like we're, we haven't given much thought to how this impacts like international like ag policy and the interactions like what happens when you do offset some corn production and like that goes towards ethanol and how does that interact with general ag policy and international trade. I think that I'm getting a lot of questions about that and I would love to see more research on that. Heather or an ego, anything to add. Okay. Oh yeah, and an ego. No, okay, so I'm going to try to combine our, our last two questions together so one of them is asks if Ontario had located wind energy away from homes and population centers as Quebec in New York have done for the most part. I would highlight that for the most part, would Ontario wind resistance have developed that's one question and then the second question is about whether there's prospects for major advances in in transmission. Technology infrastructure is there reason to expect that transmission will evolve such that a lot of these projects can be located further away from these population centers like technologically like with these big transmission lines or do we think pretty much we're going to be working with the status quo in terms of our transmission infrastructure. So everyone can take a shot so so basically this question of citing close to population centers versus citing far away and building out transmission. What are the trade offs in terms of public resistance. Heather why don't you start. I can just say a little bit I think I'm definitely there's a spatial. I think that political science would do well to sort of integrate a lot of the work of environmental science in understanding politics of place and space, space conflicts and we haven't really cracked that. There's a lot of air cliche pal at the University of Montreal has done some work on this around our perceptions of space and the way that that interacts with purchasing partisanship. I would say it's not a simple direct correlation so it's not a matter of just simply. So, so new bronze workers often feel an affinity to Albertans, even though they're across the country, because the because of the desire to be an energy producing the state. I mean, actually, I think a lot of people would disagree with me that but they're but my point is just that they're that space is often mediated by ideology and political partisanship. So, so unpacking that is going to be an issue. But definitely, I think, and then the other piece which I sort of hinted at and mentioned briefly in the talk is this sense of, of pastoral. In Ontario, there are a lot of rural rural communities that have been there for a long time but there's also a lot of people who move from the golden horseshoe out because they wanted pastoral benefits, and then they were really annoyed when when industry came in to their to their perception of pastoral so so I would just say, I like most an interpretivist I would say there's space matters but it's mediated. Adding on to that. So, a paper that I did with a colleague at Michigan State just came out, and we like the title of it was farmers versus Lakers, and it's getting out what Heather was talking about it's can. Are there are there landscape characteristics or demographic characteristics, why people live in a place that that correlates, if not predicts, but at least correlates with their response to a proposed energy project and we find that, yes, it does matter, like people with productivist lands view, like places where the landscape is about production is like energy tends to be a better fit. Then places where, where the landscape is valued for its aesthetic amenities and, and sometimes and where there's the biggest conflict at least what we find is where both of those things are present. So you have farmers who want to put solar panels or wind turbines on their property for the productive value, but their neighbors moved there for the view. And so that's where there's a lot of conflict. I think on the idea of like whether transmission is going to exacerbate this like what will happen. I mean one of the actual tricky things and transmission we can have a separate thing about this is like, who gets the say over transmission lines is different. Often, like in many states, like the even the landowner that the transmission line goes on, doesn't have the say it like they, because these are like, because these are connecting if it's an interstate kind of system, it's like, you can't impede interstate commerce and so oftentimes transmission companies are given the power of eminent domain, which is actually really hard. Hard sell in a lot of communities like transmission can be more contentious for landowners than the actual project that it might be connecting. So, I think that that transmission could help alleviate where you like help extend and and access communities that might be more amenable, but the process of extending that transmission could be really contentious. And I would also just say that like, I think that energy development has the opportunity to do some of these ties that Heather was talking about, you know, between different regions, urban and rural regions, but it also has the opportunity to exacerbate tensions, if that project is seen as, as something that is is foisted on the rural community by the users of like those who desire that power in other communities so like, if I think this is where the idea of like what I would say needs is really integral to like whether you're seeing as like, hey, we're doing, you know, this is economic development for us, and it's satisfying the, you know, the energy needs of the cities, versus like, this is being, this is being pushed on us by a policy driven by urban desires that we don't agree with. We have to live with something that we don't like in our backyard. So I feel like, kind of how much say you give and where you put those power plants really like those. And the, the, the, the geography of that is like, really entangled. And I think I see a lot of head nodding, I think we're going to have to end things there but I just want to thank you all so much I'm particularly happy that this panel included perspectives from all three North American countries because, and I think this touches nicely on various I think this whole series has really highlighted the degrees to which each country has its own separate issues but also to which there are common themes, and how, you know, energy doesn't know national borders and things like that so I just want to thank you all and I want to thank all of our panelists and Professor rave for helping to bring this whole thing together from the Ford schools perspective. It's been a really great series and for those of you who are just joining for this session and may have missed previous sessions, you can find all of them on the Ford school YouTube channel, and the video from this session will be added to there as well so with that. Thank you all, and have a great afternoon.