 Please come in and grab some pizza. We have about a 10 minute presentation from a group called Off Fossil Jewels Petition. And we'll give them a few minutes to tell us a little bit about the work that they've been doing out in the community, getting some grassroots support for some of the things that we care very deeply about. And then we're gonna spend a good chunk of the caucus time today hearing some reports out from the Senate committees on work that they've been doing. You were here last week with us, you know that last week we heard report out from the various House committees who are moving climate related legislation. And so we wanted to give equal time to the Senate because of course now that we've had crossover we know as a climate solutions caucus what bills are in motion and what we wanna be getting out there to put our support behind as we head through a final passage of some of these bills. So who will be presenting from the Off Fossil Jewels report? Excellent, look at that. My name is Jeffrey Gardner. I work with the Upper Valley Affinity Group by the McBrackford. And this is the petition that we have been circulating for several months as it appeared online. And also we have mostly gotten signatures by either of these printed petitions, a short one and a long one. And they all come to the same conclusion. And that conclusion is that the demand on this group, climate caucus, is that you sponsor and support the two bills, House 51, Senate 66, that call for no more fossil fuel infrastructure in the state of Vermont. And this is the petition itself as signed. This is the petition as signed and also as it occurred online. And in total, once we've taken all the duplicates, all the stateers out of it, 1,473 people have signed this petition. When you put that together with the 55 towns that have approved town meeting day resolutions that are asking for basically the same thing, I think you come to the conclusion this is something that the monitors take seriously. I haven't given you the printout that has all the comments that people left online, but I can summarize them. And they're urgent and urgency is the keynote in them. First of all, what people recognize urgently is what you know, and that is not only time is short, but with respect to many things we're already out of time relative to climate change. And this petition urges you to act now this session on these bills. Second of all, what people recognize is that fracked gas, which actually is the conversion fuel of choice across the country, when we give up coal, what we're going through more and more is gas, it's neither cheap nor clean, neither of those things. And I think all of the members of this group now understand that fracked gas for either heating or for generating electricity is at least as bad as oil and possibly even as bad as coal. And it's not cheap. It's expensive in terms of the social costs associated with it that the industry externalizes and even as a consumer product it's not cheap and it's gonna be getting more expensive as the rush to export fracked gas, pipelines moving everywhere to the coast, both east and west and to the south to export it. So that's important. The other thing that people are urging about is over and over again in the comments is yes, we ought to get off using fossil fuels for 75% of what we use it for, which is transportation and heating homes. And yes, we know that to some extent electric cars are important and so are heat pumps but underlying that is if we don't use fossil fuels for those things, we use electricity. And if that electricity is being supplied by more and more fossil fuels, then we're not doing by far what we should be doing and all we could be doing. And that means that the two key things are conservation for one and for two, we have to change the underlying infrastructure and that is darn hard and darn complicated but there's no question about it, that is what needs to be done quick. These two bills begin to do that. They draw a line that says the obsolete dirty ways of supplying energy are behind us. Let's focus on the future and how we face the difficult task of creating a new and different energy infrastructure. And that's Gael to say a few words. Good afternoon, my name is Gael Polskamp. I'm an organizer with 350 Vermont. I worked on the town meeting day resolution campaign, climate solutions resolution. I'm sure you're all aware that the resolution passed in 55 towns throughout Vermont. And the resolution calls on a halt to new fossil fuel infrastructure. In addition, it calls on state leadership to take bold action to stop climate change. We are in a moment of grassroots momentum building. I'm sure you all remember when the over 150 youth came into this building and demanded action on climate change and tomorrow I will be joining 250 remonters to walk from Middlebury to Montpelier for the next step climate solution walk. On March 21st, we sent a letter asking for a joint hearing on the two bills, the S66 and H51. And I'm here today to ask you all to support leadership in arranging that hearing. We're requesting that it take place on April 9th in the evening. I know it's a lot of work on your part. We recognize that it will require more resources and time but it is time that we are running out of and we need to act now. And so if you all could support Tim Brigham and to help him gain support from Speaker Mitzi Johnson and the Sergeant of Arms to have this hearing on April 9th, that would be very appreciated. Thank you. Hi, my name is Rachel Smoker. I live in Hinesburg and have a PhD in biology from University of Michigan and I'm the director of an organization that works internationally on climate issues and has for over a decade. And I want to disavow you of the notion that you have time to drag your heels or further discuss and push off into the future any action on climate change. Over this past year I've had the privilege, I guess you would call it, of being one of the peer reviewers of the IPCC report on pathways to 1.5 degrees and on the use of land which hasn't yet been released but is in draft form now. And those reports are based on models which are based on all kinds of underlying assumptions and there are a lot of things that are missing from those models. For example, the US military which is the largest consumer of fossil fuels in the United States, those emissions are exempt from reporting under those models is not included in those models. A lot of things are lacking from those models. So I don't want to stand here and say, you know the IPCC is not a good authority but it's got a lot of limitations. And when the media picks up on the IPCC reports and says we have 12 years and everyone says okay, maybe next session or the session after or some sort of year down the path, we will address the issue of climate change in a really strong manner. We don't have that kind of time. The 12 years thing was something that a lot of people who worked on the IPCC reports were upset that the media picked up on that and people have been searching their souls to try to figure out how do we speak more urgently about this matter to mobilize our legislators and our communities to take the kind of action that needs to happen. How do we do that? And just a couple of days ago an article was published in, I think it was Nature anyway, I have it here for you. And basically they said we need to link the issues of climate change to people's personal health. And that's very difficult for us because we're pretty comfortable relative to say people and Mozambique who just got wiped out by a hurricane which may or may not have had to do with climate change and we can debate that while they're struggling to survive. But this is not a question anymore. I want to pass this around. This is the LNG, sorry, no, this is the natural cast pipeline infrastructure in the United States. This is the LNG import-export terminals. We have only begun exporting LNG in the last, since 2016. There are 26 proposed and in construction LNG terminals. Just since 2016, we are suddenly becoming a world supply. What do we have to do? We have to stop building infrastructure. Infrastructure has to be stopped. Otherwise we are a dead planet really. And on top of that, we have to take into consideration the fact that this infrastructure is unsafe for us. It's unsafe if you have a pipeline in your backyard. Many of you may know I have been fighting this pipeline in Vermont for several years. It's now under independent investigation for multiple systemic construction violations and failures. People die when these things blow up. They're not safe, thank you. It is our support and enthusiasm for the message that you guys have brought to us today. And we thank you for your work in engaging with Vermonters because we know that one of the biggest challenges that we face in trying to move things through this building is that we need our colleagues to be hearing from their constituents so that they will come on board and will support some of the things that we want to do. And so for the rest of the meeting today, we're gonna be spending some time talking about the bills that are coming through the Senate so that we as Climate Solutions Caucus members know what's coming and how we can support it. And so what I would say to the citizen advocates who are in the room with us right now, we are the people who are convinced and committed. And we really wanna, we wanna do what you wanna do. And our challenge is that there are not enough of us in this room to crowd you out or to force us to move across the hall into room 11, which is bigger. So we need you to get out and go through the cafeteria and hang out and have lunch with some of the folks who are not active participants or endorsers of these concepts within the Climate Solutions Caucus because we can pull them, you can push them, and together we can get the critical mass that we need within the House and within the Senate to move some of these ideas. Mari. I have one more ask, some of you may be familiar with the other infrastructure bill, H175 fondly called the Nate Palmer Bill, a constituent from Addison County who thought of the idea of banning the use of eminent domain to build new fossil fuel infrastructure. So when you are all out in the community and talking to other legislators, please push that bill as well. H175 is a companion bill with H51, Mary Sullivan's bill. It already with the tremendous grassroots efforts that have been happening in Addison County, including a lawsuit that and Mary Sullivan's H51 and the Nate Palmer Bill, H175, we believe were instrumental in Bristol, the Bristol community rescinding the Vermont gas contract to introduce new pipeline in that community. So they're already, the infrastructure bills I think are already having an impact. But please talk about H175 as well because it's a really simple bill that might be really powerful. Thank you. So we're going to shift gears now. We'll come back to this for conversation when we're done with the report out from the different Senate committees. So we have Senator Starr. Thank you for joining us for lunch. You're welcome to give us a Senate-esque update from where you are, or you can come stand in the middle of the room, or come sit. Yeah. I thought Vice-Chair, if you could sign with me on the page. I'll be right over here. Well, here I am. And it's a pleasure to be here. I chair the Senate Ag Committee. And we deal with all types of ag issues as well as economic development issues in forestry. And in ag, it's real important that I think it's only fair that you folks should know that farmers are very good environmentalists. And this very morning, just a quick story, we had a farmer in testifying in regards to plate coolers and variable speed motors on the equipment. And he went on to tell us that just this last year, he went through and did all these things. And his energy consumption, his bill, went from $800 in sum dollars to $300 in sum dollars. And it's doubled the output of he can put out twice as much milk or put through twice as many cows. So farmers are doing these things that they don't get much mention, but it's happening all over the state to cut down our consumption or their consumption on energy of all types. Many farmers have gone to buying tractors, diesel. Most of them are diesel tractors. But they have to put an added to them that it costs about $3 in something a gallon of the additive that burns with the diesel so they don't smoke and they still consume as much fuel. But in the committee this year, we put through regenerative ag. The house passed the bill, but we've also passed one in S160 that we sent to the house. So that we can build and encourage farmers to build better soils, to use crop rotations, to help with brumoffs. The ag community is very committed to doing what's right to cut down on fossil fuel usage. We don't use a lot of fossil fuels as we want to generate electricity, but what we do use is probably too much. And so we're getting the farm community on board. Actually, Pearson, I don't think we've had any complaints from any of those projects that we put forth to help with all of our pollution issues. The waterways, getting them out of the wetlands. So we don't work in the wetlands anyways. We just get our tractors stuck in more bootcrops for our animals. But they've been exceptionally good to work with. And hopefully, we'll get either one or the other of those bills passed on either systems that we've got or the house has got. Maybe we'll pass them both to make sure that one doesn't get talk-talked late in the session. So I don't know if that answers all the questions you've got, but we're just in addition to the ecosystem services, and the idea is farmers are required to meet required agricultural practices. This is relatively new to yield pretty barely water quality. But building soil, sequestered carbon, helps with flooding resilience, helps with nutrient runoff. And so is there an economic trigger we could offer to help farmers? So that's part of the bill. Do you want to also talk about the forest? What do we call it? The carbon sequestration for statements? Yeah, we've got that in there, too. I mean, we've done really quite a lot this year. Put through where the Commissioner of Forest and Parks has got to do some research work on trying to get carbon. Well, you know, I don't even really like that bill, because what it does is it allows us to sell these credits to polluters. And then we get the money back to keep our land open. And I'm not really a strong believer in that practice, but it's a way to keep our forest healthy, to keep ownership with individuals instead of those individuals and to chop that property up into smaller blocks, which could end up getting homes built on. So it is a way to allow landowners, forest owners, to keep their property in forest. And I just hope that it works out the way we think it's going to work out. And because we all watch television from time to time, and when California happens, they hit the news, and they show all those cars traveling wider than I can count. Oh, pretty wide. But it's all you see is that smog and stuck light. I don't want to help them continue to do that. And our trees take care of y'all allowing that. So I hope we get a happy medium where we aren't allowing that to continue, because we already have too much dirty air. Yes, a quick question. Could you tell us the numbers of those two bills? Yeah, I thought you were going to ask me to count. I'm lucky. Yeah, S160 and H1175. 525. Well, S160 has both of those. Yeah. OK. That's it for those. And I just wanted to say, if any of you folks are ever in the building, we meet in the mornings. And would like to get on our schedule, you're always more than welcome to come. Yes. I'm also a farmer. And I applaud your efforts in supporting ecological services. However, I also, we really have to stop extracting fossil fuels. In the 16 years I've been farming, I've seen a lot of changes in Vermont. And I'm very worried about the ecological collapse that is going to occur because of climate change. I am an organic farmer. I rely heavily on beneficial insects to control pest insect populations. And so when the ecosystem gets out of balance, those beneficial insects disappear. And we're already seeing that happen. And so that's why I'm here to urge that we stop building new fossil fuel infrastructure, as well as support those ecological services. I don't know what you mean by building infrastructure for fossil fuels. Pipelines, is that what you're saying? Yes. Well, we only got that one gas pipeline that I know of. And I would think that the double, the deep blue sea. But you're better off having people maybe burn natural gas than you are down there burning number two fuel. OK, so we're not going to make the issues here. So folks, I think we should give Senator Starr a big thank you for coming and sharing with us a couple of issues here. Pizza, pizza. So resources. Senator Bray. Good afternoon. My name is Chris Bray. I chair some natural resources and energy. So on the Senate side, we combine two House committees really in one. And a lot of the by agreement and plan, a lot of what we did in the first half was related to the natural resources. So we did the Clean Water Act for this year and a PFAS bill. So people may have heard about PFOA, poisoning people around the state. So we spent a lot of time working back through. And then let me fill you in though that we have done some smaller scale of renewable energy and ending bills. So there's S-12, the state energy plan. The whole notion is conservation efficiency, great thing. The state should leak by example. We have a four year pilot that we're now extending another four years. The state basically, kind of like a homeowner, takes a loan and takes that loan money and does weatherization and efficiency upgrades in its own buildings. We're seeing that they put in a million a year and they're seeing benefits on the neighborhood of three to four million for each project year. So this was where continuing that program. Again, it's always good for the state to lead by example and to learn from doing the products first hand in house. S-30, so that was S-12 and this is past the Senate and it's now going over to the House. S-30 is a bill on hydrofluorocarbons that also passed the Senate over to the House. So people only remember the Montreal Protocol that said we need to stop using chlorofluorocarbons as a refrigerant because they were so damaging the ozone layer. One of the substitutes that came out of that was hydrofluorocarbons. Turns out that their greenhouse warming potential of a molecule to molecule CO2 to hydrofluorocarbons is a thousand fold worse. So there's a phase down. The federal government was working on this. An EPA rule got ruled ineffective or remanded by a judge, a circuit court judge at that point. His name was Brett Kavanaugh and when he went back to the EPA, this administration decided not to take another bite, the Apple rewrite rule to try to get something to pass. They're sitting on their hands. So Vermont decided to step up and look at what California has done and taken. We wrote our own legislation to begin the phase down of hydrofluorocarbons. Small-scale hydro, so we have many small-scale hydro dams coming off of long-term contracts. We're gonna make sure we don't lose them. And so S-170 is a bill that actually brought that the floor passed an amendment to it. It's now in Senate Finance. So I hope that you might be able to help encourage it to keep on moving, get it out in Senate Finance and over to the house. The plastics bill, so you may have heard that just yesterday we voted out of 30 to zero a plastics bill. So we're getting rid of continuous plastic bags, straws, and polystyrene. There's a world's awash in plastics. There's a nine-fold increase in the total production of plastic in the last 40 years. 50% of all plastic ever created was created in the last 15 years. It's causing environmental problems, sound waste problems. And also there's a lot of embedded energy, right? So it's fossil fuels going to make plastic. We're proud of our work on electric vehicles, right? But if you take the 3,000 electric vehicles that are out there and then sort of reduce the effective number by how clean is our grid, 60%, you're down about 1,800 sort of purely electric vehicles. If we implement well the plastic bag reduction, it's the equivalent of taking 1,927 vehicles off the road in a year. So it's not something that you might necessarily think of as a climate bill, but it's basically, it has the opportunity to create the near equivalent of what we've done on all our ED work, which everyone hopes and believes we will really pick up the pay sign. Two things. S-113. S-113, thank you. And then in terms of looking forward. So we have S-171, a weatherization bill. There's widespread agreement. Governed Climate Caucus, Climate Commission named it a goal of doubling the weatherization rate in the state of Obama. We've taken a lot of testimony. We're trying to make sure we're calling it weatherization for all. So it's not only low income weatherization, but low weatherization opportunities for middle income from others. So most part have been left out of weatherization work. There's a huge opportunity to keep much more money in the state. We're exporting, well, the target would mean keeping five to $800 million worth of money from others that are sending out of state, buying in fuels, keeping it in state by reducing usage from the beginning, as well as switching over to in-state generated or clean renewable energy. So heat pumps and all that. We're continuing to work on that. There was a mention about public health. And I think we've been, there's, especially in the world of weatherization, there's a strong connection. And finally, we're getting data to support it that the health benefits that go along with having a safe, secure, weatherized home actually making a great difference and avoiding the need to go, while ill health or going to the emergency room with some asthma and they're in a house that is poorly insulated, moldy, not really that healthy to live in. The weatherization program we run, the Save Your Mind is really an all, it's an all-hands-on-deck program. It doesn't only save you energy, but they also will do things that alleviate mold, increase proper ventilation, eliminate safety hazards while they're working with the clients. And I'll, one other thing, S-172, so there's been a frustrating nut to crack has been that our net meeting program, which has brought clean renewable energy to 11,000 families, is, it was, it's not really well designed for large-scale off-takers. So UVM alone is 51 megawatts of power. But there are many schools, hospitals, municipalities that would like to have the opportunity to bring clean renewable energy into their school system, into their hospital, whatever. It's part of, it's a way to control costs. It's also a way to put their money where their mouth is in terms of their, if you're believing in a healthy community, a healthy hospital stands for, first and foremost, health, why wouldn't you want to be part of the energy solution? Right now, there's a cap. There are no net meeting projects over 500 kilowatts. And so 172 looks at creating projects up to five megawatts and at a lower, and we're also looking for economies of scale, so we get bigger and we generate it more cheaply and sell it more cheaply, especially if you have large off-takers. So that's, we're working through that right now. It's a challenge because there's developers, utilities, the PUC, the department, and the legislature all in the mix, but I think there's a shared interest and I think we'll be moving something. To be honest, I want to be, there's 13 days left for Senate morning committees. We may have a few more than that. It's on the nature of 13 days, maybe 17 if they add extra time. So what we're also doing right now, for instance on community-scale renewables, is teeing up work so that when we get back in January, we'll be in a better place to really move something. Since, happily, this is the first year of a biennium, there are bigger lifts that take more than a single session and especially, right, we always need to send our work to the other side, send it to the house and vice versa and then it has to think. It's a, for a lot of people, it seems like a frustrated process. You have to slow down, sort of start all over again, but it helps us do more through work. So I wish I could be up here saying, we have this big, loud, green new deal to be sort of holding out and saying that we're, there's huge changes coming, but I think we've been doing, I would say the green deal, the green not-so-new deal in Vermont for 20 plus years, you know, weatherization, excuse me, efficiency of Vermont is 20 years old. It was the first statewide energy efficiency utility. We continue to grow and develop that program. Now we're trying to expand it into legislation work, but it is, it's one of those things, if you grow up around it, or you've seen it most of your life, to take it for granted, but it's become a model for efficiency utilities around the country and even around the world, but I would say, I'm a patient person, but we need to be a little more impatient and be bolder on some of the initiatives. So for instance, weatherization, weatherization, we could do a 10-fold increase, right? We should. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. That was a good and robust list. So we have two more Senate committees to report out. So we have Senator Perchlich to give us a report out on transportation. That's not me, Andrew Perchlich. I'm on the Transportation Committee in the Senate of the new Senator this year. Chair is Senator Mazur, who's going to be here today, but one of the things I'll, I'm going to mention four things. The first thing I want to mention is that the committee is going through kind of a transition of the transportation topics. The chair has been in that committee for 34 years. You know, when I first got appointed to the committee, I didn't know how open he'd be to these new ideas, but he's been very welcome until the new ideas I brought to that committee. Often, he says for 34 years is all potholes and paving. That's all transportation done with. And we really broaden the, we spent, on any one topic, I'd say we spent more time on electrification of our transportation more than anything else. We are dealing with the potholes and paving, but we're also going to be working on how we're going to transition our whole transportation sector over to electricity. And start talking about climate change in that committee, which really hasn't happened before, which I think is worth mentioning. So yeah. Yeah. The thing that we're doing is first thing, if we're going to make this transition to electric vehicles and electric transportation general, we need to deal with the regulatory structure. So there's a lot of different ways that the regulatory structure we have just didn't deal with electric vehicles. So we're going to allow the state to charge for charging. The state has some charging stations, but they can't charge. So they're free, which is nice with us. They have electric vehicles, but there's just not enough of them as we have more and more electric vehicles. They're willing to put more out there, but they want to be able to at least cover their costs. We're talking about just who has authority over these charging stations. Bunch of different regulatory issues that we're discovering that interplay with that metering and electric vehicle charging. And we're also, the biggest thing that we're grappling with is how is the electric vehicles going to help support our transportation infrastructure? We're already, our gas tax revenue, our transportation funds are already on a declining because just vehicle miles and vehicles are more efficient in general. So if we're going to switch over to electric vehicles, how are those electric vehicles going to support the potholes and paving work that we need to do in the bridge repairs and all the public transportation? We spend a lot of money in the state on public transportation. That's coming out of the gas tax. So if we're going to support mass transit, if we're going to support the Amtrak, we spend eight and a half million dollars a year supporting our Amtrak service. That we need to find other ways of keeping that support. If we're going to want to grow our trains and buses, we're going to need more revenue. And as we switch to electricity, we have to figure out the way to do that. But we're just getting started. It's not going to happen this year. We're just kind of laying the regulatory framework to make that happen. We're also talking about EV incentives, electric vehicle incentives. How are we going to jumpstart the market, get more people into electric vehicles? And specifically, as the bill came over from the House and as the governor had also put in his budget on focusing on low and moderate income for monsters on getting electric vehicles to those folks. And our committee is also looking at even lower income that kind of folks that don't have a car that really need a car to get the transportation. How do we make sure if we get them into a vehicle, it's the most efficient vehicle? Or how do we convince them that they don't need an F-250 that maybe a used Prius hybrid is good enough for what they need? So we're looking at that as well. And then public transit is definitely an interest. The state spends more on public transit than any other state per capita. So we are doing a lot, but there's definitely more that we could do. There's definitely an interest in trains. We've spent a lot of time in the committee talking about our current train infrastructure and passenger trains and how we can expand but again, we're kind of just laying the framework so we can build that on for years to come. Excellent, thank you so much. And we have Senator Clarkson who sits on the Economic Development Committee. So do you have any report out for us on climate? I do, and I'd just like to say there are two things in Senate natural resources that I hope will be addressed in both I'm introducing one of them tomorrow and have already been introduced to one other fossil fuel infrastructure. No, no fossil fuel infrastructure has been introduced in the Senate natural resources and I'm hoping they will address that as we go forward through the biennium. And the other one that I'm introducing tomorrow is the Global Warming Solutions Act which takes our goals, our at-wonder flask operational goals which I know the chairs wanted to do for a long time and make them a reality, make them a requirement. And that we need to meet those in order to do state business. And for all our agencies and departments we're here to so I'm excited about that and looking forward to presenting that tomorrow morning. In Senate Economic Development I think the benefit of going second is that the House got to introduce some fairly interesting carbon pricing bills which I really applaud them for doing. And I'm actually gonna recast the carbon pricing bills in the economic development bills which I have warned my dear partner, my chair, I'm Vice Chair of Senate Economic Development so he knows they're coming but Global Warming will have huge impact on five of Vermont's most iconic industries. Forestry, the forest products industry, tourism, sugaring, snowmobiling, agriculture and many more. They will devastate what we consider iconic Vermont industry. It is an economic development issue and so for the Senate we're going to recast those in economic development ways that we can address them and those will be introduced later this session and I will hope we will work on working on those during the summer and into next session. Excellent. Senator McCormick, anything on the appropriations horizon? Yeah, I mean ultimately everything has money attached to it so everything comes before the appropriations committee. The big issue right now, first of all I want to express my sympathy for people who are frustrated that we're not doing enough fast enough. The climate caucus has made a decision, a strategic decision, to focus on fairly modest goals that are hopefully achievable. One of which is to maintain weatherization and to expand weatherization and that involves an appropriation. There's money on that. If people, citizens, want to actually have an impact on this issue right now, I would suggest that they stress the need to fully fund weatherization. We get specific that weatherization and there's two elements in weatherization. One is maintaining and expanding the current program, which is aimed at low income people. And secondly to expand to the middle class to have weather and natural resources and energy committee has addressed that as a goal as well. And so that I think is right now the main issue on the appropriations committee. I must tell you the people of Vermont have made it very clear that they really, really don't like taxes. And because of that, we function as a legislature with really frankly less money than is necessary to meet the total aggregate need of the state. And what the appropriations committee does besides appropriating is we decide what not to appropriate. We decide what to appropriate at 80% of the need. And the result is that that's sort of where good programs go if not to die, at least to just be sort of compromised. And so people need the appropriations committee specifically but the entire legislature because the committee hears from our colleagues. And we are a place where people come in lobby for money. We need a popular outpouring. I sympathize with the idea of just do something big and bold now about global warming. But right now the specific issue is do something about weatherization and namely pay for it. The other issue that we've decided as a caucus to focus on is electrification of the transportation. And again, when you look at the total issue it's a fairly modest effort but it's a gettable effort. We are up against what many of our colleagues I've said this before that there's a spectrum of denial. There's flat out denial. People who say there's no problem. Shy of that there is the denial that takes this form. Yes, there's a problem but we don't have to do that much about it right now which is another form of denial. And getting people, getting our colleagues adequately excited about this is a challenge. So what we have done is strategically decided to focus on these gettable goals now. So I would ask for people to let your legislators know that they should let the appropriations committee know that we need to find the money somewhere. Senator Pearson, anything from the finance committee angle? Sure, I think you've heard some of the bills that a lot of bills come through policy committees like the plastics bill lands in finance and so we've been able to move those along. The hydro bill that Senator Bray mentioned I expect we'll vote out within a few days. The big battle though coming is the weatherization tax on heating fuels and there will be the house has increased somewhat. It's interesting, I think it's a four cents now, is that right? It's a two cents now. It's a two now, it's gone to four for the exemption for. So status closed with two cents, it's gone to four cents. If we wanted to meet our weatherization goals it would need to be a quarter. So this is the challenges that we face and there's a lot of opposition to making it four cents. Senator who's part of our caucus here, Senator McDonnell pointed out that efficiency of Vermont has a 9% tax of four cents on a gallon of home heating fuel is a 0.2% tax. So efficiency of Vermont is very clear how it reinvests in the whole system. This is one of the dynamics. So we will be fighting with that and I'm a strong supporter of putting money into weatherization, more money if we can find it and if we can get votes to do that. To me that is probably the top priority that we face in the coming weeks. But there are issues around water quality, around all sorts of rural economic issues that frankly our working landscape is one of our best offenses for carbon sequestration for the climate crisis. So they all trickle through finance. The committee, I don't think all approach it with a climate crisis lens, but is by and large supportive of efforts. And as others have said, we are nibbling. And others in this room have been involved in putting carbon pricing schemes out there and trying to be visionary and stretch the debate. And we are also trying to not just talk about ideas but actually put dollars into our budgets and reflect state budget and values that our monitors want us to face this crisis. We all applauded when Phil Scott said we were gonna answer the Paris Accord after Trump pulled out. All of us universally supported that. It's now on us to actually put our money where our mouth is. We have good programs in place. We are off target for meeting whether it's greenhouse gas reduction or weatherization targets. We are not anywhere close to meeting them. Some of these have been in statute for 10, 11, 12 years. So it's a question of resources. And I'll just tell you, it's easy to be disappointed in the legislature. It's easy as a legislator to be disappointed in the work we do. It is not easy to say we're gonna cut food stamps. We're gonna cut reach up grants to people that are homeless and trying to raise kids so that we can address the climate crisis. We all understand that the climate crisis is the crisis that impacts all of humanity's future. But some of the programs and some of the challenges on money we are way behind on meeting those needs. Reach Up Family has not had a boost in those grants for, I don't know, 12, 15 years, Matt. It's a long time. It is a long time. These are the challenges we have. It's not all corporate welfare versus climate crisis. So you have a group of allies here pushing on this stuff, but your voice is really necessary. Thanks for coming down. Quick question on topic? Yeah. I think we have to practice what we preach. And I brought this up with you specifically, but I cannot get the numbers out of people. But New Hampshire State House, which is approximately the same size with the same size windows, put window quilts in and they made their money back in about three years and they're now making a profit. I heard a quote from the owner of the company that was, I don't want to give them the exact numbers. I haven't got enough paper yet and I want to be exact, but in the, more than $10,000 in heating and cooling costs alone, we're going to need to show that, but a wish list for next Christmas or next legislation or whatever else is, they put a limit on the tax credits they can get from Tesla and I believe it's bulk. After you go over, you know, 10,000 cars, you don't get that tax credit anymore. And they had, those two companies have gone over this. They don't get the tax credits anymore. I would sure like to see Vermont promise to match what's lost in those two companies and in our own state legislator to match that tax credit that is taken away. Very much appreciate that perspective. So we are going to start hearing the house floor bells ringing very shortly. I just wanted to frame up a little bit about where we're going here as the climate solutions caucus. We have some regrouping and some refocusing that we are going to do now that we've heard last week's report out from house chairs and this week's report out from the Senate committees. Now we kind of know what bills are in play and we as the climate solutions caucus will work to support the chairs of the bodies who will continue the work on these bills. But we know right now that we are flying a prop plane when we wish that we were flying a Boeing or maybe an Airbus. Maybe an Airbus. We know that we would like to be doing more and we want to be doing it better and faster. So just rest assured, we have a series of conversations within the legislative climate solutions caucus planned over the next week to really begin the planning for how we take this set of small things that we are doing this year and build on it so that we are putting together something that is more comprehensive and more inclusive of a lot of these other ideas that you're hearing around the room. So we will continue that work and I really just need to kind of throw back to our advocate community, we need your help in filling these chairs with legislators. We need your help in pushing back against the closed-minded or backwards thinking that we hear from so many people that this isn't a crisis, that this isn't something that we need to be working on, that this is too expensive or Vermont's too small a state to make a difference. We need you to keep pushing, keep pulling, keep demanding and keep educating. So thank you so much for being here with us and now we have both the House and the Senate bells ringing. So did you have something you needed to say? I want to say that we, the leadership committee of the caucus will meet and decide how best to use this petition. This will not simply end here. We'll decide how to get this to the people who need to see it. You want me to take it? Yeah. And the person here. To second what Senator Cormack said a little while ago about weatherization. So this is a very live topic in the next 10 days or so. The Senate will be deciding how to approach it and so I would encourage everyone to reach out to your senators and help them appreciate that it is a huge, a very important major step we could take the doubling of the work. Molly Burke wants to make a quick announcement. I want to make, announce, introduce a student from Montpelier High School who's been very active. Hope Petrera, are you still there? No. Who? Hi Congress, when all the students were here, she's been very active. She goes here and I tell what we're doing here. So I just want to acknowledge our youth and thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks everybody. Did you want to ask one of us? I just wanted to point out that neither the Lake Palmerville nor our off fossil fuel bills have anything to do with money. And they're being presented as, oh, everything costs money and they don't. That's true, sir. That is a very good question. How are you?