 Hello everyone. My name is Holly Rhodes and on behalf of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine and Scientific American and Nature portfolio, both part of spring or nature, I welcome you to today's Science on the Hill event, a discussion about climate jobs and the Science on the Hill is an event series that aims to connect experts in the scientific community directly with the policy ecosystem, including lawmakers and staffers on the Hill. Before I turn it over to Laura Helmuth, the editor in chief of Scientific American to provide opening remarks, I want to give a quick overview of today's event. We'll start with a 30 minute discussion with four expert panelists on how do the US can simultaneously address the climate crisis, protect jobs and grow a strong economy. Then representatives Sean Caston and Jerry McNerney will offer brief remarks will reserve the rest of the hour for your questions. We invite all of you to submit questions for the expert panelists at any time during this event using the Q&A button located on the zoom bar. I also want to point out that the event is live captioned and you can access that transcript using the live transcript icon on the zoom bar. If you have any technical issues during the event, please send a chat to the host. Then note that our discussion today is being recorded and will be posted on both the national academies and the spring or nature platforms shortly. We encourage you to share the conversation today on social media using the hashtag science on the hill. Thank you all for joining us today. And in particular, thank you to our expert panelists and to representatives Caston and McNerney for their time and participation today. Over to you, Laura. Thank you so much. And thanks so much to everyone for joining us today to talk about one of the most important issues of our time. And I especially want to thank anybody who was up late last night or who had to get up early this morning to follow what was happening in Congress. When we picked this date, we were focused on the United Nations big climate change conference in Glasgow that just concluded where the countries of the world agreed, among other things, to keep talking about climate change. And so this discussion is really urgent. We need to keep talking, thinking about the best solutions, how we can work together. But for anybody who hasn't seen the Build Back Better Act just passed the House and it includes 550 billion to fight climate change, promote green energy development and manufacturing. So this is a really timely conversation and we're so glad to have everybody gathered here today. As you all know, climate change is a global problem with lots of local effects, wildfires in California, disruption to agriculture in Illinois, droughts and flooding, sea level rise. In the solutions, there's no one single fix, but there are a lot of solutions at the local level, national level, business and policy and science and technology and behavior and economics. So today we're going to talk through some of those fixes. What can we do about this? We're eager to hear your questions as well. We have a really great lineup of speakers. So I will pass it right away to Josh Fishman, who's a senior editor at Scientific American who covers policy and health and basically all the important things to moderate the conversation with our expert speakers. Thanks a lot. Thanks, Laura. Welcome to all of you. Thank you all so much for coming. I'm Josh Fishman and we're here today to have a conversation about ways to pull the planet out of a climate crisis and save jobs and protect our economy at the same time. And to me, for a while, it seemed that in our public and our political discourse, that's been challenging that whole idea that we can do all of this. And I often hear that we can't do all of these things, but for instance, taking action to save the climate might hurt jobs. So today we're lucky to be joined by four researchers who are experts in these issues, who study them, and we're going to talk about what's actually possible. And I'm going to introduce them now. We are joined by Susan Tierney, who's a senior advisor at the analysis group, and she's an expert on energy economics, regulation and policy, particularly in the electric and the gas industries, and she served on the National Academy's committee on accelerating decarbonization. We are also joined by Meijin Shah, who's an assistant professor of urban and environmental policy at Occidental College. Her research focuses on workforce transition. That have social and economic justice. She's been part of a project that interviewed people on their experiences with these kinds of industrial transitions. We also are joined by Rich Powell, who is the executive director of ClearPath and ClearPath Action. These are organizations that look to accelerate innovations that reduce emissions in the energy and industrial sectors. He advises policymakers on building and exporting American clean energy and industrial technology. And we have Billy Pizer, the vice president for research and policy engagement at Resources for the Future. He's been an environmental policy professor at Duke University and he researches ways that regulations and climate policy affect production and competitiveness. He's also served on the National Academy's decarbonization committee. So we're going to jump right in. And I wanted to start by asking a big question. If we're going to change our emissions levels and move to net zero emissions, what top level policies get us there? Rich and Billy, maybe you could start us off. So I'll say quickly, I'm going to make a pitch for the role of innovation policy as an absolutely core part of deep decarbonization. I think we have many of the technologies we need today domestically in the US and even around the world to accomplish shallow decarbonization. So we've got terrific renewable technologies and wind and solar. We have a very strong suite of energy efficiency technologies that can really drive demand for energy across all sectors down significantly and curtail significant growth and energy demand around the world as the world rapidly develops. But virtually every analysis that has looked at how to get to a first to US and then eventually a global net zero energy system shows that there's a whole suite of technologies across the power and heavy industry and transportation and agricultural sectors that today are at the pilot and early demonstration stage at best and that needs significant additional basic applied research demonstration and learning by doing to rapidly break down their costs and improve their performance. And so as we see the most important suite of policies to drive not just US domestic emissions reductions but global emissions reductions, we see innovation policy is really a core part of that. I'm happy to say that earlier this week with the passage of the bipartisan infrastructure bill that agenda that policy agenda in DC got an enormous shot in the arm. We've just made a huge commitment to fully funding, you know, kind of a vast Manhattan project scale effort to demonstrate more than 20 advanced deep decarbonization technologies in both the power and industrial sector. So I think that's a terrific next step in this journey, but much remains to be done in order to actually get those things to the level of performance and reliability and affordability where they could be part of the global mix of technologies, especially that helps the rapidly developed world reduce its emissions. Right, Billy rich said much remains to be done any thoughts on that. Yeah, well, first of all, totally agree with the role of technology development that we're not going to solve this problem without development of new technologies without bringing down the cost of current technologies. That's going to be an incredibly important part of the formula to get to net zero. You know, I tend to think about this and I think the National Academy report kind of focused on this. You know, thinking in different buckets. So in the power sector, the name of the game is getting to, you know, carbon free electricity. And that can be a combination in addition to the research dollars policies to provide subsidies for cleaner energy as well as policies that create a portfolio requirement for utilities to increasingly draw on clean sources of energy, non carbon emitting technologies. In the next sector, you might think about transportation. The focus is really largely on electrification and shifting into electric vehicles. Again, you can have technology policies to bring new technologies you can have incentives to financial incentives to encourage adoption. And you can have some sort of portfolio standard to encourage greater sales of electric vehicles. And I should mention in the background, it's always important to be encouraging energy efficiency all at the same time, because otherwise you need more power, you need more clean power to do all the things you want to do. The next sector you might think about is buildings where we need to be shifting from boilers to heat pumps where it's possible and think about ways we can electrify the building sector over time. And then probably the harvest sector to deal with is the industrial sector. And that's where I think, you know, the points that Rich was making about technology is going to be particularly important. Because as we try to electrify or otherwise reduce emissions in the industrial sector and get to net zero. It's going to require technologies that are not quite there and whether it's electrification or hydrogen or shifting to carbon capture and storage technologies or some sort of negative emission technology that offsets what emissions remain. Those are going to be the key sectors in the an industry in order to get to net zero. So it's going to be a you know, a combination when we talk about energy, the energy focused emissions across those four areas. And then there will also be land use policies that are going to have to be adopted in that sector as well. But you know, I think we know the policies that we need and are the different policies that can be used to get there. And it's just a matter of pushing those policies forward. So there's a whole suite of policies that we need. And it sounds like we've identified them so you've been working in this area for quite some time. What in your view are some of the most promising policies, particularly in the industrial sector that Billy noted was going to be the toughest nut to crack here. I think one of the most important things for the industrial sector will be how to shift to clean manufacturing techniques. A, B is shifting to fuels that are lower carbon, where the type of industry has to be a direct consumer of fuels that in the very long term that could include things like hydrogen and different kind of electricity supply for different industrial uses. So I would, I would say those two types of things are most important. I can see that there are going to be parts of the industrial sector that is going to be harder to decarbonize in terms of the electricity supply. Excuse me. In the other sectors, as Billy and Rich have just said, one would expect to see a shift from direct use of fossil fuel to more electricity that would be harder in some of the industrial sectors. And that's why working on fuels would be very important and efficient processes. What are the sectors in industry that are going to be harder to shift so traditionally people talk about steel cement. Very large heavy manufacturing of raw products like that. And there is work that's underway to try to address those issues. In the end of the day. Some industrial processes may be one of the reasons why it will be important to do direct air capture and other carbon dioxide renew removal technologies just to offset those emissions which are very expensive very hard to capture. Yeah, just to put a point on it, it's these industries, two types, one of the industries that require very, very high temperatures that may be difficult to do with electricity. The other is process emissions like cement where it's a natural byproduct of the production, the chemical process that produces the greenhouse gases where either you need a totally different chemical process or you have to figure out some way to sequester that CO2. Right. Majin I want to bring you in here because we've just been talking about particular industries and workers in those industries might understandably be concerned about what's going to happen to their jobs as those industries shift to a reduced emissions going to a net zero area. And what are some of the concerns that you've heard. Well, first I'm going to say thank you to you Josh and to everyone for putting together this convert this really important conversation and to representative casting and McNeerney. So I think that you know the worker concerns are very important that we understand that we can make decisions to have a just to transition this justly right so I think worker concerns have been used to slow the transition away from fossil fuels as a way to distract and, you know, derail the process. You know, and similarly there's a lot of attention that is paid to really hard to decarbonize sectors which is of course important but there is a lot that we could be doing to really dramatically be reducing our greenhouse gases that we really are not doing. And I think that leads to this idea that workers have some instability about the future right they're really uncertain if there will be a transition I think there has been a lot of false promises about how we can continue to just use fossil fuels and just tweak the system a little bit and meet our chemicals, which is absolutely not true right we need to really deeply decarbonize our entire systems. And so I think it's also important to remember that there has been a history of unjust transition you know if we think about deindustrialization and globalization. We had a lot of declining sectors that then didn't when you know those jobs were not replaced tax revenue was that replacing those communities. And then we had a failure of the great green recovery of the 2008 recession right there were millions of green jobs that were promised that never really materialized. We spent too much time and energy on training workers for jobs that didn't exist. And so I think it's important to remember we have to really think about demand side job creation you know what kind of jobs are we creating are we ensuring that they are good jobs. And also that you know the fossil fuel industry in and of itself is not a benevolent employer right that the fossil fuel industry pays higher wages, because workers organized and in very violent situations with if you think about the coal miners right they made them into good jobs. So we shouldn't think that the fossil fuel industry is some you know some benevolent industry that treats us workers well, no. Right, they have pay higher wages, because of all the organizing and power that workers have built, and that same energy right can be in the low carbon industries as you know, and if we tie worker standards into renewable energy policies we can ensure then that the jobs that are being created are good jobs. So it sounds to me like you're saying that the same energy that workers put into making these jobs in high carbon industries into good jobs is energy that workers and their organizations could put into renewable more energy efficient industries. 100% and also not just workers right there's very good public policy so for instance in Illinois they just passed a really big climate and energy bill that ties any renewable energy project that's over two megawatts has to have labor standards and that integration of labor standards with renewable energy build out was how we're going to build a good high quality job force. That's very interesting. And I'm hoping that representative cast and from Illinois will be able to talk a little bit more about that in a few minutes. Sue, what about some of the things that major has been talking about about basically taking care of worker concerns regarding some of the technologies that you've highlighted. First of all I want to thank her for her comments about the kinds of important workforce protection issues that are out there that the National Academy study that Billy and I have participated on, called for a number of those improvements as part of the just I think it might be useful to talk about the wide variety of jobs that one can imagine in a low carbon economy. Think about the local level there's going to be if, if we are electrifying buildings, if we are putting in more solar panels and energy efficiency there are a lot of local jobs where there can be good paying construction type engine, electrical engineers plumbers, a lot of different that is more distributed than the kinds of industrial jobs that we've had in the past. You can think about, especially energy efficiency those are really a lot of is great for those who are receiving the benefits of that but there's a lot of, you know, great work that we've seen. And that was demonstrated not only it over time with energy efficiency programs but as part of the stimulus last time around. There are electrical jobs associated with grid modernization expansion of the transmission system. There's going to be a lot of jobs in the innovation sectors, as rich just described in Billy added to. So there's a lot of things there we see really a shift with construction of solar installation of solar panels. There's a lot of things there we see really a shift with construction of storage systems installation of wind things so these are very different kinds of jobs in some circumstances, then we've had in the extractive industries. That said, I want to make sure that we say we know that there will be job losses in some geographies and industries. That is, that is the case that's why part of a just transition has to be support for those organizations, those, those communities that have been very fossil dependent. There's, there's just a lot of things going on here in terms of the transformation of the economy. The study that Billy and I looked at indicated that one could expect to see a net increase of one to 2 million jobs, as associated with a clean energy economy but we know we know we know it's, it's not going to be a smooth transition for a lot of folks. Let me pick up on that and turn to you, Billy, are there particular institutions, we could call them enabling institutions that could help with that kind of transition. You know, the key thing as Sue mentioned is to recognize that these are going to be, you know, lives are going to be localized communities that are associated with these, these industries that are attached to fossil fuels. And so there's going to have to be local participation in the processes and that was part of what we talked about in the report, very participatory processes to engage these communities and what has to happen in order for them to transition. At the same time, it has to be federal support because this is, this is something that benefits everybody to transition to the cleaner technologies and that zero. And so it's not fair that these local communities, you know, may have a higher cost. So I think a lot of it is about designing local institutions to channel resources in ways that local communities need and can use, but recognizing that the financial needs to come from the federal government. I think that's a great point Sue, please. Can I just follow up with two types of institutions that are our study point to one is would be the establishment of a national transition corporation this would be one in which. And we hope maybe in the next climate bill this would be there. Yeah, yeah, we'll see. This, this would be something where federal dollars would flow to communities to help with transition issues. There would be coordinated federal assistance. And things projects that are often considered unattractive to the private sector, things like addressing abandoned facilities that that that really need to be cleaned up for local community efforts. Everyone would be a national green bank, and I note that the House bill that was just passed includes the clean energy and sustainability accelerator, and that is one where the National Academy's report identified this as being very important that 40% Well, now it is 40% of the dollars would float as part of the justice 40 initiative to make sure that those investments in local community back projects really focus on targeting both these transition issues for people losing jobs, as well as transitioning issues in disadvantaged communities where they haven't been able to be part of the wealth creation. So great point. What is the justice 40 initiative for people who don't under don't know that. Mission you want to say it. Sure. Justice 40 initiative is, you know targeted investments the idea is up to 40% of all funding or climate funding should be targeted towards the communities that need it the most. It's somewhat modeled after some policies in California but it's really thinking about where do Pete where do we need, where and how are we spending our money and ensuring that communities that have been excluded from the extractive economy from the benefits of the extractive economy but have borne the burden of it right through air pollution through, you know, failing infrastructure are able to have that investment so that they can then begin to, you know, transition also to a low carbon future. And has. How has that initiative been going. Well, I think we have yet to see some of the, the implementation results happen because we are on the cusp of this as a national policy. Certainly the Biden administration has now I'm speaking for myself and not the Academy's report in any way, but the Biden administration has identified this as important in the all of government approach that they are taking. For example, the build back better approach were came out of Congress, both the House and Senate, we would begin to see this actually attached to some of the dollars and their implementation strategies. If I can just quickly add I mean I think you know one of the challenges with this is it requires a lot of modeling, a lot of analysis economic analysis requires a lot of, you know, our quality modeling in terms of the consequences of the pollution reductions. And that sort of stuff needs to be developed. We're looking for resources for the future because that is the kind of thing that we are doing. But that sort of analysis in order to establish who is actually benefiting from a particular policy is something that that requires a great deal of analysis. I think that we don't have to start from zero though right because here in California we have something called Cal and virus green which has a number of indicators that maps out, you know who has pollution burdens where our resources not being spent and I think the federal government is modeling some of their mapping exercises on the Cal and virus green model. I don't think we should have just one metric one score right it should be a combination of scores but I think that you know understanding where money needs to go is is something that is well underway and we don't have to start from ground zero. And that's a good point to turn to rich who works a lot with the federal sector. Do you think that some of the provisions that were in the infrastructure bill that are in the build back better bill are going to help with some of these issues of equity. Absolutely do on the bipartisan infrastructure bill. I think the first thing we should all remember is that fossil fuels are not the problem emissions from fossil fuels are the problem. And so we have a vast resource base and workforce built up whole communities built up around the extraction and use of fossil fuels. And so if there are ways that we can use those in a lower mission ideally a zero mission way over time. That solves a lot of problems right that solves the, the carbon and climate impacts of those problems that can solve the local pollution problems that can potentially solve other problems related to pollution around the extraction and processing. And so the bipartisan infrastructure bill. If if a sing if you had to say which is single technology one in the bipartisan infrastructure bill, amongst the best technologies it would be carbon capture and storage so that bill sets up an enormous suite of demonstrations across gas power coal power heavy industry, and and then I think to Sue's earlier point carbon dioxide removal so pulling the carbon out of the air going to sort of net zero in some instances. And so I think that actually gives many of these transitioning communities transitioning from fossil fuels or cold dependent communities, some lifeline right some hope that they could potentially continue to use those resources in a cleaner lower carbon way in the future. I think that's really important. Relatedly there's also a huge investment in advanced nuclear technologies as well and geothermal technologies as well. And the thing to remember about a lot of these things is, in the end it's all just a lot of different ways of boiling water to turn a turbine to generate electricity right, and it's really only that front end of the plant that's different much of the rest of the plant is very very similar right the steam systems that turbines, the interconnects to the grid, etc. And so there's a huge workforce and electrical workforce utility workforce around that second half of the plants, and many of those folks could be repurposed. A fantastic example that was just finalized this week so camera Wyoming will be the site of one of the two advanced nuclear reactors that are built by 2027 under the Department of Energy's advanced reactor demonstration program. I'm delighted to say that bipartisan infrastructure bill earlier this week fully funded that program so now that the federal side is fully funded now the private sector will bring across the chair. Camera Wyoming exists because of a coal mine and a mine mouth coal plant there are 2700 people there if there is nothing else in camera. That is the economic opportunity. That plant will be replaced by an advanced nuclear plant which will literally save that community. So that that community would have ceased to exist. As that plant was scheduled to shut down the next couple weeks, and or in the next couple of years, and I think that kind of story, allowing these traditional coal communities either to continue in some operations in carbon capture to transition to advanced technologies like advanced nuclear or geothermal or something like that is a really interesting way that we can help a lot of these communities in transition and potentially offers to preserve very high quality engineering and industrial jobs. That is a very helpful story to me in trying to understand how this transition could work. And major I know that you've done some research in Wyoming. Do you think that what rich just described plays there. You know I think a lot of the transition is just basic safety net issues right the more just we can build our society the easier this transition will be so something like the build back better agenda right makes it easier for people to live, you know, healthcare childcare all of those, you know, wage replacement. Some of the challenge is, you know what I call fuel source so what kind of fuel are we using we have to stop using fossil fuels. But some of it is just we have an unjust society so it's hard to transition workers because when they lose their jobs they often don't have anything. I think you know it's some of this will be challenging technically but a lot of it is just how do we make our society more just so that when we people do lose their jobs they don't worry about how they're going to feed their families they don't worry about getting sick right they don't worry about how they're going to pay their electric bill like that that won't go away. Until we start to build a stronger safety net. So you're saying this really is not an energy economy issue but a, but a social economics issue. So what social safety net is the easier it is for us to do an energy transition. We're winding down on our time so I, you know, and that's a very interesting point and I wanted to throw it over to the rest of the panel. What do you think of, of that that these transitions become more feasible. And do we have the funding for that social safety net. I just, I just talked but the funding part always, I feel like, you know, we don't have a shortage of resources, right, we have billions and trillions of dollars for high income tax cuts for the military for all of those things. It's really important to remember that mitigation is always cheaper and less complicated than adaptation, stopping the worst impact to the climate crisis will always be cheaper and easier than dealing with a warming world. So, when we think about cost you know I think it's really important to think more big picture about what what is the cost of inaction. Good point, Billy. So what do you think of mitigation's point mitigation is cheaper and more effective. Yes, no. Well, I guess I would certainly we need to be doing more mitigation. And, and you know the net zero goals that have been laid out I think are extremely important. I think we can't pretend we aren't going to need to do adaptation and increase resilience. And in my mind it's a question of balance across these different dimensions. So, you know, I don't want to see us lose track of that because there are going to be communities that are already suffering from the impacts of climate change wildfires and flooding coastal flooding river flooding there's a lot of different, you know angles to this. I bumped into a farmer who was talking about how he had gotten three inches of rain in one hour and it's changing the way they have to do their farming practices because they're worried about the top soil being washed away. So there's just a lot of stuff that has to happen. And I think we need to be thinking about all those different pieces and how to balance them. There's a lot of stuff that has to happen in the minute that we have left rich. Do you think we have the tools to make all that stuff happen. I think we have the beginnings of the tools. The good news is we have a fantastic roadmap from a number of the previous energy sources and technologies that we've scaled up. Over the past few decades, whether it was, you know, the remarkable shield gas drilling revolution which has largely been contributed to the US decline in emissions to probably radically reduce the cost of wind and solar and now battery technologies and electric vehicles, we sort of know the roadmap for each of those things. Unfortunately, there's whole classes of things we still have left to do as we've discussed today we've got to figure out a way to make steel at global scale, competitively with zero emissions and the same for concreted to then to the same for petrochemicals and everything else, but at least we've got some sense about how to make each of those things scaled up and practical and now we just need to keep getting to work on the policy to enable all that. That's great. And we're going to have to leave it there for this portion of the program. I know that there are a lot more questions and that will try and cover some of them in our next segment. So, for that segment I want to bring Laura back in now and I want to thank you. And Laura is going to kick off our discussion with our congressional representatives. And thanks so much Wow that was a stimulating discussion. As Josh said if you have questions please type them into the box we'll get to those later in this event. And also if you missed some things want to be sure that that other people see this conversation, the recording will be available from on Springer nature's website in the National Academies of Sciences Engineering and medicine. We are delighted now to have two members of Congress with us here today, both of whom have very relevant experience and expertise for this discussion. So we'll start with representative Jerry McNearney of Illinois. He has a PhD in mathematics a background in engineering and he's worked on wind energy. This is his fifth science on the Hill event he was here from the very beginning he helped us launch this this really important conversation series. And then we'll hear from representative Sean Caston of California, who has master's degrees in engineering and a background in science and has been a clean energy entrepreneur. And this is his first science on the Hill event so we're really grateful to have them both with us and welcome representative McNearney. Thank you, Lauren I just want to make a little correction correction I'm from California and Sean is from Illinois. But we're both here for the same reason we feel very strongly about this issue. As you said I devoted my career before coming to Congress for 20 some years to developing wind energy technology, and other forms of electric generation. The discussion is very interesting. And I see, from my point of view now, there's about three challenges that I'd like to categorize the first would be the technical challenges so developing the technology that we need that is capable of guiding us and providing the results of the transition. The second will be actually implementing that technology. So that's a significant challenge and the last is the political challenge that we're facing. And I just want to follow that by saying, we've talked a lot about how this build back better and the bipartisan infrastructure are so important, and they are very important What is instead is the fierce resistance that was given to that type of program here on Capitol Hill. And it's a resistance that I've seen since I've got since I became first a member of Congress back in 2007. Until today, all the members of Congress or basically virtually all members of Congress acknowledge publicly that climate is a concern and that we need to make do something about it but there's still a fierce resistance to any specific proposals any specific spending programs and, and I think that's a sort of a crux of where we are. I've proposed the carbon tax, I think, for our last five Congresses I think that's a very effective way to move forward, but politically it may be a non starter, unless the public really becomes enraged and has a huge outcry. I don't think that's the approach that's going to work although I'm going to continue to push that. My question here for the panel is, we often hear that the, the technology is just not ready for this transition that we can't realistically reach net zero by 2040 or 2050, because of transmission issues, because of technology issues, rare earth metals that are needed battery for batteries and for generators and so on. And so that question would go to rich do you think, and I'm just playing the devil's advocate here do you think we actually can make it I mean this is a huge big challenge. And a comment I have is from Billy, you mentioned a number of items, but you didn't bring up water. And I'm sure I mentioned I are from the West Coast. Water is a huge issue for us and it's a big part of the energy clean future puzzle that we need to fit into the into the program so those are my initial comments and any feedback you have I'd appreciate it and I'll go back to learn. I'm very happy to start on those congressman. First, thank you for your your long leadership and attention on these issues. If I had to point to one thing that really keeps me up at night about the transition. I think we can make it on the technology I think we can develop these things I think we've got an amazing workforce in the United States that can do this I think we've got a range of technologies and a range of resources that we can leverage. And frankly, I'm most worried about government getting in the way. So if you if you look at the art existing permitting and citing structure in this country to get things done and I see representative cast and not he was part of a dialogue that we participated in together the aspirants to try to take this, take this issue on it's tough. Things are getting worse, not better. The interconnect cues to get a new clean power project, for example, into the under the grid around the country are getting longer, not shorter I'm sorry to say it's particularly bad in the great state of California. It's extremely difficult to cite new transmission across the country to carry clean power from the places where it's really abundant say and you know in abundant abundant renewables to load centers. It's extremely difficult to cite a new pipelines and I think that's going to be just as true for clean fuel pipelines like hydrogen pipelines or CO2 pipelines as it's been for natural gas and oil pipelines and, and I actually worry that it will be the regulatory system in the government restrictions, and the ability to allow so many people to come in and stop things and sort of exercise nimbyism that that may be the thing that trips us up, even if all of the technology is there and the economics are there and workforce there and the political bills there just maybe the permanent. I'll just say very quickly thank you also for your efforts. Thank you for introducing a carbon tax repeatedly. I didn't talk about that that was something the National Academy recommended. It would be nice in the background to really help these things, everything move along to your to your water question I think water is, you know, as it gets scarcer due to climate change and it's in demand, certainly thinking about reforming water markets and, you know, making water allocation as, as, you know, economical as possible is going to be increasingly important. And I would just also add, you know, in response to the question to rich about technology and getting there, you know, critically important is getting started, and moving on in the next decade so we're ready to set things up for what comes next. There's a lot of steps that can be taken now that are not, you know, they're not threatened by the technologies that we still need in the future. Great, thank you so much. Thanks so much to representative near any of the great state of California. Now we'll turn over to representative cast in the great state of Illinois. Thank you, Laura. It's a pleasure to be here with Jerry. I think I can say this with no exaggeration that you were talking to the only two members of Congress who became adults and cut their teeth as energy developers rather than as legislators. And, and that matters. I think in part and this is sort of in response to to riches comments about, you know, let's not have regulation getting away. I would suggest you that all of us as leaders and as communicators are responsible for creating a problem. And the problem is we have described a win-win problem as a win-lose problem. The problem, of course, being how we convert to a clean energy economy and deal with the consequences of global warming. We framed all this as, you know, this this false dichotomy between our wallets and our morals or obligations to future generations. And the reality is that anything you do to deliver useful energy with less fossil fuel input is something that you do to deliver useful energy with less fossil fuel expenditure. And, and if you find that hard to fathom, give you a couple numbers. We, the United States uses a little over 100 quadrillion BTUs of primary energy a year and has an economy of a little over $20 trillion a year. Those are big numbers, but divide them. That means we generate about 20 cents of economic activity for every thousand BTUs. Germany creates 33 cents, one and a half times as efficient at converting energy into economic activity UK 38 cents, Switzerland 51 cents. Those people have good standards of living same access what what are we doing so badly in the US and why can't we have our cake and eat it to and a big part of that is that we have. We have basically built an economy in the United States around the idea of infinite resources. It's in our founding documents right and we've designed an economy to incentivize resource extraction we subsidize the fossil fuel industry in this country by $650 billion every year. It's almost as much as we spend on national defense, the build back better bill we just passed creates $550 billion of incentives over 10 years, which means that if we increase the bill we just passed by a factor of 10, we still would not have a level playing field. We're still we're topping that number of your 10 years and the reason why I say it's still a problem is that this win-win opportunity. We've talked about it the wrong way and so we focused on the wrong issues. Let's embrace that let's do it out of greed, but what happens if we go through and create a world where you don't have to spend nearly as much for energy. Well that means a huge wealth transfer from energy producers to energy consumers and a wealth transfer at a rate that if we don't think about it carefully, even though it's a net positive for the economy could be very disruptive to our financial system and so we're very late I've been doing a lot of focus over the last term or two. And trying to make sure our financial regulators are thinking about those systemic risk to our to our society. So what we do in this, in this, the job transition that that Majin was talking about. We are shifting from labor intensive forms of energy to labor life forms of energy. You don't hire operators to run a solar panel. You don't hire operators to mine wind. Now we're creating a ton of construction jobs and it's true that the Build Back Better Act is going to create some 7 million jobs or so. But we're essentially retiring long term operating jobs and creating short term construction jobs. There's a wonderful saying that in a utopia, you buy a robot and that means you don't have to work anymore. In a dystopia the robot fires you. Our challenge is to figure out how to make sure that these gains are equitably shared through our society. And to recognize that what's hard about those win-win transitions is ultimately that losers cry much louder than winners cheer. The folks who know what they have to lose who are fighting their efforts rich every time you try to build a transmission liner because they get economic value from the congested grid. They know what it would cost if we actually had low cost energy on the system. And the folks who would benefit from that aren't the table and so I'd leave you just with as much as we've thought about a lot of those things in the Build Back Better. We've talked about a lot of them. And we've done more I think than any legislation has ever done that subject. We've had ourselves in the back too hard. We still have to do more. And I think our challenge is communicators is to think about how to articulate this problem and articulate in a way to speak to people in the language that they listen to. Some of you know we had some fun this summer with this whole hotfork summer thing and the whole idea was how do we get people to understand that the kind of issues that you talk about rich need to be understood at a level that people say oh I should actually care about the regional transmission system planning. I've just lost you. I've bored you. I've put you out of tears but if you're you know but try to get it and I think our challenge is how to demystify this stuff. Get people to embrace it and do it out of their self interest, which ultimately in one word, it is our job to lead. Because we're not constrained by technology we're not constrained by dollars we are constrained only by ambition. So let's fix it. So thanks and look forward to that continued conversation. Thank you so much to representative McNeary representative castan for these inspiring actionable important comments. I know a lot of us in the background we're kind of nodding the whole time. Yes, yes, and communication is so important. Which is why everybody who is who's in the audience here today is is part of the solution for these solutions. And going to your questions. The first question, which several people asked and it's a big one is, you know with many experts saying that the commitments that were made at the UN climate conference that that just concluded, are not quite enough to hit 1.5 degrees C as the threshold for how much global temperature change will see what's next. So big question, what's next for climate policy what are the most important things we need to do right now right next. And this is, this is an open question for the for the first panel, or perhaps I can jump in. I would like to turn the response your question by saying that, even if we have not identified all of the commitments that are going to be necessary to get to 1.5. We need demonstrations and proofs that we can make progress. And I think that the commitments, if we execute on them well in an equitable way, and in a efficient way as representative cast and has just said, then we're going to show people that this transition is possible. A lot of the hesitation goes to, you know, yesterday's protecting yesterday's world and tomorrow's world could be very constructive and so we've got to get on with that. And that's why this decade is so important. And I'll just add also to represent the great comments that we just heard that this is really win win right like if we transition away from fossil fuels we will have a much better safer world. And, you know, a lot of discussion on climate change understandably is really doom and gloom because we are facing a very big challenge 100%. But we also kind of regularly send people into Mars, which seems so that to me seems very difficult retrofitting retrofitting every building in the country, you know building out solar and winds and geothermal. These things you know that technology is there, we can do these things right and I think it makes people's lives better when you live in a house that is not drafty right it makes your life better and I think that you know it that's win win framing is really important like, yes, there will be job losses but if we create good decent jobs, you know, in every sector, we can absorb those losses right these are not challenges that there are some unique challenges but a lot of it is just how do we do what we know how to do well and do it on a much larger scale. Thank you just that quickly I was, I was at the cop and Glasgow and I was particularly heartened by what seems to be an emerging global agreement to stop financing the build of new particularly subcritical coal plants so that's the, the, the, the oldest, most emitting most polluting technology. You know, the first rule of getting out of a hole is stop digging right and we continue to dig around the world pun intended, I guess, and we have to stop building those. The most notable additional participant in that pledge was China, who has, who has financed and built a number of these very recently, nearly 100 gigawatts through its belt and road initiative. I think the most important thing ahead if you have to look at just a single global lever is holding everyone to those extremely important pledges we cannot keep building the oldest generation coal technology unmitigated extremely high emitting, because these things end up staying, you know, online for decades and decades to come and just the climate map doesn't work. If we keep adding those really high emitting sources, especially in the rapidly built. I would just add very quickly, I think you know people look at the climate negotiations, which I've been going to want to offer cheese 20 years. But for like a dramatic outcome every year. And I think the important thing to realize is what we need is, you know, continual progress and these annual meetings shine a light on countries on other stakeholders on subnational actors, and they force people to come to the table with with actions, and they are opportunities as rich was saying to hold people accountable for they've said in the past. So we just have to keep doing this and keep using that international stage to put pressure on people. Yeah, thanks so much for highlighting these important next steps. So the next question is, is another sort of general one pivoting to how do we grow and prepare the workforce that's necessary for green sector, low carbon environment and this is a question that several people asked in the audience. I think a helpful way to think about it is we don't, there are some things that will need totally new jobs for but a lot of it is just transitioning existing workforces so people that used to build oil and gas pipelines could maybe build wind turbines right so it's not a lot of brand new work that we are unfamiliar with that we have to train a whole new workforce on my bigger concern is the demand side that are we creating good decent jobs for people to transition into. It could be in low carbon sectors that could be in other sectors, you know, if a former coal miner would like to be a teacher, I think that transition is also fine, right. So the issue again is just a lot of it is just basic economic issues right are recreating good decent jobs for people to transition into there is very strong training programs at the state level at the federal level so I'm less concerned I guess about the supply side of labor as the demand side. I would just add to that, you know, part of the energy transition will require more folks in in some extremely specialized and highly skilled portions of labor market, for example, you know, if you believe our net zero models will have a significant expansion of nuclear energy in the country we currently are not literally we're not training enough nuclear engineers and physicists to support the bill that most of the models would would indicate are required to help the carbonize the power sector to increase the expansion of other parts of the economy. We've started to improve on that so the Energy Act of 2020 which was signed into law last December again in a very bipartisan way, I greatly expanded the nuclear energy university program so hugely reinvest in these big nuclear engineering programs around the country I think that's that's certainly a good step and you know we've talked a lot through all this about, you know, the vast increase in the energy engineers and another, you know, pretty, pretty highly skilled things will need if we're going to build this massive transmission infrastructure and switch over to a more of a construction oriented energy economy than a sort of a maintenance and operating oriented energy economy so I do think that there may well be some places where we need federal investments in skills training whether that's kind of high end university programs, apprenticeships, those sorts of things, especially some of these areas. I would just add that our National Academy study identified the role that a new GI bill could play for the transition workforce issues that we're talking about and I would call everyone's attention to looking at that but essentially we we called for three, excuse me, five years to be spent over many years to transition across the workforce supply chain, including those technical jobs that Rich is talking about, and other on the ground skills base for those that media just talked about. Okay, thanks a lot and we have a question that's related to a National Academy's report on getting to net zero by 2050. And the question is, you know, how, what can we do now to move toward net zero, considering that a lot of the technology might be necessary to get there does not exist yet at scale what are the what are the top priorities, what can be done right now. We've been talking about it here in the last hour. Getting these things off the ground, showing our appreciation for congressional action on these dollar injections into the different parts of the economy that's great. Part of that is the R&D agenda that Rich has talked about to get us ready for after that. But there's a lot of things that can, that can be happening now. Yeah, I was just going to add, I mean, in the in the power sector and the transportation sector, we can be moving forward the technologies we have now faster than we are. And I think, you know, putting the place the policies that transition those sectors. You know, we've got some of them in place and the new bill is moving further in that direction. But I think those, you know, the places where you have the technologies are where we should be moving now as well as preparing for the next step as as you said. Okay, thank you so much. So I'm going to to wrap it up and I just want to thank the speakers, all of our speakers for these inspiring actionable powerful urgent comments and for all your work on on on getting to an equitable, safe climate for the future. So thanks for joining us thanks everybody in the audience. I'm going to turn it over back to Holly Rhodes of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine for a few final comments. We're delighted you could all join us today really appreciate the stimulating discussion. Thank you, Laura and Josh for your excellent moderation and for this fascinating conversation. I also want to say thank you again to meet you and Billy rich and Sue, and to representatives cast in a McNerney for sharing your perspectives and your time for this really important conversation. All of you at home, or at work for joining this conversation at Science on the Hill. 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