 My name is Caitlin Watson. I am the New York City chapter co-steward of the Architecture Lobby. For those of you who don't know, we are a nonprofit, member-driven organization that advocates for labor rights and is working on building power within architecture and ally professions. We're really excited about the Green New Deal and organizing around it, because I think that it acknowledges that there can be no sustainable world without sustainable labor practices, which is something that is very dear to us. So if you're interested in learning more about us, you can check out our table during the 20 minute break that will follow this panel. All right, so I had the pleasure of listening into the discussion this morning at the workshop. So we're really in for something. Great, so I'll go ahead and introduce our panelists. We have Ellis Calvin, who is an urban planner at the Regional Plan Association, committed to making the New York region a more equitable and sustainable place. John Forester, who's a member of the New York City Commission on Human Rights, and a leading member of the Civil Service Technical Guild, Local 375 District Council 37, which represents engineers, architects, scientists, and project managers in public agencies throughout the city. Then we have Oscar Oliver Didier, who is a Bronx-based urban designer from Puerto Rico, who's currently the senior lead urban designer for the borough of the Bronx at the New York City Department of City Planning, and a member of the adjunct faculty for the visual arts program at Fordham University. We have Leah Meesterlin, who's an urbanist, GIS methodologist, cartographer, and assistant professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation. Juan Restrepo, who's the Queen's Organizer of Transportation Alternatives, and Jennifer Scarlett, who is the coordinator of two community organizations, Bronx Climate Justice North and North Bronx Racial Justice. Thank you. Hi, everyone. I've been nominated to attempt the impossible and summarize an energetic, vaguely frenetic morning discussion. I'm going to do so in very broad strokes and ask my collaborators, colleagues, co-conspirators to fill in. First, I want to thank all of the organizers. This has been an amazing day thus far and we know it's not finished yet. I'm keeping my eye on our colleagues at Cutter Cold because I do not speak slowly, usually, and I'm trying my best, so I'm on it for you. And thank you for your work and your services. And also to everybody who joined our morning session, we had a lot of interest and energy. You can see our panel is down two participants to begin with, but we made that up in spades with input from everybody else, so that was really super lovely. I guess the sort of, like I said, I'll give a sort of overarching themes that emerged from our conversation. We have diagrammed notes of the conversation as they happened, as well as illustrations. We've raised more questions than answers and these were all produced live during the session. So since we are taking a break afterward, we invite everyone to come up and further the impossible with us. I think not to repeat the previous panel too much, but we also, we started with a set of working premises or and foundational principles, guiding principles as well, that fall largely into two categories. The first being a sort of commitment and requirement, a prerequisite condition of publicness. And the second, taking seriously or thinking through what we mean by a just transition, both in terms of defining and understanding processes and outcomes that could be just and understood just and for whom, as well as what, oh that a transition might entail and asking a transition toward what. Unlike the first panel, who's sort of trying to tackle the energy question with the starting point of Indian Point, which also has, it's a specific place with a specific date attached to it, we were charged with examining and considering I-95 without a specific date attached to it. And that clearly led us to conversations about, again, the extent to which our transportation infrastructure, especially our car-based transportation infrastructure is meaningfully public, not just in terms of its public ownership, but the tiers and the hierarchies of publics engaged and involved in that ownership. We've had conversations on the financing mechanism, structures, and the extent of their relative publicness, the details of which, I'm sure everybody here would love to elaborate on while I fly right back by it to begin with. Right, okay, so then following from those sort of premises, most of our conversation fell into, like I said, three sort of thematic categories. The first is a commitment or an understanding that whatever it is that we, in thinking through a massive 13-state, is it 13-state? 15-state interstate highway as a starting point for a conversation on our car dependence and having a conversation toward decarbonization, multimodality is an absolute necessity. This is something that we could all build a consensus around, additionally, limiting, if not, eliminating growth, either in the short term, in terms of a moratorium or longer. This, of course, connects to another set of considerations, the second-large theme being one of connectivity and interconnectivity. As a group, every proposed idea, whether from the scale of a technical scientific solution to a complete overhaul and restructuring of our national economy, and everything happened in between as well, included a recognition that transportation, whether car-based or otherwise, serves the purpose of connecting locations, right? And that as a result, we are always, or we can't talk about transit car or otherwise without talking about housing, without talking about jobs, without talking about modes of economic production, that a conversation about commuting is equally, like starts to fold into a conversation about shipping as well, right? And that thinking through the trips involved means thinking about transportation as an infrastructure that is foundationally connective. And so moving beyond transportation infrastructures as we see them now requires moving beyond development patterns that we have now and being willing to question those at multiple points along I-95, as well as thinking about that corridor more broadly. And that brings us to the last large theme, which is one of scale, right? That with each sort of positive proposal or idea whether that is a punitive tax or on the other side of the spectrum, sort of incentive-based proposals and policies, we were able to sort of form consensus around the need for local flexibility and understanding that there are motivations behind our transport infrastructure that are meaningfully interstate in nature. That currently we are relying upon many of our highways to serve decidedly not interstate functions, like local functions that can be reorganized and thought through differently, thinking again about whether that's a matter of reorganizing local markets and local economies to allow for people to live and work and shop and acquire their goods where they are, right, or otherwise. The other half of scale is not only one of sort of land use organization and economic structure in physical terms, but the question of jurisdictions of decision-making, right? Because I-95 crosses through localities, regions, and states, the functions that are not interstate by necessity might be reorganized and re-understood and altered through local or state means. And of course, each of the policies or proposals that have found their way to diagrams and illustrations are potentially manifest through localized means. I'm gonna put that way. Okay. Those are the big ones. Go for it, guys. Okay, thank you. Great job. So as an activist and organizer, and going up to Albany to Lobby and City Hall and all the rest of it, I often get asked by elected officials, well, what's realistic? We have to be, as an elected official, I need to be realistic. And I tend to wanna throw that question back at them because as city counselors in Venice learned a couple days ago, immediately after they completed a vote saying that there is no climate emergency, their council chamber flooded for the first time ever. So what is realistic? The IPCC says that we have 11 years, but it's widely known that IPCC scientists themselves say, that's what we feel political pressure to say that we have half that time. And so when we sit here talking about what we're doing 10 years from now, 20 years from now, what is realistic? I just want us to continually grapple with that question. And then as the previous panel did, there's the question in terms of equity of who do we listen to? Who do we talk to and why? Who should we listen to and why? The gentleman who is at the end of the table in the previous panel raised that so eloquently. Listening to state agencies, city agencies, our electeds, I'm not so sure about, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation just gave approval to paving 18 acres of wetlands in Staten Island for big box stores and parking lots. At a time when what we need is more wetlands, more buffer areas for storms, and more carbon sequestration from nature. There's a case study that I'll just quickly mention in terms of who do we listen to, which is the Sheridan Expressway, which is a little highway spur in the southeast Bronx, going from Hunts Point up to I-95, has been a place of contention for a long time. Robert Moses back in the 60s put it in but lost a battle to extend it up through the Bronx Zoo and the New York Botanical Garden. And then in the 90s, it became a topic again where community organizations and there are people in this room, including with my friend with South Bronx Unite, who know this history much better than I do, but young people in particular who led the charge people from youth ministries for peace and justice and the Point Community Center in the South Bronx to really re-envision sort of taking over this expressway and turning it into parkland, public land, and truly affordable housing. Instead, the New York State Department of Transportation has come up with a plan to kind of rename the highway. It won't be the expressway anymore. It'll be shared in Boulevard. It'll have a few more trees and it'll have some big ramps down near the Hunts Point Food Distribution Center that will, according to the DOT itself, increase particulate matter in the atmosphere in a neighborhood that's deeply excruciatingly burdened with asthma and it will increase truck traffic on local streets. So, and there have been scoping meetings and occasional meetings in the community by DOT where no Bronx elected officials show up, no city agency folks showed up, and where people were not allowed public discussion or Q&A, they were just told to submit written comments. So, who do we listen to? We listen to youth. I mean, it's their future we're talking about. So, in the grander scale of I-95, I just would ask that we think both in terms of timeline and of who we're listening to and not just decarbonization but decolonization, meaning justice and equity. Great, thank you. Again, John Forster, just one little correction. I no longer work for the Commission on Human Rights, although I very much believe in their cause, but I work actually for local 375 at District Council 37, which represents 150,000 workers here in New York City that are public sector workers. And doing this panel on the backdrop of I-95, it is, in fact, it's so important that this is done in the public sector. I-95 is a public project. It should not be controlled by private firms. It should not be turned into toll roads. It is, in fact, a private sector project that should be government led, which also brings us back to the re-establishment of the commons, we used to have the commons, right? So what does that mean? It means a right, in my mind, a housing, to healthcare, to jobs, to education, but also a right to, in fact, energy, to transportation, and to a just judicial system. Those are all, in my mind, there's probably other things as well that make up those commons. As a public project, it's also terribly important that the employment that happens in the work that takes place. And I don't think people were advocating that we destroy I-95. I don't think we have the time. I think the urgency of it is that we reuse it, that we use it in some different way, or with different fuels. And where we do use, where we employ people, they really should be union jobs. I mean union jobs have traditionally provided an access for good jobs with good benefits. Certainly in our public sector unions, my union is 80% people of color. I mean this is where the job should be. This is how we should be working on these kinds of projects. In terms of transportation, because obviously I-95 is about transportation, yes, I mean we should be building electric cars. Yes, we should be building high-speed trains. We should be building out where we can provide more transportation to communities that at this point are underserved in terms of transportation. But I think we also need to look at some possible new technologies that are out there. One in particular, there's some informational pamphlets on it out in the front, is something that's called Metro. It is a clean liquid hydrogen fuel. The only byproduct is water. There are no greenhouse gas emissions. It can use the existing infrastructure that we have. And it works in internal combustion engines. We have over two billion internal combustion engines in the world. There is no way that we are going to come up with two billion electric cars, buses, let alone planes, et cetera. But we do have some alternative fuels that probably could power all those things. It can power all those things and do it in a clean way that eliminates greenhouse gas emissions, which is really I think at the bottom line here in terms of what we're talking about, as well as the equity issues and the just transition, both for the workers that might get displaced in this process, but also for the communities and particularly the frontline communities in terms of having that kind of where we move forward and having equity and moving forward on that. So I think those are the major points I wanted to make, even though I have a little more time. Thank you. Thanks for that, John. Hi there, my name is Juan Restrepo. I'm the Queen's organizer for a nonprofit called Transportation Alternatives. We focus on making our streets more humane, more climate conscious, different from how people in New York have been conceptualizing them as streets for cars, but rather as streets for people who walk to school, people who like to church, those unconventional ways of getting around that have often been thought as weird. They're not weird anymore. And I think that's part of the messaging that has been kind of circulating not only throughout New York, but throughout the country. This idea that the way that people are getting around is different. And the Green New Deal is sort of our big chance to enshrine that on a national level and really reshape our streets. It's kind of hard to talk about the I-95 in the context of the Green New Deal. It really is. So maybe I'm gonna bring it down to maybe my more local level where I look at it, because the I-95 exists in every community. It's just, instead of being a highway through the country, it's an arterial street that's extremely dangerous throughout your neighborhood. And I think if there's one thing I could add to this conversation is that everyone here has the ability to help to put in those Green New Deal concepts in your local community, because we're not going to be able to create a movement if we're not starting it from the bottom up, if we're not winning those small victories within our own communities that are encouraging people to really start to think bigger. I think a lot of people don't recognize that their streets can change. Streets aren't built the way that they are or how they remain right now and they remain that way forever. We can redefine how a street is used so that people who are driving have new options and that's the way that we're going to start to evangelize people and really start to empower them. Like if our goal here is to really get people to start to think how are we going to redefine a highway, we have to start that conversation as much on the local level, empowering people. And we've been doing a really great job of doing this in New York City at the very least. We just had the city council speaker do this revolutionary bill called the streets master plan and intends on adding 250 miles of protected bike lanes, 150 miles of bus lanes, new pedestrian plazas, making every intersection ADA accessible. These are the kinds of things that when we start that conversation in New York City, it's going to pick up in Chicago, it's going to pick up in Seattle, it's going to pick up in Philly, and yes, that's a very city-oriented way of thinking about it, but it's kind of the way that I've been looking at it. But we really need to push beyond this city-driven narrative of how we're going to redefine our streets and really think about how we're going to tackle the I-95. And this is just one major highway where a lot of fossil fuel is being used. Now, we're talking about an entire country and I think it's going to be an even harder conversation to really conceptualize that, but at the very least, I want to just give that thought, how are we going to achieve this on the local level? And that's what I want to add for now and maybe I'll add some more in the future. We're officially over time, so I'm going to respectfully steal a minute so that Ellis and Oscar can add anything that I might have left out. Thank you. I think you did a great job of summarizing and these comments enriching it. So there's not much more that I have to add, but I did want to underline one thing that came up, which was the urgency. I think there's a lot of really great ideas that are longer termed that we should also be thinking about. A lot of big shifts and big changes, but this is also an emergency and extremely urgent and there are a number of things that we talked about that could be done immediately. For example, the moratorium on building new roads, widening existing roads, basically continuing the existing pattern. Yeah, so that's... Hi, I'm Oscar Oliver de Dier. I'm a Bronx-based urban designer from Puerto Rico and I'll promise I'll be brief. I think that one of the most important questions that we sort of asked ourselves at one moment in time during the conversation was how do you define what infrastructure means in the 21st century? And I think this is a very important question because of maybe all the three buckets, transportation might have the more sort of physical condition or level of impact in our sort of daily routines and lives. And when speaking or talking specifically about I-95 and about sort of the highway system, we've been able to rethink and reimagine housing. We've been able to rethink and reimagine open space, but we really haven't sort of rethought or re-hatched the highway system from when it was sort of first invented in the 1950s and all the way before that. So sort of really rethinking and trying to expand, one could say the urban imaginary related to the highway system. I think it's also important. And when talking about the commons, it obviously somehow brings about the conversation about how it's financed and public banking and all these things, but also about how can we create spaces of interaction, not only a space for connecting one destination to the other, but how can you actually rethink it as a space for the commons in a literal sense, a space where people can come together and either we rethink land use, we rethink creatively how the highway system itself can be, implement other uses, it could be multimodal, it could be multi-programmatic, and just sort of expanding that urban imaginary I think is something very important and we sort of have more questions than answers for that, but I think that just having that conversation and trying to lay out those questions is key. Thank you all. So now it's my pleasure to introduce Catalina Cruz, represents New York's 39th district in the state assembly, which encompasses the neighborhoods of Corona, Elmhurst and Jackson Heights. Buenas tardes, how's everybody doing today? So I received this invitation a couple of weeks ago and I will be honest with you, I didn't know what I was in for, because often what happens in conversations about the Green New Deal or the environment is that it gets politicized and we don't really get to have these in-depth conversations about what does it really mean? What does it mean for people in our community? And so when I heard about what was gonna happen today, I of course had to come and say hello and just bring a little bit of a few remarks about how this impacts my community, my district. I represent Jackson Heights, Corona and Elmhurst and for those of you who may not know, we are one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city and we are also one of the neighborhoods with the highest rate of asthma. And this is out there, if you wanna look at it, we're also very close to La Guardia, we're very close to highways, we have way too many cars. I'm looking at you guys. And we've been working for a very long time trying to find solutions to start-up conversations, but we're also the kind of community that is more concerned with the immediacy of our problems, our immediate needs. We're the kind of community who is constantly facing eviction, we're the kind of community who's facing deportations, we're the kind of community that is facing poverty. And it's been a very long time, this conversation has been a very long time coming where we can actually have a conversation about the environment while recognizing all those immediate needs. And I think many of you might agree that the Green New Deal does that. It recognizes that innate relationship between poverty and the consequences of not taking care of our environment. And my ask of you today is as you're listening, is that you go back to our communities, to your communities, and talk to other people who are not here today. This conversation for many people is not a sexy one. They have many more things that are more immediate to their immediate lives. And until we start talking about at the kitchen table, at the bar with our friends, at the PTA, until we start really talking about what does it mean to live in a district, to live in a community where many folks here from Jackson Heights, we all know about that airplane noise. We all know about the proximity to the airport and what the pollution that comes from, the construction, the whole new LGA, and what that all means for communities like ours. And how that carries over into districts like this one, because we're right across the street from Corona, from, again, that raid of asthma. So until we actually start normalizing that conversation and not just by having the forums, because the forum is great, this is where we learn a lot of this stuff, but we gotta take it back with us, because until the everyday person who only comes to vote once a year, who only has that political conversation once a year, well, every two years or four years, until those folks, not just those of us here who care about this are actually having those conversations is gonna be very difficult for the folks in Congress, for my colleagues and I, to actually pass legislation that people care about that is going to change their lives. So that's my only ask of you. Thank you for being here today, because that means you actually care about that connection, about the environment, about changing the lives of the people in our community. But I also wanna thank the museum. I wanna thank Gabriela and Francisco for their work. This is fantastic that you guys have put this together, the architecture lobby and the Beale Center to have partners that care about our district in the way that you do and who are taking the time to help us build this, because I gotta be honest, I don't think that this is the thing that's gonna pass in one year or maybe two years. It's going to take a while for us to educate every person so that when they come out to the polls, so when they're advocating, when they're talking about this issue, they understand that it isn't just about their immediate needs, that if we don't take care of our environment the way that we need to, there's going to be no immediate need to take care of. Thank you so much and have a wonderful afternoon. Yeah. Okay. You get to hang out with us a little bit. Oh, sure. Yes, please. These heels can't take. All right, great. So now we'll open up for questions and we'll keep with the pattern that we used this morning and we'll have three questions at a time. All right. So Steve, one in the back here. Yes, thank you all. This was a good discussion. I'm sorry, ma'am, I don't know your name, but I heard you say something about decolonization and I figured we probably needed to hear more about that, especially with the tone of some of these conversations. I know that decolonization is about severing colonial practices and ties and how settlers see themselves asserting themselves in the future. And I think that might be very relevant to some of the discussions that we're having today. So I wanted to hear more of what did you mean by decolonization? I know you're speaking a lot about transportation and interstate highways, but a lot of people in New York City we rely on public transportation. So I want to know what renewable clean energy for public transportation would look like and how that would kind of be implemented, like would it start with the outer boroughs or would it start specifically with Manhattan? I know that's kind of a loaded question. Hi, maybe piggybacking on the public transportation question. I was just recently in the Netherlands where granted they have a very strong culture of planning, but the same transit card gets you access to regional rail, international rail, bike share and including Zipcar, basically. So you have a real nexus of intermodal transit all tied to one transit pass. And I wonder if the Green New Deal has space for something like that. Yeah, so thank you. My name's Jen Scarlett, I'm with Bronx Climate Justice North and thanks for the question about decolonization. So basically what I meant in using that term is to raise power relations. You know that as you use the term settler colonial that there's a class of people in this country, the 1% and those who are socioeconomically better off who wield all the power, the corporate class, all the rest. So just that decolonization, I love the Green New Deal, I'm thrilled by it because I feel like it embodies the concept of decolonization, that the New Deal portion of it is all about equity, it's all about power relations, it's all about lifting up the justice needs of folks who have been on the wrong end of environmental racism and environmental injustice and all of that. So that's what I meant by, we talk a lot at events like this about decarbonization but equally important to the work of decarbonization is the decolonization portion, the New Deal portion of the Green New Deal. Okay, in terms of the renewable clean energy for public transportation, I think one of the amazing things about New York is that we have such a small carbon footprint per capita and there's two major reasons for that and one is because of the way our housing stock is built together in so many places so that the heating is more shared but the other big reason for that is our subway system. I mean, we have been providing pretty clean public transportation for a long time and in fact the city is working all the time on rolling out new forms of that in terms of electric buses and energy efforts. Again, I think we have a lot of possibilities there and frankly I would rely on some people that are working perhaps more closely to that than I am. I mentioned earlier the possibility of some new technology that would be energy clean, liquid hydrogen fuels. So I think there's a constant look at that in terms of the rollout. It's nice when these things don't all start in Manhattan and that we can in fact have these starting in some of the other boroughs instead and I think that there is some sensitivity to that. May I propose corona for a starting point? To the public transit question. So as John mentioned, electric buses is one way. The MTA has started rolling out electric buses in their new capital plan. They're going to be adding 500 new electric buses. However, that's only about a quarter of the total new buses that they're adding. I think part of the reason for that is probably technical that it is hard to build up that infrastructure but that's still not enough. And it was also kind of a little disappointing in that capital plan that there wasn't much else in terms of addressing climate change other than finishing up projects leftover from Hurricane Sandy. So it'd be great if the MTA took that a little bit more seriously and invest a little bit more in, or quite a bit more in green energy generation and electric vehicles. If I may add to the inability of the MTA to have a vision. You know, one of the things that I think is very problematic is that they do start small, but they start late. And so I don't have much faith that even the number of buses that they've committed to that they're going to actually get around to getting them out on the road. I mean, look at what happened. I'm not sure how many people have been reading but what happened with the repairs that were supposed to happen on the seven train by the end of this year on that capital plan. They continuously don't meet their goal or promise, whatever you wanna call it. And so one of the things that I think folks up in Albany including myself are very committed to doing is making sure that we force them to have a more vision that we make sure that we're having the conversations. They routinely come to us and brief us about a million things. And this is one of the things that we're going to be raising with them. In a community like Corona where we have transportation deserts, there are blocks that if you have small children or if you're a senior citizen, it's going to take you a very long time to find a bus. And once you actually find a bus stop, you're gonna be stuck there for a very long time waiting for the bus. Or you might get three, four buses that are empty and they just leave you. And so if we're able to have buses with this new more safe for the environment technology, along these routes, I am hopeful that it'll help the health crisis that a lot of their working poor that are living in Corona. And so I am very much committed to making sure that, and I'd love to talk to you more about it so that we can push the MTA to get it together. I was gonna give a somewhat roundabout response, if not answer to the third question on sort of integrated transit options and those that cross transit scales. I think your question, sir, was whether there was room for such a thing within the Green New Deal legislation. That's not for me to say, except I sure hope so, but I don't really know how. But the how question is something that was raised repeatedly in our morning session, right? And this is a sort of one of those scalar sticking points. And that, again, not only the sort of scales of action, but the scales of decision making in both legislative and jurisdictional implementation enforcement, et cetera, terms, right? That that gets extraordinarily tricky, not only cross boundaries with regional governance, but in the nested boundaries in a federated, at best decentralized sort of aiming for democratic processes. But I think in some ways, at least conceptually, dovetails with some of the Assemblywoman's remarks on sort of communicating and understanding or contextualizing these conversations with respect to the sort of immediate issues of everyday lives in households and in communities, right? These scalar troubles that we came up against over and over again, talks about, is basically about the distance from oneself in both physical terms and in terms of time and where the urgency comes in. And repeatedly, we found ourselves phrasing something as given and accepted as I-95 in terms of that trade-off between rent cost and transport cost, and this being a bread and butter kitchen table issue that all of us have to deal with and our frontline communities even more so. Go ahead. I just wanted to add something quickly about the colonization and the fact that it was brought up. I think it was very smart to use and rescue the term of the New Deal to sort of hatch this sort of new plan to tackle the environmental crisis. But I do think that from a historical perspective and from, I guess, the topic of scale, this also must be decolonized, especially because the New Deal, the original sort of New Deal from the 1930s really sort of the people who reeked the benefits of that were mostly white people. And I think that in a certain sense, and here is what I go to the topic of scale, at a more local level, we already talked about how with the example of the highway system and these other sort of infrastructure investments, the communities of color were the most affected by precisely the contaminants and all these sort of things related to asthma alley in the Bronx, et cetera, et cetera. At a country-wide scale, obviously the benefits from having access to these sort of like cheap mortgages and the suburban expansion, that was mostly the people who reeked the benefits were the white suburban population. And in a matter of a global scale, as we've said before, the impacts and most of the emissions that are coming and are creating the climate crisis are coming from the global north and the part of the globe that's being most affected by is precisely the global south. So it's also about talking about that kind of scale and thinking about reparations and thinking about aid, not only at a country-by-country level, but at a global decolonization and global justice scale as well. Yeah, thank you for fleshing it out about the New Deal. Entire swads of people were sort of deliberately trashed by the New Deal in order to seek the votes of white Southern Democrats. Hopefully we all know a lot of that history. Just back to New York City's transit system, which is such a mess as we all know, the carbon footprint for transportation of New York City is among the worst in the world. And we have a supposed jewel of a subway system, but we all know that it's been allowed to erode to a really pathetic state. There are more than 2 million cars on the road in New York City. And in general, New York City, doesn't have a climate plan, although it keeps promising to put one together. New York City's goal is still 80% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. More conservative cities like San Diego have a goal of 100% by 2030 or 2035. So we really have a lot of work to do. Follow up on the Sheridan comment. It's really a shame after 10 years of advocacy and planning that that 20 years, that it fell apart. So we know it's gonna take a long time to remake our transportation infrastructure, but whether the lessons learned from that, that we might be able to, if we do mobilize a Green New Deal, how do we not make that mistake again? Because we've got a lot of highways that are dividing communities all over America's cities. And that seems like our key operation point for a Green New Deal. Hi, I also really love the Green New Deal for bringing economic and environmental needs to come together and trying to address those kitchen table issues, the how do we bring these objectives into the lives of everyday people who are not as politically engaged in a daily basis. And I was wondering if the panel could talk about some of those sort of opening the conversation examples of issues that you think we should be talking about more when we go back to our communities, things we might not be thinking of to start the Green New Deal conversation. Thinking about transportation, I'm also thinking about delivery of goods. Queens wanted no part of Amazon and Long Island city, but Amazon is still in Queens with their delivery trucks everywhere. Clogging the streets and polluting on the highways and meanwhile, local shops are shuttering, so possibly part of the transportation equation also. Yeah, just to reiterate that there's a real decolonization lesson there, and that fact is the young folks in a community like that or the ones who should have the power, so how do we change, how do we achieve decolonization? All of these issues are really playing out very vividly in Puerto Rico, and it's a crucible for these struggles and everything we can do here to support the struggle there and to lift up the voices of folks and the power of folks who should have it. Yeah, there shouldn't be any more shared and expressway debacles. See, on the third question, I think within, sir, I'd be happy to talk at length about this later. I don't think anybody is gonna enjoy that if I just go for it right now, but the summary version, at least as far as we got this morning in particular, is that your comment is spot on, right? If we think about our transportation, both at neighborhood scales or city scales and definitely regionally and interstate transport in terms of commuters or ourselves moving ourselves through the world alone, we are going to miss the mess of consumerism-driven shipping and the quantity of vehicle miles and the carbon that goes along with that and the infrastructure, physical and other end digital that supports it, the digital half also energy sucking that supports those movements of goods across this country and globally. That takes a massive amount of political will, attention, loud voices and willingness to change behaviors on the very sometimes selfish and also convenient personal level, right? That's the short version. That's the short version. That restructuring certain parts of our economy to allow for less commuting is one thing. We need localized markets and truly walkable and we're alternative modes of not just moving about in a day-to-day way, but also acquiring everything we need to live. If, so I think it was the first question about how do we open up more of a conversation at the table on the environment? So I recently took a trip to Medellin, Colombia where the government was able to do just that. And I think partially it was by forcing the conversation by changing certain policies. People were, when I say pissed, they were pissed. One of the things they did is this novel idea of I have no idea how to actually translate it, but it's called Pico y Placa. And basically if your plate ended in an odd number on this particular day, you couldn't drive it. If your vehicle ended in an even number on this particular day, you couldn't drive it. And so they started actually passing laws that forced people to have a conversation about the issue and making it, I mean, initially people were having conversations, they were pissed at the government, but when they started to see the air quality rate actually improve, if you had ever been to Bogota or Medellin or certain parts in Colombia 15 years ago and you went this year, completely different air quality, completely different air quality, people might be angry. I have this thing that I say that sometimes we as electives need to let the community lead us and sometimes we need to lead the community. And I think it's important that in issues like this, we may need to pass a few laws that people may not be super happy about so that we can force the conversation about how do we as everyday people need to change what we do to actually improve our ability to live? It's as simple as that. And that is what they've done in Medellin. And so I would say we don't have to reinvent the wheel. We can look to see at other cities, countries, localities where this has been successful, where we've made the environment air quality, respiratory issues, something we talk about as a normal thing, as what, how does this affect me and how am I going to vote based on these issues? And once we're normalizing it, we're going to actually see a little bit more traction because right now I will be honest, it's still seen as an issue of the rich. It's still seen as an issue of the folks who are middle class and up. The working poor do not have the time to worry about this. And until we are forcing the conversation on everyone so that everyone can see that this isn't just about the middle class and up, that this is an issue that if you, you are many people, I love Corona, but many people would live somewhere else if they could afford it. But they don't right now because the rent is too high. And so they're forced to live near a highway, near the airport, near places that put their children's health at risk. So that I guess that's me saying we'll probably pass a few laws that people won't be happy about. I'd also like to just take a quick moment to also respond to Aaron's question. Something actually that the Assemblywoman said really resonated with me, which is to have these conversations also in the bars as well as other places. And the reason I say that is because I think we've been acculturated to not, that's not permitted. We're not supposed to have political conversations in bars. Supposed to talk about football or whatever, sports, but not political conversations because that's my time to be, have a timeout or whatever. And I think we have to absolutely have those conversations in bars. I think we have to talk about the Green New Deal as probably our best last chance at survival. I think we have to talk about that our culture of consumerism has to be rolled back and that we can't just be a throwaway society in any respect anymore. We need to talk about those rights to housing, jobs, energy transportation. But we also, I think we have to talk about it in terms of human equality. And human equality, not just here in the United States, but internationally. If there are any weaknesses in the Green New Deal, I'm sure there are several, but one of them is it does vary, it's very nationally based, for the most part. And it really needs to be, we need to be thinking about this on an international level and the fact that all human beings are all equal across the world and they all deserve a Green New Deal. Yeah, let me just add one thing, which is there's another stakeholder that as humans we tend not to talk about a lot, which is nature. And maybe some of the designers and architects and engineers in the room know the name Jeanine Benyes, who has done so much work on biomimicry and learning from life and from living organisms about how to do things better as humans. And one of the questions she asks is how does life make things? And she's very good in her TED Talks at pointing out that humans create products that are 4% product and 96% waste. And that we also tend to fail to create things that enhance the environment rather than destroying it. Whereas living organisms have figured out how to live and take care of themselves while taking care of their place for thousands of generations forward. So she's really all about learning from nature, learning how living organisms have solved all sorts of design and engineering problems and that will help us live sustainably and solve this urgent problem we have. I wanted to quickly add something about the Sheridan that's question. I think that as a case study, it's a very relevant case study because from the incredible sort of outreach process and involvement of the communities that we're talking about before, these recommendations mostly either because of political purposes or the speed at how they had to occur from a state level in the state DOT. They basically bypass some of these recommendations because it had to be finished before whatever the term was up or it had to be quickly done and again mostly for political purposes. And why I think it's an important case study is precisely because I think and it's very important that the Green New Deal we keep talking about how quickly it needs to occur and that's obvious. I think that we are clearly in a crisis about that when we're sort of speeding through the process that we're really looking at the details and how they affect the community surrounding some of these sort of infrastructure investments, whatever they may be. All right, so do we have any closing comments from the panel before we read? Can I make a quick ask? I'm very hopeful that it'll pass. I'm very hopeful. I don't know when, but I'm very hopeful. And so one of the terrible things that often happens is that we will pass great legislation and nobody looks at the aftermath and if it worked properly. So this is more like when it passes, can everyone make a commitment to make sure that it is functioning the way that we wanted to and needed to? Because sometimes we as legislators and as advocates will propose amazing things, but nobody does the follow up to see if in real life and once put into practice, it works the way it needs to. Because who knows, maybe we need to be even stronger or maybe something needs to be amended that's a whole other conversation. But this is more like proactively let's think about that and keep it in the back of your head. I'll make a partial commitment slash do you one better. I have a hunch there are a lot of people in this room that will not only give you that, but might also be able to commit to before and after implementation policy evaluation studies so we can improve it along the way. All right, on that note, we will take a brief 10 minute break. So just a reminder that there's no coffee or food in this space when you return. So please be back here in 10 minutes and do take a chance to come up and look at the diagrams that this team produced. So great, thanks.