 Welcome, thank you all for coming to this press conference on the renewable energy standard reform. My name is Jessica Van Oort, I'm on the board of 350 Vermont. I also chair our local planning commission down in Pallet where I live and my wife and I own and run a small business. I'll be getting things started here today and we will be hearing from several other speakers. But we want to open first with a land acknowledgement. Welcome Earl. Quite. Today we acknowledge that we live on and share and help protect the ancestral lands of the Adenaki Nation, the Al-Nubak, our name for the people, the Wobanakiak, the people of the Donland, as the traditional caretakers in Dakina which includes Vermont, parts of New Hampshire, Maine, northern Massachusetts and Quebec called Wobanakiak, the Donland. We honor this land today on the banks of Manushtuk, also known as the Manuski River named after our delicious ramps. We pay our respect to our ancestors, elders, relations past, present and emerging. All of us here together, indigenous and non-indigenous, pledge our hearts to support and protect this land for future generations. All of us here together. We'll leave any. So we all have just experienced a summer like we've never had before. We've never had supermonitors lost homes and livelihoods. And we also lost any lingering feelings that climate change cannot touch us here. Meanwhile, floods and fire devastated communities around the world. If we don't get off sources of energy that release greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere, what we're experiencing right now is going to be magnified. As we approach the 1.5 degree Celsius tipping point, we need to do all that we plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in a way that doesn't place a burden on marginalized communities here in Vermont or beyond our borders. Over the past two years, Vermonters across the state have become increasingly vocal about revisiting the renewable energy standard, which is the law that governs how much renewable energy electric utilities are required to source and what the definition of that renewable energy is. As a result of this advocacy, lawmakers are taking another look at the renewable energy standard. We have an opportunity right now in our state to not only change the emissions and social impacts of our electricity here, but to provide an example for the rest of the country about what is possible. We want to thank the Legislative Working Group, the body tasked with making recommendations for a reformed renewable energy standard for their work this fall. While the working group stakeholders seem to agree that we need 100 percent renewable energy by 2035, there isn't agreement about what should count as renewable. We hope lawmakers will champion a renewable energy standard that requires our electricity to come from 60 percent new solar and wind by 2035 and end the practice of unbundled renewable energy credits, known as REX, especially from large hydropower. This is what we need to kick fossil fuels off the grid and make sure we aren't exporting the harms of our energy production. This fall, 350 Vermont toured the state with our Empower Vermont campaign. We've had over 200 Vermonters attend our events. Almost half the attendees have committed to advocating for a truly green and just renewable energy standard. So far, there have been 29 public comments made to the working group expressing support in line with our values. At every event we have, we ask the room, how much of our electricity should come from wind and solar? The answer is almost unanimously 100 percent. Vermont has a reputation for being green, but this is in many ways a false narrative. In terms of our electricity, allowing sources like large hydrodrone and the use of REX makes our emissions reduction look much better on paper than they are up in the atmosphere. Meanwhile, Hydro-Quebec plans to flood more lands up north. We can't have Vermont relying on this power that causes significant ecological damage, produces methane emissions, and destroys traditional indigenous lands. We also need to stop relying on renewable energy credits, a practice that 16 attorneys general have deemed deceptive, writing to the Federal Trade Commission that, quote, REX alone do not support renewable energy and instead can harm the renewable energy industry, end quote. Instead, we want to see a reformed renewable energy standard that prioritizes and incentivizes tier two, which is in state, low emissions renewables, including local community energy projects and makes this power accessible to low and moderate income Vermonters, ensures that we're meeting our renewable energy goals through adding new sources, ends the practice of using hydro-Quebec renewable energy credits to offset Vermont's use of fossil fuels, prohibits additional large hydropower to be used to meet new renewable energy goals, and does not export the negative impact of dirty energy to communities and ecosystems beyond our borders. So with that, I would like to introduce our next speaker, who is Gael Polstamp, a farmer, parent, and a member of the Vermont Climate Council. Gael. Good afternoon. I'm here today to speak to you as a farmer, a parent, and someone who has witnessed the impacts of climate change firsthand. This summer was the most challenging season I've experienced in over two decades of farming. The heavy rainfall and flooding in Vermont highlighted our food system's increasing vulnerability to the effects of global warming, while our culture has always been subject to inherent risks. The loss of crops due to what initially seemed like a minor rainstorm provided a glimpse into the potential uncertainties ahead. I would like to bring your attention to the image next to me. The picture on the left was taken on July 12th, just two days after the major flooding. However, it continued to rain heavily throughout July and August. As a result, this field did not dry out until September. Unfortunately, by that time, my crops had already withered away. On the other hand, the photo on the right shows what a good growing season can produce. This is why it is imperative that we address this crisis with the utmost urgency and responsibility it requires and utilize all the resources available to us. Climate change is not a distant theoretical threat. It is happening now, and as we can see, we are already feeling its effects. The unpredictable weather patterns and natural disasters, we will have catastrophic consequences for farmers in Vermont and across the globe if we do not take immediate action. Climate models suggest that rising global temperatures of two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels could lead to vulnerabilities in the world's food-producing regions, which could be disastrous. In the past, when one of the world's breadbasket regions faced a natural disaster, other regions were able to fill that gap. But what if multiple food-producing areas experienced extreme disruption and catastrophe? What sort of geopolitical instability will ensue if billions of people are starving because they cannot access food? Unfortunately, these scenarios are not far-fetched, and if we do not rapidly increase the use of renewable energy, I worry about what the future holds. We cannot afford to delay action on the climate crisis if we want to ensure a thriving global food system for future generations. Taking urgent steps to reduce emissions will pave the way for a brighter and more hopeful future for our children and grandchildren. That is why I'm here today to urge policymakers to employ every measure possible, beginning with passing the Renewable Energy Standards Reform Bill. Thank you. And now I'd like to welcome Earl Hatley, enrolled citizen of Abenaki Nation of Mrs. Quoy, environmental scientist and co-founder of LEED Agency. Mr. Quoy, once again, I'm here to speak on the Renewable Energy Standard Bill. We would like to have a clean Renewable Energy Standard Bill. By clean, I mean a bill that supports community solar wind and storage, a res bill that eliminates false solutions, including renewable natural gas, biomass, hydrogen, and especially biofuels and large hydrodams such as Hydro-Quebec, which impact our indigenous peoples' communities, our cultural rights to subsistence. Biofuels destroy the rainforest and indigenous cultures' rights, while Hydro-Quebec floods indigenous lands, poisons the aquatic life with methylmercury, and melts arctic waters with warm water discharges that drive away marine life from arctic fishing and hunting areas. Hydro-Quebec is also proposing to add landfill gas and nuclear power to its energy mix in the future. Vermont does not need these false solutions. We want a res bill that ends the purchase and sales of renewable energy credits. We want a bill that supports low utility rates to 6% and 10% for low and middle income households. This is the kind of solution that Vermont needs. This is the kind of solution that we here support. We are hoping that the legislature is listening today. We'll leave it to you. Most of you are probably already familiar with Bill McKibbin, environmental activist and founder of 350.org. Bill could not be here with us today, but he sent us this video. Hello, everybody. It's Bill McKibbin. I so wish I was there in person, but I'm not because I'm off failing to save the world so far else, but in this case, I think Vermont is poised to play a really important role if we can get this right. Here's the thing, two things to know about 2023. One of them is depressing. This was the hottest year in 125,000 years. Climate change has broken out. We're seeing the year that I was writing about back in 1989 when I wrote The End of Nature. This is what I was thinking about. Part of me is really alone. 2023 is also seeing finally a breakout of renewable energy by mid-summer around the world. We were putting up about a gigawatts worth of solar power a day. Half of that was in China, so the rest of the world needs to get under the same kind of curve. It's possible because solar power is now pretty cheap. We live on a planet for the cheapest way to produce energy is to point a sheet of glass like a sun. It's not for your problem. You have to mine lithium for properties and so on and so forth. But those things are far, far less destructive than the fossil fuel regime we're in right now where we're destroying the planet's climate system and where 9 million people a year around this planet are dying from breathing the combustion by-products of fossil fuel. We can't stop burning stuff. Bilements, coal, gas, oil. We're lying instead on the fact that the good Lord was kind enough to hang a large ball of burning gas 93 million miles up in the sky and we now have the wit to make the four years of it. But making full use of it, catching its rays on affordable panels, taking advantage of the fact that it differentially heats the earth, producing the breeze that we can catch in those turbines, taking advantage of it means having some solar panels and having some turbines. They do not need to cover every inch of the line. They don't even need to cover most of it, but they do need to cover some of it and we cannot be saying that aesthetic grounds alone are enough to block this stuff. That if we do that, then we offload all the cost of our energy, of our energy and use under other people, and we offload the cost of the last 100 years of our energy use under other people, in other places who are poorer and more vulnerable. For one is a huge carbon debt. You can do some of that sadly through the flooding in our own state, but other people are paying even more of it and in solidarity with them, we need to be moving now. We can afford to do it now. It will produce more reliable power and more affordable power for our launchers and it will produce a world with some future for our kids and our kids. That's what RES reform matters. That's why we have to move fast to really, really increase the amount that we're producing here. It's an easily measured bottom line and one that we've got to go to work on. So I'm really happy people like Thomas Hans and so many others are pushing now and with their expertise and intelligence and all your hard work, I think we'll get done with what it means doing. I hope we will because I do not want 2023 to turn out to have been the coolest year for the rest of my life. Thanks y'all. Susan. So to wrap up, as we do the electrification we need in the heating and transportation sectors, our electricity use is only going to increase. It's urgent that we bring new solar and wind online because that's what will ultimately kick fossil fuels off the grid and lower emissions. This is our chance as a state to say yes and to lay the foundation for our electricity to come from low emission sources that don't export the harms of our energy use. We are asking the working group and our legislature to deliver this for Vermonters. Thank you.