 Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining us today for a 2020 Climate Action Update. I'm Dan Bresset, the Executive Director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. EESI was founded in 1984 on a bipartisan basis by members of Congress to provide science-based information about environmental, energy, and climate change policies to policymakers. We've also, over time, developed a program to provide technical assistance to rural utilities interested in on-bill financing programs with their customers. This is our final briefing of the year. Whether in person or online, we have been proud to welcome several thousand attendees, including congressional staff, federal agency representatives, advocates, stakeholders, business leaders, and concerned citizens to our briefings. We've covered a lot of issues, as diverse and divergent, as coastal resilience finance in Hawaii, the energy efficiency programs offered by rural electric cooperatives, the climate impact on cultural heritage sites, to K through 12 aquaculture classes. Thanks to everyone who participated in our congressional education programming this year, and especially to our amazing panelists. And we're working on a fantastic briefing slate for 2021, if I might set aside my modesty for just a second. With the new Congress and administration, EESI will be ready to do our part to ensure that policymakers have the information, analyses, case studies, and success stories necessary to motivate them, to take action on climate change. Whether briefings or fact sheets, everything we produce is freely available and accessible online. And as always, the best way to stay up to date and never miss a thing, is to visit our website at www.esi.org and sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter, climate change solutions. As eager as I am to get started after the holiday break and hit the ground running in 2021, today our topic is the status of climate action goals as of the end of the current year, 2020. I guess the first two months of 2020 were okay, but for the most part, this has been a difficult and challenging year. There's also been a critical time in the fight against climate change. From here, we embark on the coming decade with 2030 goals looming, and the need to reduce emissions and transition justly and equitably to a decarbonized clean energy economy is only becoming more and more urgent. In the years since the adoption of the Paris Agreement, the story of climate policy in the US has been a tale of two extremes. On the one hand, the executive branch has abandoned our international commitments, ignored science, and done its best to undermine efforts. On the other hand, not to be deterred, states and local governments have done their best to fill the leadership vacuum, set goals, and implement policies and programs needed to reduce emissions. A key driver of our efforts at ESI has been the work picking up an intensity in some corners of Congress that has amplified the progress of states and local governments. Probably the most notable example of this is the report issued over the summer by the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis. And so now, after the past few years, where do we find ourselves? That is the topic of the briefing today. What have we achieved? What do we need to do now? What are the challenges? What are the opportunities? And to help answer these questions, we will first hear a presentation of two major reports. We are still in to deliver America's pledge, a retrospective and delivering on America's pledge, achieving climate progress in 2020. And then we'll be joined by a panel of experts for a moderated discussion to reflect on this progress and consider what might come next. Before I introduce our panelists, let me mention two important bits of logistics. First, if you miss anything or want to learn more, you can access an archived webcast as well as written materials and the slides from our panelists if you visit us online at www.esi.org. And second, after the presentation of the two reports, when we get to the discussion, we'd be glad to incorporate your questions too. If you have a question, you have two options to ask it. First, you can send us a message on Twitter following us at EESI online. Or second, you can send an email to EESI at EESI.org. We will do our best to get to everyone's questions during our Q&A discussion. The presentation I mentioned will be jointly delivered by Nate Hultman and Carla Frisch. Dr. Nate Hultman is director of the Center for Global Sustainability and Associate Professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy. He is also associate director of the Joint Global Climate, excuse me. Joint Global Change Research Institute. I wanted to put climate in there so bad. And a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. And Carla Frisch is a senior principal at Rocky Mountain Institute working on America's Pledge. America's Pledge brings together private and public sector leaders to ensure the United States remains a global leader in reducing emissions and delivers the country's ambitious climate goals of the Paris Agreement. Nate and Carla, thank you so much for joining us today. I can't wait to hear your presentation. And I'm sure it will trigger a really, really interesting discussion afterwards. So welcome to the briefing today. Well, thank you. And thanks to EESI for pulling this together and also for our fellow panelists for lending their thoughts and perspectives to this conversation today, as well as to all of you for joining and for your interest and support of this interesting and critically important topic. Let's see, so I just wanna be sure can we go to the introductory slide? Great, so my name's Nate Holtman. I've been co-leading this project called America's Pledge with my colleague Carla Frischel, you'll hear from in just a couple of minutes. And one of the dimensions that America's Pledge has been tackling over the past few years is actually to better understand climate action in the United States as we heard in the introduction during a time when the federal government is particularly from the executive has been largely absent or changing policies in a way that contravened climate action. So what we've seen and what we've witnessed over the past few years is a tremendous groundswell of activity from the bottom up, from state cities and businesses and many other actors. We'll hear more about them also during the discussion who have stepped up to say we are still in for the goals of the Paris Agreement as well as to climate action in the United States. And so America's Pledge has been pulled together and works with a number of other partners I'll mention in just a few minutes to better understand what that action is, what impact it's been having, what impact it could have and also how there might be partnership with a re-engaged federal government. And we'll talk through some of those various issues during the course of this short presentation. Next slide please. So America's Pledge and We Are Still In work closely together. We Are Still In is a large organization of actors of various kinds who have stepped up to say we are still into the goals of the Paris Agreement and we've got Alon, we'll hear from later today who's been helping organize that. And America's Pledge is an organization that's been working across different research institutes including my own, but also Rocky Mountain Institute and World Resources Institute as co-equal partners as well as working with Bloomberg Philanthropies as a partner to better understand the impacts of all these actors stepping up. Next slide please. Great, and I'm not gonna go through these in detail but I just wanted to know that there's a tremendous amount of analysis that we've done on this question and we're gonna give you a flavor of that today but obviously you're welcome to go to the website. Look in more detail, there's not only kind of summaries but also for those of you who are interested a lot of technical documentation, particularly laying out different kinds of policy platforms and opportunities as we understood them through the course of the last few years of work with this great team that I've been working with. So next slide please. Okay, and so just to kind of sketch out sort of to orient us in terms of how we in America's pledge with we are still in but also I think the more broad climate community including the sub-nationals in the US have evolved our thinking in some ways over the past couple of years. I think it's obvious that if we're dealing with climate change that this is an international issue there's a global dimension of climate change. We all know that there's a need for all to control and act in different ways in their different country contexts. And so the international discussion around climate change has always been a focus of attention for countries around the world as well as for people interested in climate action globally. Another dimension that's also been very clear and obvious to most people throughout the last few decades of climate is that national action matters. We've been focused on thinking about what kinds of climate policies might the US enact, might Europe, might China, might all of the other key emitters enact. Those are going to be always critical because a lot of the primary policy levers always reside with the national level of government. But in addition, one thing we have learned over the past couple of years is the critical importance of not just the international, not just the national, but the subnational community in driving forward an ambitious climate agenda not only at the national level, but frankly also at the international level. And what we've found and what we have discovered through the actions and leadership of a number of organizations and governors and city mayors throughout this country and even globally is that these actions not only deliver emissions reductions when aggregated at a meaningful scale, but also create the conditions for a stepped up federal re-engagement that can actually then do more and do it more robustly over time than if we had not had this subnational action to begin with. And so it's a critical piece to recognize that those three elements interlinked is how we can build a more robust, a more ambitious and a more frankly, implementable national climate strategy and the work that we've been doing with subnational partners as well as with America's pledge has been trying to elucidate exactly the mechanisms for how that works and how much those kinds of joint actions can really do in terms of an overall US emissions trajectory, which we'll see a little bit of in the next slide. So what we have seen and witnessed like I said in the past few years is a tremendous groundswell of subnational actors stepping up. What we see in this particular slide is a kind of numerical representation of what the size of those coalitions looks like. You can see that for example, there's roughly half of our states and a number of cities, a number of businesses and other actors numbering at this point nearly 4,000 independent actors across these different constituency types have stepped up and are doing different kinds of climate actions within their own jurisdictions. The map on the right is one way to look at that, which is again, it's sort of primarily looking at the numbers of actors who have signed up and where they actually are geographically. Now that is frankly amazing and it's quite impressive and there's a lot of genuine energy and activity from that community. A key question though remains which is what do they actually add up to? All of these different commitments, we welcome them, they are incredibly important in and of themselves, but can they make a difference in the overall pathway of the US emission story? And that's another element of our analysis which we can show you on the next slide. A next way to think about it is not just the numbers but what is the scale of that set of actors? And this was something we did take a look at in some detail, shortly stated those actors already and in fact, this is always growing but they already represent over half of US emissions. They represent 65% of the US population and nearly 70% of US GDP. Just to put that in context, that GDP number, if that coalition were an actual country, it would represent an economy that was roughly the size of China's and the world's second largest economy. So this actor group, the scale of it is actually quite large and that's important and also kind of gives us more confidence to think that this group can actually make a difference. But of course the final step is what are the policies they're enacting and how much can those policies actually make a difference? And to answer that part of the story, we'll look at the next slide. And this shows what the actual outcome is of the various commitments even as of roughly last year, this report came out about six months ago. Actually no, a little bit longer, I guess it's about a year ago. Sorry, time flies in COVID times. About a year ago, we came out with this report and what this shows is that those actors working together already committed to something like reductions that add up to something like 25% reductions relative to 2005 levels by 2030, but expanded action by this set of states, cities, businesses and others. The continued leadership and consistent leadership we've seen over the past couple of years could get us to something like 37% reduction by 2030. And with additional action from the federal government and additional re-engagement from the federal government, we showed that that could lead up to something like a 49% reduction by 2030. Now, it's just important to note since we now are on the cusp of a federal re-engagement that our analysis did look at a very vigorous federal re-engagement, including from Congress. And so those numbers ought to be kind of interpreted in that light and more can be discussed about this if people are interested during Q&A. So that's what we kind of discovered in some ways, we as a community discovered that over the course of the last few years and America's Pledge kind of helped sort of understand what the actual impact of those might be. But really the leadership and the work has come from the sub-national community. And I think it's really important for us to pause and both give credit to and reflect on the importance of that action over the past few years. And then also now as we are on the cusp of thinking about a federal kind of strategy to think about how we make that into an all-in national climate strategy that truly integrates this action and builds it into a longer-term and more robust national strategy. So that's kind of where that part of the analysis goes. One thing that we did want to also understand, and I think was a critical thing for this kind of immediate period of this year and the next couple of years is how the kind of COVID situation impacts overall emissions trajectories in the US. And frankly to look at what we've done as a community over the past few years and sort of aggregate and understand some particular highlights from that. And to tell you more about that, I am very happy to hand over to my colleague and co-lead for this project, Carla Frisch. Hi, very happy to be here with you all today and thanks to EESI. So I wanted to tell you a little bit about some of the specifics that are happening on the ground across the country. So on the next slide, we have a couple examples for you. So since 2017, when this movement became much more formalized and organized, of course it's been going on for decades that we have states and cities and businesses and others leading on climate. But since 2017 and that formal organization in the US, the number of electric vehicles has doubled. 16 states have committed to HFC hydrofluorocarbon phase down. Now 16 states is enough that it almost becomes a de facto federal standard. Because you don't wanna have two different products for two different sets of states. So amazing progress by states stepping up. And we've seen a real shift in public understanding and thinking about the energy transition. And polling shows that 79% of Americans support a renewable energy future in the United States. Now that's not the 50-50 voting split that we see in some recent elections, local and national. That's a huge majority, really focus on the path to clean energy. On the next slide, a couple more. So as far as commitments to 100% clean energy. Back in 2017, it was just Hawaii leading the way and saying we're legally committing to this. Now we've got 13 states in Puerto Rico and over 170 cities. And the really exciting part is that more than 30 cities have already achieved 100% clean energy. So we're seeing both the commitment and the follow through from these local leaders. Seven states and 27 gas companies have committed to methane leak reduction along the supply chain. And a new emerging trend over the last year or two years is this movement toward all electric buildings to really reduce indoor air pollution and reduce greenhouse gases. So now 6 million people in the US live in cities with a commitment to be all electric. Next slide. So, yeah, as was mentioned at the top, there've been two good months of 2020 so far, January and February. So we wanted to look in depth and understanding the really tough times that have been going on for all of us and particularly tough for some the global pandemic and the economic recession, flanked by the need to address climate change and the urgent conversation that we're having about racial and economic justice. So for those, we wanted to dig in deeply and figure out what exactly is going on in the US in 2020 under these circumstances. So on the next slide, we give you a little snapshot of the tracking that we've been doing. And I would say we've had a good problem, which is that in our work in tracking climate and clean energy action, we just can't track it all. There's so much happening. So this timeline has some of the key amazing accomplishments over the past year. And you can find it in our report where you can scroll in on the font and get it to a size that works for you. But a couple of my favorites here include Houston and Kansas City, committing to net zero 100% clean right when they were in the heart of the pandemic and figuring out how to house people in hospitals. And part of that is the deep connection that these local leaders are seeing between addressing climate change, lowering costs in their communities by moving to clean energy and providing sustainable economy and health benefits for their residents. So these solutions are really intertwined. Now on the next slide, I'll give you a snapshot of our analytic work. So we dug in really deeply into five sectors to figure out what's going on on the ground. So we looked at what are the key drivers affecting emissions? What's the direction and extent of recent trends? And what's their potential to affect emissions reductions in 2030? So I won't go through all the details on the right, but on the next slide, I'll give you the key conclusion, which is this. Overall, our assessment modestly increases our confidence in the ability of states, cities and businesses and others to deliver on bottom up climate action. So this result, I would say was counterintuitive to us in starting the research project. We thought 2020 might have slowed down this action, but in fact, the trend in the US has sped up in some cases. A really huge amount of progress here. Now on the next slide, I think one of the factors for that trend is that about 70% of Americans support this move to 100% clean economy by 2050 to prioritizing the clean energy and to protecting communities of color from climate impacts and stronger fuel efficiency standards. So this is the direction that people wanna go and they have not let COVID and the economic recession slow them down. So on the next slide, another key part of our analysis was looking at what's possible for clean stimulus and recovery. This is an active conversation on the Hill now and we imagine we'll continue into the spring. Perhaps there's different tranches that are possible, but there's a lot that can happen in communities around the US that supports action on climate but also improved air quality and improved local economies. So an electricity that could include investments in grid modernization and transportation, keeping public transit up and going and providing workforce training for a shift to electric vehicles. In methane, helping clean up idle and abandoned infrastructure. In buildings, expanding our weatherization and efficiency, expanding this trend toward electrification and in HFCs hydrofluorocarbons, there's huge opportunities here on shifting to HVAC and optimizing our end of life disposal. So on the next slide, we have the link to the two reports here. If this piqued your interest and you'd like to go deeper, there's a lot of material there about the amazing things that have happened in the last four years. And in particularly the deep dive on 2020 where things have sped up instead of slowed down. And we're really looking forward to the possibility of an all-in focus on climate where these states and cities and businesses and others have the opportunity to partner with federal leaders to continue some of this movement. So thank you very much and looking forward to the discussion. Thanks, Carla and thanks, Nate. Congratulations on all the work that went into that. I know it was a lot of efforts on the parts of a lot of people and it's really, really important for people to realize that in the United States, climate policy isn't just federal policy. It's also state policy, local policy, it all adds up. So thank you very much. Quick reminder, if you missed any of that, if you wanna go back and look at some of the slides in more detail, they'll be made available on ESI's website, www.esi.org. And if you missed any of it, there's an archived webcast as well. So you can go back and watch anything you wanna see again. Quick reminder, we are gonna have a moderated Q and A discussion in a few minutes. Actually, like a few seconds at this point. And if you have any questions out there in our streaming audience, you can ask those to us in two different ways. One is you can follow us on Twitter at EESI online and ask it that way. Or you can send us an email, EESI at EESI.org. And now it is time to hear from some other folks and to move into a moderated discussion based on sort of all of the great information that Nate and Carla just presented. Now I get to introduce my colleague, Anna McGinn. Anna is a policy associate with ESI and it will be leading and most of the question and answer period that we'll be getting to in a moment. And we are gonna be joined in addition to Nate and Carla. They'll be sticking with us for the next while. We also have three other climate experts, clean energy leaders who'll be joining us for that discussion. So a little bit of a different format today, but this is a great topic and there's lots of different perspectives to share. So I'm gonna introduce our three additional climate experts and then I'm gonna turn it over to Anna and them to move into that discussion. First is Elon Strait. Elon is the director of US climate campaigns in Washington, DC. He manages the We Are Still In initiative which launched to raise the voice of and promote the collaboration of subnational actors who support the Paris Agreement on climate change to build a broader base of support for climate action in the United States. He develops and executes local and national climate campaigns. We also will be joined by Lisa Jacobson. She is the president of the business council for sustainable energy. Lisa has advised states and federal policy makers on energy, tax, air quality and climate change issues. She is a member of the Department of Energy's State Energy Efficiency Steering Committee, the US Trade Representatives Trade and Environment Policy Advisory Committee and the Gas Technology Institute's Public Interest Advisory Committee. Kelly Stone is our third additional expert. She is a senior policy analyst at ActionAid. She focuses on biofuel, climate change, food security and land use. She joined ActionAid in 2014. And before that, she worked in the US House of Representatives specializing in food security as well as foreign affairs and appropriation. She has master's degrees from the, or a master's degree from the London School of Economics and a bachelor's degree from DePaul University. Welcome, Elon, Lisa and Kelly. And Anna, three of you are in great hands. Anna is going to take very good care of us during the moderated Q&A. And I'm gonna be watching for audience questions. Welcome to the briefing today. Great, thanks so much Dan. And to all our panelists, we're so excited to have you and Carla and Nate, thank you so much for that introductory presentation. We're excited to dig in a little more to the America's Pledge work as well as the work of our other panelists. So to start us off, to our panelists who didn't present, we're wondering if you can describe your organization's approach to inspiring, coordinating or implementing climate action in the US leading to 2020, which as we all know, has been a key benchmark year for climate goals. So Elon, maybe we'll start with you and then we'll go to Lisa and then to Kelly. Yeah, thanks so much. So it is a great time to sort of sit back and reflect on what we've learned over the last four years. And that presentation by Nate and Carla was especially good at laying out what has been successful and what's worked to drive, as Nate and Carla both alluded to, some pretty shocking results when you think about what you might have expected to happen on climate action over the last four years and especially culminating in this pandemic. So my work has really been around movement building, trying to build a coalition of cities and states and businesses and universities and cultural institutions and faith groups and others who wanna remain committed to climate action. And, but at the same time, really in 2016 didn't know where to begin. So I think a lot of institutions and a lot of leaders viewed this as an issue for the federal government that the federal government was gonna handle back in 2016. And then when President Trump announced that he was gonna hold the United States and the Paris Agreement, all of a sudden all of these leaders sat down and thought for themselves, well, I guess I have to sort of pick up the mantle here and think about how I can drive this agenda forward. And in some sense, and I hate to even say this, but in some sense, that's a bit of a silver lining of that action, that the withdrawal of the United States and the Paris Agreement has forced a lot of these institutions to think and act on their own on climate action. So that exactly as Nate said, when the federal government gets back into re-engage, which hopefully they'll do in a month, that there is this huge foundation of subnational action around the country. But I wanna point to three lessons in particular. The first is that policy and political levers in the United States are everywhere you look, really, that the way this country is set up, it is not a top-down economic system, the way that some other countries are. A lot of the choices about where emissions come from are made at a hyper-local level. So if you think about the reliance on natural gas to heat homes or where our transportation emissions come from, those are actually made sometimes at not even the city level, but the town level for building codes or for public transportation or where roads are gonna be put. And those decisions can be incentivized by the federal government. We can create standards at the federal level, but at the end of the day, those are always gonna be local decisions. And so how we bring local decision makers into the climate policy process, it was important over the last few years and it will continue to be important going forward. The second is a big lesson I learned was about the strength of numbers in 2016, climate and views on climate were very political. It was seen as even a partisan thing, which it still is to some extent, but so much less so now. When we launched, We Are Still Am, it was a statement that institutions did not support the president's decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. And we have lots of institutions, corporates in particular who were nervous about speaking out against a presidential decision. But once it reached a certain threshold, hundreds or thousands of institutions were saying the same thing. It was much easier for them to join that coalition and say their piece as well. So much so that we're constantly looking for, in our parlance, unusual suspects, new speakers in the movement, folks that might catch your eye that they're speaking out about climate change and it is getting harder to find unusual suspects. People like institutions like Walmart or McDonald's are now usual suspects in the climate movement. And that's a huge movement from 2016. And the last thing I'll say is just that one lesson learned, especially this was that there is no way to adequately address the climate crisis without a view of viewing this through the lens of environmental and racial justice. First of all, the moral cause that we're talking about here is that the people who have caused this crisis the least are the ones who bear the brunt the most. And in the United States, that is in particular communities of color, especially on the coast. And you can learn a lot about the politics of this issue just by learning about how climate change is being caused and who climate change is being impacted. So for example, the best predictor of where a fossil fuel facility is located in the United States is the race of the neighboring communities. It's not their income level, it's not the education level, it's their race. And so that tells you things about who is able to prevent the installation of fossil fuel facilities in their backyard and who isn't. And so when you're trying to build a movement of people who want to support cleaner air and cleaner water, it's really important to include the people who have those facilities in their backyard right now. And I don't think the environmental movement does that adequately yet. And it's something that we really need to build on in the future. Thanks so much, Ilan. Lisa, if you wanna jump in, that'd be great. I would love to and pleasure to be with you all. And Ilan, you said so much in there that I really appreciate and agree with given my vantage point. And I'm speaking today representing members of the Business Council for Sustainable Energy. We are a broad based energy trade association focused on clean energy technologies, products and services. And we are mostly commercially available technologies. So things like energy efficiency, natural gas technologies, renewable energy, energy storage, sustainable transportation and digital technologies that help integrate it all. So we are a movement ourselves, a coalition of industries that both support and implement their own climate change strategies. So I can talk about that from a subnational perspective, but also they're helping their customers and clients achieve their economic and sustainability goals. And it really has never been a better time to be investing and working in the energy sector. I've been involved on the policy side for almost 20 years now and the growth and maturity and the advancements made in the sectors that I've been working with is really phenomenal. So one of the things that BCSE does is it tries to share and document those changes. And just like we heard with what America's Pledge is documenting, really dramatic and important advancements. And I can talk about some of them in other parts of the Q and A, but also just to point out that even though there have been significant economic and job implications, given the business conditions of COVID-19, we've not seen our companies tell us that their customers or clients are backing away from these important climate change and sustainability objectives. And it's also accelerated a conversation on making sure that their facilities and their whole business is more resilient. And that is something that the federal government has a role to play in helping those companies and industries become more resilient, but also it can be a real leader and demonstrator of how you integrate both mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions and investment in resilient infrastructure into the work and the models that they are achieving. So I also wanted to say just about subnational action overall, that was a really big focus in the lead-up to Paris because as international governments and stakeholders were thinking about the science and noticing that we were still very far behind even our short-term emission reduction goals, we understood that the private sector and other subnational actors were gonna be essential to move us forward. So there was a great deal of time and energy spent trying to build coalitions to bring subnational actors more into the conversations on policy, but also more into the investment and implementation. And that was going fairly well. There was a lot of activity in the lead-up to Paris, but as was just discussed by Elon, if there is a silver lining, at least from a US perspective of the US pulling out of Paris, it was the reaction by the private sector. And that's one of the things that Business Council for Sustainable Energy has been tracking extremely closely. And when I look, for example, at just one of the metrics in terms of corporate action to reduce emissions, let's look at procurement of clean energy. When we ended the decade, we went from basically no corporate procurements in clean energy to about 14 gigawatts of signed power purchase agreements for renewable energy, just dramatic, dramatic changes. And we were doubling upon doubling each year. So with the COVID pandemic this year, we were concerned that we wouldn't see the level of activity in corporate PPA signings, and corporate interest in activity and renewable energy. The interest might be there, but for other reasons it might have been stalled. Well, we don't have the final data yet for 2020, but what we are understanding is that it's still quite robust. And again, there's not a move away from using more clean and renewable energy. So just to kind of close out, as Elon did with a couple of points that maybe we can get into, when we think about climate action in 2020 and what we need to do going forward, we need to think about leveraging the private sector. So it really is a public-private partnership. And there certainly are things that the federal government has done and can do to accelerate that type of activity. Also, we are in a totally different landscape when it comes to opportunity and affordability of clean energy than we were even, let's just say, five to 10 years ago. And the private sector is proving that. Because we are now, as Elon said, able to point to many different types of companies and not just kind of the big names that were kind of the high-profile early movers, it's really embedded in all sectors of the economy. We are able to show that clean energy is practical, it is reliable, it is affordable, and it has very strong economic benefits. So those are the kinds of things that I reflect on, even with the challenges we have with the COVID economic situation and what we need to do for recovery, clean energy stands out, it can help us solve the problems that we have both from a sustainability perspective and also in terms of having a robust economy going forward. Thanks, Lisa. Kelly, love to give the stage over to you for your response to the question. Yeah. Hi, everyone, and thank you so much for having me. So as I'm Kelly Stone with ActionAid USA and ActionAid is an international network that works on issues of extreme poverty and working with local communities on really realizing their human rights and my office in the US focuses particularly on climate change and food rights. So for us, actually this conversation really starts with the climate crisis and where we need to get to, to have a chance of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. And the IPCC says that the next decade is really critical to realizing that goal and that to have a chance, we really need to be cutting emissions globally by 50% by 2030. So we start at that international level, but then of course what the IPCC report doesn't say is how you split that effort between all the many stakeholders that have a role to play here. So we have been working with colleagues at the UNFCCC to really develop what we call a fair shares approach. And we think this approach is really key to unlocking ambition at the international level between countries. So for this, the question is, how do we divide it up fairly? And we start with the principles that it should be based on historical responsibility, how much of the mess has each country made, but then also capacity. What capacity do they really have to act on climate change? And what we found was that international cooperation here is really key. If you take all the rich countries who have had a huge role in creating this crisis, that even if they did everything that would actually not be enough to solve the problem that does not get us to the global level of effort that's needed. And so it is really required for rich countries to do their fair share. They need to be doing everything they can domestically, but then also working to provide support to poor countries to expand their capacity so that they can be doing more to act on climate than would be reasonably fair or practical to be asking them to do so. So with that sort of framework, we've been having a conversation in the US Climate Action Network for the past year and a half about what is the US fair share and how do we take that approach into the next decade and really work towards what needs to happen. And through that process of looking at what the US historical responsibility is, which is of course huge, we're still the largest historical emitter and what our capacity is, which is significant, even considering the huge and unacceptable inequality in this country. And we've come up with a figure that is 195% emission reductions from our 2005 baseline by 2030. Now, that's a big number. And based on what US can is calling for in other spaces, we're looking at what we see as necessary would be 70% emissions reduction from that 2005 baseline by 2030. And then that 125% to get to that 195 would then be through international support. So that's climate finance, capacity building, technology transfer, all the different other types of avenues that we have available to us to help promote action in other countries who wouldn't otherwise have the capacity to act on this and who are frankly already getting hit very hard by the climate crisis. And my organization really sees this as a moral imperative. Like I said, we're a human rights-based organization. So that's definitely where we start. But we also see this as a political and pragmatic necessity. The US fair share is so big, no one else is gonna come in to clean up our mess. Like there is no one out there who could possibly fill the hole left by US in action. We're gonna reach the 1.5 degree goals in the Paris Agreement, the US has to do its part. But we also see it as a pragmatic point for if we really need everyone to be doing their part, if we're going to be meeting the Paris Agreement goals. And that means that, you know, having everyone do their part and having it seen as fair is really gonna be essential to unlocking that ambition. It just wouldn't be fair to ask other countries to do their part if we aren't doing ours. So we really see this fair shares approach as the way to unlock that needed ambition from all the parties involved so that we can collectively at the international level, the national level and the local level really get to the climate action that we need. I will leave it there and look forward to everyone's questions. Thanks so much, Kelly. And I wanna pick up on the fair share analysis from US Climate Action Network because I think it's a great place to look at what the US really needs to be looking towards as our responsibility for addressing climate change. And so we've heard from Carla and Nate as well as Lisa and Elon about so much of what's going on in the US already. And so I wanna take the conversation a little bit forward looking and see how we can build upon the non-federal and federal climate work that's happening to see how we could get towards the goal that is in the fair share analysis. So maybe we'll go to Carla and then Nate to kind of reflect on what might be the opportunities based on the analysis that you've both done with America's Pledge to see what could be some really groundbreaking next steps the US could take if we had all actors on board. Thanks for that question. So I think the key element you both said there is all actors on board. So our analysis from America's Pledge looks at what's possible in the US if these cities, states, businesses and others continue their amazing momentum. And if the federal government in 2021 we engages in a serious way. So a lot is possible and there's different authorities across those levels. So if you look at the local level there's building codes at the state level they can pass renewable portfolio standards at the federal level there's regulations that can be put in place. So all of those different levels of government combined with the private sector actors that Lisa talked about can really make significant progress in the US. But we find that it's gonna take all of them working together not just one set of them moving forward. And I'll say quite practically in the data we've seen a lot of the early actions focused on clean electricity. And you see in the actual emissions data from the United States that our electricity emissions are going down quite significantly. And over the past year or two there's been a significant focus on clean transportation and on efficient and electric buildings. So I think we're at the point where we're gonna start to see those reductions in the emissions data for the US. And of course we have an emerging conversation around all the different parts of industry how do we beef up American manufacturing and at the same time significantly reduce emissions and improve quality of life. And those emerging conversations I think we'll start to drive the emissions reductions that we're gonna see in a couple of years. So we've seen electricity emissions coming down. We've seen building and transportation emissions and actions starting to be at the point where they're gonna be coming down. And then I think industry will follow. So some real opportunity there. Yeah and so thanks for that question and also thanks to all the panelists for those great comments. It's just extraordinary hearing all these different views and certainly exciting to hear all the work that's been going on across the community. So just to the question Carla hit the main points I think that are important. I would sort of add that. So Carla made a couple of points about specific sectors and about the all in sort of strategy. Those are critical. The other way to think about it is to think about what are the sectors? How do you kind of get to net zero? That's like another kind of organizing principle that I think we even through the incoming administration has articulated a net zero concept. And ultimately there's only a few big pieces that there's a few big sort of categories of action. You decarbonize your electricity, get all the carbon out of it. You use that electricity wherever you can provide energy services. And then you use that electricity more efficiently and then you work on non-CO2 kind of other gasses. There's kind of a few ways to cut that but basically that's it. And I think that we have to think about all those different things all at one time. And it turns out that some of those things are gonna be easier for certain kinds of actors to grab hold of and deal with. Let's have those actors do that. And I think that's what we've been seeing over the last few years. I want to also. Not just that important. And if anything, we've seen an acceleration but ultimately I think as Carlos said, the very kind of in terms of scaling in the US like the very big opportunities are in the electricity sector in the immediate term. There's a lot of very cheap opportunities there. Use less coal is probably the key one. But there's lots of other strategies to deal with that. Efficiency, I think Carla mentioned this too, efficiency in lots of different dimensions is a really critical near-term option. And then also in terms of thinking about other kinds of groups and constituencies, land sector work is actually gonna be ultimately very important. I think there's a lot of different kinds of actors and actions that can be done in lands that are gonna be also critical both in the near-term but also setting us up in the right way for like delivering post 2030. And I think there's like thinking about those kinds of strategies can also be something that our various groups focus on. Thanks, Nate, Elon or Kelly or Lisa, feel free to jump in if you have additional comments there on how we can look towards addressing this gap between where US can is laying out that we need to be in where we're currently are. This is Lisa, I'm happy to hop in and then just following up on Carla's comments. Yes, when we look at things like US emissions and she mentioned the power sector, at the end of the last decade, we were 25% reduction in power sector emissions over the last decade. So that was really remarkable but certain areas like transportation, industrial, commercial, we clearly need more work. And when you think about the experience we've had with the COVID pandemic, it would clearly have seen transportation related emissions go down. So I'm very curious to see what our new baseline it's gonna be when we start the year. But there is a lot of opportunity for fuel economy improvements and a fuel efficiency improvement. So that gives me hope. But I actually wanted to talk a little bit more about the comments that were made about the international. And one of the things that I really valued when I first got involved in this field was the international development aspects of capacity building in the areas of climate mitigation and adaptation. And the business council for sustainable energy was very involved with that, both with our federal government through the US agency for international development, the department of energy, some of our national labs. And even though our industries were maturing and evolving and innovating, we were sharing that expertise with other countries. And some of that was very local on the ground with partner countries. So we've lost a good amount of that in terms of the investment that the federal government makes in programs like that. And we've also lost, kind of the broader diplomatic advantages that come from working on the ground with those countries. And then from a business perspective, we are leaders in clean energy technologies in terms of manufacturing them and then implementing them in countries. But without the partnership of the federal government to help us, we sometimes are inhibited from offering those products and services to customers and clients in other countries that might need it. So from my standpoint, and certainly BCSE will be sharing this with the incoming Biden and Harris administration, we need to retake that leadership role as it comes to helping with capacity building in other countries and sharing the knowledge and the business products and services that US companies can help with. Yeah, and I can jump in on that because I do think climate finance is a huge part of what can make the international cooperation work. And it's, when you think about like the US contribution to the Green Climate Fund and the US presence in something like the Green Climate Fund, we've just been absent because that's something that the federal government really has to play a primary role in. But I do see an important need for state and local work sort of unlocking that ambition and pushing forward that federal government interest because I think it's gonna be really essential that the US come back into the climate finance in a big way and making people understand that this isn't charity. Actually, this is part of doing our fair share of cleaning up the mess that we had a huge role in creating and that people are really suffering right now through no fault of their own with the climate crisis. And I also wanna pick up on something I think Nate mentioned on agriculture and land use. I think this is really key in somewhere where there's a lot of potential. And it also speaks to what we've been talking about with how fortunately it seems like we've been able to move forward on climate action through 2020 despite the crisis. But I think some of that is because a crisis like COVID, just like climate change really shows the cracks in the current system. And it shows who's already hurting because they get hit twice as hard. And so I think we need to take what's been happening in the food sector and the food supply chain challenges and the challenges in meat packing plants and really take that as a point to look that, this is something that's not working. And how do we build towards a better vision for agriculture that works for the workers, the farmers and the planet and the people who eat food too? Yeah, I start from my point of view. I would just, I really liked what Carlo was saying about the need to cooperate and how cooperation across different communities can create sort of exponential action. And I think what's gonna happen, what you're gonna see over the coming decade or at least I hope what's gonna happen is that these transitions are gonna seem slow and then all of a sudden and they're gonna happen very rapidly. And my concern is equally, how do we make sure that these economic transformations happen but also how do we make sure that nobody gets left behind by these transitions? That means people that currently are looking for employment, how do they find employment in a new economy? And second, people that are currently employed either directly or tangentially in the fossil fuel industry, how do we make sure that we're not decimating communities as a result of this transformation? The way that we saw in the 90s with trade opening up around the world. And so those are two things that I think are absolutely essential to solving the politics of this issue as well because I do really think, as Carla was saying, that once these communities start cooperating with each other, once the incentives are aligned in the right direction, these transitions can happen quite rapidly. Thank you, line. And so as we, we just walked ahead a little bit and now I wanna take us looking back again and just see how we might inspire some of this all in and federal action that's really needed. So I'm wondering if we could share an example of a scalable climate action that's currently underway in a part of the U.S. or in a company that you think that Congress can learn from in terms of designing federal policies that might be introduced to the next Congress that would really bolster climate action at the federal level. And to the extent we can build in how they address kind of systems thinking of incorporating environmental justice and incorporating public health and other really key lenses that we have to look at everything through. We'd love your comments on those as well. So Carla's nodding her head. So maybe we'll start with you Carla and then we'll go around again. Right, thanks so much. And I love your focus on the tangible examples because when we're talking about climate across all sectors and across the world, it can be a lot. So just focusing in, one that's been really interesting for me is building electrification. So what I mean by that is making sure that our HVAC systems for heating ventilation and air conditioning and our appliances and buildings are electric. And what that can do is significantly improve indoor air quality. And one stat that surprised me is that if you have a natural gas stove and you don't have the vent hood on, then 60% of the time the NOx emissions inside are higher than outdoor ambient air quality standards. And that can have serious impacts for anyone with any kind of health condition, particularly for young or elderly. And right now during COVID, we've seen the clear data that air quality can exacerbate COVID symptoms. So in that shift to building electrification, there's a wealth of existing electric technologies available. For example, across the Southeast, most heating and air conditioning is electric. Heat pumps are a very efficient way to do that. Of course, we have options for electric appliances and we've been electrifying the rural United States through rural electrification programs for 100 years with huge benefits for farmers and all kinds of folks. So there has been a wave of cities particularly led in California and Massachusetts but also across the entire US who have taken the steps to either pass or start considering passing rules that all new construction would be all electric. Because when you're starting from scratch, it's easy to go all electric. And then there's options for, as appliances hit their end of life, you're switching from gas to electric. One interesting thing that we'll have to look at there is a lot of energy efficiency incentives offered by utilities, offered by third party providers are designed to help us reduce our electricity use. And in this electrification world, we're looking at actually increasing our electricity use in a way of course that's very efficient. But we will have to look at refining some of those incentives at the local and federal level which is a very interesting trend with clear on the ground health opportunities as well as climate benefits. Great, I love that example. Luisa, can we jump in next? Sure. Yeah, I mean, I actually was gonna focus on some of the changes in building efficiency but from a different direction, just moving towards a kind of systems building energy management. And then as I was talking before about digital technologies, how digital technologies can help accelerate a range of benefits, including energy efficiency. And also just kind of piggybacking on what was just discussed, there were other areas of innovation that I think are really exciting in the building sector and some of those relate to fuels. And so what I've noticed in the last several years with a number of our members because I represent natural gas interests is a focus on procuring renewable natural gas or helping their customers procure renewable natural gas. And at the end of last year, I believe there was five states that had voluntary tariffs to allow renewable natural gas to be offered to customers. And I think nine states were looking at it. So it's still small but important. And I agree, we need to look at reducing emissions in all areas. So building efficiency and systems approach to building energy management combined with digital tools and new and innovative fuels and resources are gonna enable the building sector to go much farther than it has in terms of reducing emissions. And it's very exciting. So thank you. Great. Elon, I know as the director of We Are Still In, you probably have about a thousand or more examples right in front of your head at any given time. But we'll give you the opportunity to pick one or two to share with us. I'll pick one that I think is more of a national policy issue because that's who we're speaking to today. So the one, and people talk about this all the time, so nothing I'm gonna say is that ingenious, but it's our grid, it's the national grid. And the fact that having multiple grids that could be more resilient to shock, that could be more modern presents security risks for the United States, both in terms of cybersecurity and other issues. I think that the one thing that we should tackle or not the one thing, but one of the major things we need to tackle, if we're gonna spend money on infrastructures, how do we modernize the grid? And how do we make it a grid that's more able to take on and offload renewable energy on the cycles that renewable energy's on and is better able to take use of all the storage innovation that's been going on over the last few years. So I think that is a real barrier for a lot of the local work that we've been working on is the weaker or features of our national grid system, which I think now 2021 is a real opportunity to think about how we just get a national grid that is capable of transitioning to completely clean energy so that we can have the air quality, as Carla was talking about, that people desperately want. I can jump in on that. Yeah, I think from an international perspective, I mean, one for Congress is start appropriating climate finance money again, authorizing and appropriating money to the Green Climate Fund is a big step. And part of that is also thinking through, when we think through all of our foreign policy and all of our diplomacy, we should be applying a climate lens to that just like we should be applying a climate lens to all the domestic legislation that may be moving forward. I also think in the U.S., actually something to think about is land access for small farmers. We're losing a lot of small family farmers right now in the economic crisis. And so finding ways to keep them on the land and to get new farmers who are interested in farming in a way that is gonna help us instead of hurting us on the fight against climate change is a really key program that we're pushing forward. Sorry, I cheated and slipped into. That's all right. Nate, over to you. So sure, these are all great. And just a quick other thought on this is first of all, I'll say yes on the thinking about climate finance. I mean, I think one of the ways that we in the U.S. will ultimately succeed is not only by getting our own house in order, which is a lot of the focus of today's conversation, but I think doing what we ought to be doing, which I think we've heard a little bit about in the interventions today. And I think that's really important to keep a focus on. But then also thinking about how we can get others to do more and I think just making sure that we are doing the right thing and the international scene is also really gonna be critical for that raising of global ambition that we know we need to do globally to get onto a 1.5 path. So just a kind of yes on that. And then one other quick thing, I mean, I think Carla or maybe somebody else mentioned methane, you know, there's a whole other, I was talking about the lands and different constituents. I also think that there is some near-term opportunity in just methane leak reduction. And that's on both the, you know, whether you like or don't like fracking, you know, it's gonna be around a little longer and, you know, figuring out how to clean that stuff up in the near-term is actually kind of helpful and could in fact help, you know, kind of reduce emissions, you know, relatively quickly. It's not necessarily the path we wanna be on the long-term but there are opportunities there that bring in different kinds of organizations and interests that could be valuable. And then the other side of that, of course, is cleaning up leakage and current distribution infrastructure like in Boston or whatever. And there's lots of partnerships that have been, you know, kind of built out with private sector and public sector actors that have been quite successful, very low-cost, high emissions reductions. And, you know, it's sort of a smaller, you know, area but it's one that there could be a good amount of near-term collaboration, I think. So that's just another one that I think people might be, you know, kind of look at as a possibility. Great, I hope that congressional staffers and all of our audience are taking notes. I feel like we've got a great compilation of ideas here to build on. And I know that we had a question in from the audience so I'm gonna send it over to Dan to share that. Great, yes. And yes, there's so much good stuff. It's been such an interesting conversation to listen to. This is a question that I think actually is kind of an interesting follow-up to the question that Anna just asked you all. But before I ask it, there was been so much more discussion of building codes today than I expected. My favorite issue. And I actually just wrote an article about the latest building energy code development cycle and unfortunately some really critical electrification code proposals that got adopted got left out when it was finalized. And so if you wanna learn a little bit more about that, I just wrote an article about it that was in yesterday's climate change solutions. But back to the question. This one's about examples of creative solutions, especially those that might come from sector to sector competition or competition between levels of government that either encourage agility or nimble responses to climate change or that maybe encourage new partnership building. So everyone just had a great example of a scalable opportunity for emissions reductions. Are there any that you've come across that are especially creative from a partnership building or from just which is more innovative? Not sure who wants to go first on that. I'm trying to read your expressions to figure out who has the right to say. Always tricky. But it looks like Carla. Carla's raised her hand. Right. I love this question. So one of the areas that's been really fascinating to me has been in the We Are Still In coalition, there's cultural institutions like museums and there's universities and colleges. And they have the really unique dual challenge of their educational institutions so that they're teaching us about these issues. And then they can also walk themselves by implementing efficiency and museums, having electric vehicle charging, having solar, universities are doing all kinds of things. So they're both educating and doing. And then what's been interesting to watch is as these different sectors come together, they're also leaders across their communities. So teaming up with cities, teaming up with state officials, teaming up with corporates. So what we find is the organization structure for these different sectors to be able to talk to each other actually has cultivated quite a bit of creativity and bringing as Alan was saying, unusual suspects to come together and make changes and also create that base of community that's really important to keep this movement sustained over time. I want to come in on this because it's so funny because Carla is talking about a We Are Still In example and I was actually going to talk about an America's Pledge example of an innovative thing. And what I've been really excited about as the America's Pledge analysis has matured, it's gone from a pretty high level analysis of what's possible with subnational action to getting really detailed about what are the specific opportunities as you guys saw in the presentation. But what else is possible, and I hope I'm not betraying any confidence by saying that Carla is working on this in fact, is that you can then do that at a state level. So you can then within a state say, here are the emissions reductions potential in this state. Here are the best opportunities. And then you can get even more specific and you can say things like, what you need to do in the state of X, like let's just take the state of Massachusetts, is we need to get to electric vehicle penetration of 70% by 2030. What that means is we don't have enough charging stations right now for that. We actually need seven times more charging stations. And then that gives you like a pretty clear roadmap for the state of Massachusetts about how you get on the pathway towards transformation. It gets you out of the mindset of, well, we just need to spend more money on this or we need to change consumer behavior to really tangible steps that the analysis can show you of, we need a sevenfold increase in EV charging institutions, charging stations, which means we need 10 more institutions to volunteer to put charging stations in their parking lots, et cetera. Like you can get really detailed. And so that's been one of the most exciting things for me is watching as this analysis, which used to be a very high level of like, what's the U.S. emissions inventory? What's the projection to now having these bottom up estimates that can really create action plans just on their own in a particular place. I've loved seeing that. Kelly, do you want to jump in next? Sure, and I'll actually build on that a little bit and say that, I mean, so my organization's approach to development is that it really should be community led and that the community knows what they need to realize their rights and to thrive. And so it's about supporting them in their, and how they want to get it. And so I think part of a just transition really for getting these nimble responses in these creative solutions, it is about taking that sort of community-based model and building a real picture, like Elon was just talking about, is that as a community, right down to the neighborhood and local level in the U.S. and in Bangladesh, what kind of world are we building? And that gives people a stake in, and they can see themselves in what we're trying to build to. And that makes it easier and possible to really unlock the level of ambition and the creative unexpected solutions that we needed, that we need in a way that's actionable. Great, glad you brought that up. That's something that we think a lot about, not just on the mitigation side, but on the adaptation side as well, community involvement from the start is so critical. Nate or Lisa, happy to give you an opportunity to hop on on this question. And after that, we'll turn it back over to Anna to keep with our Q and A. Go ahead, Lisa. Yeah, I mean, I think I had to, first of all, can you hear me? I don't know if you noticed but I have a different background. Let's see who's paying attention. I had a power issue here in the office, so I had to switch to another location. So I wasn't sure if you could hear me, but a couple of things that I was gonna point out, one, which may not be new, but I think we're seeing it in new ways and it certainly was covered in the other presentations is the value of target setting. Especially now, if you had had this panel a year ago, we probably would have been talking largely about science-based targets and how corporations in particular, but not only all institutions as they were thinking about greenhouse gas management were moving towards science-based targets. And then in the last year, obviously there's been many commitments that are even more aggressive than what those science-based targets would have been one or two years ago. So it's really dramatic and important. And when I think about some of the commitments that have been made, especially for the 80% or above 2050 targets, in a lot of cases, those entities making those commitments don't necessarily know all the answers and how they're gonna get to those final stages of achieving their goals. But they've made those targets nonetheless because they're confident that they will be able to figure it out. And I think that is just extremely powerful. And when we think about what we would hope that the incoming Biden and Harris administration would do, it would be to refresh a lot of the targets and goal-setting processes that were put in place in previous administrations, both for energy efficiency and energy management, for sustainability broadly, for resilience and adaptation, and of course, for a greenhouse gas reduction. And by doing so and going down that path, they will not only improve federal facilities, but they will kickstart actions at other levels, at community levels, certainly at state and regional levels, and within the private sector. And then the other comment I was gonna make, which also is necessarily a new comment, it's about public-private partnerships and really the power and innovation that comes with those kinds of conversations. And as was just said, BCSE has worked on those most recently in relationship to resilience planning in local communities that were impacted by hurricanes in 2017. So Puerto Rico and Houston area communities that were impacted in those storms. And we've been bringing companies in to talk with community leaders and citizens and policymakers to discuss what's needed at this moment in time to help them recover. And the new ideas and the innovative and really bold thinking that's come out of those conversations is quite powerful and has been very impressive to me. I did notice your background, Lisa, and thank you for being so resilient. I'm happy to give you the final word and then we'll turn it back over to Anna. Okay. Maybe just a short note, because there's been lots of other great contributions on this topic. I'm gonna just pick up on this last point about the target setting. I think that's a really interesting dimension of how action can happen. And I think a several of the other comments touched on this or kind of went into it in some detail. And so, even as the entire country, we undertake and we will undertake, I expect a process of target setting over the next year or even less to develop a national climate strategy, deliver an NDC, the international community to catalyze action and also help give us a kind of North Star or something we wanna aim toward. And that process, I think is the way in which those processes are undertaken is evolving. But I also think that not only can we learn how to do that process better and more robustly at the national federal level under this next administration. And I think there might be ways that experience of the last few years can certainly feed into that process. But also thinking about how that process of getting a group of actors together, whether it's leaders or legislatures or kind of coalitions and thinking through what those groups want to do and how they can deliver them. Because there's this learning process that's embedded in that. I think we just heard in the last comment how you can get innovation, you can get ideas, you can get sort of creativity when you convene those kinds of conversations of, okay, what can we do? What can we aim for? And people learn about what the opportunities then are. And that echoes back a little bit to Elon's point about how we've learned with this America's pledge we are still in broader subnational community about moving from the kind of big picture aggregation questions to kind of going down to the kind of dimensions of what different groups can do in their own specific jurisdictions or organizational kind of infrastructure. And that's where learning happens and that's where actually some of the, much of the value of this process can be, new value can be identified, right? So I think thinking creatively again about how we use this kind of iteration process of thinking about what can we use those opportunities on the reverse and often lower costs than many people have in their prior assumptions. They learn about that as they go through the process. They get excited about it and then they wanna do more. And obviously that aggregates to being able to do more as a country and as a world. Thanks, Nate. So we've spent most of our conversation today, this afternoon talking about mitigation strategies, how we're gonna reduce emissions, decarbonize the US economy. And I wanna take a moment to think about the adaptation resilience side of things, the environmental justice side of things and how looking forward that can also be integrated to the central piece of the work that it really is and in addressing climate change in a holistic way. So I'm wondering if each of you could speak a little bit to how in your ideal world, how the federal government would integrate the pieces of climate justice, climate mitigation, climate adaptation together as they look to put together a national strategy as Nate just mentioned. And that massive question can be answered if you were next four minutes, that would be perfect. So maybe Elon will start with you and then we'll go around. Yeah, it's such a good question. I've been wondering myself like over the last four years as Nate was just describing, there's been these wonderful conversations that have been started in local communities as a result of either civil society or private sector invitation and how much of that the federal government should take over versus how much of that should continue to exist sort of in civil society. And I guess my response is I think that the best and Kelly said this earlier, but the best conversations, the best processes for determining how to become more resilient, how to reduce emissions, how to become less polluting our community led conversations. I think the best thing that the federal government can do is just to provide resources to communities around the country to be able to manage those conversations. And then the financial tools to invest in the infrastructure that's needed to get that done. I would like to see the federal government have the position of letting a thousand flowers bloom so to speak in this context of how do we help Baton Rouge, Louisiana have a conversation that makes sense for Baton Rouge, Louisiana about its resilience needs and its mitigation needs. And then when they've determined that this is the infrastructure that they need in order to survive instead of a 100 year flood, a 500 year flood in the city because of climate change, how do we help them finance that infrastructure through loan guarantees or through municipal bond guarantees or something? In other words, the right approach here is one that in my view is as decentralized as possible, but as supported by federal resources as much as possible. Great, that's really helpful. Please, Carl, if you have a question. And then we'll go to you, Lisa. Okay. Just to briefly add to that, I would say there's a huge opportunity here with stimulus, because a lot of these communities are really hurting right now. In keeping their existing infrastructure and clean energy efforts up and underway. So there's an opportunity to help keep them afloat with that stimulus, with funds going directly to them. And then I wanted to note that members of these coalitions are in basically every congressional district. So for those of you listening who are in staff offices or committee offices, I would really encourage you if you haven't heard from these folks already to engage with them directly, because they have a lot to say and a lot of opportunity in the vision there for the future of their communities. Lisa, over here. Sure, yeah, I was just gonna add to, I agree with Carla and I appreciate what Elon said too. And from the experience that BCSE has had with this resilience planning project, you know, it won't surprise anyone that these communities all want to engage and want to bring in their different constituents to the conversation, but they lack the resources. Many of them are just trying to, especially in the COVID pandemic times, but even before, just trying to maintain current operations. So I think federal resources to help states, localities and tribes do resilience planning with a holistic set of objectives in mind is extremely helpful. So I was gonna say, you know, just big picture what can the federal government do? It can support convening on a consistent and sustained basis. And it can provide capacity-building resources to local governments and other organizers of these conversations. Nate, do you wanna jump in? Or Kelly, go ahead, and then we'll give you a call. You can go ahead. No, no, it's okay. Well, anyway, I'll keep on really fast, all these are really great comments. And I think mine's not that different, which is, look, we've got the climate crisis, the COVID crisis, we've got a racial justice and equity crisis, and we've got an economic recession. And I think that right now, addressing all of those, we can do it, but we've gotta kinda invest, right? Like it's gotta be some significant, sustained investment in sustainable infrastructure and making sure that that sustainable infrastructure is, as others have said very eloquently, more than me, kind of make sure that that is actually flowing to diverse places and different kinds of places in our country and not just for kind of energy technology and this or that, but it's actually integrated across all of these considerations that I think we're talking about. I think we can get support for that. And I think that that's actually gonna be a critical part of thinking about not just the next couple of years to 2030, but also putting us on the right pathway to the 2050 net zero. So we've gotta do both of those things at the same time. And this is actually a really good moment to start that massive investment that I think we need to do. Yeah, and I'll just add to what everybody said. I do think a key part is keeping adaptation at the table with mitigation. It's both and. We can't ignore adaptation and assume that mitigation is gonna solve the problem. It's already too late for that. And I do think that keeping, I agree keeping frontline communities at the center and core of all the planning. And that also we need to be mindful. We need to be proactive about reaching out to marginalized and vulnerable communities and really putting them at the center. It's not enough to just to try to not be racist. You have to actually be anti-racist if you want to try to reach out to the folks that we need to get to. And then the last piece I'd say is we really need to be acknowledging the harm that's already been done and recognizing that some of it can't be undone. We're already suffering loss and damage in this country and there needs to be work done on how to make people whole as much as we can. Great. I'll just take a quick look at the video. Oh, go ahead, Anna. I was just gonna thank everyone for the great discussion and then Dan has a couple crack up points for us. Well, that's all I was gonna say was thank you so much for an excellent panel, such an engaging and interesting conversation. A couple of briefings ago we, some of our feedback was that it would be helpful to have some final thoughts at the end of the briefing rather than just closing out. So I've been taking copious notes and just wanted to share a couple of thoughts as we wrap things up and part of the fun of organizing the briefings. It's our prerogative. We go a minute or two over. So first is something that really stuck out to me. The United States has an ability to do the right thing that goes far beyond the federal government. Leaders at the state and local levels have always in fact had to say in a wide range of environmental and clean energy issues like building energy codes came up a few times today and they've been more willing lately maybe to step up after the federal government backed out of its international commitments and they've stepped up and they've mobilized and they've coordinated a pretty broad set of climate solutions. And to paraphrase Carla all aboard, it's gonna take everything in order to make some progress and we've actually seen that happen. I love Elon's points about more and more usual suspects when it comes to climate action and fewer and fewer unusual suspects. And these suspects are also coming from more and more places, including the private sector. And that presents an opportunity for innovation, for a creativity and for public-private partnerships. We have to ensure that all of this work is done in a way that lifts up communities that are too frequently left out of environmental and clean energy decision-making. Environmental justice and equity considerations, they're not actually considerations. They're central critical elements of the policy response to climate change as well as the other present crises that we're facing that Nate rattled off a few moments ago. And then I think last, the next decade is really, really critical and if you've watched our briefing today, you learned that there's a movement to build on and that there's a need for the federal government to reassert itself, including in international finance. And so as we close out 2020 and look to next year after taking this moment to reflect, I hope you'll join us in our audience. I hope you'll join us in our commitment to advancing climate change solutions to realize our vision of a sustainable, resilient and equitable world. One last major thank you to our panelists today. Thanks for joining us. Someone who could not be with us today but who deserves a special shout out is Brandon Wu. Brandon is a colleague of Kelly's at ActionAid and is a climate policy expert and he was a big part of the lead up to today. And I just wanted to acknowledge his help and also say hi in case he's still streaming us. Hopefully he's having a good afternoon. Also like to thank everyone on team ESI who helped pull this off, not just Anna but also Honorary, our communications director, Dan O'Brien, Sydney, Amber, as well as our fabulous interns, Emma and Joseph who are keeping up with highlights and also Twitter today. So thanks to everybody. The slide that's up right now just very briefly, you have a moment, we'd love to have your feedback. We pay very close attention to everything you tell us. If you have a moment to take the survey it really does help us think about how to do these better, the topics that we need to address and just in general, continuous improvement, a good thing if you have a moment we really appreciate it. Last plug, if you've missed anything today if you wanna go back and revisit anything I hope you'll visit us online, www.esi.org and you can view our entire briefing archive and I would be remiss to not once again mention our bi-weekly newsletter, Climate Change Solutions. It's the best way to keep up. We've got a lot coming down the pike in 2021 and Climate Change Solutions will help you stay abreast of all of it. With that, thanks to our panelists today for helping us close out a really excellent 2020 Briefing Series, Congressional Education Programming Series and you've helped us, I think, take stock of where we are and I think speaking for myself, I feel recharged and can't wait for 2021 to get here so that we can get to work with the new Congress and the new administration. So with that, we'll close. Thanks again. I hope everyone has a great rest of your afternoon.