 Thank you all for a really fantastic quarter. I didn't know what we were getting into with this virtual teaching thing. And I'm still not sure like net net, I mean, I did find some benefits and I thought we were able to do some fun things that we'd never done before. And I hope you enjoyed it. I pleased with the additions we made. I think we'll keep a lot of them actually, but I just really regret not being able to see you in three dimensions and have copies in person and see you in a classroom. So thank you and I'm here. I mean, hopefully in the spring quarter we'll get to do some more like outside distance stuff, but know that I'm here to put wind in your sails throughout your journey and take to and not to be strangers as this, as time goes on and even though the quarter is ending and this class is ending, we're here to support you in your future endeavors. So know that. And just another plug for anyone who hasn't, who didn't get the message on what my background is, this is our space for our party, which we will come back to after our marathon here and hang out. I hope you guys have come up with some good climate themed cocktails, bring your dogs, your kids, your friends and costumes, welcome. So looking forward to that. And we're two minutes into our very tightly packed schedule we'll be a seamless transition and Nina's gonna run the show. So with that, let's welcome our first group. Okay, so Alicia mentioned that we were working on green banks and through the course of our research we ended up kind of transitioning our project slightly to advocate for a green complement to the Belt and Road Initiative. China's Belt and Road Initiative was established in 2013 and the project aims to develop basically an economic belt of trade routes and in infrastructure corridors along the traditional Silk Road route. So the goal is to strengthen trade and improve connectivity between China and Africa, Eurasia, Europe, the Middle East and South and Southeast Asia. So this project includes everything from railways to airports, to ports, pipelines, industrial parks and real estate projects, to free trade agreements and treaties. And as of January, 2020, more than 60 countries have established projects through this BRI and there are plans to develop infrastructure worth accumulative $6 trillion. So there are numerous institutions at varying levels of the international hierarchy along with existing cooperative agreements that govern the BRI. The BRI is currently governed not only by Chinese government ministries but also by existing bilateral and multilateral international cooperation agreements. The BRI's countries, so the countries that are involved in the BRI, their GDP average growth rate is expected to be twice that of the OECD and investment in BRI countries are likely to comprise more than half of the total investment worldwide. So in a worst case scenario, the BRI countries could account for over half of global CO2 emissions by 2050. So as you can see, the BRI could be considered a huge threat to climate change but it's also a really great opportunity. China has the most money to spend in this particular sector and they're getting even better at spending it as time goes on. So I want to take a look quickly at the spectrum of kind of proposed interventions related to greening the BRI. So debate among experts suggests that there are several approaches, one of which is that China adopt voluntary, kind of voluntarily stopped to invest in coal-fired power generation. So this is in the lower left hand quadrant of the matrix that you see on the screen. And the reason why it's there is that it requires China to voluntarily do this. And so it's a rather weak kind of intervention. The second intervention that has been proposed by experts is that China basically apply its domestic climate policies and it's green financing to BRI projects. And this again is also kind of in that weak voluntary sector or rather quadrant in the lower left. And then the third intervention you'll see in the upper left hand quadrant is where host countries require the listing of carbon pricing systems to show investors that kind of what the shadow price is of the carbon intensive assets that they're working with. And that one is listed on the left side of the quadrant, again, because it's voluntary. And the one intervention that we heard some about that has already somewhat begun under the Biden administration is listed in the upper right hand quadrant. And so this is the intervention that focuses on shifting financial incentives away from lower carbon investments. So President Biden has already developed a plan to halt US funding to overseas fossil fuel projects. But the plan is gonna require that the Biden team kind of closely coordinate with foreign policy trade and clean energy initiatives because there isn't a lot of money in the US for coal projects or rather because the absence of US money for coal projects won't kind of on its own sway other nations energy plans. And I will turn it over to Maya. Great. So we are prioritizing the BRI because the world cannot achieve its climate goals if investment and infrastructure development continues as usual right now. To date, I think it could be described that China is doing more good things at home but hasn't been doing fewer good things, fewer bad things abroad to use the phrase from a Duke researcher. It's China's the world's biggest funder of coal. And if all the coal-fired power plants that are planned globally today are actually built, our carbon budget that would keep us below two degrees of warming would be used just on those new coal plants. And we also realized that China is going to invest these funds and it's not as effective to try to directly combat that. So we wanted to think of a way to create incentives to shift this funding towards the decarbonized infrastructure that the world needs. There's no single best way to do this but we thought that a green Marshall plan has some potential and is worth exploring further. So the idea behind the green Marshall plan is to use the US's competitive advantage as a financial powerhouse and a global convener to change the global investing environment to alter and redirect the BRI funds instead of trying to dam them. We're not proposing a direct corollary with the original Marshall plan that focused heavily on rebuilding physical infrastructure because to Kira's point, we are not in the point to directly compete with the Chinese on this plane. However, we think that building and crafting standards and regulations and research partnerships to create the investing environment that is more lucrative and hospitable for low carbon development can complement instead of trying to engage in direct power competition with China. Our research suggests that the US can use its influence to inspire green energy investments in three major ways. And the first is in shaping stronger green investment standards and building that global alignment across financial institutions to shape the capital that is flowing into development across the planet. And then on the side of the countries that are receiving the investments, the US can help shape clean energy standards and regulations as well as offer technical expertise and support in implementing them. And then finally, the US can actually lead some green investments into low carbon technologies alongside other partner nations. To dive a little bit deeper into the green investment standards, I wanna set the context again that no country is gonna come near China's infrastructure spend. China has funded over 800 billion in infrastructure projects over the last couple of decades. But we believe that through the net one trillion of American investments in Asia, the Middle East and Africa across sectors that the US can help shape the conversation around financing. And two key steps that are important to take specifically are one, mandating financial disclosures, right? So lenders would need to include a climate risk assessment on all financial reporting. And then second, taking the step that Biden has started to outline in his executive order to actually ban US investment in coal and oil. And then in terms of increased demand on the host country side, the US can also make foreign aid contingent upon adequate progress toward the Paris goals, as well as increase the availability of low cost financing and technical expertise for green investments. We know that China is funding coal projects in BRI countries because the host countries are demanding them. So proving a test case of something like coal securitization and key geographies could hopefully convince some governments to shift demand toward renewables. And finally, the US should hope to engage BRI recipient countries and China to join in on the leaders climate summit among other ongoing global conversations. Next slide. And then finally, we wanna highlight an example of where the US can begin to funnel some investment dollars and the impact that that could have. So we can take India as an example, right? So India is obviously a key player in the region and is a top recipient of Chinese coal investment, right? So over 7.7 billion. And we can see on the right-hand chart kind of how much Indian per capita emissions would increase. And you can imagine that impact across a billion people. But yet this is a country that's committed to renewable energy targets and hasn't actually signed onto the BRI officially. So we've just laid out some numbers here. I won't go through all of them in the interest of time. But certainly there's massive, massive potential for the US and partner countries to begin to invest. Yeah, so we'll blast through the rest of this. I know we wanna leave enough time for questions, but essentially a lot of what we're proposing is kind of already reflected in the executive order that Biden put out recently. And we think that there's statutory underpinning there that Congress has already passed previously to push through this kind of ambitious standard setting and strategic relationships with recipient countries, BRI recipient countries or any country around the world. So just like with the BRI, there's a lot of debate among experts and researchers of what actually qualifies. We know that in a green Marshall plan, it won't be easy to clearly pinpoint what impact specific policies have. But we know that there are a few key things that we can track and I'll just highlight two of them here. So one is given the fact that host countries demand and domestic policies really influence the type of investments that they receive through the BRI, we'd like to see an increase in explicitly pro-green development and investment standards and policies and a reduction in explicitly pro-coal domestic policies that still are on the books of a lot of these Belt Road initiative countries right now. Similarly to the beyond coal effort led by the Sierra Club and Bloomberg, we'd also like to see a reduction in the number of coal plants that are up and running as well as an avoidance of planned coal plants, perhaps partially driven by a changing global financing environment that's encouraged by some of the mechanisms through a green Marshall plan. It's interesting to note here that as, even though China is the leading funder of coal, Japan and South Korea, which are two long-term US allies are second and third on the list. And so the US re-engaging on this topic globally could help reduce some of that coal financing as well. I know we're out of time, so we could just really quickly 30 seconds wrap up. We see potential outcomes from this in both kind of the positive and negative direction having to do with alignment of countries, especially in UN climate talks. But then there's also kind of on the other side, geopolitical concerns, especially as it relates to the United States' relationship with China. There's kind of a lot more there beyond just the climate issues between our two countries and every country in between. And we wanted to kind of give special shout out to these three either guest speakers from our class or in Ude's for Ude, his video that we got to watch as kind of underpinning a lot of the thinking that we went through to put this presentation together. So with that, we'll open up for questions and take it from there. Great. Love that. Okay, let's hear from you all. I see applause, which is great. And now I want to see if there are some hands up for questions. Yeah, Ben. Yeah, first of all, that was super interesting. Thanks for sharing all that. Yeah, my question is around the kind of politics of this. I think one of you alluded to it in your slides, that the U.S. kind of already has its own investment gap. And so I'm curious why, like, what went into kind of focusing your plan on investing abroad versus investing at home? I can jump in and at least start to form an answer to that. I think it's a really great question. It's something we've thought a lot about. I think one thing we talked about with Kate and some other folks who kind of write on this topic is that, and Maya alluded to this at the beginning, is China's spending a lot of money, no matter what, and no one's gonna be really outspending them or changing their minds as to whether they're going to spend that money. I think domestic spending on our end is obviously very important as well. But what we were focused on is how to change behavior in the market, especially in the region, the BRI region, and what the United States can do, either wielding its own investment dollars or own kind of soft power influence in that region. And we felt like the U.S. can coordinate with other countries to increase its spend on the one hand, but kind of maybe more importantly, our financial standards or investment standards that it can push out and really lead on how to spend money in the right way in an efficient manner and start to take back this global leadership standpoint on such an important and relevant issue. And we would hope that that kind of, on the one hand, encourages China to act in a certain way, but more importantly, would influence the recipient countries to be looking at ways to take dollars and put them to use in a productive and climate sensitive way. Thanks. Okay, David, I'll answer your question. Thanks, Al. This is super interesting. How do you, how does your plan sort of, I guess, tie in with existing international multilateral development bank frameworks where the United States already has pretty substantial leadership? So the U.S. is the largest buddy member of the World Bank. It's the largest buddy member of the Asian development bank. You already have substantial initiatives kind of pushing toward these ends. And so how do you sort of view this plan as either complimenting or superseding this? Yeah, that's a good question. There's a lot to build on already. And in sort of labeling it as a green Marshall plan is partly to wrangle everything under one roof. It was mentioned briefly in Ruby's slide, but part of it is just kind of reinvesting in what was already brought up under the Obama administration and then stopped under Trump. So there was an initiative to share research and roll it out with India that was launched in 2009, I think, and then shut down. So part of it is just kind of like easily building on what we have and using frameworks like a Green New Deal that are sort of easy to digest and understand. And so that would kind of be one mechanism. And then another is one of the elements of the original Marshall plan was sort of creating an overseas market for US production. And so I think that's one thing that maybe doesn't exist as strongly or as clearly right now that could be interesting through joint ventures to sort of develop those markets outside of solar and wind where China really is already ahead and we're not gonna catch up, but other things that the US could have a competitive advantage in. Okay, really well done guys. I think we're gonna capture our on-timeness here and say thank you and we'll move on to group two. As you all noticed for the future groups. Yeah, again, applause. Nina's gonna keep time. And so I know it's hard to manage chat and your slides, but do keep an eye out. You'll see her give you the two minute warning one minute warning. We are gonna try and stick to the 12 minutes and then AQ&A, but it'll definitely be 20 minutes in total and we'll let you finish what you're saying and your presentation will cut you off in the stream, but that's all the timing's gonna work. Great start, okay, let's hear group two. Great, okay, I'm gonna kick us off. So today we're gonna be talking to you about policy and waste to hydrogen in California. So to kick us off and just frame why hydrogen. So in the past two decades, we've seen tremendous progress in the space of solar PVs, wind and battery storage, which means we're now living in a world where an entirely carbon-free electric grid is not too far away in our future. However, there's a number of sectors that remain that are pretty hard to decarbonize. And so if you look at this chart on the left, these dark blue ties or wedges show those sectors and that's where hydrogen can play a role. So specifically hydrogen can provide heat for the steel and cement industry, offers seasonal load storage for the grid when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining. Hydrogen's also important for other industries in refining. And lastly, it can play an important role in transport for applications that aren't great for EVs, specifically long distance trucking, rain shipping and aviation. And then the other reason that hydrogen is really important is if you look at the graph on the right, you'll see the big jump in demand for hydrogen because of all the reasons I just talked about. And right now there isn't a clear way of how we'll meet this demand. All right, so where is hydrogen currently used in California and what's the forecasted demand? Demand for hydrogen in California is currently roughly 2 million metric tons per year. The bulk of which comes from demand for hydrogen for refining. That's about 50% of the demand. Demand for hydrogen for ammonia fertilizer is a significant chunk. And then as of June, 2020, there were about 7,000 fuel cell electric vehicles in California. So we have two images here showing forecasted demand for hydrogen in California. The image on the right shows forecasted demand through 2030 and the one on the left through 2050. A few notable things here. Hydrogen demand for refining makes up a significant chunk of demand through 2030 but a much smaller percentage of the overall demand through 2050. In both scenarios, demand for hydrogen for light duty vehicles and heavy duty and medium duty vehicles is a big chunk of total demand. Additionally, heat and process makes up almost no demand by 2030 but a significant chunk of demand in 2050. And this depends substantially on the price of renewable hydrogen falling so that renewable hydrogen can replace natural gas and process heat, water, space heating and cooking. Additionally, briefly noting a few economic benefits. By 2030, renewable hydrogen could contribute $2 billion to the California economy and $18 billion by 2050. So Rachel gave a great overview of why we should be optimistic about the increase in demand for hydrogen. Some of the drivers of this as has been mentioned includes broad use of hydrogen across key industrial sectors but also driving this is really ambitious government and corporate commitments to net zero targets and green hydrogen and clean hydrogen can play a really key role in this. However, when we're looking at how to get from that 2024 demand number to 2030 there are still a number of really critical obstacles. They include high production and storage costs so the economics, a lot of infrastructure like pipelines and other infrastructure is gonna be needed at scale in order to facilitate this. And as of right now when it comes to green hydrogen versus gray or brown hydrogen, there isn't really a value recognition of the sustainable aspects. And so what this results in next is 96% of hydrogen production today is still created using highly fossil fuel intensive process called steam methane reforming which accounts for 2% of total human emissions which from a single process is pretty substantial. And so what should we do instead? In our research, we found a suite of emerging clean hydrogen production technologies four of which are highlighted here that could supplant current SMR production. And we could spend a tremendous amount of time comparing these technologies and digging in but I'll cut straight to the highlights. So when we were trying to decide what technology should we focus on we wanted to, we were interested in finding something that could be immediately impactful and also economically viable. So as we kind of run down the line SMR plus carbon capture and sequestration requires geological storage and has linked in extensive permitting which impacts the economics. Methane pyrolysis has two byproducts or products one is hydrogen and one is carbon solid which has a really small market. And then electrolysis which we actually see being really competitive in the future is just too expensive today. So that leaves us with municipal waste pyrolysis which also has a couple of key obstacles but as we're delving into it and Korean can expand upon this we thought they were solvable and we have some interesting ideas of how to make this a great way to start on clean hydrogen and to unlock the impact of this technology. Thanks Sophie. To frame our discussion we sought to explore what waste to hydrogen means within the context of large hydrogen consumers which we alluded to earlier were refiners whether they're fossil-based refiners or renewable diesel refiners. Currently these two types of plants receive fossil hydrogen supply from steam methane reforming shown in SMR on the bottom left that takes in natural gas and converts it to hydrogen gas. With each ton of hydrogen we make 14 tons of CO2 which is pretty bizarre. This hydrogen supply to these plants constitutes roughly 15 to 30% of their emissions and that means that they're currently penalized through the low carbon fuel standard which exists in California. So they're definitely incentivized to decarbonize at the moment. Now it should be instead opt to switch to a waste to hydrogen where we feed in municipal waste and convert it to hydrogen to feed these plants. We would see an interesting set of revenue drivers that are worth exploring and would frame the policy intervention that we're considering. The first is that you're selling hydrogen that is a valuable molecule. The second is that you're also getting paid to take waste. So rather than paying a landfill you get paid to take the waste. That's called the tipping fee. And then lastly you're selling the carbon attributes through the low carbon fuel standard market which values carbon right now at $200 a ton. It's interesting to just note here that the hydrogen produced from this process is technically neutral, zero tons of CO2. And the reason for that is that landfills are enormous major sources of emissions because they produce methane which leaks out and is 23 times stronger than CO2 as a greenhouse gas. Can we go next? Thanks, but before we go further I just wanted to shed some light on California's waste problem and how waste to hydrogen relates to this. California's reliance on landfilling is actually increasing over time and that's not sustainable. Our recycling rates are actually dropping in California. The story gets exacerbated because of China's recent ban on waste importing. Before we used to just package our recyclables and send them over to China. Now that's not happening. In fact, just in the past two years we've closed down almost a thousand centers for recycling just in California. So in return, we see limited actions are possible with a waste management system as landfills are paid pretty cheap. They're very cheap and competitive. They only need $60 per ton of waste to remain economically viable. That makes local recycling without shipping to China very difficult. If you see on the right countries with much higher fees like Netherlands in the $300 range tend to have a higher recycling rate and get very creative around incineration or transformation into something of higher value. A solution is definitely needed for this and it's certainly difficult if the tipping fees stay this low. Thanks. Thanks, Frank. So Sophie covered some general obstacles to hydrogen adoption broadly but let's dive into a few obstacles to this specific technology. The primary hurdle is really around public opinion and that's rooted in waste gasification association with traditional incineration. And so if we're just thinking about traditional incineration that is burning waste for heat and energy. And there's some pretty nasty byproducts to that. You have toxic gases in the form of NOx, SOx, dioxins and purins. And then you have solid waste toxic material as well. You have fly ash coming out of the smoke stacks. You have bottom ash that's also very toxic and you need to dispose of that and all of these things are associated pretty tightly with environmental justice concerns. So it's not surprising that there is a resistance in a certain NIMBYism to waste gasification. Rachel, give me a couple of clicks here. But gasification is actually a very specific type of incineration. So what we're doing is we are reducing the oxygen available in the combustion environment and we are blasting this waste with such high temperatures and energy that the waste actually decomposes into its base elements. So rather than getting all of those toxic byproducts what you get is carbon, oxygen and hydrogen as gases all things we know how to deal with. And the solid waste is actually a molten metal glass that can be reused in construction activities, right? So you don't get any of the toxic byproducts. So the first big hurdle is really around public education of this new technology and how we can leverage it. You give me one click, Rachel. I think it's also important to always consider what is the base case, right? And in this situation, the vast majority of the waste would be going to a landfill where you have leakage in aquifers and many other environmental justice considerations. One more click here. And so there are some additional obstacles, right? As Sophie mentioned earlier hydrogen transportation infrastructure doesn't really exist today. So we need to co-locate supply with the man. Competition is there's a low cost highly competitive space. In some cases, you're dealing with the mafia. Korean has some policy recommendations to deal with that competition, maybe not the mafia specifically. And then additionally, this is early stage risky tech, right? So if you're in a fledgling industry, we need capital, we need patients and we need diligence and paying attention to how we effectively and safely operate this technology at scale. Let's touch briefly on current policies. In the US, each state has their own policies for hydrogen, but at the federal level, there's the EPA, the US Department of Energy and FERC all play a role. The EPA really is looking at, started investing in hydrogen at the federal level in 2005, looking at an energy independence perspective of how to be less dependent on foreign oil. And then at the state level, California is leading the way, the LCFS, the low carbon fuel standard policy provides a market to trade credits that are making low carbon fuels more affordable. And then the zero emission vehicle credits are also making a similar market that has been crucial to Tesla's success and has been expanded to 10 other states. And then you can see with this small graph on the right, most of the EU is leading the international policy, but other countries are also building out their policies largely around transport. So we would like to propose a policy that supports the economics for waste to hydrogen. We believe the most effective target is targeting incumbent landfills, which bear no social costs for their operations. We've reviewed three options shown here on the left that have precedence in other nations. The first one being a landfill tax in the EU. The landfill tax has been added to discourage landfilling and internalize externalities. The second one, which is well, and we're recommending is including landfill emissions in the California cap and trade. This should make landfilling more expensive and as a result, result in higher tipping fees to gasification facilities, making them more economically viable. I think we're in time for Q&A, but if you can just flip the slide to the next one, I think it's good to park this here because this is related to the measurements of outcome. And I think we can maybe open it up to questions. Okay, great. Really well done. I see Melissa had her hand up and then Jesse and I'll hold my question for Kareem about the mafia. Thank you guys. That was awesome. If you're able to go back to one of the slides, I just wanna clarify something there. Oh, thanks, Rachel. This was the slide on the current and forecasted. I think it was demand for hydrogen. Anyways, the axes were a bit confusing and I wanted to better under, yeah, number three. The one with the two charts. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, so I was looking at this. Do you mind talking through this one more time? And what's confusing me is that the y-axes on the left has an extra zero. So I was wondering if that's an actual 10x decrease or a typo. Yeah, so both these charts came from the same report by a group out of UC Irvine. But I believe that the difference is that the right one goes through 2030 and the left one goes through 2050. So if you actually looked at where it is at 2030, it is closer to 450. So that's the difference is that the left one is 20 years later. And so demand like rapidly scales up between 2030 and 2050. Okay, and most of the half the demand is coming from light duty vehicles? About, by 2050, it's about a third that will come from light duty vehicles. Okay, got you. What are current policies which incentivize if there are any, the use of hydrogen for these transportation methods? Yeah, I'm happy to jump in. There's several, on the federal level, there's a renewable portable and renewable fuel center known as RINs. On the local level, there's low carbon fuel standards which measure the gram CO2 per megajoule final use. And there's also for the manufacturers zero emission vehicle credits for tax rebates. California just FYI also has a mandate for a certain number of hydrogen fueling stations to be developed by 2030. So that's another one. Yeah, the CEC has a plan for that too. Hydrogen, awesome. Okay, we've got a lot of questions here. Jesse. Yeah, great, thanks. Enjoy the presentation. So for policy ideas that you mentioned, do you expect any opposition and have you thought about allies and how to pet a bolster allies and how to address opposition? Yeah, I'm happy to take that. So in terms of opposition, it is likely that we'll see opposition from current landfill or waste management practices. However, the California emission, the cap and trade system is pretty interesting. Right now the price is pretty low but it's forecasted to rise. And so what that means is that there's no short-term impact but they can price in the future rise of this. So I suspect that there's gonna be two coalitions forming one on the refiner side saying that they would like this to happen because that's access to cheap, clean hydrogen. And the other is that waste management groups themselves have invested in such technologies. And so it would be now maybe potentially incented internally to start rolling this out themselves. So it's like, so with that, the noticing what California cap and trade is that it's a ramping carbon price essentially. So it gives them time to adjust and not stress the supply chains immediately and disrupt their entire sector. Great. According to the participants list, Abigail, your hand was that put first although Jessica, you appear first in my screen. So I don't know how this works but Abigail, go ahead. Yeah, hi, really enjoyed the presentation. I was struck by the closing of the recycling plants, 1,000 closed in the last year. Could you guys give a little detail on why you think that is? And sort of, I mean, I know it's cheaper for cities to kind of export their trash. And so there hasn't been a lot of investment in new recycling, but it surprises me that we're closing them. Yeah, that was my research again. Happy to take that one on. Yeah, so there's a, it's a really funny thing. So most recycling in the world actually, you kind of do either sorting before you throw out the trash or sorting happens in a sorting center, but the actual demand for the recyclable kind of the stuff that leaves, a lot of that demand resides outside where there's a lot of hunger for material. So China being a very rapidly developing country was absorbing all of that. They closed their doors to that because there's just far too much waste that's not being used up in China and it's just sitting there and being open burned. So what happens is China will pay for that recyclable waste decently. Whereas right now there's, it's just not. And so what's left is you kind of have to find another off-taker for this recyclable waste. And as a result, you're kind of stuck with the local area around you to manage this waste. And there's very little demand for it because the, and especially because the virgin price as in by making this material from scratch is pretty cheap actually, unfortunately. And so what's happening right now is without serious government intervention, the economics simply do not work out. And as a result, they're actually going bankrupt. They're shutting down. It's just not profitable to run anymore. There's no demand anymore. And there's a great energy game podcast on this. There's a, there's kind of a dark side to recycling. Parable employers, I will say that. So they keep asking us for state subsidy to bail them out. And it's very hard to justify doing because they pay truly awful wages and they have major labor violations. So it's just been a really, really tough thing. But the reality is that not just here, but all over the country, you guys think you're recycling your plastic and you're not, it's going into landfill and it's piling up at ports, which is really heartbreaking. And I just want to add one last thing is, I think, think about it this way. There's little local demand for recycling, but there's one thing that's always in demand in any area, energy, right? So in a way, this is just kind of recycling things at a molecular level where there's always demand for molecular energy. Very cool. Thank you. Thanks. What a great presentation. Instead of Q and A, Jessica, I'm sorry, but in the interest of time, we're going to keep moving. So group three, you're up. Hey everyone, can everyone see my screen? You can see your screen. Yeah, maybe what spotlight. Nina, I don't know if you can take the spotlight or not, maybe it's over here. Awesome. All right, hi everyone. So we are going to be talking about carbon dioxide removal equity in multilateral climate agreements. So really excited to talk about this topic with you today. It's been covered a bit and a couple of, like touched on a bit in different sections. Recently, I believe the one with Plumeo as well. So excited to build off some of the learnings we have there. Just as a reminder though, want to give an overview on what carbon dioxide removal, or CDR is and why it represents different opportunities depending on the type of country or geography, where you are. So on the left-hand side, we have natural CDR, which includes land, agricultural practices or other natural resources to improve the carbon removing conditions and increase carbon removing biomass. And so an example you often think about is the carbon sequestration and soil reforestation and improve forest management. On the right-hand side, we have technological CDRs when we're using more energy intensive technological processes, which removes CO2 from the air, surfaces or water. So we have the carbon dioxide mineralization or the direct air capture DAC. And for reference, it was mentioned, I think in this class at least once, but around the work with Climeworks and some of the direct air capture work that they've been doing there from Switzerland. Important considerations across the natural and technological CDR is when thinking about the fit with the type of countries. An important point is that with developing nations, with heavy agricultural industries to be a stronger fit with natural CDR that could produce more jobs and minimize CapEx costs. However, on the right-hand side, what we talk about with moving the needle and we had a whole class debate on this as well is are the natural based CDR solutions enough? And do we also need to consider technological CDRs to achieve the 1.5 degree C warming goals? For example, the note though is on the technological CDR is that with the high CapEx requirement, there is an argument in terms of who's bearing responsibility and who can afford this particular CDR. And why is this important? We've discussed this a bit in class, so just as a reminder on the left-hand side, with the business as a usual scenario, it represents a temperature rise by four to five degrees Celsius, what you see here on the red line. However, if we're trying to achieve the two degrees or below scenario, the IPCC report in 2018 argued we do need CDR in our solution base. However, and on that point as we think about climate solutions, climate change has only exacerbated the change or like the gap in global economic inequality. One study found that 25% of the difference is like there's an increased 25% difference between the highest and lowest countries with economic output per person due to climate change. And so as we're thinking about mitigating climate change, how do we prevent that exacerbation of inequality? And then on the bottom right, there's a couple of different approaches that we'll talk about today as well and let's run around who has the most emissions or who is the most able to pay for responsibility on dealing with CDR and thinking about who needs to invest in CDR practices and where to ensure that it is equitable across the global South, for example, or countries that are most impacted by climate change, even though those may not be the countries that are necessarily able to pay for CDR. Thank you. So if CDR is necessary in order to keep within the 1.5 degrees target, then we will need to have global cooperation in order to reach that. And so here are some of the measurable outcomes that not only global cooperation could achieve, but global cooperation with equity in mind could achieve. And these sort of grew out of a conversation I had with someone at the World Resources Institute who is currently writing a report on equity in CDR, specifically direct air capture deployment and who is stressing that a lot of research has really yet to be done here. So what do we know that deploying CDR equitably could achieve? Number one is job growth. There's one report that says that over 3,000 jobs could be created per one megaton direct air capture plant. And we're gonna need way more than one megaton of direct air capture if we're going to reach these targets. A way to develop, sorry, a sustainable development transition mechanism. So particularly with CCS, there's a lot of opportunities to retrain workers from the oil and gas sector to work on CCS and sequestration from DAC efficiency through cooperation. So there've been a number of academic papers looking at how can we come to a global agreement on carbon dioxide removal that keeps equity in mind? And one of the points that these papers are making is that by thinking about equity before we come to the negotiating table, we can actually reach these goals more efficiently because this will be a part of the conversation. So we need to think about it beforehand. And then finally, if we're thinking about equity when we are making these global agreements and doing the research now because so much research has yet to be done, we can avert inequitable outcomes and we can also know what to measure so that we know if it's equitable or not what's happening as these are being deployed. So the next slide is sort of just drilling down on what some of these things that we might wanna measure when we're thinking about the equity of CDR deployment. And again, this comes out of somebody I spoke to who's at WRI who's writing a report on this. And so job creation, we already looked at in the last slide, local resource impacts which Melissa will drill down on, land sovereignty that particularly with sequestration, there are unique geologic formations that need to be tapped into for the carbon to be sequestered. So we really need to be thinking about where are these places? What countries are these in? And how can we make sure that these people that these countries have a seat at the table and how is this going to affect the people who are living there? We don't want this to be the next fracking or the next mining in which like indigenous communities are displaced in which agricultural landholders lose their land. We need to be thinking about it right now. How is this gonna affect land sovereignty? And also what are the energy impacts going to be? As particularly with technological CDR, it requires energy. And so we need to be thinking about how is this going to, what kind of energy are we gonna use? What is the energy draw going to be so that we know what to measure before and during this transition? Lillian raised a number of super important questions for us to think about. In particular, I will drill down into measurable outcomes that have surfaced from an important study conducted by six scholars at the University of Ute, Virginia, which was published in nature on the trade-offs between large-scale DAC adoption as well as two other negative emission technologies and changes or degradations on land use, food prices and water consumption. So this study concluded that this tripod of trade-offs really depends on the level of DAC deployment and the exact relationship is still unclear. However, the findings do spotlight equity concerns that must be accounted for by policymakers because these three resources matter for quality of life for the communities where such NETs, negative emission technologies are adopted. And in particular, the study distinguishes between DAC, which is a chemical engineering process that uses aqueous sorbents to remove CO2 from the air, between DAC and two nature-based solutions, which are BEX, that is bioenergy with carbon capture and storage. Basically, biomass is converted into heat electricity or gas fuels, and these carbon emissions are then stored in geological formations. So DAC, BEX, and then Afro-Restation. In particular, I'm gonna go into land use, water use and crop pricing. So historically, we've already seen inequities resulting from energy infrastructure siting, which I think Dr. Mijing Chah had also talked about. And the study found that land use from DAC is actually fairly negligible compared to BEX and Afro-Restation, but there is insufficient research on the impact of food prices when the land is used for something else at the expense of grasslands, pasture, and production of other crops. Secondly, on water, withdrawals from surface and groundwater as well as evaporative losses can contribute to water scarcity of two minutes left. And then jumping quickly to food prices, this one was particularly interesting because the study estimated that large scale DAC deployment can actually increase world food prices by five X relative to 2010 levels, especially affecting the global South. So if we look at the next slide, here we just show a visual representation of where the study expects the largest scale DAC to be deployed by 2035. And you'll see that's mostly in the US, South America, China, and Australia. And then if we look at the distribution of projected impact on food prices, you'll see that disproportionately the South and particularly Africa could see a five to six X food price spike by 2050. Thanks, next slide. Yes, thanks, Melissa. So I briefly present where we are today in terms of efforts to integrate equity into the CDR space. So it's important to underline that today we have a bottom up approach, contrary to the previous top down approach. So today, under the Paris Agreement, each country decides and define what equity is. Each country has to submit what is called nationally determined contributions where they explain how their efforts to reduce emissions are fair and equitable. And we start to see that NDCs mentioning CDR for the moment only natural-based solutions. So in the next slide, I'll speak about where we are heading. So with this bottom up approach, it's very unlikely that we will have in the short term a consensus on equity and CDR, but there is important discussions at the international level at the moment. The first one concerns market mechanisms. In the Paris Agreement countries, there is a mechanism which allows countries to export their emissions reduction to other countries and that this mechanism could be used for CDR. However, we have to distinguish technological solutions and natural-based solutions. It would be great for technological solutions, but not for natural-based solutions because there are many risks like the reversal risk or monitoring risks. In addition to that, if we have a very strong transparency rules, we will be able to see exactly what governments are doing to reduce their emissions. And so we could push for more pledges on CDR and equity. And we can imagine also that courts might require governments to use CDR based on equity if they don't meet the Paris Agreement goals. So I will hand it over to Greg. Thanks. So I think we're out of time technically. So I'll try to just say two sentences on challenges and try to distill it to two points. The key takeaway that we had from conversations with people like Julio Friedman was that there are a lot of challenges in this that need to be resolved before equity can take center stage. There are things like just the infancy of the market, the knowledge gap, the high cost of some CDR solutions and the lack of infrastructure for carbon dioxide storage, capture and storage. And really you need to solve those challenges before you can start thinking about how to do equity. But now if we go to the next slide, there are some important things to consider in terms of maintaining equity in CDR and some challenges in achieving that such as political cohesion. And we talked a little bit about is the one country, one vote model right for this? There are monitoring and evaluation challenges. Lillian was talking about, we need to figure out what it is we need to monitor to make sure that equity is being preserved. And there are challenges in terms of global standards and definitions. So happy to dive into some of these of Q and A just to give people a chance to ask about other parts of our presentation. Great, okay, really well done. I already see Sid's hand up and then Rachel. Amazing, this is super, super interesting. I think I hadn't fully considered the equity implications of CDR. So this is fascinating. Melissa, I wanted to ask a question about your section around food prices going 5x in Africa. I wasn't sure I followed the logic of that because my understanding was just some regional variation but most of the big grains are global commodities. And so there's a kind of global price with some regional variation. But it's looked like most of CDR was in North America, China, Europe and most of the food price increase was very concentrated in Africa. I just wanted to hear more about how that works and why global trade wouldn't smooth those price increases. Yeah, to be honest, I was super surprised by the 5x multiple that came out especially when in the study like a couple of paragraphs earlier it talks about how DAC doesn't use a ton of land. The one sentence which I answered for Kate as well is that apparently these hikes are attributable to constraints on the ability of commercial land to be expanded into what's called natural land. I honestly don't know enough about these two types of land used to speak to that but I think what's most problematic is on the commodity market impact is probably BEX as it not only competes on energy supply side but also for other land use demands and carbon negative subsidies as well. Yeah, just real quick, it made sense for me from a BEX perspective but not a DAC perspective. So now I'm confused again because DAC is like one of the huge selling points of DAC is that it's small footprint. So I don't, it doesn't make sense to me actually at all and you can do it on the margins of other land uses actually. So I'm still confused by that, I have to admit also but in terms of BEX and in terms of kind of natural CDR it makes more sense. Thanks for the link. Okay, Rachel. Yeah, thank you so much. I was wondering if you could talk a bit more about ideas you might have to resolving the knowledge cap as just thinking about the debate we had it seems like that is gonna be a really big challenge. I can take this one. I think in one word, research. I think that there's a lot of, the first step is sort of figuring out what needs to be measured in terms of are the biggest impacts going to be on land use? Is it gonna be on energy usage? Is it going to be on water usage? Also, our presentation had a pretty broad scope. We like in the IPCC report, carbon dioxide removal encompasses direct air capture, BEX, some natural climate solutions. And so for each of these solutions they have different impacts. And so first, we need to understand what are the biggest impacts going to be for each of these solutions in terms of equity and then start measuring them. But from what I understand, it's especially with direct air capture, it's quite nascent the thinking around what will the equity implications of this be? And so like the person I talked to at WRI is just writing our report on this now and has been talking to people in this space and also said that she's finding it's quite nascent thinking around this. Okay, I'm tempted to keep us on time here. Nina, this is, we're up for our next group. So, Catherine, I'm sorry I had signaled. We'd invite your question, but I think I'm gonna keep us on time instead. Cause we've got one more group before break. So we will turn it to group four congrats again to the CDR group. These have been so interesting and so well done. Take off for the work. So I can kick us off. Our project is on Fannie, Freddie. So Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and climate risk. And the question we're asking is building back always better. So to get us going and as an overview of our project, basically we're looking at climate risk exposure within the United States. And we're trying to understand what happens as over the next century or so as severe environmental threats escalate over time. What's going to happen to the current regional development patterns at large, particularly for areas that are exposed to the highest level of climate risk. Currently the process is they are wildfire hits, then what happens is they end up being some government bailout, we build back the community and it happens again. So with that in mind, we're trying to figure out ways to increase climate disclosures and also provide federal different relocation of policies and incentives to improve overall justice and climate risk across the country at large. So to start with just some scary stats. So we've all seen in various forms. The United States has many areas that are high risk to increasing climate disasters. The map on the right here shows some of the different types of climate change risks that'll happen and every region kind of has its own version of what that might look like. In particular though, even though there is risk across the board as 80% says here, 80% of the population will be at risk to at least one climate hazard. These are disproportionately affecting different communities. So California, for example, with the wildfires is one community that's heavily at risk. Other areas like Florida and Texas and particular areas that are suffering from potential extreme participation in the future will also be at risk. This costs billions of dollars of damages annually and will only escalate as climate change gets worse. So with that, I'll pass it off to Jess who will describe the problem in greater detail. Yeah, so even though we know about these risks, this knowledge has not changed the pattern of development and housing. So to start, let's look at federal mortgages. As Danielle mentioned, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are continuing to pump money into housing in flood plains, wildfire prone areas and other high risk regions. And mortgage underwriters are not requiring disclosures on these climate risks. Next zoning, namely the dominance of single family housing has limited the supply of housing in areas that are safer, which means that there's like due to limited supply and basic laws of economics. Prices are higher in the safer area, so this creates a shortage of affordable housing. On top of this ensures have started trying to pull out of places like California and Florida or increase their risk premiums so high that residents are just choosing to forego insurance entirely. And finally, all of these factors sort of culminate in large concerns about inequity because of the shortage of affordable housing, low income families are forced to live in high risk areas and these are communities disproportionately composed of people of color. Next slide. And I'll breeze through this since Danielle already outlined this cycle on the left, but essentially what you'll see is that everyone living in high risk areas which is 80% of the country eventually is trapped in a vicious cycle. People are continuing to lose their homes and over time we're gonna need to relocate these folks. But unfortunately there are no current structural mechanisms in place to facilitate relocation on the scale or development of affordable housing for these relocated citizens. And per our analysis, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are the best levers to use in facilitating and orderly transition. So I'll pass it up to Peter. Thank you, Jessica. Our intervention is inherently too prompt. So the first on the left is increased climate risk disclosure for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. So this would be disclosures informed by the TCFD guidelines. The goal such function of how this would work is that this would expose the concern that Fannie and Freddie lack capital to deal climate losses. This disclosure will force them to hold more capital which will ultimately protect taxpayers from bailouts from climate losses. This would likely take place to executive action likely from FHFA. Now complimenting that prong is a portfolio of relocation resettlement incentives and programs which kind of there's a portfolio here because there's no one single silver bullet. And so this could include things like the civilian and climate corps to build in low climate risk areas, the creation of green opportunity zones to incentivize development and relocation aid for residents. Next slide, please. Okay, so why this definitely might work. All right, so as I just mentioned there's no silver bullets. The migration is inherently interstate which makes federal government a better actor for state governments. And the price sector will likely take advantage of this arbitrage at some point anyway. And so government action can enable more orderly transition. Also, there's kind of a moment in the political zeitgeist right now in the Biden admin where there's some energy for climate action. FHFA is already seeking comments on this topic anyway so we think this could actually get done. And executive action will likely also avoid congressional morass. Next slide. I don't know if this worked. So kind of on a scale like unintended consequences to metrics for success the key here is does this actually move people in an equitable way? So this goes wrong if the wealth gap increases through plunging property prices for low income folks or if the wealth from development actually accrues to investors. On the flip side, this actually works if we move folks in a safe and orderly way and which could also catalyze broader financial transparency. We're going through this pretty fast so feel free to ask more questions about this in the Q and A section. So as Peter said, we have a two-pronged approach and so in terms of looking for kind of what types of examples can we draw from we also kind of look across both of those prongs. So number one, we looked at ways to implement changes in the mortgage market effectively. In other words, how have Fannie and Freddie implemented change and risk assessment in the past? And then number two, we looked at examples of resettlement programs, both programs that helped people move out of a particular place and also programs that encouraged people to move into a particular place. So the deep dive on the mortgage risk assessment piece, this is certainly not the first time that Fannie and Freddie have tried to price particular risks. And you saw that Peter suggested that executive action would likely be a good avenue for this. Why is that? It's because if you don't use executive action things get pretty fraught pretty quickly. So Fannie and Freddie tried to do this with earthquake pricing for California residents and California leaders thwarted that in the 90s in jurisdictions where judicial foreclosure was like kind of part of the foreclosure process. They tried to charge higher rates in those jurisdictions and that got thwarted by Congress. So while there are a few successful examples, the way that we would kind of think about framing this from the perspective of Fannie and Freddie is basically not acting. It's what the market distortion is. The status quo is distorting the market and changing it to get that right. It's not penalizing anyone. It's just pricing risk, which is exactly what Fannie and Freddie are supposed to do. But that being said, trying to think about ways to mitigate some of the concentrated harms of this policy is gonna be very important. And then in terms of migration examples, the key takeaway here is that it's a lot easier to welcome people into a new place and encourage them to go there than it is to try to get people to move out of the place that they're in. Hurricane Katrina was a particularly kind of tragic example of this where it was extraordinarily difficult for both displaced New Orleans residents and for cities like Houston that had to kind of absorb a lot of refugees from Katrina. One more promising example of moving people out, it's actually in West Africa, in South Tome and Princepe, they engaged in more of a community driven process of figuring out kind of where do we want to move our community now that we've figured out that there's too much flooding here. So kind of that community involvement is important, but really for successful examples, we think that there's a lot more promise in following the examples of Duluth and Buffalo, which have kind of branded themselves as climate refugee cities already. And so kind of continuing to double down on that is probably gonna be more promising than waiting for the disaster to happen and then trying to get people to leave their homes. All right, and so finally, we just wanna talk through some of these intervention challenges again, which my colleagues have already touched on. The first is that to truly discourage people from locating in climate sensitive areas, borrowing costs need to rise sharply enough to spur a kind of death spiral, right? Creating a self-fulfilling narrative that cuts off investment in entire regions. And obviously for those already owning homes in those areas, their equity could disappear overnight. Some owners realizing that their homes are worth less than their mortgages could refuse to pay, triggering foreclosures and igniting some of the same forces that created the financial crisis of 2008. So that's pretty bad, but our position is that this kind of death spiral is bound to happen regardless as people fully realize what kind of crisis is unfolding. And so we think it's important for the government to have an affirmative strategy to facilitate a humane transition. This transition also presents equity concerns. Jess mentioned that the lack of, that low in communities and black communities are disproportionately exposed to climate risk. Another consideration is that past mass relocations, such as the Great Migration of the mid 20th century had very mixed outcomes. Many of the folks who moved during the Great Migration were not welcomed into Northern cities and were excluded from employment and housing opportunities. Now, the Great Migration involved around 9 billion people and we're talking hundreds of millions of people here. So we have to be very deliberate about forging a different path. Finally, choosing winners and losers is a political minefield. We see this all the time in the discourse around climate change, particularly subsidies for renewable energy or withdrawing subsidies from oil and gas, frustration that the government is somehow like subjectively choosing winners and losers in an unfair way. Yeah, Ben already mentioned that in the early 1990s, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac tried to raise the price of mortgages and properties in California neighborhoods and there's like furious opposition from California leaders. So we probably expect a similar type of thing here. And there will be winners and losers in terms of state and county governments. But it's not really a choice because again, change is inevitable. The choice we have is between an orderly transition and a disorderly one. I think complete transparency and decision methodology is key here. And like Ben said, emphasizing with the current market distortion and the inevitability of correction whether we manage it or not. And with that, we welcome questions. Great, again, very well done. Michael, I saw your hand up first. Yeah, thank you. That was great. Katherine, I wanted to pick up on one of the last points you made, kind of going the route of executive action. I'm curious if you guys have a sense of kind of where the Congress, sorry, executive action, did I say that? I'm curious if you have a sense of the congressional politics and state politics of like on the issue and kind of what executive action will kind of follow that that would have on the congressional and state level. I could start and folks would jump in. So, I mean, on the executive action front, I know this isn't exactly what you asked, but I like that we know that the FHFA, which is the agency who would implement such a change, but at least with the Fannie and Freddie is actively like soliciting input on such a proposal right now. So it does seem like this is the kind of thing that they are like possibly doing, if not likely to do. In terms of the, are you asking about congressional like fallout that could happen in terms of electoral results if the Democratic administration implements this kind of thing? Yeah, I mean, if there's a political divide on the issue, like is this something that's gonna be picked up by kind of the dissenters on this and made a big stink out of or are folks in Congress pretty aligned on how they feel about this and executive actions just kind of the easiest route to get there? Yeah, well, I mean, I think I'm not sure if this is what you're asking either exactly, but one thing on the very last slide that we had was this like chart that's like, okay, where are the climate impacts in different places in the country? And I think I thought this graphic was useful because it shows that like, okay, the states that are like disproportionately impacted by climate change and therefore the places you might expect people to move from are disproportionately red states, right? So this is like a pretty bad look in terms of electoral politics of like, you can only imagine like the claims that the Democratic administration is like punishing red states or whatever, like it would not be great, but the bookings article that I pulled this from was actually making the opposite argument that the fact that these states are so disproportionately impacted by climate change could change the way that like, the current political polarization around climate change and that perhaps, you know, Republicans might come around to taking more aggressive climate action given the impact on their constituents. So I don't know, maybe that's just- I don't think Brookings looks at wildfire, just FYI. So that changes that chart actually because I think they mostly look at extreme heat and inland flooding, which is a very particular issue for the Southeast and the South. If you start looking at wildfire, you get massive impacts in the West. So that changes the dynamic a bit. One last thing I'll add on the topic is that we're originally thinking about looking at just California, but then after talking with Kay, we learned that like California has very, like it's very local and powered. And so on a state level, it'd actually be really hard for like the state of California to even like pull, like California towns back from like wilderness areas to even prevent wildfires and things like that. So on one specific state example, that's one of the reasons why it would be also even tricky to accomplish intrastate movement in California, for example. Great, okay, Maya. Yeah, thank you guys. I grew up in Santa Rosa. So this is super relevant for me as my parents are deciding where they're gonna retire and whether they're asleep there. I was wondering if there's thinking that you guys came across on how to categorize the places you need to move from. So I appreciated the thought of like, it's better to sort of pull than push people. But like, can you be, do you have to wait for the disaster to hit? Do you have to have the data that says this is gonna happen every five years, every 10 years? Like how are people thinking about the cutoffs and categorization when it's all sort of, some of it has happened and it's concrete, but some of it is projection? I can give that like a start of an answer and then someone else can jump in. I would say that's like exactly what insurance companies are supposed to do and lenders are supposed to do. So like, I would leave it, I would say, any of Freddie are saying it's now required that you do a climate risk assessment and leave it to the private sector to figure out the best way to do that. And I think the incentive should be pretty aligned because they're not gonna wanna make mortgages that are going to be overly risky, but maybe that's a cop out of an answer. So if anyone has a better idea, jump in. Person who looked at a lot of the statistics for all of this around what's gonna happen in the next century, like the organization that I saw that was doing the most work around this is 427 and they basically are trying to assess and impact the risk and then provide that for various levels, different types of institutions so they can utilize their data. So they're quantifying, they're the ones quantifying what's going on. I'm sure other people are also working on this, but a lot of the maps, like the New York Times pulls from this organization and various other people to basically make the information more accessible, but they're the ones being like, these are the five different types of climate risk that we anticipate. This is the various levels of severity that are gonna happen. And these like wildfires to Kate's point are an extreme one that's going to be incredibly expensive and frequent, that's going to be a higher level of risk than say something that might happen in the Midwest. So I think like folks are starting to maybe or have been doing this data and it seems like the New York Times, even in like the past two months have really started to make this public, like accessible to the world and had a lot of fun infographics on it. So I don't know, our whole goal is to like get it beyond these like research and numbers to what Ben was just talking about, to have it actually part of the climate risk. But there's some a few websites where you can be like, enter your address and check your climate risk. See what it looks like when choosing homes. And that's kind of seems like where we're at right now. Okay, Royce, do you have a quick question? Can be answered in a minute. Sure, you guys can cut off whenever you want. It was a great presentation. I thought the topic was super interesting and you guys did a super thorough job. I actually, so I studied urban planning for two years in grad school first. And this was the topic of my two years. There was how do you plan for a future city that's under attack by climate change and then work for four years doing climate change infrastructure plans. And one thing that we realized very quickly in working in city was that if you want to do what you're proposing which is manage retreat, on the scale that we would need to do it in the US you would not be able to move everyone from the coastal areas or from airfront to fire to any existing built housing markets. So I guess my question would be where would you fit everyone in and how would we pay for it? And how would we get them jobs in those markets? Oh, that should be out of time. That's a small question, Rice. Saved by the bell. Yeah, so you want to give a great question, Rice. I don't know, do you want to try it in 60 seconds? I can try to give like a really quick start to it although honestly like your background makes you more equipped to answer this question than ours. So I could just easily turn it back to you. I think the kind of green opportunity zones where like my head is currently at like the current opportunity zones that's kind of written into law have like tons of issues with them. But I think part of the idea and a topic that we thought about getting into more risks around like the zoning and how do you zone like more high density housing? But I think a key portion of this is like how do you start to fund a totally different way of building housing and development? So how can you create incentives to develop high density housing in urban areas away from the coast? But that's kind of my cop out in. No, that's also like it's going to be expensive no matter what. I'll just say from a California perspective that's exactly what we're trying to do and many, many, many maps through urban footprint and other places on, there's a huge amount of potential development in low risk, low vehicle miles traveled kind of infill areas in the state. But we run into the issue that we talked about when you guys talked to me about this which is the local control issue because we absolutely are doing everything we can streamlining incentives like every policy we can to drive toward that kind of development but people really, really want to do sprawl development on green fields in fire risk areas. So it's a real challenge. I mean, I think it has to be more of a, it has to be more of a consistent policy across kind of financing and regulation to make it actually work. As the timekeeper, I'm going to wrap this here and amazingly thanks to Mina and all of you we are on time and great job for our first four groups. We've got the back half, back three. I will say, because I'm sure we're looking for something to do in these eight minutes. The one thing we have not done yet are force evals. They were late in issuing them. We usually do them in the second to last class but they weren't ready yet. So I'm going to put this in the chat if you want to take the next eight minutes we'll reconvene at 5.45, it's in access. We really appreciate your evaluations and we do read every line in them and try and improve and evolve the class based on your feedback. If it's, you just want to walk away just save that link for later and please do fill it out by March 11th and guys can turn your video off. Videos off, chillax, we'll be back at 5.45. When you get started, turn your videos back on and sorry to spring the evals on you like that. I know the last thing I wanted to do just now was be staring at my computer. Yes, I found a teleporcation device. It's very exciting. So feel free to obviously do those another time but didn't want to forget. All right, on our next group, what are we at 5? All right, I will start us off. Our objective here is to reimagine food production and distribution in New York City. As the largest and most densely populated city in the US, New York is a prime case for exercising innovation in technology and business models in the urban agriculture and local distribution industries. Next slide please. One more please. So the current state of New York City's food system is that's not fully secure while farms make up 25% of New York State's land. Much of the city's food is trucked or flown in from across the country and worldwide. The US commercial food system evolved to support a rapidly growing population but is characterized today by a high energy usage and waste throughout all phases from production, wholesale, and retail distribution to consumption. As New York City is expected to add nearly 1 million residents in the next two decades, the city needs to identify ways to move from an unsustainable food system to one that promotes health and environmental sustainability. Current urban agriculture sources in the city are small in scale consisting of urban farms, rooftop gardens, beekeeping operations, and hundreds of community gardens. The two main players in the local commercial farming space are Gotham Greens and Brooklyn Grange together which supply just a tiny sliver of New York City's food supply. Next slide. Most food in the city today arrives and is distributed by trucks with these vehicle trips expected to peak in 2035. The majority of food goes through wholesale distribution centers before being sent to retail stores with the exception being national chains that have their own distribution infrastructure. New York City has had a long history of food accessibility issues with an average ratio of grocery stores square footage to residents at about 15 square feet per 10 people compared to national average of 50 square feet per 10 people. The New York City Hunts Point Food Distribution Center is the country's largest wholesale food market and it supplies more than half of the city's fresh food. It's also located in a low to moderate income neighborhood in the South Bronx and contributes heavily to local emissions from the 15,000 trucks that come to market daily. As an example, the rate of asthma induced hospitalization in the census tract is twice the city's average. In 2012, Hurricane Sandy also uncovered the vulnerability of the city's infrastructure. During the storm, water came within feet of flooding Hunts Point Market which would have been destroyed by the food supply by both water and shutting down the power grid that provides refrigeration. At the mayor's office, I was working on assembling $80 million in financing to construct an on-site geothermal and solar microgrid to provide energy resiliency for Hunts Point but we were very well aware that the flood risk for this critical piece of food infrastructure will only continue to worsen over time. Next slide. In 2014, the city passed a local law and public commitment known as 80 by 50 which promised that New York City would meet its own target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions 80% by the year 2050. While nearly 70% of emissions in New York is caused by building energy usage, transportation is still a major source of emissions. So by focusing on revamping New York's food system, the city can also help address its climate change mitigation goals. New York City's zoning resolution allows agricultural uses in residential, manufacturing and most types of commercial districts. Parks make up 20% of city land but no commercial agriculture is permitted in parks unless it's within community gardens. And this is due to legal and political issues of preserving open space for communities. So instead, urban ag expansion in the city will need to look at more creative adaptive reuse solutions in manufacturing and commercial zones. The lack of urban agricultural zoning restrictions across most of the city presents an opportunity to significantly scale up local urban agriculture, especially with a changing real estate market in a post COVID world. Local food production is more sustainable and has the potential to alleviate road traffic and reduce emissions, while also strengthening your city's food system upstream. And with that, I'm gonna hand it off to Lea for the fun stuff. Lea, I'm doing it. Oh yeah. I hope you can hear me now. So we looked at how technology could really be used to reimagine what New York looks like. One of the things we researched in particular is vertical farming as well as the unit economics of it and how vertical farming integrates these things like hydroponics, aeroponics and aquaponics, which are all different ways of growing vegetables without the use of soil. So then we looked to what companies around the world are doing some of the most innovative things. One company is called 1.1 and we have the opportunity to interview the founder for this project. Their company is inspired by the idea that 1.1 billion began this millennium hungry and they use aeroponics, automation and AI in order to grow food with 99% less water and 250 times more yield per acre. Aeropharms is also quite interesting. They have the largest indoor vertical farm in the world in New Jersey and they are very focused more so on an educational angle in terms of promoting healthy eating. Iron Ox is focused on a more robotic led approach and they're seeking to advance robotic arms so that they can eliminate the need for manual labor, which is one of the highest components of costs in vertical farming. Their vegetables can be found in Whole Foods and they recently raised $20 million series fee. And then finally and Farm is a Berlin-based company and they strive to bring food as close as possible to the consumer as closer than the grocery store itself. So they've developed these novel modular cabinets that can be placed anywhere within a city and grow food inside so you can see here that they have these modular cabinets within the grocery stores themselves and they've deployed 200 cabinets across the group and raised $100 million today. But how do the unit economics work today? Does it make sense? So within our interview with the founder of 1.1 we were surprised to find that the biggest cost is actually labor even more than the capex. You would think it is quite capex intensive and that is the case. The labor actually comprises 50% of the cost because at the end of the day you're manufacturing a living thing and that takes a very highly skilled labor force to pick the seed to do the oversight and monitoring even if you do have a level of automation. But hopefully this does reduce over time as robotic arms and other automation features become more advanced. Capex is also intensive representing almost 30% of the all in cost of production and then you have energy and real estate. Ways in order to combat this are potentially to use renewable energy. So there are vertical farms in Denmark for instance that utilize wind. And then from a real estate perspective and linking it back to New York is there an ability to attack underutilized space within New York? So according to the founder at 1.1 you need at least 50,000 square feet in order to scale. So we're talking more so warehouse space. But can you look at things like cinemas and malls that aren't really being used properly and can those be converted to vertical farms? For instance in London there's a company called Growing Underground that has a vertical farm located within an air raid bunker a hundred feet below London. And that's kind of this like pinkish photo it's about them here. But unit economics are still difficult. So 1.1 for instance is at about $10 a pound for the cost of production. They're trying to get down to $3 and for context a traditional low cost high volume leafy green leg romaine is produced in a traditional farm at 75 cents a pound. However, for vertical farming that's directly where the consumer is also consuming it. You don't have shipping or storage required so that can help to bring the cost down. But ultimately this does mean that vertical farms tend to focus more so on premium vegetables like organic kale and spinach which can command higher retail pricing like at $6 to $7 a pound. I'll now pass it off to Jesse for a case study in Singapore. Great. So one city that New York can learn from is Singapore which due to its ambitious plans to raise it's a domestic food up production and the face of severe land constraints is place itself on the forefront of urban food innovation. And we've seen this in vertical farming which due to significant support from government in investment has grown forex in recent years and had award winning global designs. Aquaponics which is also early stage but quite a plentiful IOT based off farming. So Wi-Fi enabled sensing technology that can allow people to monitor and to control these farms remotely with a support from MIT research which could be applied in on New York and also mixed land use. So urban farms that are a commercial but then also offer educational spaces for us school children and then recreational spaces for our seniors. Next slide. And so very briefly, so we have Sky Greens which is the first commercial vertical farm in Singapore. So it's the size of five football fields and increased productivity and also very little energy and water use. And then there's a recent example of one former school that was turned into an urban farm and a shared space for a childcare center and also a nursing home. And now on to Abigail. Great. So really quick, just touching on the current state of food distribution in New York as you heard from Royce at the beginning, distribution is one of the major issues facing the city, specifically the central port that all of the food goes through. And while that did experience risk from flooding, COVID also posed a major challenge in the recent months. So that is an area that we focused on. So across food distribution, we have sourcing, actual physical distribution, access and nutrition. So these are three areas that as we were reimagining what we would like New York's food system to look like we focused on. Because New York is an island, things need to be flown, trucked and railed in primarily trucked and sourcing from large industrial farms are not helping the climate impact. Again, distribution through Hunts Point is antiquated. There's a lot of technological updates that could happen there. New York has lots of food deserts as a result of this fragmented distribution system which causes inequities in access. And the long supply chain also causes a lack of nutrition in a lot of the food that does eventually make it into the food deserts. It's lower quality, it's not as fresh and it's not as affordable. Next slide. So these are some of the solutions that we researched and helped brainstorm for how to kind of improve New York's distribution and food distribution system. I won't go into a ton of detail so we can make it to Vivas and some of the policy and legal implications but just a lot of technology updates, reimagining urban spaces, electrification and EV trucks would have a huge impact on distribution and making it more green. We talked a lot about co-ops versus traditional supermarkets and localizing pop-ups for fresh food and just as Lea touched on with vertical farming as that continues to scale and become more affordable, locally grown food sources will hopefully also become more affordable and we can give people access to more high quality, locally grown food over to Vivas. Hey guys, so it seems like we've run out of time so we can stop here and I can just answer questions on behalf of the group but if nobody has questions then I'll do the last two slides that we had so that we still kind of maintain on balance what we need to do here. I appreciate that Vivas, I don't see any hands up at the moment so why don't you give one to two minutes? Okay, thank you. So we have two slides left. The first is there are lots of organizations focusing on this issue and on the left-hand side you see a few examples of the many organizations that are doing this. We did a deep dive on three that we got in contact with. So City Harvest I think was mentioned a little bit earlier but they collected about 55 million pounds of food from large food centers. So restaurants, grocers, et cetera and what they do is they also deliver it free of charge and they have very much internalized the food justice, environmental justice part of the equation. The other one that I wanna show is Harlem Grown which earlier we talked about recycling and how a lot of that stuff still ends up at a landfill and Harlem Grown saw the exact same problem happening in their communities with food and so they diverted about 8,500 pounds of food scraps from a landfill over to compost systems so that it could be recycled within the cities. Yeah, and then on the right-hand side when we looked at what it takes to do food recovery the best practice is actually step number one which is just reduce the volume of surplus food there is and if you do that you solve most of the issues and yes, it's important to incentivize donating and have a place in which to donate the food and setting up composting but just reducing the top of the funnel is the most important part. Next slide is our last slide. Yeah, so some potential levers for New York City and New York State to consider to keep up their efforts. It's number one liability protections play a huge role to disincentivize food recycling and to disincentivize the proper care of food waste. So extending liability protections such that the organization which is responsible for food recycling does not have to incur potential additional costs the major lever expanding the Green Bank mandate which is very climate focused to also include sustainable food focus making the argument to them that sustainable food is a core component of climate change encouraging mixed use farming and then finally, of course, the University R&D. New York City has a vibrant educational scene and so there are lots of universities that can play a role. In our last page, we showed an example of an organization that was targeting food waste from universities. So thank you for being here today. In conclusion, I'll just say New York City has been a city that has led in a lot of technology in the past one of the first cities to be electrified one of the first subway systems in the world and we believe they can also be one of the cities that leads on this very important issue of food and we'll take questions. Okay, great. Now we have a lot of hands up in the time that we have left. Peter, I saw yours first. Sure, thanks so much, team. Yeah, it was stressful at the end to raise my hand because I didn't want to cut the results from talking. I guess my question is twofold. Like one, if you could have had a magic wand what policy would you like enact immediately? You could have kind of just like wave a magic wand and then two on the business side. I'm curious which of the companies you kind of profiled or that you profiled do you think is most likely to achieve their kind of full mission and transformation? Why don't I take number one and then somebody else can take number two? In our last content slide we had actually put them in order for what we think should be the major policy levers that were pulled. The liability protections we believe is the most important piece that should happen. And specifically not only the term of liability but also to cover good faith donation of food scraps and that good faith piece is very important. For me on the last piece, I would say probably iron ox are in pharma. I wouldn't need to learn more about the businesses to actually pick one, but given labor, manual labor is 50% of the cost today and automation will be a huge driver bringing that $10 a pound down to $3 or $2. I think what they're doing with trying to develop robotic arms for the picking, seeding, packaging, everything, every part from cradle to grave, if you wanna call that, will be extremely critical to bringing cost down. So I like their thesis. And then in pharma, I think is just super interesting the idea that you can actually integrate vertical farms in underutilized real estate space and you don't even need that much space. So it was interesting to hear the 1.1 founder talk about how he needed at least 50,000 square feet in order for his vertical farms to make financial sense. I don't know if in farms, revenue and cost model makes sense, but they have raised a $100 million series B. So maybe it makes enough financial sense that they are kind of building these little mini cabinets and they have 200 of them across Europe. Hey, thanks. In the time we have left, Lea, we'll go to you. And then for everyone, I'm sorry that we haven't gotten to all the questions. I love seeing all these hands up. I hope you do reach out to your classmates to follow up because I know there's a lot of information you're a lot of great content to dig into. So Lea, please go ahead. Thank you very much. It's really interesting. I was wondering in terms of robotic farming and vertical farming, if there are some public policy initiatives in the US at some state level. And I was also wondering if one of the challenge is not the public perception because one of the challenge is to have urban farming also so people can have control over what they are eating and I feel like robotic farming could go against this principle. So I would be curious to hear your thoughts on that. And I also, sorry, the question was how robotic farming, sorry, I don't know if I really caught the question. Yes, I was wondering if there were public policy initiatives for robotic farming. And if I was wondering if one of the challenge to the development of robotic farming was not the public perception, if there were some negative perception around robotic farming. Lea, I can jump in on this if that's helpful. Yeah, so I assume Lea by public perception, you mean not organic, is that what you're getting at? Like people not, I guess I'm confused by what you mean by public perception, but vertical farming is such a nascent industry. I mean, we just recently in the last 10 years have come up with the LED lighting technology to be able to scale it and make it somewhat affordable and doable indoors. So I'm not sure if I'm familiar with the total public perception, but I think the opportunity there to Lea's point on her side is just to continue scaling and the number of companies that are innovating in this space. I mean, we mentioned Gotham Greens, there's also Bowery Farms doing a lot of cool stuff. We spoke with a company called We Are the New Farmers, they're doing more algae-based vertical farming, but I think the idea of robots growing your food, it's potentially challenging, but ultimately more green, which is ironic, but in the long-term could be. To Lea's point, I do think it's worth noting that New York City is a very, very pro-union and pro-labor city, and that robotics and automation in general can be a real political challenge when it comes to labor and just the trade-offs there, right? Like we wanna make food as cheap as possible because we don't pay people very much, should we also be trying to pay people more so that they can afford food that isn't as cheap as possible? So interesting trade-offs there, just politically in terms of economics, but just unions are a really big part of New York policy. Well, ironically, Andrew Yang is running for mayor who is the king of automation. So that should be an interesting showdown. I'm good luck with that. Okay, I'm gonna take on my role as timekeeper and move us along. Thank you, that was a great presentation, great Q&A, and on to group six. Hey everyone, can you see the screen? Yep, yep. All right, well, we are the second group doing carbon capture uses and storage, but we are gonna take a bit of a different tact by looking at the policies related to how to encourage the development of technology and implementation of CCUS. Not wanting to rehash too much of what was already presented, we'll go to this slide, just to show the size of the problem. This is from an IEA survey showing, or study showing what needs to be done to mitigate CO2 reductions in the energy sector specifically. But if you look at all sectors altogether, by 2060 we're gonna need to have 115 gigatons of CO2 CCUS in place with 93% of it stored permanently. The biggest emitters are the ones that are currently producing our power. So if they were to run without CCUS over the next five decades as we implemented more clean energy technologies, it would emit about 600 billion tons of CO2. So those are the highest priority applications for CCUS technologies as we are able to kind of start building cleaner power plants. And finally, just to give an idea of how much fossil fuel is still gonna be a big part of our energy mix moving forward, about 60% of the CO2 needed to be captured up to 2070 is gonna be still from fossil fuels. And the rest of it will become from normal industrial processes and bioenergy and some DAC. So moving on, just to recap, some CCUS technologies include capturing straight from the air, which is direct air capture as well as from industrial processes. Then we'll put it underground in reservoirs and salt mines that exist in natural formations. Or we can use that CO2 and combine it with hydrogen that is created sustainably to make other fuels for planes, ships, automobiles, things like that. The other group also talks about the three different types of CCUS that are currently out there. Natural methods are currently limited by available land and we have to use land for growing crops and feeding people as well as all of the policies related to that may not necessarily be scalable to the largest extent. And then there's the technological options. Direct air capture is the most expensive method we have out there currently, but there's a large potential for its application and sequestration, like cumulative potential. However, when you look at indirect ocean capture and alkaline B of the ocean, there are a lot of secondary considerations that people have to be concerned about, such as putting chemicals into the oceans that will change the acidity of it. That has bigger implications than simply just sucking CO2 out of the air is gonna be more bio-modification that you're doing, affecting the natural life in the ocean there. So really the downside for those is that they, the long-term effects are very much unstudied. So direct air capture is the one that needs to be focused on right now because the real downside in cost comes from just the power required to run those units. And then finally, they have the VEX method, which is the Bioenergy with CCS and then the Biochar sequestration from Bioenergy. So the limitation on those methods are the biomass production, so that it also requires a lot of just natural resources to generate that amount of fuel. So again, we wanna refocus in this presentation on the technological solutions and how to support specifically direct air capture methods of industrial applications. So with this in mind, let's look at where we are today. So when you look at the current install capacity of large-scale carbon capture facilities, so then we're talking about the technical part, you see that over the last decade, the deployment has actually tripled, though we're coming from a very low base. Interesting to notice is that of the 21 large-scale facilities worldwide, half is actually located in the United States today, and the large majority of these plans, around 80%, is used for so-called enhanced oil recovery. So this means that the capture CO2 is pumped back into the oil fields where it helps to dissolve the oil, making it easier to recover. However, so when we look into the future and if we look at the capacity that we would need to meet the sustainable development scenarios, as James just showed, we actually need an insult capacity of 800 megatons a year in 2030, which would mean a times 20 comparatively to the capacity today. And if we can go to the next slide, James already briefly mentioned that one of the of the constraining factors currently for the update of CCUS is the cost. There's not one cost when we talk about CCUS and specifically looking at the carbon capture part of the process. The costs in greatly vary based on the initial source of CO2 and in particular how concentrated that one is. So if you look at the left-hand side for industrial processes with sort of like cure or highly concentrated CO2 streams, for example, in natural gas processing, the current costs range from 15 to $25 per ton CO2. And this is one of the reasons that for example, with the enhanced oil recovery, it actually financially already makes sense to install carbon capture because you increase the output of your field. However, if you look at the more dilute gas streams, so for example, in cement production, you see that there's already like a much higher range in costs from 40 to 120. And then when we think about direct air capture, which if we are gonna go to net zero, we do need in some way, the current cost range from 205 to $340 per ton. And part of the reason behind this is that these technologies are very much still in development and not applied on a very large scale basis today. On top of the carbon capture costs, it will also depend on the exact setup of the system, how much the final cost is, depending on transportation and storage costs. I'm just handing it over. Great. In order to better understand both current and proposed carbon capture usage and storage interventions, we wanna introduce the national system of innovation framework. And there are five levels for which we should design carbon capture and storage interventions working from the bottom up, there are society, policy, knowledge, industry and economy. Next slide, please. So today, carbon capture usage and storage has challenges at each of these levels, unfortunately. Again, starting with the bottom, there's societal skepticism around CCS technology and that's a huge barrier. There is a reason that we had a debate around geoengineering in our class. For policy, the biggest hurdle in the US is finding a way to gain bipartisan support for carbon capture usage and storage, both because it's an environmental technology and because it's a more decent one as well. On the knowledge front, the technology is still in development and costs are unfortunately quite high as Miran just pointed out. For industry, we need to properly align our incentives in order to encourage companies to actually change their practices and we don't have that today. And then finally, with the economy, there currently isn't effective economic policy around carbon capture usage and storage. And again, the nascency of the market is a little bit troubling to investors. So next we'll turn to some of the proposals that we have in terms of what could actually work instead. Thanks Emily. So real quickly, I'm actually gonna cover sort of a case study of the wind and solar sectors. And the reason why we're using that is, our view is that there are sort of existing regulatory proposals that are trying to spur innovation in the carbon capture space and primarily at least in the past few years they've been tax credit driven. And so on that point, we thought it'd be helpful to really understand the theory behind using the use of tax credits and seeing it, how they played out in the wind and solar sector and sort of what the sort of key takeaway from those are. And so looking at wind and solar on the left side, what you saw is a couple of different jump starts for wind. So wind actually, the initial PTC kicked off in the early nineties, but you didn't really see uptake until there was pretty substantial, consistent extension of the wind PTC standard, sorry, wind PTC credit in the mid 2000s. Solar was a similar thing. The initial solar credit actually started in 1978, but you really didn't see substantial adoption of solar into the late 2000s. The ultimate goal, I think with these tax credits is you're trying to effectively create the maturation of a market. So if you look on the right side, what you see is the cost of the unsubsidized cost of electricity as a result from solar and wind. And what you see is that the idea behind the tax credit is to spur innovation, to spur maturation of the market to ultimately drive the relevant economies of scale that allow for the technology to be adopted. Next slide, James. So how does this play into carbon capture? What we really want to take away here is that these incentives are and can be valuable, but the current incentives are targeted towards the wrong place. So as we showed earlier, what you saw is that carbon capture, the cost is very substantially between a number of different technologies. And to the extent that the current incentive does not actually reward innovation and simply rewards investing in the existing technologies that are already profitable, this actually not only prevents uptake but inhibits the development of new technologies. In particular, as you look to something like DAC, something like technologies that are currently more expensive that have not been well-innovated, we need to find a way to actually alter the existing regulatory standard and the existing incentives and the tax credits to make sure that these are the technologies being innovated, not the low-cost EOI recovery ones that are already economically profitable. And so from the investment side of things, we think there needs to be some modification of the tax side, sorry, of the existing tax credits to make sure that they target the specific early stage innovations. And on the regulatory side, we think creating sort of a demand market on analogous to RPS standards that existed for renewable energy, but for carbon consumption, sorry, but for carbon removal, what will absolutely be necessary. With that, I'll pass off to Josh, who will talk about the next few. Yeah, so I'll try to make this really quick. David already kind of handled what we were referring to as more of the economic incentive and supply side of things. I'm gonna focus more on how policy can create a demand because while the wind and solar case study is really useful for understanding some of the levers that we can be pulling in order to promote CCUS usage, it's fundamentally different in the sense that with renewable energy, you're still getting energy at the end of the day, whereas with carbon removal, you're paying for a service that you can't really kind of turn around and use for something else. And so looking at some recent policy initiatives, the landscape looks very different now than it did even a year ago, simply because of the change in administration. However, CCUS is one of the rare areas where there is some bipartisan consensus and support. And so what our proposed policy interventions for this space is really kind of capturing the purchasing power of both the federal government and state government through either agencies taking this into account of their overall climate budget and implementing a carbon disposal analogous RPS programs. Next slide, please. And I know we're at time for Q&A, so I'll just try to make this really quick. Essentially, our goal is to create a kind of NASA pure carbon removal marketplace that can then be extended from the government to private parties. And that this will take advantage of all five level of the scheme that Emily mentioned earlier. So it will lend legitimacy to CCUS issues through bipartisan support, support market development by guaranteeing a purchaser and spur innovation by making it economically feasible. Next slide, please. And we can just leave it here because this is kind of the main takeaway how our interventions will affect the market, both on an economic and industry scale and kind of capturing, no pun intended, the benefits of our intervention moving forward to create an environment in which we can use these technologies to actually create a new market to fight climate change. Yet another great presentation. Thank you all. Okay, great, see your hand. Thanks guys, that was super interesting. The idea of like building, of creating policies that are analogous to RPS specifically for CCUS, that's super interesting. I'm curious if there's potential to just like build those, to like build carbon removal carve outs into actual RPS themselves. So like rather than building out a whole new policy, I'm just curious if you guys like ran across that all as you were looking into this idea. Yeah, so we didn't really find a ton of that movement in the current literature. And but the reason why RPS as it currently stands probably isn't the greatest vehicle for carbon capture is that the kind of energy certificates that are being purchased by individuals subject to RPS, it doesn't really work in the same way for carbon removal generally. And so because at the end of the day, they're still getting energy and they're just more paying for the energy production services. So it's more of taking that model and twisting it to be kind of a carbon removal space and making sure that the government is kind of mandating a certain amount of carbon removal in industries. So then you can establish a similar kind of certificate standard for carbon capture and removal. Yeah, I think if you look at sort of the adoption of RPS standards, I think currently I think it's like 29 states of standards and 25 of them adopted in between 2000 and 2010. And so the ones that didn't have and haven't are thinking about this, I think they are sort of on the margin thinking about ways to sort of create this preliminary market at the state level, even if it's just via, for example, the California LCFS conceptual standard, but really it's going to be a state by state approach at the RPS for any sort of RPS mechanism. You could just, I mean, the federal government is debating a clean energy standard right now. And you could theoretically include removed tons as part of a clean energy standard as something with value. I mean, I think that the key is what you guys have been talking about, which is that there isn't a thing at the end of the day that you can sell right now. So if you need to find a way to have a thing at the end of the day, you can sell either as a credit or as to meet your standards that you've been set in whatever way. And that is really the rub right on this whole thing is that the reason Enhanced Oil Recovery works is because there's a thing at the end of the day you can sell, which is the oil. So I think that's a really important point. And I think, Kate, can I add on that? I think one thing is that, right, if you think of cap and trade and carbon credit markets that will be useful if you look at sort of like the left side of the cost spectrum that we talked about, however, you're still also dealing with the innovation that you need for direct air capture. And I think there we just need to get really creative to make sure that enough money flows there, right? And you could think of, I remember in Europe with biofuels at some point, you've got like a multiplier for certain types. And you could think of those kind of interventions as well when you combine carbon credit markets and spurring innovation in direct air capture. Miran, sorry, that's a really good point. And just to say 45Q is not great for things like R&D because it's a tax credit. So tax credits don't really work for that in the same way as direct R&D support. So it's probably a combination of things, early stage R&D and then later stage investments in things like tax credits. But yeah, it's a great point. Okay, I'm sorry, I'm gonna have to move us along and we've got our last group. Can you see my screen? Yes. Awesome, go for it. Should we kick off? Cool. Thanks everyone. So Kim, what, do you want me to kick off or are you gonna? Yeah, you're gonna go, yeah. I'm good, cool, go, go. I know you were on mute. Thank you for coming. This is, so we're exploring environment justice policy for the new US administration. In this presentation we're drawing on kind of global lessons from other countries and the European Union as well as national examples from here in California to potentially guide the way in which the Biden administration is thinking about environmental justice more generally. We go to the next slide. Perfect, so we've heard a lot about environmental justice. At its core, according to the EPA, it effectively means the fair treatment of people of, you know, our races, cultures and income. Crucially, and this is something I didn't quite appreciate in the past, it involves not just justice and the development of laws but in the implementation and enforcement of those laws. So the laws and paper could be, you know, they might seem just, but they might be enforced in very different ways and environmental justice should and theoretically span all of those dimensions. On the right side, we see that it's been, sorry, can we go back? Yeah, it's been a growing strand of the climate movement. More and more policy makers are thinking about environmental justice as they craft kind of green stimulus packages. There were a bunch of those packages as soon as the COVID pandemic hit. We're now in the phase where a lot of those are actually being implemented. And so today we're looking across countries and states, like I mentioned, you know, highlight some of the mechanisms that might guide the bio administrations approach. Okay, so in the US, low income people of color, women, minorities, indigenous people are overburdened communities and they are hit first and suffer the longest from pollution or climate change. Environmental racism is deeply rooted and is from the history of residential segregation. It is reported that African-Americans are 75% more likely to live near refineries. And this is relevant to high COVID mortality in African-Americans because air pollution exposure is linked to 8% increase in deaths from COVID. Also, as it is revealed in the recent Texas blackout, low income household lack resources to flee from or to rebound after extreme weather events caused from climate change. Still, these communities are underrepresented. Among 2057 environmental nonprofits in the US, 80% of steps and 85% of both members are white people. Next slide, please. So EJ movement began in 1980s when the black communities in North Carolina protest against bringing toxic soils to their communities and it became a nationwide movements. In response, EPA created EJ office in 1992 and President Clinton issued an executive order to identify negative environmental effects on minorities. However, nothing much has changed over decades. In 2021, President Biden prioritized EJ for the first time in the history of US. He issued an executive order to increase government accountability by creating supervisory council in the White House and increase enforcement by creating EJ office within the Department of Justice and empower communities by developing EJ screening tools or notification programs and provide economic opportunities by spending 40% of investment to disadvantaged communities. Sid, you're going. Perfect. So like I mentioned, governments across the world have been looking into EJ and trying to embed it into their recovery plans. Here, I'll just double click on three examples. There are many others, but these are kind of three big invisible examples of EJ across the world, especially over the last year. So the first one's the European Union, which as part of its overall, nearly half a trillion dollar COVID recovery package created a 17 and a half billion dollar Just Transition Fund. They've been talking about Just Transition for a while, but this was the first time it really was given shape across the block. A few themes stood out as we looked at that. One was the focus on re-skilling as people transition from older, more carbon intensive industries to new ones. There was language around fighting energy poverty and funding, the transition. And that was prompted by the Gilles Jean protest in France. The support for SMEs. And again, there was an investment thesis that focused on regions that are being left behind. You know, regions that have been dependent on fossil fuels and other industries. It's worth noting that it used to be bigger. The initial plans were 40 billion and they were scaled back. In Canada, Canada created a Just Transition Task Force that was a much narrower agreement. They were looking at the phase out of coal, which they do want to do at the federal level and across their regions and made a number of recommendations around employment support for people who work in the industry, pathways for retirement, because many of the workers in the industry are relatively old, and also diversification and research in the areas that are being quote unquote left behind. And then finally the UK's plans for a green industrial revolution, which is kind of Boris Johnson's new thing. I think, unlike the US, climate policy is more bipartisan and Dory's have tried to kind of recapture the natural on that front. They've taken a regional approach as well. So they're looking at carbon capture, battery tech, things like that in regions that are again, historically been left behind in the north of England, in Wales and in Scotland. Korea, next slide. And I'm not going to bore you with the details, but the big takeaways were number one, that many of these approaches are largely regional. So they prioritized historically undisturbed areas. But we actually saw very few examples that explicitly prioritized racial justice. To be fair, that is probably a bigger concern in the US than other places given the history and the context in this country. But that was just something to note as we looked across the world. And the other thing to note is the plans often lack detail on metrics and measurement. When I was looking across to some of the other presentations, I was slightly envious. I think EJ has historically been talked about in kind of loose and fluffy terms. There are very few metrics and measurements always lacking when some of these policies are put into place. It's just worth noting. And then finally, backsliding is a risk, you know? EU scale back ambition, even in the space of six months, the UK has been persistently delaying its Northern Powerhouse project, which began in around 2012, 2013. It's been a while. So I think there are some cautionary tales here, but also signs of hope and inspiration as we look across the world. Great. So as we look beyond just the global side, taking it a little bit closer to home, the environmental justice policies that California has implemented are also very interesting. So first off, why do we care about California besides the fact that we live here? So California obviously leads in terms of policy for the United States in a lot of ways. So recently with the minimum wage, with net neutrality, with having women on boards for different corporations, in a lot of ways, the policies that California implements often is copied and modeled after nationally and in other states. So how California responds is very much a trendsetter in some ways. So as we look at that, oops, can we go back to the last slide? So California has had a long history of environmental justice. So obviously with Native American policies back in the early 1700s, segregation against immigrants in black communities in the 1800s and Hispanic farm workers recently. And so recently in 2016, they passed a Senate Bill 1000, which was a pretty big deal. What that essentially did was it required local governments as they started implementing and drafting their general plans to make sure that disadvantaged communities were outlined and addressed from the get-go. So the California EPA, they have environmental justice program, they have environmental justice task force, and they also have this thing called the CalEnviroScreen, which is a dashboard that you can see right here, which identifies communities that are disproportionately impacted or vulnerable to environmental pollution. So this helps a lot in being transparent. So the next slide, there's a little bit more about some of the major laws that have passed recently. So I'm not gonna go into details on this one, but many of them really just focus on how, which areas are gonna be most vulnerable and which areas can be most helped. So for example, the disadvantaged community benefits, 25% of state cap and trade revenues will specifically go towards projects that benefit disadvantaged communities. So that's one way that they're practically taking the lead on that. All right, next slide. So as we started thinking about how we could use the lessons that we've learned from both the UK, the European Union, California to draft potential recommendations for providing administration, we wanted to think of it in two different ways. We wanted to not just mitigate past harm but also mitigate future harm. So one idea that we were talking about is right now with the Congressional Budget Office, whenever laws are being drafted and passed within Congress, they get the CBO to score it, score it based on how much funding it requires, whether it's revenue neutral, so on and so forth. And having an independent office, it's very similar to CBO in that sense to address the environmental justice impacts and any bills or policies that are being drafted will make a huge difference. Another thing that we considered is being able to help crowdsource data complaints. So right now with the CFPB, with financial institutions, the EOC, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for jobs, we'd have something similar for environmental justice and being transparent about that will help people all across the nation to see where trends are aligned. And of course, we wanted to be able to boost legal aid for these communities since many of them currently lack the resources to fight for themselves. Another thing that we're looking to is expanding superfund designations. Right now it requires quite a bit of requirements to achieve superfund designation status. So expanding it so that this would encompass a wider range of sites and then increase funding to the sites. Next slide, please. Two other things that we also mentioned is setting targets for minority representation within environmental policymaking. Of course, as we mentioned in the previous slide that Kyeonghye Kleeonghwa mentioned, it's very much not represented right now. So setting these targets and making sure that this target is the goal that we keep striving towards will make a huge difference for these communities. And finally, being able to plan in advance. So this goes towards mitigating future disasters and future harm. Of course, as climate change happens, cities such as New Orleans, Miami, so on and so forth are gonna be disproportionately affected by climate change. And often within these cities, it's the lower income neighborhoods that are most vulnerable. So how can we support a retreat from these high-risk cities and regions? Is it providing more funding for them? Is it helping them these more vulnerable populations retreat and plan for climate migration earlier, so on and so forth? So these are just some of the recommendations that we explored. Awesome, friends. I know we're in the last stretch, so I'm gonna try and keep this quick as I navigate my dual screens here. So thank you for bearing with me. Basically, the outcomes for any UJ program right is gonna be very similar. The outcomes for any large green infrastructure program or any large economic policy that you have tied to this. The difference is we're just looking at how much of these benefits are actually achieved by these disadvantaged communities. So a lot of the outcomes listed here, you can see a lot of the interventions or outcomes tied to this are probably similar to other green policies that you've seen. We've just specified how much of these benefits are actually going to these communities in general. Unintended effects, I think Sid mentioned this briefly. A lot of the talk around EJ can feel very fluffy or it can feel very macro. And what defines a disadvantaged community can be different community to community. So it might feel like we're making a lot of impact in a particular region, but when you look at that community as a whole, it might actually feel like we're not making any impact at all. So that's something to keep in mind when we're thinking about EJ policies and the specific outcomes. Key challenges, obviously all of this is dependent on data and actually understanding what issues are community to community. So again, I know Alvin briefly touched on this from a California standpoint. The Biden administration I know has spoken about this. There's tons of screening tools and kind of mechanisms being developed to understand how we can collect data on these issues, but we need to just continuously be aware and understand if these tools are actually collecting the right data and using the right attributes to do so. Existing efforts, again, we spent half of this presentation telling you about things that have already been done or at least policies that have been put on paper. And maybe the debate or the argument that we should be having is how much of those policies have actually translated into action. And time will tell. I think the EJ efforts by the Biden administration at least have been, they were just announced a couple of months ago and granted we know policymakers work on those things the years in advance, but it'll be interesting to see how much of what we've already stated in this presentation has already been thought of or frankly in the works. Conclusion, we talked a lot about lots of examples of global and national policy. California, states like California can be a guidepost. I think the most important thing since for the last presentation, I can say this, all the remaining groups before us presented some fantastic interventions and really collected some great thoughts on what we can do to mitigate climate change. I think the intent of our group in this presentation is really just to remind us that to ensure that we're putting in the right checks and balances within our systems to ensure that the benefits that we're getting from all those interventions are actually equitably reached and attained by all people and not just some. So I will cede my stage now and thank you so much. Wow, really well done. And Vina, way to tie it all together to the presentations and how it relates to yours. Kate and I have been chatting back and forth just marveling at how well done all of these presentations have been and whether or not we can take any credit as your instructors or if it's just all of you, but well done, Bravo. So we've got some time for a few questions. I don't see any hands up yet. You wanna brave the last Q and A and again, good job to this and go and last that's not easy to do. Rachel. Yeah, thank you so much for this. This was wonderful. I'm curious if it's even been decided or if you have an idea about how much diverse representation there is on things like the climate justice like task force within DOJ or some of the like White House oversight programs that Biden's implementing. I can take a stab at that and then let others chime in. I personally haven't seen much on that topic in terms of like who's, I think you've seen like who's filling those like key oversight roles. I do think, I mean, this is a personal reflection and related to this but not, but I do think it's awesome that there's someone of indigenous descent that's gonna lead the Department of Interior. I think that's a really big sign and like a good step forward in this movement. So not necessarily tied to that specific agency you're talking about but I think a good signal. Yeah, I read an article criticizing white environmentalism in the US which means the agency are created white male and the agencies and NGOs are dominated by white people in general. So, but I didn't get the exact ratio people of color and white people. Maya, last question for our evening. That is some pressure. I was struck Sid by your slides talking about comparisons to global policy and what's been done and it felt like a lot of it was focused more on communities that were going to be impacted by the transition as opposed to historically marginalized communities. And so I was just wondering if you guys could talk about maybe that tension as you see it a little bit or how you think about wrapping that group into the EJ movement. Totally. I think the one thing to note on that front is some of these communities have already been hit pretty hard over the last say 40, 50 years. I think the context is pretty is different in Europe versus here where deindustrialization has actually happened much quicker than ours here. And many of the regions we're talking about are in many ways, it's been happening for a while is sort of what I'm getting at. And there is an element of we're gonna correct ongoing injustices as the transition happens but to a large degree, the transition is well underway. And so I think some of the same aims exist in both places. I think the US is very unique, right? It's got a racial history you reckon with as well as very specific injustices that are tied to racism and, you know social commemoration, ultimately each country is very different. But yeah, I think there's a bit of both going on and both here in other countries. I'm sorry, Alicia, I have to say something in this because we're spending a bunch of time thinking about it in California which is that one of the challenges, very specific policy challenges on this is that, you know, the history of redlining has led to a number of communities of color being in industrial areas of US in particular but also other countries. The US just has an enormous amount of space. So our zoning policies and land use policies are really different than a lot of other countries but that's challenging because as we're thinking about transition approaches like CCS from the other presentations or food production or whatever the thing we're thinking about we're still need industrial land to do those. And so there's a real tension of like do you do more industry in the places that already had industry when there's people living next to industry who are disproportionately affected by industry. So there's a whole EJ movement to get rid of industry period which is an interesting challenge when it comes to thinking about what transition looks like what kind of jobs we're gonna move into and how we're gonna actually meet all these goals that we're talking about. So I just think the land use implications of all this in the US in particular are really important because our structural racism plays out through land use much more than it does in a lot of other places. And so you kind of have to pay attention to that. Dave, thank you everyone. What an incredible marathon of presentations, great questions I put in the chat again the link to our spatial event. If that's what you can call it we will be there at 7.15 with cocktails and welcoming you by the fireplace here. And please do stay in touch also please do fill out the evaluations. I'm sorry we didn't have a chance to do it in class we didn't have them last week and this week we had a full agenda. So it's in access we really appreciate your feedback and don't be strangers, hope we'll see you soon but also as the quarter and the years progress. Kate, did you wanna close out anything? All right, trying to get off mute. Yeah, thank you. This was just really phenomenal engagement in class phenomenal presentations you guys have been I'm gonna just say my favorite class so far of the three years I've been co-teaching this really fantastic. And I have learned so much from all of you and all kinds of these things I'm gonna take back to policy in practice. So thank you everybody really just so impressed and so just so glad to know that this next generation of leaders is rising up and gonna take over companies and law firms and policy decision making because you guys are amazing. So thank you for everything.