 let's begin. Welcome everybody, the people in the room and the people online. Welcome to this open meeting of the Geographical Sciences Committee. I'm Carol Harden. I chair the committee. Today we have the opportunity to consider the effects of energy transition on opportunities in rural America. So the way this is going to work is we'll start off with just a few introductions and I'll make just a couple comments to kind of set the stage for all this. And then we'll have three speakers. The first two are here in the room with us. And then Dr. Julia Haggerty and Dr. Betsy Taylor. After their presentations we'll take a short break and then we'll have a presentation. We'll reconvene for presentation by Dr. Dostin Mulvaney, who will be speaking to us at 3 o'clock Eastern time from San Jose, California. After each presentation we'll have a few moments for questions and answers. And then we'll have a longer session for discussion at the end of the afternoon and we plan to end the whole open session by 4.30. So that's the overall picture. I'd like to begin with some introductions and we'll start with the people in the room and I ask you to when you do speak just hit the go button on your microphone so that people offline, online can hear you. And what do we need to know? Name? Institution? That's probably good enough. So I'm Carol Hardin. I'm a professor emerita of the University of Tennessee, although I now reside in the state of Vermont. My name is Jacqueline Vajunek. I'm a program officer for geography and spatial sciences at NSF. Okay, I was pushing the sign that says push to talk. I'm Betsy Taylor. I'm executive director of the livelihoods knowledge exchange network. I'm Julia Haggerty. I'm at Montana State University. I'm Nancy Jackson. I'm at New Jersey Institute of Technology. Boudu Haddi, Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Karlie Brody with the National Academies. Elizabeth Aida with the National Academies. Bill Selecki, City University of New York Hunter College. Marilyn Brown, I'm a regents professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Glenn McDonald from UCLA. Deb Glick from National Academies. And then we have just a few people with us online today. I wonder if we could ask you to just say your name and if you're affiliated with an institution or the place where you are at the moment. I think we have a few others. Hi, my name is Kristin Smith. I'm at Montana State University. Okay. Well, welcome to everybody. Whether or not you were able to introduce yourself, I think we'll go ahead and move forward. I'd like to give you just a little bit of context for this meeting. The mission of our geographical sciences committee, which is a standing committee here at the National Academies. Our mission is to serve the nation. And one way we do this is to convene meetings such as this one on topics that we think are really important to the country's future. One of the purposes of this meeting is to educate ourselves. But beyond that, what we really want to do here today is to consider what is and what is not well understood about the effects of the current energy transmission on opportunities for rural America. We see this topic as being inherently geographic as well as interdisciplinary. And in the past few years, our committee has spent a lot of time considering questions that primarily relate to urban areas. So we really wanted to turn our attention to rural America. Plus, we understand that our cities wouldn't exist without the rest of the country. We need food, fiber, fuel, water, ecosystem services, raw materials. I mean, we basically need all of our rural America and we need to make sure that the opportunities are there for rural America. We see an energy transition at play. We see a real move toward solar and wind power, toward battery storage. And in many places, it's really becoming a reality and we expect this transformation to become even more dramatic in the next decade. For one thing, the economics of the energy transition, the economics of it are changing and the cost of renewable energy is really on the decline. And this goes, this isn't political. Sometimes we worry about political differences between rural and urban places. But as you can see on this map, it has red states, red parts of states and blue parts of states. The blue ones are congressional districts held by the Democrats in the 116th, the current Congress, and the red, of course, are Republicans. And these are all districts with online wind projects and wind related manufacturing facilities. So we're not only seeing this move toward wind energy in places that we might think of as very progressively politically blue. We're seeing this change, this transition going on really across the country. Some of the predicted changes are really quite dramatic. And to use coal as an example, just last week, an online writer for Forbes noted that six years from now, most coal plants in the United States are expected to cost more to operate than the cost of building replacement solar and wind within 35 miles of the plant itself. And so the map that shows up here actually toggles back and forth between 2018 and 2025. But the real picture is that the reds are more than 25% less cost for renewables. And then of course, it grades into the blues and the dark. So you can see that there's a definite geography to this. And it is in every place in the country where renewables are going to be costing a lot less according to this projection. But there is a very definite geography to it. So we're seeing the energy transition happening. And there are a lot of drivers for that. Certainly we're worried about public health. And we're worried about the fact that our energy choices have just tremendous consequences for the whole earth planetary system. This is the last map that I have to show you. And this is a map from the climate communication group at Yale. That is the result of a survey of the estimated percentage of adults who think that global warming is happening. And as you can see, we're now at a point where pretty much more than half the population across the country is seeing is ready to say yes, we think that we think this is happening. And so this is of course, one of the drivers for the energy transition. Also, now to guide our discussion today, the committee, as we thought about this, posed a set of four questions. I'm going to put these up now, and maybe we'll refer back to these later. The first one is just what types of changes related to the energy transition have already been observed in rural areas? Where are we now? What are we seeing? The second question is, what are the ripple effects of these changes to rural communities and states? And then this is really a big question for us, the open ended one. What new opportunities in rural areas are expected to be associated with this transition? So what is the future? What what could the future hold in the name in the realm of opportunity? And then because we're geographers, we've asked what new geographic patterns, for instance, economic activity, human migration, environmental cost and benefits are emerging or are expected to emerge as a result of the energy transition. So with those, I think I've given you enough background that we should just jump right in to our hearing from our speakers today. Our first speaker will be Dr. Julia Haggerty. She's a member of the Department of Earth Sciences at Montana State University. And she also has a faculty appointment in the Montana Institute on Ecosystems. She leads work on problems of community resilience, energy impacts and rural land use change. And she currently directs a multi institutional research project called escaping the resource curse, which is funded by the US Department of Agriculture. In addition, she co directs energy impacts.org, which is an NSF funded research coordination network focused on social science, research on energy development. She holds a BA from Colorado College and a PhD, not in geography, but in history, from the University of Colorado at Boulder. She was a postdoc at the Center for the Study of Agriculture and the Environment at the University of Otago for two years. I guess we're all geographers, we all know that Otago was in New Zealand. And then for the following five years work as a policy analyst for the regional nonprofit research group, Headwaters Economics based in Bozeman, Montana. She is a member of the American Association of Geographers, the AAG, and she has served as Secretary of the AAG's Environment and Energy Specialty Group and as a member of the Board of Directors for the Rural Geography Specialty Group. This year she received the Professional Geographer Award from the Energy and Environment Specialty Group. Congratulations, Julia. She's no stranger to the academies either and since 2015 she served as a member of the Roundtable on unconventional oil and gas here. The title of her presentation is energy transitions in, oh, it changed, the third West transition, the big picture on small places. So please tell me welcome Dr. Haggerty. Are we testing? Happy? Yeah, thank you. It was a squeak? Yeah. Okay. So good afternoon and greetings from the Rockies. It was 20 degrees when I woke up yesterday. So it's a pleasure to be here. But it's also an honor. So thank you so much for the invitation. See, oh, and before I even to my prepared comments, I will note one thing that Dr. Hardin didn't observe, which is in the mandate for this committee discussion. It did include transitions associated with unconventional hydrocarbon production. So don't be surprised when you hear about that in my talk. So the energy transition isn't exclusively a rural phenomenon, but it has outsized effects in rural areas. And what I've done is organized my comments to focus on three issues that have emerged as priorities for geographic research and scholarship. And this is just based on my experience as a resource geographer working in the American West. And these three issues are first, understanding the feedbacks and linkages between agricultural and energy system change, coordinating research in energy landscapes to improve its intellectual merit, and to improve broader impacts of that work. And finally, addressing the gap in transition planning in rural America, including doing what I call getting real about legacy issues. So to make these priorities, I want to first provide just a quick primer on the economic geography of the rural West. And then I'll turn to recent and ongoing research in both oil and gas and coal communities. This is necessarily kind of headlines and highlights. And I brought a lot of B slides in case we want to follow up in Q&A. So starting with economic geography. Energy transition, as you know, is playing out in a highly uneven economic landscape with opportunities increasingly concentrated in just a few urban areas in this country. So this is a post industrial economy that has significant challenges for isolated remote areas. I call these places the third West, which is an adaptation of the economist Ray Rasker's Three West concept that asks us to rethink what it means to be rural. So rather than being a function of population density, the Three West concept emphasizes access to markets, including via airports. So the Three West really are three categories of Western counties that perform differently in terms of social and economic metrics. There are the metropolitan counties where the majority of economic activity happens, counties that are connected to them through transportation networks, which include airports. And then finally, this third category of isolated counties. So, Jennifer's will know that this third area constitutes a formal economic region, and also overlaps with our academic and popular notions of the rural West. It's characterized by open spaces, landscapes of extraction and production has very low population densities. And this data visualization from Headwaters Economics shows the third West counties in gray, and shows that compared to metro and connected counties, these remote counties are less able to capture high wage service job, have lower average earnings per job, and greater income volatility. Demographically, the region suffers from out migration and aging population and typically lower levels of educational attainment. I'm looking at Deb and Carly. So the social and economic effects of being isolated from growing economic sectors are compounded by ongoing trends of mechanization in the primary sectors, and the effects of long time dependence on volatile commodity markets. Another important characteristic of this region is what the rural sociologist Carl Crenzel called the social cost of space. The social cost of space describes the confounding effects of distance and low population density on the cost of providing social and governmental services. From doctors to snow plows, there's simply more time and distance involved in providing services and fewer people to bear the cost. In the third West and other rural parts of America, research documents four times fewer adults for a reformal volunteer role than an urban and suburban areas. There's not fewer nonprofits doing the work of providing services. There's just fewer people to staff those positions. Outdated fiscal policy also tends to define these geographies. Tax and expenditure limits adopted during the tax revolt at both the state and the local level mean that counties often can't grow themselves out of a fiscal crisis. And that decades after extracting valuable natural resources or generating electricity for remote cities, they have little to no public funds on hand to assist with transition. So all these factors are important when we think about community capacity to respond to economic and environmental change. And there are other changes on the table as well. The impacts of climate change are one. But industrial development is also changing. Where traditional industrial development asked rural people to live and work with extraction or industrial production in exchange for decent wages and long term employment. Today's industrial projects tend to promise fewer local jobs for a shorter amount of time, suggesting that the value proposition for these projects is largely about public revenue, which as I suggested, rural counties often have a really difficult time capturing. So let me shift now to some research highlights. Starting with energy and agriculture. So Kristen Smith is on the phone, provided this picture from her dissertation research. When farming dominates the rural landscape, new energy development is going to run into existing agricultural land use. So as in the case of these five semi trucks that are hauling water to a frack job near this North Dakota wheat farm. This expanding energy agriculture overlay has prompted important research about resource competition in these sectors about environmental outcomes, as well as work into how agricultural operators and communities experience and perceive energy development. In this study of land use effects of oil and gas development, we asked estimated loss provisioning ecosystem services in the Great Plains across North America as a function of new oil and gas wells that were constructed between 2000 and 2012. The results document a loss to energy sprawl of the equivalent of 5 million animal unit months of forage or 120 million bushels of wheat. We know that ongoing work by geoscientists is continuing to refine how we understand energy and water conflicts. And together these kinds of studies tend to depict fossil fuel and energy development as it odds. However, in our work in Western oil and gas landscape, we find a more complicated picture. Landowners more commonly describe unconventional oil and gas less as a zero sum game and more as a balancing act. And this is even the case for landowners who don't stand to directly benefit personally from energy development. Our research is finding that in addition to the value that rural stakeholders put on broader benefits to their communities, at both the farm and the regional scale, they see the oil and gas boom as an opportunity to expand hard infrastructure that they understand to be critical to their long term economic viability, especially roads and water delivery systems. This massive expansion of infrastructure, which is typically overlooked in approaches to the energy agriculture nexus, presents real questions about whether an already marginal land use system, we're talking about farming in the arid west, is made more resilient or more rigid, both in socioeconomic and social ecological terms. So this I submit is a critical area for future research and just as a plug for qualitative research, both of these dissertation projects that you see here have revealed this new area through slow, careful, qualitative research. Our research on planning efforts by oil and gas communities documents a surge of organizing and innovation in these places. Local groups share information, they plan impact mitigation, they otherwise respond to the impact of an energy boom. These are all trends that demonstrate a huge amount of rural community resilience. But at the same time their efforts tend to be reactive. They're spending a huge amount of social capital and energy on filling a regulatory gap that exists with respect to impact assessment and mitigation. And all these activities are a reminder that in our world is developed governance, industrial development exploits a vast amount of uncompensated volunteer labor. So these are ad hoc governance efforts to address energy impacts that aren't a substitute for robust impact assessment for planning. And they especially fall short when it comes to addressing legacy concerns. The challenges of local planning become even more evident when we switch to thinking about the coal transition. So here you see coal strip, which is a mine mouth power plant built in a remote spot in eastern Montana. It went online in the 1980s. And it was built to deliver electricity to Seattle and Portland, which if you're not familiar with the geography right is hundreds of miles away. And those markets are now seeking to actively decarbonize their electricity mix. But that's not actually why these two older units of coal strips for generating units will schedule will close in three years. These units are closing to resolve a lawsuit about non-compliance with the mercury and nantoxic standards. And the future of these other two stacks is very much in question right now. So coal strips situation embodied many of the complexities of the coal transition in the west. This is a facility just at the generating scale that has multiple plant owners who are in multiple jurisdictions subject to a diverse set of accountability structures with respect to decommissioning. The mine company recently declared bankruptcy and so now the mine is being held by the holding company. And together these ownership dynamics create an overlapping but disintegrated decision-making space about decommissioning and reclamation. And these are spaces that rural communities are typically poorly prepared to negotiate. Coal strip is a relatively empowered company town. It has unionized workers at the mine and at the plant. It's surrounded by relatively disempowered Native American nations who are nonetheless greatly influenced by developments in the coal economy. And as you can see here there's a vast existing infrastructure. There is in addition to the plants in the mine a water pipeline that brings water from the Yellowstone River hundreds of miles away and transmission lines that has been built. Railroad a railroad leg and a pretty significant existing environmental legacy. So we have a leaking coal ash pond problem here as well as real questions about what the future looks like. So we're studying how local and state entities are responding to the coal transition in the West and I want to share a little bit about that. But first I want to just think about the coal transition as a geographic phenomenon at the national scale. So as you know the dissolution of the U.S. generating fleet coal generating fleet happening it's accelerating. Here we show what we think is the most up-to-date timeline of coal generating capacity going out into the future. So here we show green these are all coal additions over time in gray we show retirements here we are in the present and this is what we know is happening in the future. And I just want to remind the committee that this is not wholly what we would call a clean energy transition. So we add in this chart natural gas additions in bright blue that's a lot of natural gas capacity that we've added and it raises some pretty serious questions about past dependency in our electricity system. But let's think about this as a spatial issue and as a problem for planning. The coal transition clearly affects both mines and plants but we haven't had a research or a policy space that really connects those developments in an effective way to date. So we're just starting to do this and we're doing it in collaboration with colleagues at Headwaters Economics and the University of Wyoming. And what we find when we aggregate these data sets and it's a pretty complicated set of data connections we have to make is that while every nine in ten megawatts of power that's scheduled to retire at a power plant is in a metropolitan or connected place seven in every ten tons of coal that the jeopardy from these plant closures is in a remote and rural place. So that's actually not that surprising if you know that 40 percent of the nation's coal is mined in a single county in Wyoming. But we're all we're really interested in this as a planning problem. So we've asked about the places where plant and mine closures coincide to make this really complex set of planning challenges. So here we map a very early assessment of the complexity of the closure of the decommissioning planning space. Every dot you see here is a county that hosts a mine or a power plant or both. Those that are at risk of losing both a generating station and a mine are shown in red and those that show a risk of losing either a mine or a plant even in partial amounts are shown in yellow and green dots are what we call safe for now. So in the western portion of the map you can see that the third west and the energy transition really begin to line up. We consider this as a planning and cumulative impact assessment challenges and as I said are interested in governance responses. In this paper we synthesize literature from community resilience, economic geography, and planning scholarships to create a framework for assessing transition planning and then we apply that to 10 ongoing plant closures in the west. What we learned from this work is that in rural geographies anticipating the loss of a plant planning for transition ranges from non-existent to fairly inadequate. The closure of two of coal strips generating units for example has produced two planning documents one by the coal industry that focuses on rolling back regulation and another by the local economic development coalition that focuses on attracting replacement heavy industries such as tire burning facilities. So coal strips existing plans like the majority of emerging planning processes really struggle to address the four elements that we see as critical to robust transition planning. You need to have a plan to replace lost revenue. You need to plan for environmental reclamation and try to build that into local economic opportunities. Planning needs to be realistic about economic geography and what opportunities really exist and it's important for planning processes to reflect an outlook that is forward looking rather than backward looking. So thinking about this kind of planning problem it's easy to blame the lack of a mandate and the loss of federal assistance for transition planning but the reality I would argue is that there's really a series of conditions that converge to produce what I call the transition planning policy gap. So this diagram suggests that this policy gap and planning gap occurs when local limits on capacity meet a set of exogenous barriers to transition planning and the result is in the middle of communities that really has no way to chart its course forward and I use this diagram also to make some suggestions for what we as geographers might consider doing. So first I would encourage us to think about the ways we can respond to the local factors that are shown here on the left. Despite high levels of social capital and community resilience resource dependent communities often suffer from a lack of planning capacity. A tendency toward what my favorite environmental sociologist Bill Friedmird would call addictive economic decisions and hugely overtaxed social systems. So here's an excellent opportunity for service learning at local universities and colleges as well as professional training programs to support participatory planning impact modeling and assessment and to fill community capacity gaps. As the case of the diverse stakeholder landscape of culture illustrates support for local planning also has to be integrated at the regional scale. So geographers I would argue really need to work to think about what the most creative and effective forms that regional coordination in impact assessment and mitigation might take. As a quick detour I'll note that there is a risk that uncoordinated research creates unwanted costs in communities and actually skews our research findings. So we have a USDA funded inquiry into the topic of research fatigue in energy communities and it's produced a meta-analysis of all of the shale research that has been conducted between 2000 and 2018 and all the times that social scientists have gone out to collect data in energy communities. And there appears to be a correlation between the number of universities in an area and the amount of research that goes on. So we're lucky that the National Science Foundation supports our energy impact research coordination network. But going back to Cole, making the case for regional coordination. This is something we've done before. We've done rapid and serious engaged research regional scale before. The Cole infrastructure which you can see on this map in the left in the west is for the most part relatively new and it was built in a moment of unprecedented coordination. So the scope of the 1971 north-central power study hundreds of coal mines and power plants across the northern Great Plains and Pacific Northwest galvanized armies of scholars and researchers to study potential impacts. So many of my senior colleagues at Montana State were active in those assessments. The data they produced were important to policymakers, especially the western governors who collaborated to insist that the new coal infrastructure came with a social contract about its long-term impact. And if you're familiar with SMACRA we really have SMACRA because of this level of coordination. I think it goes without saying that this social contract is one that's largely been abandoned at this point in time. Indeed anyone who digs into local coal transition planning finds they face an enormously complex set of external forces shown here on the right. So these involve not only the national political atmosphere which you can see down here, but also importantly the private corporations in the regulatory environment in which they operate. Coal mining companies are in the midst of a cycle of bankruptcy proceedings that allow organizations like Arch Coal or Peabody to shed debt in the order of billions of dollars. In the influence of corporate structure and corporate regulation on how social impacts and long-term environmental challenges and legacy risk is addressed is a vital research gap. So I submit here is the work for an upcoming generation of critical resource geographers. So to summarize I advocate for a few priorities for geographic scholarship. This is not to the exclusion of many other important trajectories but just what I know from my own experience. So these priorities are continuing to consider the feedback between agriculture and energy, coordinating research and doing better engagement, and jumping into the transition planning policy gap. So thanks for your attention so far. I'm very grateful to the collaborators and funders that make this work possible. I'm happy to take any questions and dig into details that you might find interesting now. Who has a question? Well I'll begin. You showed us a pretty dramatic view of this coal plant that is in transition of some sort and it looked like there was a community right adjacent to it. So what is your guess if the whole place were to shut down what is your guess of what would happen to that community? Would it completely die? Would everybody go somewhere else? Well let's just remember that. So here's coal strip. It was a planned community. They have won some awards for the community planning that was implemented in this community. I want to just remind you that it is in a landscape of indigenous nations with people who are not going anywhere. What I've heard from people that I know in coal strip is that many of the mine and plant workers who are near retirement age will either stay and retire in the community or likely are in a position to migrate out. I think this is a place where one of the things we consider in our transition policy analysis is whether sort of planning for population shrinkage is an important planning enterprise. So what happens to this community in the long term it's really hard to say I would expect significant out migration but there is this huge infrastructure that is built in this place. While we're on that slide, Julia, what kind of covers are on that facility and to what extent has that local community been subject to deleterious air pollution? So I'm not an expert in the technology of scrubbers but I will say that there's an interesting story here which is that the northern Cheyenne reservation when coal strip was being proposed at this moment of great coordination was very opposed to the construction of this power plant. This is in the late 1970s and so insisted on particularly in the second two stacks what we were then the sort of state-of-the-art scrubbers with respect to removing but these two older stacks aren't compliant and it's not cost effective to retrofit them for mercury and air toxic. The big environmental issue that most people are paying attention to is that there has been significant seepage of these ash ponds to the extent that many of the domestic wells in this town are threatened and it's a difficult topic to study because as part of the legal settlement all of the homeowners are bound by non-disclosure agreements and we're just in the process in the state of just now finalizing and approving the plans for addressing that coal seepage issue but that local air pollution is not an issue that has been on the radar right now. I'm sure the pollution is going somewhere. I'm just looking at that photograph I'm astounded that that's planned community was put so close to four large coal burning plant units. Very very interesting talk. It's just a question about you know about that community. One of the things I've been been looking at and some people some of my students have been asking similar questions about sort of legacies of sort of past change right and so how much of that remains and you know by no means an expert on the question but you know in other rural areas I'm more familiar with this always been at some level there's been cycles of boom and busts right and you kind of highlighted some of those exogenous factors so I guess the question you know given the stresses facing these types of communities is there kind of a legacy maybe a real simple level who are those folks and but more importantly you know what's the legacy of boom and bust and how are they sort of interpreting what's going on you know as part is that part of a series of of boom and bust processes that they you know maybe their grandparents or parents experienced and and how are they sort of thinking about is there opportunities for you know we're talking about transitions are they thinking about like you know carol mentioned relocation but are they also thinking about reimagining you know what the town could be I guess there's you know a lot of little pieces of that question but I apologize for that question I'm sure you'll hear a lot more about this in Betty's talk so I would make two distinctions the coal many of these coal towns in the west particularly in the powder river basin were constructed in the 70s so we're not really talking about multiple generations of that experience oil and gas communities on the other hand and then and since that time for the most part coal production was really quite steady until very recently so I wouldn't think of those places coal strip was complicated coal strip was a coal export community during before the railroads switched to diesel but there are not many people in coal strip that you know were present from the 1950s when the dieselization affected the railroads until the power plants were built so most of these people who are living there now came during the 70s and 80s and more recently but oil and gas communities show real sensitivity to boom and bust cycles one of things they tend to be is very fiscally conservative in response to that and they they face kind of like an impossible conundrum when it comes to making investments in local infrastructure and thinking about how to move forward but we have we do know some really interesting examples of communities like i said who are trying to use moments of windfall to make investments that they think will benefit them in the long term but they face a pretty challenging circumstance with respect to doing that kind of if i answered your question you did a quick follow-up i mean are these communities and you gave a great national picture as well about i mean is there any kind of connectivity between these communities that's a great question so i as i said i'm a huge advocate for doing regional coordination it's just building in the west so we've worked with the just transition fund and they're really interested in thinking about how to tackle this problem in the west because you can see that it's like a really spread out landscape and it doesn't necessarily have that kind of close regional identity that you might see in Appalachia but nonetheless there are some efforts to bring people together in the national association of counties is trying to do some organizing to support coal communities you think it's an open question kind of what's going to work best but i will say that the idea that we don't have regional coordination in the powder river basin where 40 percent of our coal comes from much of which is at risk that's that's a real problem so one of the transition opportunities that tva has taken advantage of is the conversion of coal plants to solar farms serving server farms you know so helping to bring better better fiber optics into rural areas at the same time giving some hope of additional employment there's never as many jobs as the coal plant offered but we saw introduced introduced by carol before your talk a statistic that indicated that we i think you've showed that we now have are facing a situation where it's cheaper to replace a coal plant that's already operating with in many cases with solar so i assume that there is some discussion along these lines to try to do the break even analysis how many years would it take to break even with that investment and have you been privy to any of those results so what what you'll just want to remember two things i would say about that so here's colster about here it has five different utilities that would be doing those irp evaluations to think about what kinds of investments they want to make an infrastructure certainly there is a lot of beneficial transmission access that opens up so if you this hasn't happened in oregon and washington yet but as you know california now requires all of their um their renewable generation to be generated within the state as part of new proceeding so there's a real question about what the market is for remote sort of renewable assets and you'll hear from justin like questions about whether or not that really even makes sense but then i would say as a person who's interested in economic geography these places don't generate revenue and they don't generate jobs so that the sort of they can generate revenue for individual landowners but typically they are not a solution for a place like coal strips in terms of helping that economy stay whole and one last point i would make about that is that in addition to the broken fiscal policies that we have in the case of renewables it gets worse because most states offer big tax incentives associated with renewables so in montana it's basically a penny on a dollar if you're a rural community that's going to have renewable resources in terms of revenue versus the community that's going to have fossil fuel resources so a state level policy that has real implications for your tolerance and interest in hosting these facilities is a big issue and then just this question that i heard most compellingly by a just transition advocate who just asked you know to what extent is ownership in the solar industry any different than ownership in the coal industry and how can we make sure that we keep this kind of question of being colonized at the top of our mind when we make decisions about energy transition. Elizabeth has been patiently waiting. One last question. Julie i wondered if you could speak toward we know in North Dakota from some colleagues who work there that they have have tried to take the approach of putting away funds for this future rainy day and to some degree i think they've been successful in at least putting some of the money away and it's probably too early to tell because they haven't come to that stage where the industry is actually on decline. I wonder if you could comment on anything that you've seen or or the research that you've done that that indicates that that model could be successful and kind of softening this boom bust situation or if or if there's so many factors at play that this pot of money waiting there is not going to you know not going to be the panacea if you could comment on that if we know anything now that could make us more wise. So you definitely want to have a legacy fund right you want to be Norway not West Virginia but here's just a philosophical way i think about it so there's kind of two issues right one is this idea that the revenues that you get the public revenues that you generate from natural resource extraction partly reflect the reason we call it severance right is is taking a non-renewable resource and turning it into capital and so that non-renewable resource is now gone and no longer a source of potential economic development in the state so that capital to the degree that you hold some of it back as public revenue should be about long-term investment it should not be about covering the cost of developing that in the first place and so that's a real problem with using public revenue to plan for future legacy remediation so you understand what i'm saying so i think North Dakota has made some really positive moves compared to other states and that legacy funds to the extent that they create a government structure for administering it that is free from kind of corruption which is sometimes a problem in these state banks is a really positive sign but i don't think it's a solution to questions about legacy well thank you so much and let's thank julia hegerty one more time we'll move on now but we do have another chance later in the afternoon if you have any further questions for her or ideas that come from that our next speaker will be dr betsey taylor she's a cultural anthropologist who has worked for community-driven development in appalachia i have a problem of i grew up in a place where we say appalachia i live for 30 years where we say appalachia and now i live in vermont where we say appalachia again what do you say betsey oh appalachia because you're in contact well and that's where it's right okay anyway she is the executive director and founding director of lichen which stands for livelihoods knowledge exchange network it's a link tank based in lexington kentucky that was developed to fill gaps in the planning resources of underserved communities and particularly to build support systems for community-based assessments of risks and assets she has an academic history too having worked at the university of kentucky and at virginia tech in the early 2000 she was an adjunct faculty member in the department of anthropology and a visiting assistant professor in the department of geography at the university of kentucky and at kentucky she also served as research director and faculty co-research director of the appalachian center and as co-director of the environmental studies program they got a lot out of you when you were there at virginia tech she was a research faculty member in the appalachian studies program among her publications is the 2010 book co-authored with herbert reid called recovering the commons democracy place and global justice that was the university of illinois press she's a nationally recognized researcher in 2013 she was appointed to the steering committee of the u.s extractive industries transparency initiative by the secretary of the department of interior and she recently chaired the human rights social justice committee of the society for applied anthropology also she served as the vice president of the political ecology society she holds a phd in anthropology from the university of michigan and earlier on some years ago held a watson fellowship that allowed her to gather data in japan the philippines and the paul on the impact of ecological change on ethical notions regarding quote nature i love that part of your cv her title today is energy transitions and the first west the complex histories of appalachia's emerging futures thank you thank you so much it's just such a pleasure to be here and already in this time i've i've learned so much it's there there are many many resonances so one of our tasks was to talk about transitions energy transitions that are already underway and so i have a photo of just about one of the few energy transitions that has actually happened in central appalachia where there's been very little uptake of of renewable energy this you you see before you the solar array on the roof of the kentucky coal museum in benham in harland county kentucky which is a very historic coal camp that's been there since the early 19th 20th century and this embodies the key theme of my talk which is that the emergent new energy realities very much are growing out of the very complex systemic patterns of the past and it's been extremely helpful to already to think about to happen in her regional conversation when i was preparing for this i reread an article by elinor ostrom about avoiding panaceas and i found it very helpful for trying to think about what our intellectual tasks are right now and her goal in that article was to say we have to think very seriously about what the broad intellectual tasks are of doing actionable policy relevant science for to manage complex adaptive systems and her point is that we have i really like this phrase of hers our habits as scholars and as officials are to decompose a complex adaptive system into manageable units where you can delimit the causal factors that you you need to think about in order to look clearly at causal interactions or if you were developing a government program or any kind of program you need to have an efficient way to assess impact so you need to to clearly see cause and effect her point is that if we do that decompose reality in that way then we will actually be promulgating policy panaceas which are limited solutions which almost inherently cannot scale and respond to the to the multi-layered scale jumping path dependent realities of complex adaptive systems and her argument is very similar to what julia has just so wonderfully laid out which is we have to we can't think of one person doing this or one unit we really need to think about ways to create what she calls diagnostic frameworks for much larger multiplicity multiplicity intellectual endeavors that bring together many kinds of of players in in that conversation so in thinking about this my the way i picture this situation is that we're talking when we're talking about energy systems let's say the coal energy system it's like looking at a three-dimensional chess game where in many ways you have the same players appearing and so well julie was talking i kept getting the shock of recognition oh there's the queen there's the rook you know but they're on different boards because of the way in which nested subsystems essentially take on these very path dependent and various causalities so in this presentation i'm going to go very broad because as we are developing is through like in this the link tank that i'm working with now and our wide webs of partnerships we also are creating these sort of big projects where we're looking for what i think is can be well described as diagnostic frameworks that can encompass multiplicities and i'm finding it in almost all of the projects that we're doing now we uh we're bringing together community people scholars officials um various players artists very excitingly and one of the first things we do is something that we're calling naming just using exercises to identifying what we're talking about what causal factors are at stake and then the next part we we call framing and this is language that partly comes from the kennering foundation and and then the final stage is alignment where we through various kinds of participatory exercises sort of do this kind of ontological clarification look at our differences and then and then bring them into alignment so i'm going to start by looking naming the ecology that we're facing and the factors naming social and cultural assets that are potentially important and then starting to couple them together with some particular tangles of wicked problems and finally try to focus on a couple key sort of sensitive intervention points as some people are saying um so so my presentation is going to be very broad not deep i'm primarily focusing on what the Appalachian Regional Commission calls north central central and south central Appalachia which i will call central Appalachia and at co-impacted areas partly because there are profound changes underway and there are many different realities that are contradictory and emergent possibilities that could be quite astonishing so let's start with looking at at the at this region as ecologically and angled together in this slide are two very different things one is the cultural framework that the nation has put on Appalachia as the point of extraction and simultaneously you can also look at Appalachia as this really remarkable region ecologically that has particular significance in the 21st century in an era of climate change and what i would propose is that with all the stereotyping of Appalachian the portrayal of it is a problem region when you work with local people to do asset-based sort of cultural reimagining and bring them together with ecologists you find flickering there a very different ecological a very different regional identity and so it's we there is a desperate need for scholarly support in documenting these alternatives if you look at the climate stressors that we face water scarcity extreme weather events of course the need to sequester carbon the dangers of climate migration both human and non-human and the need to face out long supply chains Appalachia has remarkable assets to provide it's it's the water tariff or the country think about what are we are sent the century would be without the those mountains stopping the the moisture it we we and in this presentation i've tried to identify areas where we really need scholarly support and clarification the capacity for the the forests and the soils of Appalachia to function as carbon sinks is very unclear and many of the studies are not engaging the very gated terrain this would be an ideal citizen science project if we could find a sort of broad collaboration and then if this area does provide these kinds of services are there new kinds of policy frameworks that could be tied to the this is a national service that Appalachia is providing by by by being a carbon sink now there are many dangers here but but this is part of the potential sort of emerging identity the other thing is that climate change is already affecting American agriculture in that pattern what kind of new agroforestry niches might appear as supply chains shorten and could Appalachia of the 21st century become more like Appalachia of the 19th century which was a food basket in many ways for for for the U.S. and then finally this this mountain range with its rumble terrain is is is a global resource for climate refugia and Lucy Braun in the early famously described it as the mother forest because during various glaciation it was where both flora and fauna found refuge and and and repopulated north america so but the the the much more research needs to be done and again this is very very gated research so this is a way in which they're they're might connecting some of the climate mitigation with the energy transition in Appalachia is something that i think would be of more interest than many people suspect to communities that are working on just transition there's stereotypes about sort of Appalachian mindsets it's it's not an area that's distinguished for its it's renewable it's potential for renewable energy although possibly wind power and micro hydro but but but this there's been because of the regional identification with with coal and gas it's there's only been two surveys of of of the regional capacity i want to talk now about some of this civic and social assets in the region and again this this is the kind of look of history that is is often not very visible to the outside there's a rich and layered history of of of social movements from the labor struggles to the environmental justice movements and they'd have a particular sensibility that combines the kind of working class rural connection to care for the land with economic justice this photo is comes from Anne Lewis's wonderful film to save the land and people where women played a very important role in in in fighting strip mining and of course a Highlander center continues to play a very important role started in 1932 as a labor education center it was a key site for civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s and from its beginning it was inspired by the Danish Folk School movement and so participatory action research and popular education has been really central to that mission and integral to much of the many of the social movements in in in the region and there's rich but very gated traditionally ecological knowledge this is from a wonderful collection by the folklorist Mary Hufford it's called Tending the Commons in documenting forest-based livelihoods so let's talk now about some of the the wicked problems of the of the coupled human and and ecological systems and in it's been one of our goals is to try to better integrate some of the new literatures on the resource curse internationally into which many of which are focused on greenfield development into really looking seriously getting a realistic look at at the old old resource curses in in that are often less visible in in America and these are the factors that just jump out as deeply entrenched ruts in the in the path of development in in Appalachia if you look at public revenues from the east to the west in the U.S. there there's been improvement as new development has happened but what we have in Appalachia which is core to the situation now is incredibly badly designed public revenue structures and the so that the severance monies that were only really started to be collected in the 70s and 80s in significant ways contributed to what I call a kind of fiscal diabetes where you have this sort of flood of of energy coming into a system with local governments that are unable to really handle the resources coming in doing the boom periods and then no no buffering against the the bust but there's been much too little attention to the connection between finance and coal and extraction in general in the in the 18th and 19th century so that before the you know 1910s the Appalachian region in many ways was sort of the wall street for the eastern seaboard and land speculation there sort of provided the old money for much much of the much of the east and those structures the the land holding companies and the layering of rights and ownership of land are inadequately studied and there's an extraordinary lack of transparency in information both about land and and revenues because of the the kind of federal system we have of a very siloed and fragmented governance and increasingly I feel like we really need to think about this situation of an entrenched resource curse that in some ways is sort of invisible in the larger conversation I mean there's been a kind of reinstatement of those sort of cultures of poverty framework here that's blaming the region in some ways for for for these problems I'm wondering about and again this would be helpful to to have some pondering of about considering this something like an energy debt between the nation and the region and thinking through what that might mean because you can make very direct connections between the social impacts over a hundred years that are now measurable in in in the region and the the wealth that of the of the country now on a on a positive side the the the sort of civic labor that Julia was talking about this incredible sort of ad hoc stepping into the breach of regulatory failure is vividly is is visible in several moments in the in the late 70s after devastating floods when in some of these counties half of the people were homeless the Highlander Center organized a whole series of local community meetings and they did what they called root cause analysis really looking down to the underlying problems and people said it's land land ownership so that led to one of the first really big participatory action research studies it was a groundbreaking citizen science to see who owns Appalachia hundreds of people went to the county courthouses got the records and it was processed by folks in local reach in local universities and found this shocking land inequality basically 25 percent of the land is available to to residents who local people in in most of these counties so this pattern of land inequality is can be still seen in deep inequality local inequality within these counties this shows the the ratio of income of the top 20 percent to the to the bottom 20 percent which clearly shows a two-tier class society and in this situation the power of local elites is is is endemic to the system so it's sometimes easy to look at some of these counties and see that governance problem is a problem of corruption which is there or a problem of cronyism or whatever but the underlying fact is when you have this kind of deep local inequality it it you get a a situation that is it's very hard to to assess or measure but a disconnection among many people and there've been some targeted studies of social trust shannon bell has done a lovely piece where she's shown how social trust it collapses at ways of conflict like when with some of the union struggles and you can sort of see that as layered political trauma but look at voter turnout in the in the 1960s this region actually had some of the highest voter turnout rates and in in in the country and then the kind of underinvestment in in public goods and services like education coupled with the sticky waves wages phenomenon of people not necessarily feeling the need to go ahead and get education so you get this strange paradox of too much government and too little government with a high dependence in many of these counties on distribution so power relations actually are structured more by control over the downward distribution of government goods than they are by the coal mining jobs or something like that and Wayne Coombs has just developed he directed substance abuse programs in West Virginia for many years and he's developing this model of he calls um of analyzing drug deaths and abuse as as as post and the role of the the the cumulative effect in a region that has experienced this much mining of smacra um is really remarkable because smacra essentially despite the intent of the law lacks triggers to connect the agency is responsible for economic development with the agency is responsible for reclamation um and this fragmentation of government is now coming into visibility in really dramatic ways and i think the next 10 15 years is going to see some even more shocking things especially in things like the collapse of public water systems that were put in with no long-term planning to mountainous areas that freeze in the winter at high expense and with um sort of boon bus waves of public funding for water systems that have to be maintained by counties without expertise um and so in this situation this sounds like a very dire picture let me say it's it's a strange time to be doing the work i do because i you know i'm coming coming here from Kentucky and i stopped off at a bunch of different places where we have various projects there's there's a feeling of hope afoot and it feels like this system i just described is fragile and building off of what Julia was saying i would like to argue that it's fragile because a lot of the um wicked problems came from a particular kind of rigidity in interscaler relationships between local decision making and and higher levels of decision making and there's a pent up rage of course we've seen that in various elections but also especially among young people an openness to really radical kinds of change and so i feel that if we could develop the kinds of broader frameworks for collaborative research that are cross-sectoral as Julia's describing and if we could really refine our methodologies for connecting local participatory research with scholarly tasks that actually support the direction of the problem solving i think we could see a kind of breakthrough like you know water breaking through the ice but it requires long-term stable robust horizontal regional linkages between local projects intergenerational conversations participatory action research and interagency cooperation which is probably the hardest so let me just give you some examples of projects that are having an impact the Highlander Center ever evolving has developed over the last couple years that Appalachian Economic Transition Fellowship where these young people spread out across the country and they work per year with the local grassroots project but they get together every month and part of this is an emotional and a cultural process of social learning for very intense sharing and community. Central Appalachian Network is a knowledge sharing network among people that are doing transition projects. Appalachian Voices has just started this good solar strategy to setting up micro demonstration centers hoping that will sort of spread out and this is one of my favorites and i was very involved with this from about 2014 the Alliance for Appalachia which is primarily an advocacy group their role is to connect grassroots works with federal policy have developed this method which i think is a very valuable research method participatory research method that they call agency mapping and about half of the participatory action research they do is trying to understand government in all its labyrinthine complexity and there's a great fascination with the AML fund which is sort of an accident it's become sort of the equivalent of a sovereign wealth fund but by an accident congress just didn't keep appropriating money so now there's several billions of dollars so they decided well let's really try to understand this so two of the Appalachian the Highlander Fellows took that on and we thought oh well we'll figure this out and do well this report which was supposed to be a popular education curriculum to go on the road is 175 pages that's how complicated this is it's a wonderful report and it set up relationships with various federal officials because it was such they did such a good job that they have become quite effectively involved in lobbying for the Reclaim Act which this morning was just introduced in the House Committee on Natural Resources and finally might begin to heal the deep flaw of SMACRA which is it requires that economic plans get connected to the reclamation and it requires participation citizen public participation now that's still very vague and this is again where scholarly input and especially students could help I'm part of a of a big group mostly centered in the University of Kentucky but with involvement of regional many regional colleges and universities and citizens to redo the Appalachian land ownership study which is a gargantuan task and we are just doing wonderful local projects participatory mapping to capture the intricacies of what people have decided to call the land matrix which is everything that maintains land equality including webs of power money public revenues policies and mindsets and values which came from one of our events and lots of power mapping with young people here we're doing stakeholder assessment and finding some very surprising pictures in terms of land scenarios at the local level and building solidarity again the emotional aspect of this stories of place project has spun off and it's it's very much an oral history of of land but is we're starting to add a climate dimension to this so to sum up all of these projects that give me hope um are attempting to grapple with the reality of multi-causal complex systems by building cross-scaler and cross-sectoral webs of connectivity and trying to do this in a way that makes that they can create enough durability to address the the timeframes within which that solutions actually require which is you know you know it requires the kind of investment that Highlander Center has had decades so it's thank you so much for this chance to have a sort of a conversation between the region and the nation and then other regions we have a few minutes for questions and answers and then at 2 45 we'll take a break so that we can all be ready to go when our remote speaker comes on at three o'clock um who has a question Glenn now I can get on I want to thank Julia and Betsy for two really excellent talks and I mean the the thoughts that they're kind of running through my head now I really can't control them but you know I think about your talks and also thinking about some of the geographer Michael Watts work on energy the oil industry its impact in Nigeria for example you know that putting that all together so this was sort of what role does energy maybe alternative energies play in these rural things and essentially all I've really seen is that energy extraction most of these areas have done nothing for those areas because the capital that's accrued from that then goes to other regions so it built it built New York for example right and in California it helped build Los Angeles and and you know built Dallas and and all of that but it's not doing anything for them it's a short term thing and if you think about it then they're sort of well we'll revitalize coal I don't think that would do much in the long run because they don't retain the capital and they don't retain the capacity to build something new from there and so when I think about this citing wind or citing solar in these places which I was described to me putting solar in the Imperial Valley of California would be giving job to people who basically clean windows so that is cleaning the top of the panel right where those facilities are owned by someone someplace else are owned offshore even it's not going to really do much it's going to even have less local employment and the capital accrued from it is not going to build a sustainable economy there so this is this is really a wicked problem that goes deep beyond where transmission lines are where we have solar energy and things like this this is a problem that really asks us to look at basic regulatory structure of of how capital is generated here and so I have a million things just running through my mind I want to thank you for stimulating that although I'm going to have a hard time sleeping tonight yeah it every time I come to an east coast city I look around for the timber and the wealth of Appalachia and at some point we're not going to get beyond these wicked problems so we have a national conversation about this because there is a very direct energy debt one of our projects that we're considering with the stories of place where we're documenting the oral histories of particular places but along with that the layers of land ownership in much of Central Appalachia especially West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky the land is actually held by land holding companies which are kind of like heritage artisanal legal entities you know it's like particular families and in particular cities and so we're going to reach out to those families in a way very similar to with plantations you know where enslaved people and plantation owners were brought together and these are this is the old money of the east and say let's have a conversation and so one hope is that with the stories of place project we can have artists in Kentucky and poets and photographers document the biodiversity document the devastation and then maybe have a traveling art exhibit that brings story and statistics together and then have that conversation I the language of reparations doesn't feel adequate but maybe if we have a deeper national conversation other ideas would come as the energy debt is as close as I can get yeah I'd like to again thank you they're both great talks I do think there's some commonalities I know from the Powder River Basin contracts for long-term power purchasing to California which you know ended a while ago when California decided they weren't going to ever even import anything more carbon-intensive than natural gas and now they're not even going to import renewables from outside the state boundaries so just the vulnerabilities when you're going to have a future that's dependent upon these contractual relationships I love the tracking ownership of land and all of the linkages and supply chains I think that's very powerful when you get at the REITs the real estate investment trusts and people who have I mean grandchildren who've inherited shares and stocks and investments that have no idea what they are that the impacts of those investments are having I know that the taxation of property is you know highly highly contested political hot potato but that is a that is a lever and in Georgia we're always talking about should the acres of forest you know be more or less taxed and depends on what the forests are used for and whole debate about that but you could have a debate on these communities about raising taxes so have you have those debates been carried out about property taxation I guess it's only for both of you you know um that's yes people are talking about property taxes quite a bit it's a very like many aspects of natural resource policy it's a sort of a it's a technical issue I mean maybe seems more technical than it actually is but most of us don't have much fiscal literacy so when you're talking about small local governments the those who are face a crisis suddenly will begin to understand fiscal policy really well but that doesn't always translate into political will to change the system and I could go on and on because fiscal policy is a big part of what we do and how we think about things but yes it's an important question for the last 20 years these communities have been deeply divided there's been a new level of bitterness that is complicated and so that's a hard conversation to have it is appearing though in the new pattern of contestation over public services like the the teacher strikes and again that's where you feel like the system is could shift really quickly and people are starting to connect the dots between the problems to paying teachers and and these other issues yeah actually I had a different question but you you raised another question in my mind so West Virginia is always a little bit of an enigma to me I visited there a few times it used to be you know before even the term blue but it used to be one of the bluestates and now it's like you know bright brilliant red uh at least in the last in 2016 so like what was the process you know can you describe that sort of I assume embedded in some of the the issues you're talking about and then you just kind of illustrated that this maybe this possibilities of flip I don't want to get into politics per se in terms of like you know 2020 but like what happened there and how does that is there any explanation from that to sort of you know talk about larger changes so on the news reports it looks very red because those that's the percentage of people who voted who won so but if you if you include the people who voted for no one and essentially they didn't vote then it's it's not it hasn't it so we've done a comparison in Kentucky we haven't done West Virginia of coal counties to the rest of the state eastern Kentucky had such low rates of voting that the people who did vote made the the state look redder than it is compared to other rural places and you had these interesting pockets of um burning wipeouts you know it was just sort of dramatic like the equivalent of college towns that there was something very appealing about Bernie Sanders in in many of these counties now it there there is a lot of appeal people are angry and disaffected and so there there's you know politicians who communicate that who communicate that there's something seriously wrong do have a kind of sway and and politics is very bitter and there's a level of fear that dominates local politics i would just add that there is a so when you think about some of the photographs that i showed and just how unpopulated some of the rural areas are um there's there's a bit of a vacuum so when we get this sort of big cultural division between urban and rural areas what it what's emerging to fill that space in rural areas is a really loud voice from a pretty strident set of politics and we see that a lot now when local governments have a problem they want to solve some of the radical right groups are there with networks and resources this is both through social media but literally being willing to travel to the county to help them write an ordinance that sort of reinforces this kind of fear-based perspective and that's about a failure i think on the part of the rest of us to figure out how to engage in those places okay well that's an interesting way to pause let's take a let's take a short break and let's be back here at three o'clock i'm going to cut off our break discussion and lead us into the rest of our session we're going to have a presentation by Dustin Mulvaney and then we'll have a few minutes for a Q&A just with him and then we have a further hour after that to continue our discussion and there's plenty to talk about i can tell so um Dustin do we have you on the line yeah i'm here i can hear everyone loud and clear and i even saw even saw some of the presentations this morning when i was uh multitasking while in the classroom so oh great that's morning your time let me do a quick introduction of you and then we'll turn it over to you so dr. Dustin Mulvaney is a faculty member in the environmental studies department at san jose state university that's in california and he can't join us today because of a conflict for the student thesis defense which we thought was was an acceptable excuse and we're meanwhile we're just delighted that he can join us and squeeze in this time to be with us remotely his research focuses on social and environmental dimensions of food and energy systems and in recent years his primary focus has been on energy commodity chains with an emphasis on the solar industry his recent research on solar energy commodity chains appears in his book solar power innovation sustainability and environmental justice which as i read was scheduled for release by the university of california press in april 2019 so as a quick break in the introduction is it out it is yes it's actually all right the number one new release on amazon in energy production and extraction fabulous okay so continuing with the introduction dr. you can't talk yet dr. Mulvaney's training was notably interdisciplinary his ds is in chemical engineering and his masters in environmental policy studies both from the new jersey institute of technology before heading to california for a phd in environmental studies at uc centa cruise he worked as a chemical process engineer for a fortune 500 chemical manufacturer in new jersey in west virginia and as a project engineer for a bio remediation startup at sites with mtbe spills that's a gasoline additive as a postdoc he had an nsf science technology society for fellowship in environmental science policy and management at uc berkeley he's published extensively and in addition to peer reviewed viewed journal articles and of course the book we just mentioned he has written a number of white papers edited reference volumes on green food green energy green technology green politics and served as an expert witness for the california public utilities commission he too has been active in the aag as secretary as treasurer secretary of the energy and environment specialty group and as a council member of the cultural and political ecology specialty group he's received a number of fellowships and awards including the dan lewton daniel lewton best paper award a few years ago of the aag's energy and environment specialty group so his title is land use conflict over solar farms green jobs and technological synergies in energy transitions okay it's all yours great well thank you very much for to speak with you and i i'm very much looking forward to re-listening to what i saw were really cool looking slides talking about other topics that i'm interested in learning more about so um today i'm going to talk about what i've noticed across the american west with the very california centric focus um around land use and and rural development and thinking about um some of the challenges that we're going to face as we start to deploy more and more solar right we have even california we haven't rolled out all the solar we're going to need to to decarbonize the grid so what that means is we're going to need a lot more land we're not need a lot more workers and um you know what does that actually mean for the future of of these landscapes in these communities so um next slide let's go right into this so one of the the first things to point out which may be obvious to most of us is that we're shifting from subterranean resource energy resources to ones that you have to collect more diffusely on the surface of the earth so what you're seeing in this picture is the desert sunlight solar farm that solar farm has about nine million solar panels and is about eight square miles generates about 550 gigawatts of power at peak and as you could tell that's joshua tree national park in the background as you could tell it's a pretty imposing it creates quite an imposition on on landscapes particularly this is uh cited on public lands where in california really the first big projects were being cited on public lands you can really describe california's rollout in three phases starting with um the eastern mojave desert and a lot of public lands there a little bit more south near the salt and sea in the colorado desert and then further west in the antelope valley area of the mojave desert and more recently there's been a lot more buildout in the central valley of california so we've seen somewhat of a geographic pattern there and part of the reason is solar developers are going for the closest access to transmission that's really the driver where projects are being put and then once you put enough projects in a certain area those those sites get overloaded in terms of how much power they could deliver and then they start having to curtail which means they start losing some of the economic benefit of having that big giant project next slide this project also has nine million solar panels but it's a little more spread out this is on the the carrizo plane near carrizo plane national monument which is the largest intact native grassland in california and when i was going to visit this site when it was being built a major concern from the community there was a loss of the rural character and as people came and visited this place which was very remote and seemed like it was lost to history when you go there it was it was a place that didn't seem like california if you've been to the urban places in california you seem like you're transported back into the west and the communities were very concerned about the imposition of these industrial facilities in their communities and from this picture you can see just the magnitude of of these these projects so again eight million solar about nine million solar panels about eight square miles taken up in this case it's a little more broken up because there was a concern about pronghorn antelope being able to move about this landscape so they're spaced out a little bit differently next slide this is the desert sunlight project when it was being built so the other aspect of this is you could see the the project involved the pretty heavy handed land use change they literally send eight to twelve scrapers out there and scrapes a landscape to make it a more homogeneous landscape get rid of the burrows first they remove or evict any endangered species or threatened or protected species and then they they really try to create a landscape that's easy to walk across and and can be driven across about having to worry about being stuck by a cactus or you know having a worker twist their ankle in a burrow or something like that and i'll come back to that because i think that land use practice is part of the reason that many of these projects have been opposed by so many many groups but the upshot here is a very significant land use and intensive land use change next slide this is a project called the Ivanpah solar project there's nothing there just yet but this is also showing you an impact from solar projects which is in this case they were required because there's rare plants to leave most of the landscape intact but you could see from the the image here of the cuts for the roads which will then be used to wash and first build and then wash the solar panels later on so in this case not all projects or this case this image shows that not all projects have such an intensive land use change but they all require a lot of roads and the same can be said for wind farms that's probably the biggest land use change associated with a wind farm is the actual building of all the roads to maintain the next slide this is the western mojave desert this is the antelope valley poppy reserve which you may have seen lots of pictures of where people are taking pictures of all these poppies that are in bloom this time of year and i've gone to this area for the last 10 years studying these solar projects and if you squint the lower picture you can kind of make out some of the the darker areas where there's actually giant solar farms now that weren't there many years ago so again a place where people go for its rural characteristics its wilderness characteristics to see these wildflowers suddenly has all these industrial facilities around them where they never had them before so this creates a little bit of frictions and creates some more land use controversy in these regions so next slide this is that item pile project that i showed you earlier with the road cuts when it was finalized this is a project that we probably will not see anymore of in california and i'd be surprised if we see any more in the american west anywhere these are solar power towers and they've had some pretty serious issues with mitigating the impact from avian species what happens in this they're using mirrors to focus light on a receiver at the top and when they put this plant in standby mode they raise the heat up it's about it's over 2000 degrees temperature they they create basically a halo of heat above the the receivers that you see at the top of the screen on the top of the tower and um this project has i think the last count was somewhere around 2300 or 2500 avian species lost i'm sorry individual animals lost every year from partly through collisions with the mirrors but also by flying through that heat halo fish and wildlife has a new term it's called a streamer and that's a bird that flies through the heat and they basically disintegrates next slide the desert tortoise was one of the species that was prominently featured in that ivenpah solar project there were some issues with counting it's very hard to count desert tortoises they spend such a large portion of their time underground and they're hard to see because they kind of look like rocks sometimes this project was built in and they had to translocate somewhere near 150 individual tortoises they actually had to build a nursery for tortoises because they had to overwinter them there and the the translocation of the tortoises coupled with the mitigations associated with the avian and bat species that had a management plan in place and there's actually a rare plant that needed a special management plan this cost about 52 million dollars just to mitigate for this project is a two billion dollar project so we'll maybe have dropped in the bucket of overall but um certainly created jobs you had people out there biologists and and conservationists and you can have lawyers at one point involved with this project so um but my point here though is that they're the challenge of putting large projects where you're they're somewhat sprawling right there's a term that nature conservancy uses called energy sprawl um poses specific challenges for a lot of species um as well as uh individual animals and things like that wildlife in general next slide San Joaquin kit fox this one was interesting story so this is Carrizo Plain National Monument the picture I showed you in the beginning the topaz solar project this is i'm sorry it's on the edge of Carrizo Plain National Monument not in it um this project they actually again spent quite a bit of money figuring out how many kit foxes were on site there have been a couple reports that this has actually been somewhat of a success story where they've actually been able to co-exist in this particular landscape with the solar farms they built little kit fox dens within the solar plant where they're able to kind of co-mingle with the solar panels and and leave without being trapped by coyotes and such there've been some projects that have been actually very bad for the kit fox there's one in the Colorado desert that um when during the eviction process they used coyote urine and that coyote urine transferred kit fox uh distempered to the kit fox population for the first time that recorded so so there's been challenges with that particular species next slide this is another uh species that requires mitigation usually for solar projects now there's been I mentioned a shift toward the central valley of California where the land is a little bit more degraded and you have the opportunity to build on marginal marginal farmland or in some cases prime farmland but farm bureau does not like to farm anything losing any prime farmland in california um sorry about that um so the the issue here is you need forage habitat for the Swainsons hawk which another species that has special status in california and for every acre that you develop associated with a solar farm you might have to go out and acquire mitigation lands so there's more economic activity there which is the purchase of lands for mitigation in um that might then be foraging habitat for these species I put this press release at the bottom to show um one of the challenges with that which is that one county in california received a lot of money from a solar developer because of the mitigations and then they rolled it into their general fund and we're not sure that that money's actually going to get spent on that species now so there's a lawsuit um that's been launched I'm not sure with the current statuses but it has not been resolved yet so in some cases you have mitigations that don't actually end up mitigating anything if your projects are supposed next slide the loss of the rural characters another issue is somewhat of an aesthetic issue but if you think also about why people go out to these places for the amenity values you know that could actually be an economic issue as well as you transform open and wild spaces into industrialized spaces you could create issues there this is the salorian valley this is a space between mojave preserve and in death valley national monument which is i'm sorry national park which has been very important corridor for species moving between both of those landscapes this is a spot where the the solar project solar and wind project actually combined was proposed on this site and the the beer of land management actually rejected this project this is one that was not this is a space that was never developed for solar but was controversial for quite a while because the project was proposed and and it almost seemed like the project was going to happen next slide the other issue you face with developing land out in the american west is uncovering lots of sacred places places that are important to native americans that have cultural resources this is um in blithe california where some intaglios were damaged by a solar project road that was hunting through next slide you can see that on the left there those are pictures of a geoglyph that was damaged for the construction of the blithe solar project i remember walking a site with a historian of native americans named alfredo fegaroa and he took me up to the top of this little hilltop and pointed at a solar project called the genesis project that's on this you could see it described in the lower right corner there you know a year before this le times article came out he pointed to that spot and said that that's that's where my oh my my ancestors live you know there's a watering hole on that site and everywhere that there's a watering hole there's cremation sites and artifacts and things like that and that's what in fact happened in this case they had to actually coordinate off part of that solar project because of the cultural resource impacts next slide water use we can compare it to natural gas and coal and other resources and it looks pretty good from an energy perspective but these solar projects are usually in very arid areas so and often they're dependent on groundwater and there's a lot of wells that are we have a paper right now that we're about to finalize when we counted wells that were dropped for solar projects and water use this is a smaller sample that got published in the journal land use science a few years ago last year where we looked at water use and from this the upshot from this is that land use practice that I described earlier where they basically scraped the land and damaged the any any biological organisms on top does become a dust nuisance and in fact the construction is where most of the water use is even on these pv projects for dust control to comply with the clean air act we've had projects where there's car pile-ups in in antelope valley we have projects that get shut down for dust nuisance so these are things that you know could be fixed through policy but haven't quite been implemented fully in practice yet next slide this is the Penoche Valley this is an area also that was um took about 10 years to build this project from when it was proposed partly because of some endangered species that lived on site including kit fox um blunt nose leopard lizard some other uh species that are pretty much stop building projects if you're finding these species types of species you could see here the rural amenities also factored into this and this was not prime farmland this is grazing land but as i mentioned earlier the farm bureau has said on several occasions they were very concerned about the role of big solar projects taking up prime farmland in california because that's obviously a major agricultural state next slide batteries so as we're rolling out more solar projects we are starting to see more batteries this is not a mine that produces batteries but this is a mine right above that ivenpaw project i mentioned earlier that produces rare earth elements which is also critical for certain kinds of clean energy technology such as wind turbines and such and this is associated obviously mining activity mining activity it's very challenging for water and for land and all of the things that you you're familiar with this is by the molly corp mine next slide placer claims in nevada there's over i think it's not 14 000 placer claims in nevada to evaporate for lithium brines essentially for batteries and here you can see in nevada has the whole system they have the potential lithium source they don't have all the metals but they have the lithium source they have the gigafactory which is some it's it's a bit suburban it's almost in the rural areas of of sparks nevada it's not quite in the city of sparks so it is somewhat outside of the the region in the yellow pine solar project is a proposed solar project it's going to have a lot of battery storage in nevada so again more extractive industries more land use change from solar but accompanied with some job growth as well next slide this is just to show you what it looks like in south america when you extract lithium brines these are all evaporation pines that have been built and if you squint it's a pretty high resolution photo so but you have to squint you can actually see all the wells where they they the impact isn't just where you're seeing the ponds if you look throughout that landscape you could see roads you could see wells that are being dug that are they affect groundwater again when you're pulling water when you're pulling water out of the desert often you're pulling fossil ground water out of the desert and that's lowering the groundwater tables and my understanding speaking with some colleagues that there are some indigenous communities in and around here whose water may have been affected already by declining water tables next slide but the bright side is we're creating lots of opportunity with these with these with these industries you could see photovoltaic installer here and i don't know if they're breaking apart the industrial projects versus the rooftop installers but it's a pretty well-paying job and it's the highest growing occupation according to bureau labor statistics right now so that that's kind of an economic driver for what for what's going on here or maybe it's an economic side effect of what's actually happening here you can look down below this is showing you how many jobs per megawatt installed for different kinds of solar deployment scenarios so utility scale projects are generating about 2.4 jobs per megawatt residential projects are generating almost five jobs per megawatt there so there's a pretty big difference almost twice as many jobs when you're doing rooftop you can imagine it's much more complicated you have ladders involved and roofs are different and those utility projects as i showed you they're pretty much homogenous landscapes where it's pretty easy to get people moving around next slide this is perhaps an area i thought this is an interesting thing to put in here into the conversation they the solar industry does have difficulty hiring in these places so we're talking about projects being built out in rural areas this is a study from a website i found called solar wake up it's a solar job census and they asked employers what are the challenges you have in terms of hiring people in this space and lack of technical i'm sorry lack of experience or technical knowledge turns out to be the the predominant factor for and i guess you could lump in insufficient qualifications really into that same category in some ways into the challenges that these industries face as they do move into rural areas so it kind of speaks to need for job training and more education around you know or technical training and things like that in these areas next slide with those jobs however have come some challenges in california and again this is a very california focused thing where we have something called valley fever it's caused by a fungal-borne pathogen that's in soil when you have high levels of disturbance you potentially get exposure to valley fever and these are two centers for disease control studies looking at two different solar farms one in monoray county and the drier part of monoray county inland and then one out in at the topaz solar farm which was the project i mentioned earlier on the carrizo plane here you had workers they said it was partly because they weren't wearing masks probably but two pretty severe outbreaks of valley fever amongst workers working on these sites next slide so i have this word technological or technological synergies in my slides i should talk about that for a minute and this is something i i've borrowed from dr rebecca hernandez from the university california davis who does really fantastic work trains wonderful graduate students to do similar work on land use change from solar and looking at benefits and things like that i'll just point you to the left hand slide the left part of the slide this is epa's repowering america's lands program which is basically looking at brownfields abandoned landfills abandoned mines requisites superfund sites as opportunities to put solar and they did a process of screening these access to transmission flatness slope all these things and you could see from this image it doesn't have the numbers but that from from the statement below 1.7 million acres are available from the epa's repowering america's lands program that would basically be more than 12 times california's peak demand so there's no shortage of disturbed lands and if you actually look at a lot of those abandoned landfills specifically those are a lot in the rural areas of california so you have opportunities to turn a lot of these areas into power plants essentially and maybe the job creation isn't the number one local benefit derived by these communities but certainly the sales tax on that electricity could be pretty hefty and help a lot of these communities next slide agrivoltaics another opportunity we might have in the central valley of california where you can kind of co have co-existing solar farms and either animal agriculture or in the upper left hand side you could see greenhouse as they put solar panels over or in the the sides of this picture to the upper right you could see you know in this case i don't actually know what tech crop is but it's something that they're obviously using a tractor on next slide and then something that we've been exploring or having conversations about we're hoping to get some funding for at some point but the national renewable energy lab is also doing similar work i just saw a paper that came out yesterday is enhancing these sites for ecosystem services so as solar farms roll out in the central valley you have almond orchards that require apiaries and honeybees be installed and when a solar plant comes across the street and basically removes all the vegetation it basically creates unhappy neighbors right a situation where you might even have that kind of land use conflict with isn't really the wildlife but is actually really agricultural production they don't people don't want to dust nuisance as their neighbor they don't want their trees covered in dust so the idea is to restore these sites to be more ecologically or agro ecologically friendly maybe perhaps install pollinators in them we also know that from vegetation from the transpiration from the photosynthesis that they actually cool the solar panels and that makes them operate a little more efficiently so there's actually a co-benefit there next slide and you can see in the lower corner there that's from a startup company that's trying to promote this idea by actually selling honey that they've produced within the solar farm in this case so again co-use of land i think the advantage that solar has that none of our energy technologies have is that you can actually put it on top of other things they could actually you can have dual use of land and that's a big benefit we just don't have the incentives right now or necessarily the the research findings to support the argument for for making this co-habitation more common because again you'll drive around like i mentioned i was out in the desert last week and or two weeks ago and i was seeing solar projects i'd never seen before and they were doing the same old thing about the boulders and scraping the land and potentially creating land use conflict next slide that's it i'm done good thank you i hope you guys have uh some thoughts to share with me or think or criticism so thank you great thank you so much that was quite interesting um what questions do we have for Dustin okay yeah thanks that was a really really good talk really uh i learned a lot and enjoyed it even though i've seen a lot of the things that you you just showed us in terms of facilities so here's here's a sort of interesting or a question for you is the siting of these things one is all those those sites in the desert and you didn't mention this but i know it's important they all require transmission of that power into areas where it's going to be consumed and the building of those transmission lines and then of course where they cross flammable landscapes that's a huge problem that that really extends the the negative impacts and you did show some of the agrivoltaics and we have areas like along the west side of the San Joaquin River valley which are really actually because of soil hopeless for agriculture and yet they and they already have transmission lines and things like that why has there been such a focus on using these uh using the desert lands and stuff like that aside from the fact maybe they have a little bit higher sunlight and all that rather than going into some of these brownfield sites or or or form agricultural sites which is simply not not good for agriculture do you think that's shifting and do you think that has something to do with with capital you know you can get this land for free you can use it for free you don't have to worry about the people that are there because no people are living there so it's minimal benefits to anybody basically but it maximizes profit i just just wonder what you might want to say on that i absolutely have some ideas on that so yeah absolutely the main driver why solar projects are where they are is transmission access to transmission they've had developers say if i do an interconnection study it's there's a tenfold there's a tenfold difference in cost sometimes between a good site and a bad site and i'm going to go with the good site um your point about public land so we've seen a very severe drop off in applications for public lands so i think the public land story is partly a historical artifact of the american recovery reinvestment act where lots of projects were put on public lands to have access to that funding on public lands they are allowed to fast track a project under an executive order passed under the bush administration that allows the fast tracking of energy projects on public lands so in order to have a shovel ready project a lot of projects were being proposed on public lands now not everybody got the fast track status and not every project received our funding in any way but the fact that they had started that process meant the ball was rolling and they continued to build out those projects and the cost i think now you know over the decade i've been following is power purchase agreement is fallen by 10 times meaning the cost of electricity to the utility is 10 times less from a solar project than it was 10 years ago and what that means is is the costs of some of these you know permitting mitigations the leases themselves may be creeping into um the overall picture and and that could be pushing project i mean that could be part of the reasons we're not seeing the build out in public lands there's also an issue with curtailment so we've over built in certain parts of the state we basically pay arizona to consume our excess solar electricity certain times of the day or the season and and people don't want to do that anymore so um that i mentioned rebecca hernan does his work one of her graduate students led a paper that rebecca's a co-author on it's about land sparing opportunities and it does talk about those selenium contaminated lands in the west central valley there's a couple issues with that one of them is the water issue which is that a lot of those landowners own the water rights and they're unwilling to accept it to to give the water rights along with the land so we got to figure out ways to make solar power plants operate without water that may make it a little easier we got to make we got to figure out how to get big agricultural interests to give up their water rights which sounds even more challenging than making a solar power plant operate with no water did i answer all the question i'm there's a couple parts yes thank you very much yeah dustin this is uh maryland brown i wanted to thank you for a great talk your photos are fabulous as they have been in all three talks today buying your book just to get you know the the graphics is probably going to be one of my motivators um i wanted to talk with you about your discussion and description about job creation and just put on kind of my skeptical hat from someone who's done a lot of employment assessments of energy investments uh when you do that assessment you've got to look at the jobs that are created when facilities are constructed and jobs that are required to um to run projects and then you've got to do some kind of present valuation maybe or you know somehow make comparisons along those lines and you'll find that the solar is not so very attractive when you look at the full life cycle um neither of course are many of the traditional other supply options like fossil or nuclear maybe maybe a little better but what's best of course is um energy efficiency energy efficiency is where you get most of the jobs that's a very high labor intensive relative to the cost of materials and it's just continuous this is always more that can be done it seems i just wonder uh if you've done any of that little more sophisticated you know input output direct and direct and do induce jobs and made some comparisons across different alternative energy supply and demand side options using those uh more sophisticated strategies the short answer is no but i have some thoughts on this but when i started working on this first of all i actually don't even believe this some of the stats i just showed you earlier which was the comparison between residential rooftop per megawatt and the utility scale per megawatt and the reason for that is that most of those jobs that are in the utility scale sector you might have you know a thousand construction jobs but you'll have five permanent jobs and whereas those residential sector you know those are usually more career oriented jobs like people aren't going and doing solar and then doing something else i mean some might be electricians doing multiple things but um they're usually doing solar all the time whereas like that ivenpaw project i showed you earlier that was built by bechtel using union labor but the union labor was bused out from las vegas every day or they stayed in prim once in a while they they'd be bused out for the week um and then they went on to build something else a bridge or something something different so it's really hard to pin down these job numbers and link them particularly the big construction project projects that require um you know that that workforce that's that's a bit different and more flexible um so there was a tool from enrel the national renewable energy labs called jedi i forget what it stands for with some economic development thing and they used to have the photovoltaic model on there and i fortunately was able to download one the last time it was up there but i noticed it's not up there anymore they have the other energy sectors and and i'm wondering why that is if they when i asked i wrote to them and said hey what happened to your your solar job calculator because they did that they basically say oh you create construction jobs then you have the truck the guy is selling food and you create all these kind of added you have all these adders um and they basically said the data were too old so i think that's another area that we maybe you know even this job census report that i i put together right i put into this talk that was put together by that solar wake-up site um it's not doing a sophisticated enough analysis to be able to parse the different kinds of ways we might roll this technology out the different combinations the different size and magnitude location so i i think that that's an important research need yeah the one um ultra sophisticated other perspective to jobs is that if you put in place a energy resource that's less expensive to meet energy service requirements that let's say energy efficiency you know being so cheap but also maybe a very cheap generation option like co-generation in industrial plants then the rates can decline and everyone can benefit they have more revenues that they can that they can spend because the you know they're able to redirect their income to other other assets they can buy and so they're all kind that's a that's a type of you know i mean get that in input output studies you've got to go through a computational general equilibrium model find out how the different energy resources balance each other when you insert something new and what's it going to do to prices both electricity as well as your generation your fossil fuels and other inputs and you know it takes a lot a whole lot you got to crank a lot of levers to get those final numbers but they can be very important i was able to estimate that for co-generation the fact that you could lower electricity costs had a bigger impact than almost anything else on jobs and the economy and that's just something you can't estimate very easily we do need Jedi to be reinstated or tools like that yeah most of the others the other technologies were there they just removed the photovoltaics so i'm not sure why the other technologies have better data but yeah that's important very important i think all that their data is very old all across the board in jedi um yeah if i could just one last thing on the jobs thing and it's not related any stuff i've talked about but last week we or i guess it's three weeks ago now we i represented before the california public utilities commission there's a memorandum of understanding between the energy commission public utilities commission cal recycle department of toxic substances control and the air resources board to come up with a plan for end-of-life solar because basically our last solar recycler in the state went bankrupt and they just sent it to a smelter so not everything was even being recovered but you know the silver was being recovered that's important so we've been trying to advocate for extended producer responsibility in the state um washington state has a law like that i actually wrote much of the text they had to withdraw it because i marked it up so much and had to resubmit it to their legislature new york state also has an extended producer responsibility just make sure it make sure that anybody who sells a solar panel in the state has to set aside money and that money can grow in an account and then that money is there to pay for recycling because right now california has no recycling of solar if you bring solar panels to a recycler the department of toxic substances control has advised them to turn it away so basically goes to landfill so that's the place we could create some jobs is at the end of life too so i'm sorry i interrupted someone about the task any question i was just saying we need to have those producer responsibility requirements for coal plants too okay let's have a question from bill and then i think we want to open this up more broadly yes hi dustin this is bill select you from city university of new york uh great talk i just you know our remit is sort of looking at energy you know energy transitions in rural america and you know obviously you spoke a lot on on the solar side is there and this is maybe a too big a question but can you give us a quick quick thumbnail like are there like the issues with wind i mean how you know what the differences are there key differences that we might want to consider as part of our discussion uh vis-a-vis a solar experience i mean some of the i know the environmental effects you know birds etc but are there other kind of key points that you know might be significantly different from solar in some ways i don't think so i mean in california most of the onland wind is built out like there's not any new there's very little wind being new wind being proposed right now so and i don't know what that would look like elsewhere it's very similar in the sense that it has um you know very few operators on site when you're there although i think there's a bit more repair that goes into those so there there could be more kind of um technical jobs associated with that for repairing and cleaning them um whereas solar panels are because there's no moving parts there's a little less um maintenance of them other than the washing and making sure that you replace broken ones and things like that um so that's a really good question and i'm i'm afraid i can't answer that maybe there's other experts here that can but um my my intuition is it's not that much different but okay great so so yeah quick quick so so for california wind is all built out i mean just a thumbnail sort of offshore okay good got it got it and how about other parts i mean like iowa you know texas etc a lot of other places seem to be at least you know promoting it on the surface meaning like you know they're that's what they're promoting but i don't know how much is how much of that is really uh you know real installation yeah and you the benefit that i think of that comes to mind in those parts of the country um because again california is a little bit different because a lot of the renewables are on public lands and i think that makes it a somewhat different animal um but when i read about ranchers getting together and forming a co-op to sell electricity in some ways it's similar to the honey story that i told that toward the end where you're basically creating additional revenue streams for particular land owners and i think that that's probably um one of the key economic impacts the the other being again a lot of uh a lot of sales tax gets generated through these because partly because the the electricity is somewhat expensive so in many ways um you know depending on how i guess some states don't have sales tax but um depending on how that structured um there could be benefits that way some states actually have exemptions for like california not allowed to have property tax i believe on on solar projects so something i had heard once i had not verified that but so that means that you don't necessarily always have tax benefits that circulate back into the economy but but sales tax is certainly a big piece of it i think the diablo canyon nuclear power plant in san josebispo at one point was providing over 50 of the tax base for that that area and sales tax for that whole county so so these big energy installations can have if not direct job impacts they certainly have other kinds of economic benefits that might go to schools and things like that great thanks okay let's um go ahead go ahead jackie i was going to say you might want to look at christian brandstrom's work he's um written a lot on texas um and i know the texas in oklahoma landscape are somewhat similar and i was just thinking about your like the the job thing a lot of times in oklahoma in texas there's also a shifting so his work kind of shows about the legacy effects and that actually the those ranchers getting together or mostly the corporate ranchers who can do these things it's often squeezing out the small farmers or the small ranchers which has a lot of actual local economic impacts because those large ranchers bring their stuff up on semi they're not buying local their children aren't in the school they're not necessarily investing in the tax base so there's there's other things and then in oklahoma there's a lot of fights with um native communities so the osage nation sued one conglomerate of those ranchers that got together to put in one of those um wind operations under the idea that they're destroying a sacred landscape also there's a big tourism base for the high plains and and the tall grass prairie and the bison and those kinds of things and so there's there's actually a lot of stuff in christian branch from would be a good person to look at yes great well yes great well great well i'm going to call in julia and then at this point let's have our discussion be open for participation by all of us with questions to anybody well i was just hi desa and it's julia hygrity um i just wanted to follow up on the fiscal piece because i think it's a pretty complicated question so the idea that there's a production generation tax that accrues locally that's pretty exceptional to california and most of the states that are trying to export energy are really struggling to figure out what a revenue stream looks like and even when you have good revenue policy at the state level you may not have distribution to local areas even if you have distribution to local areas they may be limited in their ability to save and invest that so it's a sort of multi-scalar system but i think i guess i i i just think we need to so maybe one other point on some interesting fiscal stuff um i mentioned my colleagues at university wyoming they're helping the state of wyoming think about their um fiscal policy because wyoming is maybe the nation's leader in sort of vulnerability current vulnerability to energy transitions and they would like to export a lot of wind and that's a challenging thing in these times and one of the things they found is that the new mexico which has one of the more aggressive tax regimes with respect to generating wind actually has the lowest production cost and one of the things that they do is enable local governments to bond to invest in wind projects which brings down the cost of capital and allows for a cheaper production cost even though they have a higher effective tax rate on those projects so it's kind of like down into the weeds but um i think yeah that's cool right well i could tell you more about it but i guess what i would suggest is that going back to glenn's comments earlier the idea that these big construction projects are going to create long-term economic benefits in the form of jobs or even taxes is kind of a flawed way to think about rural prosperity and what glenn urges us to think about is how can local places share in the property and the capital that actually is behind these things and there's a whole set of policy issues with respect to limits on community-owned property limits on local banking all those kinds of things that are in the way of that but i just we can and i totally agree with maryland's observations about the limits and ways to do complicated modeling about net economic benefits but i think when we're talking about rural places and benefits getting getting caught up in kind of the i o i o battles about how many direct and indirect jobs and how much tax revenue doesn't really capture the fundamental structural issue which is that local places don't own the capital that um is really prospering from building these things fantastic point yep i'm gonna keep that in mind really important yeah you can't look at local and and um uh out of territory ownership and imports of materials into the health you can't get at that but it underscores that the in my opinion the most advantageous solar for any local community is rooftop solar it's not the big solar farms and you know that's the battle to be played with now of course the utilities want to own the utility farms um and then there's a battle between whether the rooftop solar is yours or is at least you know all of that i think that's uh you know maybe for another day a really good topic but it has a lot of influence on um you were saying if you have a solar farm what are you displacing on a rooftop you're using land or whatever area that's you know already underutilized so there's a big advantage to that um i know we don't have quite enough rooftop space yet in the country to meet all of our needs even if it was all solar but it could go a long way yeah and it would be locally you know locally advantageous i would say but most of those solar delivers most of the solar companies putting rooftop solar on our local or at least within the state or regional yeah yeah the rooftop there's a couple studies that also show when you put roof when you put solar on a roof you actually reduce the heat gain that goes into the house and you can lower someone's air conditioning bill so there there are definitely some then and then there's some studies that suggest behavioral change some you know the in different directions some say you consume more some say you consume less because now you suddenly have a envelope of trying to keep that bill at zero so it kind of makes someone stay at a certain energy consumption more likely so i mean there's definitely questions and the fundamental challenges it goes right up against the the business model of the utilities and that's that's um that's something that many states have been grappling with for the last 10 years and some of these net metering debates and such so that's a really important point but the question is like how do you optimize both from you know that question about prosperity and benefits and the funny thing was i was studying these solar projects out in the Mojave desert realizing we're at a we have a housing crisis all these houses are underwater and i was like why can't you put all the solar why why are we building this two billion dollar solar project here we could put two billion dollars for the solar panels on people's rooftops make their houses more valuable lower their energy bills things like that and i don't think we i think i don't know we're not at the point where we're able to kind of come up with these idealized solutions in some ways so i'm not sure what the strategy to make that happen would be but but i think there are pieces moving forward on some of these like non grid or non-wires alternatives is a phrase people are using more and more especially in california where the point was raised earlier that it didn't address which is more transmission basically creates more fire risk right through the state and that's not something we want to necessarily do so so maybe there are new ways to think about future utility models where non-wires alternatives are built into something that benefits both the utility and the customer i'm not sure how that looks though um yeah i actually just to follow up on this i i was going to ask you about rooftop also um i live in vermont where we have a tremendous amount of rooftop solar and actually we're a lot of the former dairy farms dairies are having trouble but they have high transmission capability because of the electrical systems and dairies so a lot of the dairy farms have solar and we don't have dust we have a lot of rain so we don't have that kind of maintenance but it do you see action in california about moving to more urban systems you know i think about carports and as well as rooftops or other things were i mean in vermont we have sheep grazing underneath and you showed us the bees but it just seems like there's a lot of opportunity for for dual purpose and i wonder if there's much discussion happening at this time or if it's if the big utilities are really just controlling this the story in full disclosure i spent a lot of time at my grandmother's sister's dairy farm in the northeast kingdom of vermont milking cows when i was younger so i know all about yes um the answer is is sort of yeah i mean we're starting to see i mean in my own town i you know we have lots of parking lot even actually around here in san jaclar county silicon valley you're seeing more and more parking lots covered with solar and as we move toward more electric vehicles it just makes more sense to have that system more integrated and i think people are thinking about how to make that all work a little bit better like having i mean in your ideal situation you have parking lots covered with solar and you have cars underneath them and those cars are being charged by the solar or or maybe not fully but are those batteries in the cars are playing some sort of you know grid support pick up voltage sags and things like that that might happen on the electrical grid so people are thinking about it i mean there's there's some really incredible work happening at the national renewable energy labs and even pilot projects you know at the cpuc on trying to integrate some of these things so and i think people i think the story about how land use change or how much land it's going to take to decarbonize if we're going to have solar be a main backbone of that system people are realizing that there is more conversation now like when i first talked about this people were like who cares it's just wasteland out there and then i bring back these pictures and then now suddenly people get more interested and then they go out there and they're like how i was going camping this place i used to go camping is now a solar farm so um i think the story is traveling more and i think people are starting to think about that you know i i think what dominates the narrative is is utility scale is just so cheap and i think that that's the wrong way to be thinking about it because the question is cheap to who is what's cheap to the developer cheap to the rate payer not always the case and and i think that that's if we want to be thinking about how to get ourselves out of the conundrum we've created with energy crisis or market failures or whatever it is it's maybe it's the the quest for cheapness like odyssey in the first place maybe we should be paying a little bit more for our electricity and protecting low-income customers at the same time put that caveat in there well i don't want to sound like a broken record but i just think we also have to think about where the investment capital model is right so there's the whole thing about rate recovery but then investor-owned utilities have capital that they need to reinvest in facilities um and my understanding partly about the big buildout on public lands was not only because there were various administrative pushes for that but because of the way the production tax credit was established um which is essentially like a tax equity way for investment capital to find another source to return capital um so i think i don't know the answers but when we talk about distributed scale issues we want to think about um what's necessary to diminish the leverage that investment capital has at working at scale right now yeah i should make i mean i'm painting distributed as kind of a savior here but there was a big investigation into solar city about them jacking up prices because of you know they're backed by bank of america and that's providing their their liquidity so um yeah i think that that's something to be i'm certainly gonna be more tuned into that now thinking about it because i think it is a really important question so thank you julia for that hang on okay before we have bill's question we have a question from one of our online people and it's a follow-up to julia's comment in the canadian hydro projects i've been looking at there's a growing trend of profit-sharing agreements sometimes for the hydro projects and it just moves and sometimes for the industries that use the electricity but others have critiqued this kind of thing as enrolling local slash rural cultures and communities into neoliberalized production and exploitation of local and traditional resources and livelihoods how would you see this kind of profit-sharing approach in the spectrum of options for rural communities and i should note that these are often first nation lands and communities um well i think so profit-sharing is gets at the heart of the issue right which is like can can local places actually share in the returns on these things um betsey just whispered to me exactly what i was going to say which is that then you want to look at those mechanisms really carefully because um if the company's not making a profit then the community's not making a profit um pipelines which is so i don't know about the hydro projects at all um but you know pipelines have mostly been doing pretty well recently but anything that's in a you know trading in a globally based commodity is going to see real fluctuation and again there are these questions about um can communities set aside reserves to compensate for downturns in the cycle in in the american west many places are literally prohibited from establishing a reserve at the county level right you can't carry a positive balance from year to year so um i think that the philosophy is right and to be totally cliche the devil is in the details actually um it's a general question so are we ready for general questions okay well you know um i mean that all the talks and the conversation together are really great um and there's lots of these sort of threads about i mean was just mentioned um you know uh profit sharing and sort of community reserves and all these sort of you know a range of different things and i guess i i'm going to put on you know the committee hat i guess for a moment you know um you know i think we've illustrated well um the importance and the value of the geographic perspective on these kinds of questions so i think that's a broadly defined um you know that's that's kind of a given i guess the question i have um is connected to you know the question of policy and particularly federal policy like where are those windows i mean you know i mean i've always you know been chirping along here before you guys the you guys as speakers came in that you know there's been this retrenchment of federal policy and sort of like you know these a lot of these things were pushed and pressed you know in rural areas through uh federal initiatives you know coupled with you know a lot of capital investment but there's been this sort of retreat so you know is there are there particular places where federal policy could play a role or should play a role we mentioned public lands and i guess part of the other you know more even detailed question is you know with respect to this committee within the national academy the idea of like drawing in federal agencies to sort of be hey wow this is really interesting you know we want to kind of engage with these debates and you'll see what we can do you know vis-a-vis what else goes on in washington so are there any kind of that's a that's a broad big broad question um you know the federal policy angles that you know you think are just really so possible or so you know needed in certain spaces that the well who wants to take this one on i think i see betsy wiggling her finger toward the microphone i'm going to try to sort of dance around what you're saying first of all i want to explain why i've been texting and i've been back and forth with benham in kentucky and the solar panels are on the roof people have gone and looked so google is at fault so yeah and speaking of citizen science here and people are actually going out and looking at things just following up on your question about federal policy and the goals of this committee and i'm to thank you again for inviting me to be part of this it's been extremely helpful i wonder if it seems like in a lot of our conversations part of the problem is the gap between the intent of law and then what happens in administrative law as things get sort of as mary christina wood says parceled out between agencies and commodities um and on one hand we're hearing a lot of common themes and sort of common factors but the it's would it be possible to set up a sort of scholarly conversation as um as julia so wonderfully started with these ideas of frameworks about the the kind of indicators of planning like land use planning and local economic planning and sort of balancing all these factors and then bring in and set it up in such a way that we can bring in citizens who are experimenting with different kinds of planning to discuss the kinds of indicators that are being used to assess impacts and and sort of compare overarching legal and regulatory frameworks between commodities i mean for instance one of the things i'm thinking about is you know who owns the fun if many natural resources are actually nationally owned so if we if we said renewables also are owned by the nation and building renewables as part of our comet strategy then what does that fundamentally change the sort of legal framework around wealth generation from it i i don't even know where i'm going with that but um so i is there um it just feels like we need to um have more of a national conversation about what the platforms are to establish more of a common energy framework that can be open to local experimentation and conversations um i feel that there's quite a bit of possibility in the effort that was started the department of interior under president obama to join the u.s to the extractive industry transparency initiative and develop a very good portal that included renewables and other extractive commodities and sort of a suite of of data points that are have been internationally formulated to help people track the resource curse and that data portal is still up and functioning so that could possibly be a site from which to build out some of this this sort of cross regional conversation so that's a that's a very general question i'm wondering if either jillia or dustin would like also to talk about the federal policy question well i mean i guess just briefly that um there's nothing like a federal mandate to sort of bring about crisis and change right um and so when we had um the clean power plan we had suddenly a lot of scrambling and discussions among utilities that has largely abated um and we've let market we're letting the market do the work now to say hey these you know the costs of production of these resources is cheaper the fuel costs are less but that's different than a regulatory driven process and i think just to to broaden up from what betsy was offering so there's the regulatory drivers they're going to precipitate change and then there's sort of all the administrative law and practice and implementation part that really does have huge effects in places so if the reclaim act is successful in um being appropriated and and passed then there'll be lots of questions about whether it's implemented in a way that is beneficial to places um so and then you know there are still this question about being careful never to disconnect what's happening at the federal level with the state and local policies that are turned out to be really influential when you're just thinking about rural economies but also also sec regulations and and rules around bankruptcy i mean we're talking about billions of dollars of debt that were restructured that would have gone to you know reclamation of this massively important national project and companies that are now trading again on the new york stock exchange i'll i'll just offer up a couple um one of the mechanisms that that led to probably some of the the worst solar projects from a habitat perspective in terms of habitat loss and species having to be translocated or just temper being transferred to them was the BLM's mandate to develop public lands for renewable energy i think first of all that was interpreted as a mandate there's nowhere in the legislation that says mandate but um that basic i mean the rationale i get it it's like they've been giving the money to the fossil fuel and or they've been giving public lands the fossil fuel industry for so long we should get some too where the renewable energy industry were better than them but they're different landscapes they're different parts of the world and essentially that's what caused it causes bad decisions are you basically are removing money from the local communities because instead of a land owner and there are plenty of land it was funny i'd be driving around it says solar ready land is like the most common real estate sign you see out in that area and that means that land wasn't being sold that means that the the sales tax on the land purchase wasn't being kind of recouped in the local community and basically that money was going right into the federal the federal budget from leases and such so by that mandate dropping down not only did it cause all these ecological problems perhaps some political backlash because of the problems that the solar projects caused and third you're basically moving money directly back into the federal pockets as instead of circulating that in the local communities and not only that that meant that basically projects being competed that were competing you know it was you had some of the biggest most powerful companies getting private conversations with the interior secretary about who's going to get fast-tracked and who's going to get access to the air money and such so it kind of kind of created um i don't know it basically created a bunch of contradictions i think in in in the deployment or it could have been done differently i guess is the upshot there and then they under the obama administration that was the energy policy act of 2005 where that plm mandate is in and then under the obama administrations they doubled it and i have a graph it's not in my where do i have that graph i was going to put in the slides here there are about half of the projects that were proposed on public lands and even got all their permits that when they went all the way through the nipa process or if they're in california they get went through the sequel process or in some cases they had to do both um only half of them were built even though they got all their permits which is crazy because that means you put so many resources into the this evaluation think about all the resources that blm and fish and wildlife and all these agencies they're i you know i spoke into them they were like i was i instead of working on a habitat mitigation plan i've been working on for the last 10 years i suddenly got pulled off that project and was evaluating solar projects that were basically destroying habitat for these same species i mean what one point i meant to make on my desert tortoise picture and i'll shut up after this was that we spend more money on the grizzly bear bald eagle and gray wolf on the desert tortoise i'm sorry we spend more money on the desert tortoise than those other three species so and here we are creating a mechanism to destroy their habitat somewhere else so there's there's kind of something going at odds and just to finalize everything really the action seems to happen can i just make one really quick follow on deb and then one thing that i like to um remember is that we the energy transition is happening quickly and we are apparently decarbonizing at a rapid rate mostly due to market driven forces but it's not the coal production is going to persist into the future for quite some time so thinking about an opportunity to restructure the revenue opportunity around coal while it continues to exist in a way that provides for some transition for those places that aren't closing right now is a really important thing that i think could be supported at the federal level but also needs to take place in state policy so i have a question from online that i think might fit well into the to the discussion we've just been having um this seems to there seems to be a real need for incentives to accelerate green energy production but are there good policy examples of green energy incentives that include habitat protections not i have an idea here in it's not from um actually i think it did originate in legislation but it's basically in um Minnesota in their power purchase agreements they're they're required to do vegetation disclosures about what um basically how they're gonna how they're changing the landscape and their concern is pollinators and and things like that so so there's a case where you know state legislatures could pass a law saying you have to think about carbon debts you might create from land use change or you might have to think about species or or vegetation and in your contracting with with um you know private developers and such and perhaps even you don't even need legislation do that you could just have the the companies do that directly i mean it's a private contracting but whatever you want i guess um but that would be an example is is kind of screening for that and the problem is i think we have just become so obsessed with climate change we don't think about all these other issues we just like solar's good everywhere and we don't think about habitat we don't think about water use or some of these other things that are really important also to these areas okay um Marilyn yeah i wanted to segue off on the uh ownership of capital discussion for a minute you're looking at the picture here i think that's a gas plant i'm not sure but it's big and you know um over the past several centuries maybe 150 years or whatever it is um the technologies were such that the larger the plant the better the economy is justifying monopoly power and ownership of capital by small numbers of companies um but now we've had um you know the technology's been transformed and we can now do almost just as well with a highly distributed small scale energy uh facilities the possibilities uh are even multiplied more with the development of the sharing economy you know where you've got the ability to aggregate uh across um users and to use more of the capital that plants probably use to you know an average of plant is used something like 50 percent of the time um if you look at hour hour by hour um and you could have a plant that's used 100 percent of time with peer to peer sharing of electricity for instance i think that the biggest public need is for financing to allow that transition so that the ownership can be continued to transfer to smaller um scale um more distributed energy systems we can you can what do you mean by financing so in this case i would particularly like the public power model and that's not going to fit everywhere where it does exist um it offers a lot so for instance for uh rural electric cooperatives they can do on-bill financing i would call that an inclusive financing approach that is now um as long as you have a bill you know you don't even have to own your home you can um you can finance something which could be the solar on top of your your living unit uh now if you do own your home a city uh could offer property assess clean energy funds which are levied against your property your property bill so you can finance your investments through the longevity of your um your mortgage as another way the idea is to figure out how to make it um no more costly than it is for you to pay your current bill only your current bill will be partly the financing charge for your improvements and the ongoing costs of the system so i do think it's this type of um inclusive financing that's we need to work on i am very worried though about the the movement of the sharing economy to um not to ownership of the capital by everyone but to ownership by a different set of business intermediaries you know that would really lift the people who own homes they can offer air b and b and you know it's this whole different type of um beneficiaries who have capital it's not the millennials you know they don't want to participate and they don't necessarily want to own a car or a house and at some point it may come back to bite them they may find that they've been left out of all of the um you know profitable ways to to make money from the um from the resources that they have at their disposal they don't invest anything in this economy so but i think that i like the idea this inclusive financing as being a really important um challenge for governments at all levels yeah i kind of want to follow up on the capital thing and i also want to follow up some a caller mentioned the situation with first nations in canada and said there's something instructive there 60s and 70s there were a lot of major hydro projects in the james bay region north in kebakan in manitoba but also in anterio that really had one-sided agreements between the provincial entities crown corporations and the uh and the first nations that kind of came to a halt in 2004 when there was a court case of the haida in british columbia versus the province of british columbia principally the the ministry for forestry there and it was decided by the supreme court that indigenous peoples and first nations on their lands had to have you know complete say over in terms of these resource of extraction and environmental impacts etc and that led to a real slowdown in these negotiations some of them would take you know almost a decade nine years or more but it also led to situation where equity stakes and things like that or um how the development went was changed to protect cultural resources and things like that it made for a much messier surface for negotiating but in the end the first and it's not perfect as your caller mentioned but it did it is instructive and if we look at the states there's the navajo generating coal fire generating plant which is scheduled to be closed right that's going to have a massive impact massive impact on the hopi and the navajo and that but that was in a sense a supposed to be a driver for some economic resilience in in that area i think you know looking at those instances are can be instructive in some ways but in the other way that's different than uh private property private mineral rights ownership which you have in appellate chip mainly right and and they're they're confronted with a different issue so how do they how do they get equity stake how do they make money on that and and that's a that's a tricky one right i mean one thing i would i wonder about is the states states can have fees on how much oil is extracted a poor barrel cost right and california is very low some states are very high you know at the state level do we look at enemy energy surcharges and agreements that will increase capital flow to the producing regions or demand equity you know and that that's sort of out of our our system really doesn't like things like that and there's a natural resistance against taxes of any sort but you know honestly unless people in places like appellate chip take control of the resources they're you know that they'll be mining until there's no more coal or there's no more demand and then that's it there's not no one's going to do anything for them so i i do think the first nations and those things are are worth looking at but it's very different land ownership and i think that in many areas it has to be a different way we approach it because there's no sovereign rights for most of people that you talked about Betsy do we need to take a deep breath oh bill a little pile on uh so you know i'm looking at this very simply so i mean i'm you know i'm more of an urban guy so forgive me although my dissertation was on rural uh hazards chemical hazards so um you know a lot of the discussion that we've had he has focused on these sort of you know things like bankruptcy and financing like and real sort of elegant you know and even sort of indigenous you know uh land right questions and how to sort of maybe what i interpreted what you were saying is sort of translate some of those experiences to the appellation context or sort of you know writ large and really kind of um and i guess i'm you know maybe i'm not skeptical i'm maybe pessimistic or something or whatever you know i just like those things are i guess the question i have is you know for the for the rural experts here um you know how does that does the potential for progress and progressive you know politics i mean do you see it in the suite of these sort of kind of very uh at least as i interpret it quite simply kind of very um you know nuanced and sort of fairly sophisticated pieces of public policy when i hear all about like these really blunt instruments like a couple of days ago you know two trillion dollars for you know infrastructure that just sounds like a you know if that happens a giant glob of money to do something that it's going to be fairly you know incoherent in terms of what that might be spent on or even the green new deal which is also kind of a muddled kind of you know hazy vision of and you know and where does the rural kind of context fit into those you know that that tension between like very nuanced policies that are context specific and you raise the issue of place versus like these these seemingly unending like giant globs of policy that are slapped on that don't really connect to place well i'll start um we don't like globs we don't like globs of anything and i won't say anything about i think i think it's three trillion dollar infrastructure project um so one one thing that i see happening which is you know so incremental and um problem with being a world geographer is that we have nothing to say because we're such a small percentage of the population right it's like we can't we can't we can't talk about sort of significance of developments but um but out of crisis i think comes awakenings and so just to take this issue of kind of sovereign ownership and and some of the broad issues i laid out with respect to the limits that exist in policy with the ability for local governments to save money to make investments we're really seeing a resurgence of interest in the kinds of institutions you might associate with sort of great planes rural populism of you know kind of the early 20th century so interest in state-owned banks interest in local investment corporations a big surge in community foundations so then i would put on my other hat and just say and this is partly responding to what glenn said we have to be really careful about distinguishing what we're asking public revenue to do low and what we're asking local people to do right so i don't think we want these economies to be raising money to pay for the costs that remain on the landscape after development has happened um and that's a big problem with state a lot of the state severance tax kind of models is they pay for they they pay for the impact of development but they don't leave you with anything at the end um so then the question is what kinds of investment strategies exist that allow you even to hold money and then the question is what do you invest in um and i would say i mean i participate pretty actively in kind of the rural policy space and i don't think anyone has the answer to that question um and land reform would be a start but i don't think we're going to get land reform in the united states anytime soon and if we did do land reform in apalachia who would it go to right i mean you're american settlers that would be complicated um so thank you for allowing me that big picture kind of thing but i the the summary point is that um i think in the point of crisis people do become policy literate and one exciting thing is thinking about the ground up look at all the barriers there are to local retention of wealth that's it did you want also read to respond to that again this is all very contradictory and complex um so let me just sort of describe some of the conversations i'm hearing and there is an upsurgence of really quite radical thinking in some of the communities that i'm working with especially among young people so we're talking about people who have been displaced over generations and at the same time i don't want to romanticize this or exaggerate it but there is a way in which settler folks who have been here for some generations and based on the land and have sort of deeply embedded cultural traditions do have a cultural sense of sovereignty now this is in a very complicated and contested relationship with indigenous and native american groups and and i think that's a conversation that is just starting to happen now in in in the more progressive appalachian activism so that you know some some tribes are now in oklahoma who have historical connections to parts of appalachia and so there's a there's a great desire to establish very direct connections to talk about specific land and some of the archaeologists actually are doing that and part of the part of the reason people resist some of these questions about being settlers is that in the national american imaginary hillbillies sort of fit that savage slot right so with i think there is a sense that often hillbillies are asked well what about the native americans that you killed when they wouldn't say that in manhattan right you know so it's like it's sort of like you can't have a hillbilly and indigenous person in the same place because they're both actually connected to the land in some national imaginary so i just want to throw that out there but in terms of thinking about what some of you is there is talk about an appalachian commons i mean really working in this this new in the in the land there to set up commons or mosaics of much more complicated structures and also to say that if that land is stewarded as a carbon sink that's a national service so some of this i don't know where this could go legally but there's a lot of interest in what's happening in scotland because there's some pretty fundamental land reform happening in scotland which is claiming sort of commons rights so it it the big need is for the kinds of collaborative spaces for conversations that as ostrom would say the sort of diagnostic framework and there's an urgent need for scholars like you all to help clarify what the policy alternatives are but let these grassroots conversations drive what the questions are so there's a great deal of technical information that the technical uh advice that's needed thanks we have um we could continue with this but we do have one more question from the from from the outside that we'll try to work in okay so one last question from the online um so julia one of your slides shows the real winner being natural gas um aren't we really diversifying to natural gas which is the most price sensitive and the most vulnerable fuel source to disruptions to to reduce our carbon footprint i feel like i should probably let maryland answer that question um and that big surge of build-up that you see natural gas capacity additions were in a different price and policy environment than what we have today um i i watch what's going to happen with exports and lng facilities really really carefully because there's a price differential across the pacific that um will when when the technology exists for us to serve those markets will really change um what gas prices are like here today but i don't i feel really inadequate to answer that compared to maryland who do um i'm i'm just curious about i'm just curious about um so a lot of these issues that we talked about including habitat protection um it seems like it's heavily focused on fossil fuels and then solar but how about bioenergy what about bioenergy i mean there's been a there's been a lot of work looking at you know the ethanol fuel standard and and its implications for um agricultural systems you know most of the drive so so the like there's been a big plow up in in the great plains on the western edge of the great plains and that's um heavily attributed both to high commodity prices and the fuel ethanol standard um with major consequences so a great place if you're interested in that is the world wildlife foundation prints uh creates what they call a plow print which uses a variety of uh spatial data sets to calculate the loss of uh native grassland habitat in the great plains for example and of course it's not carbon neutral you know you know that but there are a lot of uh interesting new technologies being developed i'm sure oakridge has their fair share georgia tax got a bunch of them as well where we think that you could know a lot of money being pumped in which you know could be the basis of some sort of a rural renaissance i'm not sure i'm not myself investing in them but uh hoping hoping i'm wrong well i think like we have an algal biofuel research at msu and um in our i'm part of a big integrated assessment project looking at the bex economy in the great plains and one of the places that they're looking for algae to do interesting work is as a fertilizer alternative which has all sorts of like interesting energy system kind of dynamics within it um again who's going to own the technology and the production but uh i think there's a lot of exciting space there well once again i hate to cut us off when when things are still just rolling rolling fast but we have run out of time and so i'd like to first thank our speakers julia and betsy and dustin thank you so much this was really interesting both and then we i'd like to thank everybody who joined us here and not here and we've have a tremendous food for thought and a lot of a lot of new questions opened and hopefully we can move forward on this in some way that would be really productive and helpful i i am i'm warned though by betsy's mention of the word panacea that we aren't going to we aren't going to get there but thank you again thank you so much this has been a really interesting meeting thanks