 So, welcome. My name is Mariana Grossman, and I'm the founder and managing partner of Minerva Ventures. And we are an advisory firm that works on climate adaptation strategy and solutions. And we look at what are the risks and costs of climate change and climate adaptation, and we think that unaccounted for risk is not good business. So, if you want to have a well-managed business or a well-managed community or a governmental agency, you have to take into account the things that Robert Weiss and Miller was talking about. I hadn't heard the statistic of subsidence at 21 inches a month. That's what he said, right? That's just phenomenal. That's a huge impact on roads, on power infrastructure, on buildings, on rail. And just imagine the cost associated with dealing with those things, and also the water storage, it gets lost when you have subsidence, and the infrastructure that holds the water and the aquifers is smushed, and it doesn't recharge easily. So it has many implications, and that's just one example of climate impact. So heat, fire, storms, and other sea level rise are beginning to be felt and will continue to accelerate. So there's this disconnect between how we operate every day and what the future is going to hold. And what the future is going to hold is really scary, and most environmentalists have decided that we can't scare people too much or they'll get depressed and give up and just party until Armageddon. So they try to maintain this sense of hope, but then you lose the urgency. So one of the things I think is really interesting, there was an article in The New Yorker in about 2013 about the rate of diffusion of anesthesia versus hygiene and hand washing in medicine. And so that germ theory was discovered and anesthesia was discovered. And anesthesia was adopted almost instantly around the world. Why? Well imagine you're doing surgery on a patient in the Civil War with no anesthesia. The patient is thrashing, they're yelling, they're in pain, so you have to operate very fast and just try to get it over with. It's extremely physically difficult and emotionally difficult and you have to have people restraining the person. It's just a nightmare. Imagine when you have anesthesia, you have a calm sedated patient, you can take your time, you can be precise, you can use all kinds of delicate instruments, have better outcomes for the patient, and a much less stressful experience for the physician and the physician's team. So anesthesia was adopted almost instantly around the world, way before the internet. Hand washing and hygiene are a pain in the neck for the medical team. You have to scrub, you have to put on clothes and masks, you have to change your clothes in between every surgery, you have to clean everything clean and all the instruments. It's a lot of work. And the benefits accrue to the patients in the future. They accrue to the herd, to all of us collectively, but the hassle accrues to the physician and the medical team and the benefits accrue to everybody else. And there's no feedback. You don't know if somebody's had sepsis or some other problem if you're operating and you're on the next patient. So the hygiene practices still aren't universally adopted around the world. They take a lot of work, a lot of training, a lot of reinforcement to get people to follow those practices. And so climate change is kind of similar to this, where taking action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to plan for adaptation is like hygiene. It's a big hassle. It's a lot of work. It's very inconvenient. And it's hard to get people to think into the future and to see the impacts. And if I make one little change, what difference does that make? I turn off the lights, I switch from an electric car, I put on renewables or something like that on my business. What difference does that really make in the big scheme of things? So you've got to get, just like hand washing, everybody has to do it and nobody really wants the hassle. So we're going to, we have a panel that have two people who were at the Paris Accords and two people who were not, but the people who are in their chain of hierarchy were. So one of the questions I'm really interested in is, if you have a direct experience of about 200 nations and many, many non-national entities coming together and making really significant commitment for humanity to address climate change and to take on the hygiene of changing our energy systems and our practices and our adaptation strategies. If you've got that going on, there's an impact, an emotional impact of being part of that. So what is it for the people who weren't part of that, what's their experience, what motivates them and how do you diffuse that motivation and energy through their experience? And then how can we help diffuse that excitement to you, the audience? And how can you take that forward in the companies that you run, in the institutions that you're part of, in the communities where you belong? How can you help your legislatures to really get on board to take bold action and not to drag their feet or impede action to protect humanity and to protect our markets and to protect civil society from the impacts of climate change? So I'm not going to spend a lot of time introducing the panelists. I will tell you their names and their, and their roles and there's more information on them in the program. I want to preserve most of the time for them to speak. So we are really fortunate to have an amazing, diverse panel. Jan Berman is a senior director for energy efficiency strategy for Pacific Gas and Electric Company. Pat Burt is the mayor of Palo Alto and he's also an entrepreneur and very passionate about sustainability and clean tech. Mike Gatto is an assembly member from Burbank from the 43rd district and he has carried legislation on biodiesel and other, other clean fuels and also leads the chairs, the utilities committee and the assembly. And Debbie Raphael is the head, the director of the San Francisco Department of the Environment. And both Pat and Debbie were in Paris and have that experience to share and also I know that Debbie was participating in the CEM7, which I think stands for the Congress of Energy Ministerial, Clean Energy Ministerial Seventh Meeting that was just in San Francisco and there were, there were energy leaders from around the world there, elected officials and people from business and, and other domains. So we have a great experience panel and I'm going to turn it over to them. We're going to start with Mayor Burt. Well, thanks, Mariana. So in order to address Mariana's question about how Paris has impacted us going forward, I wanted to take a step backward because the context over the last 20 years or so very much has had an impact on, on where we are. So this is not a travel log, although the COP conferences have tended to be in some, some inspirational cities, but basically if we look back in time to the Kyoto Accord in 97, which was a very major achievement with a primary exception, which was that the United States was never able to sign on to it and I would put the opposition within the U.S. to one, a political organization that unlike almost all the other nations involved, we basically have a division of power and Congress didn't support the administration on it and that the refrain I would say is primarily that we, we saw at that time or a good body of the United States and Congress saw what was been proven to be a false notion that you can't have clean energy and cheap energy and a strong economy all at once and so one of the things that local government has done and Palo Alto in particular is to be able to disprove that premise and out of, in between Kyoto and Copenhagen, we really had the dawn of, of the clean tech and clean energy revolution that has occurred and much of the, the ability to, to now today have cheap clean energy has really been the result of that, that great transformation. But we thought in, in, in Copenhagen that we would have the next opportunity for a great breakthrough and frankly it didn't happen. So by the time COP16 occurred there was really a great deal of despair, frankly in the air and the only notion was that, that we, we didn't know if it'd be five or 10 years before we'd have another opportunity for an international agreement and what, what could we do in the meantime and that was for local and subnational governments and the private sector to try and move the dial and to provide successful models and really to be bottoms up political drivers. So out of that we had the Paris Accords and Bunky Moon made a particular point that the, the progress made by local and subnational governments in the private sector had been a major impetus in being able to come up with the bilateral and ultimately the, the multinational agreement that we had in Paris and so that the, the impacts from the bottom up have occurred and had a great influence but now what occurred in Paris is influencing us. So if we look back the city of Palo Alto, this didn't all happen overnight of Palo Alto now coming to 100% carbon free electricity and now having, being halfway to our goal of, of an 80% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. This, the, we're, we're the beneficiaries of owning our all our own utilities, actually the only city in the state that owns the entire set of utilities but we started electricity utility in 1900 and we've been really benefited from the wisdom of our, our forefathers ever since but really starting a little over 15 years ago we, we moved in a whole set of new directions. We established one of the first renewable portfolio standards and, and had a more aggressive one than the state and then as the state moved along we, we saw that we could progress even further. We were adopted an early sustainability plan, zero waste plan, of which we're now to nearly 80% diversion and then a comprehensive energy efficiency plan which really has been a lot of the foundation for what we've been able to do but it's not just electrical energy efficiency, it's gas efficiency and this is a 10 year program that we've each year ratcheted down our consumption and then even a water efficiency and, and I'll mention a moment that nexus and then in 2013 we saw that under the budget that we had set up which is was always a, a minimizing the impact on ratepayers of our renewable portfolio and a much more opportunistic buying structure of power purchase agreements than investor owned utilities have been able to do. We saw that under our existing budget we could actually go the rest of the way toward carbon free electricity. We're about 45% hydro and now 55% renewables and our cost of electricity is 30% below investor owned utilities. 100% carbon free, 30% below the market in cost. So that's a very strong refutation of this notion of can't have it clean and, and cheap in a strong economy. And now we're, we're working on our next generation of our sustainability and climate action plan and after the Paris Accord we, we really saw that our community was invigorated by that accord and in January we had a summit of over 300 people on a full day on a Sunday to dive, deep dive into our sustainability and climate action plan. Our city council just a little over a month ago formally adopted the goal of the 80% reduction off a 1990 baseline by 2030. But that's not just an aspirational goal. We, we see that those, these goals are thrown around and I don't really think a lot of them as goals because they don't have plans associated with them. They're more aspirations. But we're now based upon having achieved carbon neutrality. As of over a year ago, we were 35% reduction off of 1990 and we're now getting close to the 40%. So we're halfway there. And but we, that what remains now that we're carbon free electricity is not an easy path. And when we've looked for other cities and other states to see, all right, what path have you really established? What are the programs and plans to get through an 80% reduction and ultimately to a carbon free city? And those plans don't exist really. There are components of the plans, but not really comprehensive ones. So we're working on that now and we integrate it between our comprehensive, essentially our general plan for the city that we're rewriting at the same time and the intersection between sustainability and climate action and our general plan is for the first time becoming fully knit together. So these lines show how we will basically at a high level, the categories that we have to hit to get to that 80% reduction. And we now have no footprint from electricity. So transportation and use of natural gas are now 90% of our remaining greenhouse gas reductions. So there lies the challenge. Can we really do that? How do you retire an existing infrastructure of a natural gas infrastructure? We don't know of any program that has ever taken an infrastructure like that and retired it. And we're struggling with that. But we've determined to not try and score a touchdown from the 20 yard line. We'll get across the 50, continue to reduce our use of natural gas through efficiency and through electrification of switching over to electricity. Perhaps to having a renewable gas portfolio on the remainder and then five years from now, try to come up with the balance of the plan. But then the remainder is what we do with 60% of our remaining greenhouse gas emissions that are from mobility, our transportation system, principally gas in our vehicles. So can we really get to that point? And we're actually, this is an intersection between this general plan and sustainability and quality of life. So we know, we don't think that we have a competition between climate protection and climate adaptation and sustainability and the things that local residents care most about in their personal quality of life. Congestion and parking and air pollution are all quality of life issues and not just climate change issues. So we're intersecting those and and bringing together a lot greater political support because we're framing the issues around things that people care about. We have a lot of people who say, Yeah, I care about climate change. Boy, I really care about that traffic problem. And I really care about not being able to park in my neighborhood. But I do care about climate change or someone else who really cares about emergency preparedness and resiliency. And and we're trying to pull them in to the conversation on all those directions. So we also are a test bed. We're all here in the center of innovation. This is the famous HP garage. This is a 20th century model that really was the foundation of Silicon Valley and Palo Alto as a center of innovation. But the 21st century version of that looks a little bit different. And and we're seeing, interestingly, Palo Alto is a car town. Who to thunk? We not only have Tesla here as a headquarters. We have the Electric Power Research Institute and Xerox Park. They've been great centers. But now virtually every one of the major automotive companies has their center of innovation and research in either Palo Alto or surrounding areas and all of the next generation of clean vehicles shared that are shared and autonomous powered by clean energy as a vision for automobile futures in combination with all of the other mobility efforts that we can take. When I I rode my bike here as I do now because I tell people, not because I'm trying to be so ethical, but because I didn't have time to drive and park. And I can get door to door faster by bike and most things in our community than if I drove. But we have cities like Copenhagen that are world leaders in in in mode share of bicycling over 50%. But in fact, in our school system, we began over 20 years ago, a comprehensive program of safe routes to school. We went from under 15% of our students, high school students riding today over 45%. And so in that model, we've shown that in the United States, we can do things like European communities have done. And it's a lifestyle. It's a health issue. Once again, it's a quality of life and public safety issue as well. Then we've got this great nexus between what we're doing in energy and what is a great concern for our state and one that frankly strikes people emotionally, which is our drought. But for us, we have 45% of our power comes from hydro. So it's not just whether we have water. It's whether we have power and a sustainable water supply is something that we are seeing as as as important as any of our other initiatives. We think that we're we're moving toward a future of recycled potable water for a major portion of our of our water supply. This is what's actually already in San Jose. That's online of advanced recycling. But finally, water is both a resource issue on on in itself. It is a big part of our power consumption in California and our power resource. But ultimately, it is a great deal of what we're looking at as climate adaptation. We just last Monday moved forward with prioritizing sea level rise and beginning a plan for sea level rise in our community, as we have throughout this bay, where the bulk of the most important companies in Silicon Valley are threatened by sea level rise. And but the impact of that climate change on water hits the other end of the extreme. And when I was at at COP 16, I was standing in line and talking with some African representatives. I told them that I had stopped in an airport in Florida and some really nice women had asked me where I was going. I told them and they as politely as they could said, So you believe in that climate change stuff? And they were really nice, polite women. And they just they didn't want to offend me with their skepticism. And the African representatives, when I told them that story, they said, We are today massively impacted by climate change. It's not the future. It's the present. So ultimately, what can we all do as local governments that can have a leveraged and in rippled impact? And I think that that Paris has inspired us to do more. And by doing more, we can have that impact on others. So thanks. So our sister city to the north San Francisco, Debbie Raphael. And there's nothing I need to do. It just appears. Great. Thank you. Debbie Raphael, Department of Environment, San Francisco. And I can tell you that having a neighbor and a partner like Palo Alto is both inspiring and intimidating. There is a lot of wonderful friendly competition between the city of LA and all of the city surrounding LA Palo Alto, San Francisco. We're always pushing each other to do better and learn from each other. So what I want to do today is just talk briefly about my personal experience in Paris. That's what I was asked to talk about. And then bring that back to what's going on in San Francisco and what the lessons of Paris really are. So as everyone here knows, Paris was incredible success. Cop 21 195 nations came together and made verifiable commitments. They promised that in two years and five years they would come back and they would tell the world how they did, how they did towards meeting their goals. My experience of Paris was a little different. I was walking around looking for action. And as many of you know, because of all the terrorist attacks, Paris itself outside of these climate talks was pretty sleepy. This was as close to a demonstration as I got a group of people walking across a bridge with some signs. The climate talks were organized in two areas. There was the blue zone, which is where all those negotiations were happening. And this is about as close as I got to inside the blue zone. You needed to have credentials. This is where all the diplomats were. And it was very impressive. But for me, representing the city, it was a little bit foreign from my experience. Where I spent my time was in this place called the green zone. The green zone is where civil society gathered. This is where people from around the world, from NGOs and cities and businesses came to talk about their personal commitment to making what was happening in the blue zone real. I like to say the blue zone is about that policy and that high level goals. The green zone is where the action happened. And it was a phenomenal place to be for that period of time. And I want to share with you one of the people I met in the green zone, because his story for me epitomizes what we need and the lessons of Paris. His name is Stefan Martinez. Stefan, so me being from San Francisco and all about zero waste, of course, when I'm in the green zone, I don't care just about what's in the front of the house. I don't want to know the back of the house. So how close to zero waste is the cop agreement? So I got the behind the scenes tour of all the sorting. It was very cool. And I met this guy, Stefan Martinez. So Stefan is a restaurant tour. And as you can imagine in Paris, people are very attached to their food and to the restaurants. And Stefan had a problem. He had left over food and he had nowhere to put it. Because the city of Paris, while it had recycling, had no food waste composting. So what he did is he took it into his own hands. He said, I know there's something we can do with this food. So he took the food and he started to invest in anaerobic digestion. And now, three years later, he services 80 restaurants in Paris. He has a whole system of clear plastic bags that he delivers to the wait staff and the cook staff so that they can do their separation and get that instant feedback. What's going in the right place? He bought an anaerobic digester and a centrifuge that separates out the plastic. He takes the biogas that comes out of that food waste from those 80 restaurants. He uses that to fuel his trucks and he takes the compost to spread out on agricultural land outside of Paris to sequester carbon. So what Stefan's message to me was, we can't afford to wait for those guys in the blue zone to figure things out. We need to take action in our own hands and we need to do whatever is possible within each of our abilities to accelerate actions on climate change. So we've got a challenge and our challenge is that Stefan is not the norm. All of us come from communities where most people are actually not that interested in figuring out what they can do. And Mariana's example of washing hands is a great example. It's a great metaphor for this. So how are we going to engage everyone because it's going to take us all? Well what I noticed in Paris was this is the language of climate change. The language of policymakers is incredibly wonky and dense. It's things like we've got to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. Or it's this wonderful new agreement this under two MOU. We've got to reduce our emissions so that we limit warming to below two degrees Celsius. Well I have to say that that does nothing for most people. When I go to the mayor of San Francisco and I say yes this is what we need to do he looks at me and says okay I'll sign it but what does that even mean? So the question and the the solution is we need a better frame. We need a better way to talk about climate change so that we can accelerate what needs to happen and we can engage all the the latent Stefan's that are out there. We need a way to engage everyone whether it's a business, a church, a government official. We need to give them the language. And so in San Francisco we've developed a different way of talking about climate change and it's very simple and it's very elegant. 0, 50, 100 routes. 0, 50, 100 routes. This is San Francisco's climate action strategy. Zero is zero waste. Zero waste of landfill and incineration. It's getting at those methane at those very potent greenhouse gases and of course it's more efficient upstream as well when you look at the whole lifecycle of consumption. 50, 50 percent transit, 50 percent of trips in sustainable modes and when you're in and that means no single occupancy vehicles and when you're in one of course it's a renewable fuel. And 100, 100 percent renewable energy and as the mayor of Palo Alto explained that's not just electricity. We have paths for electricity but it's looking at natural gas as well and it's looking at vehicle fuels. And finally routes. Routes is the thing I like to say 0, 50, 100 is how we do less bad in the world and routes is how we're going to heal the planet. Because what we know from the Marin Carbon Project and the work at UC Berkeley is that if you put compost out on rangeland you massively increase the ability of that soil to absorb carbon and those of us who listened to the presentation this morning and you saw a California's climate action strategy you might have noticed that on the far right of that report one of the icons was the Healthy Soils Initiative. The idea that we've got to use our soils as a carbon sink because the ocean is saturated. We in San Francisco cannot plant enough trees to do much big of a dent there but we can pull CO2 out of the air if we use our food compost to the best ability and improve the soil fertility. So 0, 50, 100 routes is the way we are engaging San Franciscans. The way we are taking the lessons of the need for action from Paris. So the question is, is it working? Well if you take a look at San Francisco we have been in a boom. That's not a surprise to anybody in the room. Since 1990 our population has increased almost 15% and our GDP by almost 50%. At that same period of time we've reduced our greenhouse gas emissions by 23.3%. So again just like Palo Alto's story there is a decoupling between economy and greenhouse gases. We've seen this actually three times today. So in this room we understand that that's a truth and that's something we need to share with the rest of the world. So Kofi Annan said that the world has the technological know-how to solve its problems. But do we have the political will? That's the question. It's not one of know-how. We know the solutions. We know what we need to do. But do we have the political will? And my message from Paris was that Paris was about a call to action. It was a challenge through people like Stefan Martinez, through the people I met in the green zone, to the people who were protesting to the best of their ability on the streets of Paris. It's a call to action to all of us that it's up to us. Because the policymakers they're just a start and we're not going to accelerate things. We're not going to get to those goals unless every one of us is doing our part. So thank you. I'd like to welcome Jan Berman from Pacific Gas and Electric. Thanks Mariana. It is fabulous to be back at Stanford. So I want to give the Precourt Institute a thanks for letting me come back and relive my student days just briefly today. I personally found those talks from Pat and Debbie so inspirational hearing about their experiences in Paris and then where that took them in terms of action. And I want to start with Paris as well because I had a similar experience when our executives came back from Paris. So let's start there. We had four executives in Paris, including our CEO Tony Early. And I think we were the only investor-owned utility that went from California, although many others went from California as well. And over the two weeks our leaders participated in quite a few panels talking about SB 350, AB 32, and California's experience on the path to a cleaner energy supply. And the message that I really took back when they came back and held brown bags and meetings to share the experience was we in California are sometimes so focused on the path ahead and what we need to still accomplish that it can be a little bit stressful. But when we were in Paris, everyone wanted to know how we've come as far as we've already come. And we realized, gosh, we have a lot of things we can contribute in how to run a utility system with a very high percentage of renewables, solar, wind, and hydroelectric. How do we balance that? Other countries were very interested in it. How have we integrated higher percentages of distributed renewables? And how are we moving forward with electric vehicles? So it made us feel that not only do we have many steps to take, getting a cleaner California, but we have a lot to contribute to the world getting there as well. So I focused on that and then thought, all right, what do we do looking forward? Now I have spent quite a bit of time working on energy efficiency and I appreciate that both Professor Sweeney and Professor Weissmiller spent a lot of time on energy efficiency this morning. I think they may have both mentioned the Rosenfeld curve, which is the curve I'm showing here. It's named after UC Berkeley Professor Art Rosenfeld, and it shows that divergent path California took in the 1970s while the rest of the nation continued along, doubling their per capita consumption of electricity. California went on the flat path starting in the 1970s and has not increased its per capita consumption of electricity since then. There are a lot of takeaways you can get from what this has meant to California. First of all, we estimate that we have not built about 30 conventional power plants because of this path. That certainly is a huge contributor to not generating more pollutants over the last 30 years. In addition, we estimate that it's avoided the release of about 30 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, which is the equivalent of about 6 million cars, so good step forward. We've saved California's residences and businesses about 12 billion dollars by taking this path, which is money that can be reinvested in the economy. One of my favorite statistics that I'll give at risk of offending any Texans who might be in the room, if California spent the same share of their economy on the electricity bill as Texas does, we would spend an additional 30 billion dollars a year on electricity. So we've got 30 billion dollars we can pump back into the GDP to continue to create better economic growth and a cleaner environment simultaneously that may be missing from other states and we're looking forward to helping them get on this same path. We also have a lot of experience with renewable energy and I think another speaker already referred to the high percentage of carbon-free energy in our mix. It's largely renewables, large hydro, and nuclear, some market purchases, and then some natural gas. One of the things not shown on this slide is that the pie would be about 20% bigger if we hadn't changed paths in energy efficiency. So that's a really significant amount of resources that we would have had to construct of some type that we didn't. We've also focused a lot on the connection of distributed renewables which is something that's been very popular in California. In fact we have one of the fastest interconnection times for distributed renewables solar power in the state. We connect about one every seven minutes. Now when I first started working on distributed solar in the year 2000 we had a 163 rooftop solar units. We're at 240,000 now although at the rate of one every seven minutes that statistic is probably wildly off already. So we have learned a lot about operating a system that has these intermittent solar units coming on and off the grid. When I set the statistic in a room full of utility personnel that we typically can connect a distributed solar system in about two days there was complete silence in the room and someone finally shouted out more power to you PG&E how did you do it? It's just not something other utilities have yet got to scale on but I think that they all will be throughout the United States. We also have offered our employees a discount on solar power so that's helping employees go solar too if they'd like to. Another area of focus for the state is transportation and a number of speakers have talked about that. We are trying to do our part to contribute to the growth of electric vehicles in California partially by filing an application to install some public charging infrastructure which we hope will help get over the range of anxiety and spur the growth of electric vehicles. We've also got a large electric vehicle fleet ourselves about 1,400 electric vehicles so we're pretty experienced working with an electric fleet and we offer attractive time of use rates to make electric vehicles a more attractive option. I also did want to mention that we've been doing a lot of work with our gas system to reduce methane leakage and that actually is a fairly significant contributor so anything we can do to stop the leaks as we've done in the past decade or so is an important action for climate change. So let's talk about the grid a tiny bit. The grid is a critical element of making the system work. It's become a lot more complicated to operate and one of the things we're focusing on is how can we continue to invest in a smarter more reliable grid that will help be at the root of the change that California wants to see for clean energy. So let me talk a little bit about going forward what we want to focus on. I mean we've accomplished a lot already but there is as everyone in this room knows a lot more to do and I wanted to talk briefly about three areas policy people and partnerships. I think policy has been a key focus of people in this room and a key reason California diverged onto a more efficient cleaner path 30 years ago. From my experience in energy efficiency I think a lot about the codes and standards that Bob Weisenmiller mentioned. We just made it easier to be more efficient in California because you have to build buildings more efficiently and the equipment sold in the state has to meet certain standards. As we adopt more aggressive standards they've been adopted federally and I was great to hear that we're learning from China now as well and working that into our codes and standards. This is the least expensive way of getting people on board with using more efficient equipment. I also like to reference back to what Marianna said about how do you get people to engage in the change to be more efficient and first let me tell a little story from when I first started in energy efficiency. I was told that there is a challenge when people's water heaters break they you know you call the water heater repairman and usually there's not an efficient water heater available so they just bring whatever's available because most people don't like to do without water heaters for the two weeks it would take to get an efficient one so our campaign at the time was to educate people to pre-order water heaters in case theirs broke. Now how well do you think that worked? That was right? It's not it's sort of like the hand washing example like it might be good for you to do but you're pretty unlikely to get interested in pre-ordering a water heater. So the reason I put this up is we started thinking about making sure that we were picking the proper point of intervention in the market to make efficiency happen wherever customers are making decisions. In this case we needed to work with wholesalers and distributors to make sure that efficient water heaters were available to contractors in the state and then we needed to work with contractors to provide an incentive to them to pull the efficient water heaters and have them on the truck. The end-use customer still just needs to make a call but the efficient water heater could be more available now. So that's an example of what I mean by engaging at the best point of intervention. We try to do this wherever the customer is. If they're at home opening their mail they'll get a message from us about energy efficient behaviors. If they're online we have a marketplace that helps them compare efficiency of different equipment when they're ordering. In stores we have partnerships with retailers to display the more efficient equipment more prominently and highlight the available rebates and as I mentioned we work in the trade pro environment as well. That's just a residential example the same is true for commercial we have to look at the point where we can have the most impact to create a more efficient society. I'm just going to close with the word on how important partnerships are. We're so lucky to be here in Silicon Valley where we have opportunities to work with all these brilliant businesses that are making new advances and this is just a small set of our partnerships. I also noted the important partnerships we have with all of our governments. We work on energy efficiency with them and as well we just announced that we're providing I'm looking up the figure a million dollar grant program to help local governments deal with the effects of climate change. We recognize that that's something that could have the big impact on us with sea level rise drought and wildfires and our governments as well and so we're looking forward to working with our local governments on that. We also know that it's very important to make sure that low income areas are represented and so we've just signed on to a White House initiative to expand energy efficiency and renewable energy resources that are available to low income communities and those are just two new efforts. I think the reality is none of us is going to tackle climate change alone but these partnerships and working together are really critical to how we're going to create that change you referenced and really get the momentum to address climate change. While Paris was a great start we do have a lot to do on the path forward and we're looking forward to being engaged in that. Thank you. I'm happy to introduce Assembly member Mike Gatto from Burbank. We're really lucky to have him here today and yes. It's great for the lawmaker they put up the corporate sponsorships. So on Mike Gatto I am going to start my talk today with a little bit of a parable. So I you know if you've read my bio or maybe you haven't but I am happily married. I have two children, wonderful wife, I'm very happy but this is actually my second marriage and when I got married the first time I was dating a terrific woman and she's somebody that I'm still very very close friends with to this day and she was very kind and very wonderful but I think our personalities were like oil and water but when I announced my engagement to most of my friends my friends you know came up to me and said this is terrific she's beautiful she's great this is wonderful you guys are going to be very happy but I had one friend who came to me and said you know I don't think your marriage is going to work out and I was so angry with him. You imagine being told that when you right when you get engaged and he sat down with me and he said Mike I want to tell you why I don't think your marriage is gonna work out and he outlined all these things and I don't think we spoke for the next six or seven months. I mean it was just a very very awkward conversation but 15 months later as I realized that our personalities were like oil and water you know and we got divorced I had this thought that came over me which was which of my friends were the true friend were they the ones who told me what I wanted to hear or was it the one guy who had the courage to tell me what I didn't want to hear and I would submit it was the one guy who told me what I did not want to hear now that being said I hated him when he told it to me and but I came to appreciate it much later that type of straight talk and I'm going to tell you some things today and I'm going to assume that at certain points in my presentation you're going to hate me too because I'm going to try to tell you things you know as much like they they are as I know but I do hope that you know maybe a few months later maybe a couple years later you will appreciate what I'm telling you here today as well so I assume that most people are here because you want to get something done right and I'm a legislator and the way that you're going to get a lot of things done in this state obviously is going part of it will be going through things like the energy commission Mr. Weiss Miller who spoke earlier today and part of it will happen at the municipal level but a lot of it will happen at the legislative level and I want to talk about the best way to frame things to sort of get things done there has been an absolute sea change in the legislature in my time in office and it's really due to a number of things and we all know that these sea changes do occur right in politics from time to time if you look at the lifetime of somebody who might have been born in 1915 when that person was a child the republican party was the party of minorities and environmentalists right Teddy Roosevelt Abraham Lincoln that was the republican party and as that person went through their 20s and 30s the republican party became the party of highly educated coastal east coast cities and the people who occupied them and it was the party of ultra small government elites right and now the republican party is this coalition of sort of and I don't mean to impugn any republicans but but I think social scientists and political scientists would say that the modern republican party is a coalition of sort of big government social conservatives who want the government to intervene you know to to have certain social moors and then also by and large a lot of under educated people in the deep south and things like that and that has a sea change folks and it has profound repercussions to national politics but we have had a similar sea change in the state legislature and I want to walk you through it because I think it affects how we can get things done so a few years ago you know we had six-year term limits in the assembly and I am the last by the way the last person of that six-year class I get seven years in the assembly I'm the currently the longest serving assembly member but everybody who got elected after me gets 12 years now in the assembly and before you had people there for a very short time who wanted to punt all the difficult decisions to the executive branch they wanted to empower an executive branch commission with the power to do something and they wanted them to make a tough decision and so you saw a lot of legislation being passed where the legislature didn't really make a decision they gave it to an executive branch agency the executive branch agency ran with it and you have the policies that we have in place now last year we had a very very spectacular fight over SB 350 and people wondered why is this not getting through the legislature why is this not getting through the legislature why is there so much pushback this time well it's because the legislature has changed that is no longer acceptable to my colleagues in the legislature they do not want well I mean let's let's put it from their perspective so let me get this straight I'm going to give my power away to an executive branch agency that nobody has heard of they're going to make a decision that could be very very unpopular like tacking 10 cents on every gallon of gas and then I'm going to go talk to voters to rooms like this they're going to yell at me and I'm going to be powerless to do anything about it sounds great signed me up no that was not their reaction their reaction was hell no and so you saw last year for the first time in anybody's memory a democratic legislature rejecting a lot of very very admirable climate change goals and I know Mr. Weissemiller talked about that and he still seemed a little perplexed about that at the end of his presentation which I caught but I can tell you that people who are elected for longer periods of time people have become aware of this people have become in the legislature very hesitant to grow the executive branch at the expense of legislative power and then also to have nothing to do with those policies so the way that I hope that can inform certain of your decisions is if you want to get something through the legislature involve the legislature don't give it all to the executive branch make sure that the legislature can actually make a decision and that you form some consensus on it within the legislature the second thing that that I think you know I should talk about a little bit here are some of the divisions within the legislature right now and I call this the Paris principle you know I was asked to talk about my experiences in Paris and I did not go to Paris I did not go to Paris France but I went to Paris California has anyone ever been there okay two people all right Paris California is a town within what we call the inland empire it's a part of southern California where the many of the wonderful changes in California have bypassed this town they have a lot of problems and challenges in Paris it's still a very nice place to live in my humble opinion but the people of Paris California could not be farther away from the principles and the the rhetoric that was discussed in Paris France and you have a lot of legislators who represent parts of that parts of the state like that who feel very very disengaged they feel like all of the high principles that are discussed in Paris France do not apply in places like Paris California and I know some of you probably shaking your head saying oh no these are the communities that are more affected by our energy policies and you're right but the reality is the people who occupy those neighborhoods they don't necessarily and the people who talk and elect their representatives they don't necessarily respond to the same rhetoric that we talk about and that's why I was so heartened by by what Ms. Raphael said because she was dead on that is absolutely accurate and that is an important lesson for everybody to learn there are not two parties in California there is not one party in California there are three there there's the Republican Party which is about 25 26 members the assembly there's the Democratic Coastal Party which is about 25 26 members the assembly actually well here I'm a lawmaker this should add up to 80 and it's not quite getting there so maybe maybe I should say 28 20 but but the third party which is roughly 25 whatever up to 30 are what are so-called moderate Democrats and these are Democrats who don't always vote the same way with the the more coastal Democrats and that's another challenge that I think everybody who cares about passing a lot of you know progressive policies will have to consider and you're gonna have to I think fine-tune whatever you talk about to appeal to those lawmakers in those districts I don't think all hope is gone though I think that there's a lot of important things that people are working on and I'll just highlight a couple the ones that I'm working on you know I always tell people I always go out in gatherings like this with voters and I say well what is what is our clean energy future look like and of course every voter says solar that's you know the first thing that they say and then I say well what anything else and they say wind and so I like to turn to rooms like that and I say great that's great I totally agree with you but what do we do when the sun doesn't shine and the wind isn't blowing and most voters get a dumbfounded look on their face they don't even think about these things what do you mean I guess you're right the sun does go down at night and sometimes the wind doesn't blow well we need more storage of those electrons that is the biggest barrier that I see to a lot of communities and a lot of homes adopting solar for their rooftop so I introduced a bill this year it's assembly bill 2868 which is the California storage initiative it's we purposely named it CSI because a few years ago or a decade ago we did the California solar initiative and the California solar initiative did a wonderful job with getting the solar deployed in households and a large scale and we think that if we deploy battery technology there will be a tremendous future for solar it's agnostic by the way on the on the battery technology you know I mean obviously lithium batteries or what most people think of but there's a company that has a cave somewhere in California and I don't forgive me for not knowing all the details but what they do is they have solar panels in this very hot part of California and when the sun is shining they they pump air into the cave and when the sun goes down they let the air out and it's a primitive battery but you know what it works it turns a turbine and it produces a whole lot of power and that's the same concept that obviously we're trying to do you know at every home and with a lot of big big commercial users of power the second thing that I want to talk about is real quick just is biomethane a few years ago I passed legislation that really changed our the way that California thinks of biomethane I tried to model California after Germany they they use every bit of cow poop in the nation of Germany they use every bit of landfill gas in the nation of Germany and I think that if we're going to have you know self-sustainable cities like Palo Alto then we need to have that attitude too there's a lot of people within the environmental movement who say well it's still gas and it's still carbon and it's still dirty but you know the reality is it's going to be produced in our society and I think we ought to put it to good use and so that that legislation that I authored now allows it to be injected into common carrier pipelines and put to good use so I see that my time is up and I know that there's probably some questions so I'm going to just shut my mouth now politician shutting his mouth it's a rare thing it happens once in a while and I look forward to good questions and meeting all of you as the day progresses thank you very much so one of the things I'm going to ask you in the audience to do is to think about what is the green legacy you're creating for your children and grandchildren I think we have an excellent example of four leaders from industry and government here at different levels of government different size cities and they're really stepping way forward beyond the the typical and so often in a Q&A it's kind of the audience asking questions of the speakers but I want you to be thinking about what could you do to double your impact on your green legacy what are your investments what is your leadership in your company or your institution that you're part of how about with your neighbors with your voting with your purchasing power there are many ways that we have that we can make a difference and I think one of the things that was very consistent among all the speakers was that that the leadership that the state and the cities and our utility have demonstrated not only make a difference for our area but they set a model for other people so people can learn from each other and they're not going out and learning from as many people as they can as well so that's one of the the great things about this conference is there's a chance to learn from a lot of people including the really smart people who are sitting on this side of the room and so I want to if you have a question or a comment to be thinking about that and I before we open up the Q&A to the to the room I just wanted to know are there do the panelists have any questions of each other that you wanted to ask go ahead and we'll go to that go to the room if you raise your hand and stand up well then we'll bring you a mic so who has a question right right there please say your name first uh wady lee i live around here come here all the time hi um so i have a question for jen uh uh i'm sorry i have to wear my eye glasses to read my note uh jen is there any print uh that pg and he has that uh to turn all the energy into 100 renewable i mean five years ten years and how then uh and another question is for mike mike what do you think um a best method okay well just one question so we only have a few minutes left okay thank you thank you jen uh yeah we offer a green option tariff for customers who'd like 100 percent renewable it's a little bit of a premium over the regular rate but you can sign up on the website or the call center if you're interested in that thank you i think palo alto does too we disbanded it you don't need it anymore but we're we're now offering um a palo alto green gas so it's uh it's a bridge method um for green gas that's great we used to have a carbon neutral gas tariff which i think would be interesting to reinvestigate bringing that back okay i'm not sure if was that the answer to your question or no so i think the question is more you've got a mix at this point you have what about 33 percent renewable in your portfolio at pg and he i don't is it 27 33 i don't know about half carbon free and half uh still natural gas so what's what's the what's the progression do you think for pg me going forward uh yeah i mean that's a great question i think there's a demand from the state to continue the path of increasing renewables it will require more storage in the state so getting that balance and continuing to operate the system is something we're focused on and the question of renewable gas is a great one too as maybe as gas becomes more renewable or carbon free uh then that also starts to replace conventional natural gas uh jeff alf's peninsula clean energy i guess my question is mainly for mike um you know the legislature is being more active in a lot of things that are going on and there's a lot of complicated questions how granular do you think the legislature will get or want to get in things like storage uh you know wider area for many talking about regionalization uh over the case so how granular granular are they going to get and um how what effect is that going to have on our ability to kind of be nimble and make decisions going forward um so i think the legislature does wish to be very involved with these things um you know like like any legislative body i think there's people in the california legislature just like in congress that are more engaged with these things and more more intellectual about them and then there's other people who are less so but i don't think the the old the old uh system of the legislature passing a very very broad bill and sort of you know kicking the the tough decisions or the very specific decisions to some kind of agency whether it's the energy commission the puc the the california water boards or any of the various agencies i think those days are over i think there's a lot of pushback from lawmakers who want a closer uh and the reason why is there's this article that was written by dan walters he's a sacramental columnist he's about 60 70 years old he's seen everything a very smart guy and he said that you know obviously the problem with our system of government is the legislature can give power away but it can never take it back and this was really a profound statement because it's really depressing if you think about it it means that the legislative branch has shrunk so much over time but but obviously you know we can pass a policy that says do this executive branch then if they do something else and then we say no no no you're doing something wrong and then we pass legislation saying to overdo it the governor then just vetoes our legislation because obviously it's his or her appointees who are in that those agencies so that's the problem i think and once we give that power away it's never it never comes back and so people want to be more involved with the decisions and i think they will be right here hello i'm carl page from the entropocene institute where are you carl where are you okay i didn't see you it's been lighting my eyes it um it always seems like we only are telling half the story a lot of people are talking about making energy more expensive the carbon tax but we know that renewable energy is already getting cheaper than fossil fuels um we know that there are lots of ways nuclear energy can be cheaper than a penny a kilowatt hour how about what thoughts do you have about going to the citizens of the state and saying we're going to make energy at one cent a kilowatt hour not quite sure how it'll be a combination of renewable and nuclear or not it'll be clean and the economy will improve jobs will improve tell the upside story not just the downside of what will happen to you if we don't and thoughts about that so i'll just say that we just entered our latest power purchase agreement which is pretty large one for us that is at solar at 3.7 cents a kilowatt hour and of course we have a transmission cost it goes with it so that's not door to door but that's that's our commodity price and that ppa is to replace our oldest renewable power purchase agreement that it expires in a couple years is a wind early wind farm but on top of that it's expanding our renewable portfolio to accommodate electrification of transfer from natural gas to electricity in in buildings and the increased demand that we're having toward electric vehicles where we're already at a four percent of electric vehicles in Palo Alto are excuse me vehicles in Palo Alto are electric i'd like to say we can throw a rock and hit two teslas now okay and i think there is a really good news story that even during the period when renewables were more expensive because of california's choice to invest in energy efficiency it still saved money overall on the energy budget investing in renewables and now as they've come down the cost curve it positions the state really well for economic growth with clean energy we're going to take time for one more question please stand up and thank you katharamaaka researcher here on campus building from the theme of friendly competition and california as a model what has been your experience with cooperation or competition across cities in the us internationally and also between states and driving up ambition and in that cooperation have how have you seen the relative focus on climate change responses in isolation as compared to the broader emphasis on quality of life that mayor bird emphasized and because we're drawing to the end of our time i'm in the lot each speaker spend just a couple have a minute or something answering that question so as mariana said a couple of us here secretary schultz and i and others were at the clean energy ministerial the last two days in san francisco where energy ministers from around the world came to talk about how do you implement cop and one of the things that happened there was an agreement was signed called the pacific coast collaborative and that is a agreement between british columbia washington oregon and california and six cities in those states to work together in a very meaningful way very concrete way to start to put in place the infrastructure the governance structures and the incentives that we need to accelerate the change so that's an example of competition but in a in a very meaningful way where we've got governors premiers mayors all coming together to work very closely together part of that discussion is all about how do you how do the elected officials get these policies through because no matter how wonky they are they at the end of the day they need as my god said they have to go to a group in the room and talk about why gas is more expensive or why the decisions they made are impacting people's lives so there's a huge emphasis our interest in how we restructure the narrative around this these actions that we're going to take so there's so much happening on that collaborative stage there's so many networks of cities and states that are that are not waiting for the federal government that want to take action on their own so i represent about 500 000 people and i want to build on the the thing that mr bert said when he concluded his remarks which was those very friendly women in florida who said you know you don't really believe this this thing do you i mean california you know there are i think your question talked about you know our our jurisdictions rushing out to compete and yes there are some you know including those represented up here who who they're doing wonderful things and i think they do have a great deal of civic pride and the leaders there have a great deal of pride with how much they are leading the charge and how they are showing the world what they can do but then frankly i mean there's a lot of there's a lot of jurisdictions in our state and elsewhere that just don't give a and and they really really just don't and that that sort of infects the debate because when we were talking about a lot of these really really key policies last year to the policies that failed that mr weiss and we talked about people pointed out that you know unless we get more worldwide cooperation it doesn't mean much we california i think we generate one percent of the world's carbon unless i'm mistaken and you know we're a big jurisdiction and we're a big state and we like to think of ourselves as just tremendous leaders but unless we can get the major other sources in the world china india etc to pay attention to our leadership there will always be the naysayers that say that whatever we do here does not mean much and so i guess you know there's there is competition at the micro level but there are always people pointing out that we need more competition and agreement at the macro level so i i say that i really agree that this is a big opportunity and it's more about collaboration than competition i mean we we do get some different folks are motivated different ways but i think that we're seeing a lot of collaboration amongst cities throughout the us and globally and when i was in paris it was to attend the summit of local leaders and that has just grown exponentially in the last five years but i think we're seeing kind of three different areas of collaboration one is over technologies and programs another is about how to build a political base of support that is broad and not just among true believers and then finally what mike has talked about which is how to then take that the combination of policies and programs and emerging political support and work that into political action in legislation and and and regulations and i i think that all of those have to converge when we have just in terms of of how do you appeal to the non-true believers when we have a lot of groups that come through silicon valley and palo Alto and and of course everybody wants to know the magic sauce of of silicon valley and and an easy answer might be well just locate next to stanford in your good shape but the other part of the answer that we say is well look we here's what we are doing in a sustainable community and environmental programs and that our companies and their employees whether they're specifically in the clean tech sector or not this this is a part of the value structure and this is part of how you can build a an innovation center and attract these kinds of companies and so we make that pitch and and i think it resonates and so that's another part of the leverage of of appealing to folks on the opportunity for economic success this is this is also one of the great growth industries are probably the greatest growth industry globally in the coming decades i just wanted to pick up on something mike mentioned to note that there are so many different kinds of cities with different kinds of interests throughout california that we work with and you're lucky today that you get to hear from some of the most progressive cities on climate change but whatever the city is interested in there's usually some connection to energy efficiency and renewables so if they're agricultural and they're located in an area where they have water constraints and air quality problems renewables and energy efficiency are interesting to them or maybe they're in an economically depressed area and they're interested in clean economy jobs uh there's there's always something that will enable us to work in partnership with the city on energy efficiency and renewables so i think of my job is not convincing them on climate change but convincing them on how energy efficiency renewables meet the objectives they already have well i want to thank this wonderful panel and wonderful audience in fact i want to make sure we can tweet out from the audience point of view so you guys get to be in a picture too let's see if this will work yay okay and i want to leave with a to follow on that comment that mr. Gatto said about friendship and if we are true friends to the people we know we will tell the truth we will be informed and we'll encourage them to really stretch their thinking and understanding in california we have election coming up on tuesday and there'll be another one in november and i think it's really important for us to have leaders at all levels of government who are willing to tell the truth and to take action to protect our future generations and i want to thank all of you for being here and this great panel thank you so much