 Hello, everyone. My name is Mejin Chah. I'm an assistant professor in an urban environmental policy at Occidental College. Welcome to INED's live climate debates. This session will discuss just transition, what will it take, and can it be done. This is an issue that's very close to my heart. It's one that I think a lot about. And I think it's really the keystone about whether that will determine whether our low carbon transition will, in fact, be just or if it will just be another example of business as usual. So I'm very excited for this debate and really excited to hear what our distinguished panelists have to say. Joining us today are Mark Lee. Mark Lee is a senior economist with the British Columbia Office of the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives. Mark joined the CCPA in 1998 and is one of Canada's leading progressive commentators on economic and social policy issues. Mark led the CCPA's Climate Justice Project, which published a wide range of research on fair and effective approaches to climate action through integrating principles of social justice. We also have with us Dr. Destiny Nock, who is an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, as well as engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University. In her role as the director of the Energy, Equity, and Sustainability Group, she leads a team of researchers at the intersection of social justice, energy, and analysis, and systems modeling. And last but certainly not least, we have Dr. Manuel Pastor. Dr. Pastor is a distinguished professor of sociology and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. He currently directs the Equity Research Institute at USC. He holds an economics PhD from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is the inaugural holder of the Turpanjean Chair in Civil Society and Social Change at USC. So throughout this debate, we'll take questions from audience. Please put them in the Q&A box at any time. So without further ado, let's get started. We'll start with Mark. Our panelists will do an opening statement about three to four minutes, and then we'll open up for questions. Again, please put questions in the Q&A box at any time. And Mark, I'll pass it off to you. Okay, thank you so much, Mi-Jin, and thanks everyone for being part of this. It was really great to be here. I think I've been doing a lot of research on the idea of climate justice going back in the 13 or 14 years, and I've been really interested in some of the big questions around who benefits from fossil fuels and who pays the price when it comes to things like climate disasters. Here where I am in British Columbia, we just had a heat dome event. They called it record heat waves that essentially shattered all of the previous temperature records. In one place, about an hour and a half from where I live, we set the all-time Canadian land temperature record one day, and the town literally burned to the ground by the next. And that was late June, early July. That heat wave then set in place massive wildfires that were devastating the province through most of the summer and only just recently has there been a bit of a respite with some cooler and wetter weather. So it used to be thought that climate change was something that might happen to polar bears a century down the road, but it's something that's very present here and now. And a wildfire can destroy your town and a flood could take out your house. Heat waves could kill your grandmother. These are all realities that we're living with in the here and now. So we need rapid action to phase out a fossil fuels as quickly as possible. I'm encouraged by the new conversations around net zero, though I see a lot of loopholes that try to preserve the status quo through things like direct air capture and carbon sequestration and storage. But so I think fundamentally, if we want to get a handle on this, we need to be asking how we do that in a way that's inclusive and that's democratic. What version of humanity are we trying to say? Are we just trying to swap out all of our carbon polluting technologies for ones that are zero carbon so that our billionaires fly around in hydrogen powered jets and our sweatshops are powered by solar panels. That's not a version of humanity that I want. So I think we need to put these issues of inequality at the center of the debate. The research shows that the top 10% are responsible about half of the emissions. And so that's really central in the bottom 50% of humanity, only about 13%. So there's huge discrepancies in terms of who benefits and who's paying the price. And I think that's got to be at the heart of it. And moving forward, I think there's a lot of scope for addressing those simultaneously to find the win-wins that dramatically reduce our emissions profile, but that also achieve justice in a number of areas that link that to transportation justice to dramatic reductions in energy poverty to the creation of good, well-paying, decent jobs in the transition away from fossil fuels. More just food system that has better access and better nutrition and better supports local farmers. Now, all of these things are areas where I think we should be looking for those win-wins. And if we can do that, then I think we actually build the political support for a human civilization that's here for the long term. I'll stop there. Great. Thank you so much, Mark. Destiny. Okay. So I believe that one of the biggest challenges in achieving a just transition will be getting on the same page about definitions and making sure that we have a clear picture of what we mean by a just transition. We know that just like reaching a environmental sustainable transition, it is very complicated. There are multiple facets and there's different ways to approach that definition. And so one key thing is going to be understanding historical injustices but also understanding how the technologies that we deploy may create unforeseen injustices that we have not seen currently. And we may be exacerbating some problems. And so for example, one is the resource constraint problem. There are different resources available to different communities. And so when I'm thinking of low income communities that don't own the infrastructure of the home that they live in, then requiring electric vehicles can create some discrepancies in who's able to charge, especially if those electric vehicles have long charging times, then we need to think about public infrastructure for charging, right? And then as gas prices are increasing and we also have the double whammy of gentrification, people being pushed out of these economic hubs because it's getting too expensive, then how are we going to make sure that everybody can afford to get to work as we are electrifying our transportation sector? So getting on the same page about definitions, what that means, but then also trying to forecast what types of injustices may occur as we transition our energy systems is going to be super important. And then also being clear on what we are defining as poverty and how we are identifying who is experiencing poverty. One of the things that we've been working on in my research group is to look at different households based on different demographics like minorities and low income communities and look at how much energy they're using at different outdoor temperatures to identify who may be experiencing a lack of energy. Because one thing that we know is that households are going to be very financially savvy and yes, poverty can look like one person or one household spending a large percent of their income, meeting their energy needs, but it could also look like a person not being able to use as much energy as necessary during the heat wave to cool their home or during the winter to avoid really dangerous indoor temperatures. And so if you remember nothing else, definitions being very clear about what the goal is and being very clear about, how are we identifying who is experiencing injustices and poverty and then trying to make sure that we are looking for any gaps in our current identification strategies. Great, thank you so much, Destiny. And then Manuel? Thanks, Mijia. And so much to say, including the fact that you and I are co-authors on this issue of just transition would have been part of my introduction to be sure. So I wanted to say a word about how I came to this work and then pick up on a couple of things that other folks have said. I actually came to this work through environmental justice research and work with activists on environmental justice issues. Actually began researching environmental inequities in the middle of the 1990s, particularly in Southern California. After spending a lot of time demonstrating the extent of the disparities and also interestingly for at least part of your audience, demonstrating that disparities were actually more severe by race than they were by income, implying that it really is a sort of difference in political power and structural racism that's created so many vulnerabilities and not just the market. After doing so much of that sort of research work have turned in recent years to try to figure out how to figure out which communities are overexposed and socially vulnerable and how to make sure that those communities get the resources that they need. And the process of moving from looking at issues like air pollution, proximity to amenities like parks, et cetera, began to work in the realm of climate. And if destiny said, if there's one thing you should remember, she said the thing she said, for me, if there's one thing you should remember, it's that climate change is real, but so is the climate gap. That is the fact that there are certain communities that are disproportionately exposed to the risks from climate change who are disproportionately exposed to the co-pollutants that go along with greenhouse gas emissions that are disproportionately left out of the conversations about what to do about moving to a less carbon-intensive future. And it is that climate gap that we actually need to address in all of our policymaking. I'm sure that we'll get to more aspects of this, but I wanted to pick up on another thing that destiny said about really the time dimension of equity. We thought a lot about this and thought about that when you're talking about dealing with equity and fairness that you've got three time dimensions. One is to recognize what has happened in the past. So when we look at our urban landscapes and we see who is living near heat islands, that's a reflection of racial segregation, residential red mining, under investment in parks and tree canopies, and it creates a current risk right now. So it's looking at the past. It's also looking at the present. Do we actually have mechanisms to incorporate communities into the planning for transition? Because if we have mechanisms to incorporate low-income communities fully into the planning for transition, then we will arrive at a just transition that deals with some of these problems that we've inherited at some of the problems that we're creating right now. But critically, what destiny pointed to is thinking about equity, future casting, trying to understand whether or not the sort of mechanisms we put in right now to deal with a transition to a less carbon-intensive or carbon-free future are going to actually exacerbate inequalities. So as we move to electric vehicles, something she pointed out to, are we creating the second-hand markets for used EVs that are gonna be more accessible to low-income folks? Are we investing in the public charging infrastructure to make sure that people who live in apartments and not just people who live in houses actually have access to be able to charge vehicles? When there's this fascination with carbon markets and offsets that many economists have, are we recognizing the fact that those systems are inherently unequal, which may not make that much difference for greenhouse gas emissions? Because everywhere you reduce a greenhouse gas emission, it's got a global benefit, but they make a big difference for the co-pollutants. And these are inherently unequal systems. That's the point of a market system that you're going to get geographic inequalities because there'll be someone who reduces their pollution and is paid to do it, and someone who doesn't reduce their pollution and pays to get their way out of it. That inequality in greenhouse gas emissions, not a problem, but greenhouse gas emissions come packaged with PM10, PM2.5, other revisions. And one of the things we've looked at in the state of California is how the first couple of phases of the cap and trade markets have produced inequalities in terms of the risk scape of the co-pollutants. And an article just this weekend in the Los Angeles Times has pointed out the abuses of the offset system where people have bought offsets for things that would have occurred anyway, and then also wound up not reducing pollution in low-income communities of color, but instead bought forest lands in places that will never see the light of day of people who live in these over-impacted communities. So past, present, future, when we're thinking about a just transition, it's repairing the damage of the past, it's making sure there's full participation in design for what we do moving forward, and it's making sure that we do not make the mistakes that reproduce inequalities going forward. Thank you so much, Manuel. I'm really struck by a few issues, and please also continue to put questions in the question and answer box. But to me, as Manuel always says, just transition is a transition to justice, which is a good time to plug our conference for next week, our net kind of conference on Tuesday, which please sign up for. But as I was listening to all of you talk, there's these elements that are just consistent, right? Mark your discussion of how you could really distort net zero to really subsidize the billionaires at the cost of the rest of us. And Destiny, your idea of your points about like how are we defining poverty and who is benefiting and who is losing? And Manuel, of course, as you always lay out so well, these are all issues of injustice that exist. And to me, it seems that there are these longstanding issues and why I think Manuel, you talk about a transition to justice is that unless we address these issues, we can't actually get to the energy transition parts. And so I was wondering if you all could speak a little bit more to that. And I think that that kind of, you know, the social and economic issues can tend to really either derail climate action or get to, you know, a lot of climate advocates, I think, can think we don't have time to do these inclusive processes, right? Or that these are outside the scope of climate policy, but we can never really get to that transition to justice without, you know, addressing the underlying inequalities. So I wonder if you all have some thoughts on, you know, either how you message or how you build the coalition or how you can convince people, how we convince people that we need this transition to justice, not just an energy transition. And Destiny, why don't we start with you? So I think that one of the biggest challenges is making it local and making people understand that it's not just about, you know, helping those poor people over there, but making a just and equitable transition benefits everybody. And there is, you know, a wealth of research that shows that when you have injustices in one part of society, then everybody, it's to everybody's detriment. And I think that, you know, too easy to say sometimes that, oh, well, you know, I'm doing good and, you know, it's okay and I don't see anything wrong here, so let's just keep doing what we're doing because that's what's working. And the challenge is to get people to take a step back and realize that that comes from a place of privilege. Like you most likely have been really privileged to grow up in a place with, you know, clean water, clean air, you know, economic opportunities and you have benefited from that, but there are other people that have not been able to benefit or have, you know, fallen to the wayside because of the way that, you know, the system has unequivocally been benefiting different people. And so in terms of the messaging, I mean, they do say that in general, scientists have really long-winded answers for, you know, things and the truth spreads so much faster because, you know, we wanna be correct and we want to make sure that people have all of the facts they can make up their own mind and then, you know, the lies will spread like really quickly of, you know, oh, like if you create jobs over here, then you're gonna lose jobs over there. And that's not necessarily the case. I think that we need to get people to approach this transition from a mentality of abundance, not scarcity because there are a lot of jobs to be created and we should try to ensure that those jobs are equitably distributed. There's a lot of benefits to net zero transitions and there is this, you know, push to move as quickly as possible because we're seeing the effects of, you know, climate change now with heat waves and extreme weather events and a lot of times, you know, people are saying, well, you know, we can't do it right now because we need to solve the climate crisis now. And I think that, you know, when we're thinking about the speed at which to move, the real speed that we need to move at is the speed of trust because if people cannot trust in our engineered systems, if, you know, we get to this net zero energy transition, but all of a sudden people can't afford their light bills and they can't afford their heating bills, is that really a sustainable transition, right? And then there are going to be risks associated with social discourse and, you know, lack of achieving, you know, a future where everybody is able to afford their bills and use as much energy as they need to create healthy indoor environments. Well, I can't resist adding to that answer and answering that question. Ben, I'm kind of conscious of my role as someone who was, sorry about that, that's a... It's like just another example of people needing to be able to use as much energy as they need. Well, that's because I wasn't moving around. If I move around, I guess the light will stay on. But the thing I was going to say is that I'm conscious of my role as someone who was trained as an economist and the fact that there are economic students and others interested in economics in this audience. And one of the things that's been traditionally taught in economics is this whole notion of an equity efficiency trade-off. So that if we're paying attention to fairness, somehow we're going to sort of put a dent into prosperity. And if we were paying attention in this case to questions of environmental justice, maybe we're not gonna make as much progress on addressing climate change. And that's BS. That is the stuff of neoliberal thinking that has kind of poisoned the ability to understand the power of mutuality. There's increasing level of research that is demonstrating that when you have societies that are more equal, less segregated, less torn apart, they're able to sustain employment growth over time. We've contributed to that, looking at American metropolitan regions, the International Monetary Fund, a well-known leftist organization, has contributed to looking at that at a country level. And we need to be thinking about those sweet spots where equity and prosperity come together. And it's similar around climate change. There's a wonderful article by some of our colleagues who will be at the conference next week, Jim Boyce, is one of them, just one of the greatest titles, is environmental justice good for white folks. And what they figured out was that in places where there's a lot of environmental disparity, there's just a lot worse of an environment. And the reason is that when you think you can put it in someone else's backyard, you wind up just getting more of it. And there's a little bit of that that's going on with climate too. When you think that you can escape the worst of the climate crisis, then you don't address it overall. When you think it's only the lower ninth ward in New Orleans that's going to be destroyed by a hurricane, because there's levies aren't good enough, you wind up having that weakest link wind up destroying the whole city. So we need to be thinking about how it is that we take these issues of fairness and kind of wed them into what is the main agenda for dealing with climate. And this is important for two other reasons. One is if you look at the polling data, this is from California over the last 12 years, but it's showing up for the nation now as well. If you ask the question in California, do you think that climate change is a very serious crisis? One that you think that the state really ought to deal with it. About 50% of white Californians say yes. About 57, 58% of black and Asian Californians say yes. And about two thirds of Latino Californians say yes. That is people of color are actually more worried about the climate because for them, it's heat waves, it's air pollution, it's asthma for your kids, it's a lot of stuff. That's the constituency that we need to bring into a transition. And the reason why it needs to be a just transition. And finally, it's also why you need to address the other dimensions of inequality. First, that's just a good thing to do. Second, you want as powerful a set of constituencies on the side of addressing climate as possible. And when you are not addressing the educational and job and other inequalities that face low income communities and communities of color in the United States, that those are communities that are then more disempowered. And the more empowered they are, the more we're going to be addressing climate in ways that benefit everyone. I'm wondering how this plays out in Canada. Well, just so happens, I'm from Vancouver. Yeah, one of the things that I would add to this part of the conversation is that, I think we're shifting the grounds or we need to shift the ground away from an approach that's more market oriented and kind of green consumerism. So I think we've had an era of the last couple of decades where people have been encouraged to buy greener products and that most economists gravitate towards carbon pricing as a solution. So over time, we increase the carbon price and eventually we quote unquote internalize the externality. So that market prices better reflect the damages associated with climate change. That whole exercise is kind of fraught. And I think carbon pricing is certainly part of what we can do if we do it in a way that understands the regressive impacts on low income households and compensates for them. It also can raise a lot of money for the public investments we need. So I think ultimately we need to shift away from this kind of green consumer mindset to things that are more like structural change and that reflect collective action. Obviously climate change is the mega collective action problem of the world. But to make that more concrete, I think if you think about transportation, like a lot of the emphasis right now is on electric vehicles. And a lot of government policy right now is aimed in Canada at subsidizing the purchase of electric vehicles. Most of those are purchased by affluent households. A lot of low income households aren't buying an electric vehicle. They're much more reliant on public transit. So when we think about, okay, what's the change we're trying to make? Are we trying to like swap every internal combustion engine with an electric engine through capital stock turnover over time? I don't think that's the approach we necessarily want to go. But nor do we want to turn every trip in a private car whether electric or not into a trip on the bus. I think we want to be thinking about, well, what's the structural change here? Urban planners call it sort of the development of complete communities. So more dense housing, closer to people live closer to where they work and play and access public services and other amenities, more inherently walkable and bikeable communities. So that even if you're a climate change denier, you're gonna live a more fundamentally low carbon lifestyle simply because of the urban fabric that you live in. So to me, that's an agenda around building more dedicated, affordable housing in cities on land that's currently reserved for single family households, which here in Vancouver, almost no one can afford anymore because of the cost of land has gone up so much. And then it's gonna take a lot of labor to build that housing. So that's part of your jobs transition strategy right there. And the housing that we build should be at essentially passive house or higher standards so that the overall footprint associated with it is very low and we can use embodied wood instead of concrete to lower emissions. So all of these things are sort of, I think form like a self-reinforcing dynamic where we're fundamentally lowering the footprint of society over the long term. We can anchor that with a lot of public investments and things like public transit and other public investments for seniors housing and healthcare and that kind of thing. So we start to think about it as an investment agenda. That's not investing in fossil fuels but that's investing in the stuff that we want that's gonna improve quality of life and standard of living across a number of dimensions. I think that's what I'm talking about in terms of the win-wins that we wanna see. Regent, if I could add one thing and then ask a question, which is I think that one of the things that's coming out strongly and clearly is that there's a sort of old definition of just transition, which had a lot to do with compensating losers. That has had a lot to do with saying, what are we gonna do about coal miners who lose their job? What are we gonna do about people in the fossil fuel industry retraining, et cetera, et cetera? Or on the economic side, if in fact energy costs go up, how do we deal with some of the regressive impacts of this? But I think what you're hearing is that just transition is also about dealing with bad land use patterns. It's about dealing with questions of people who've been locked out of job markets for years, not just people who had a job but need to transition. It's about dealing with questions of overexposure to pollution. And so one of the reasons I think to shift the transition to justice is it helps move us away from the way in which, not this group, but in the past, just transition got very narrowly interpreted as sort of compensating the losers. And then I feel like I would be remiss on the part of the panel if we didn't ask you a question because you're such a leader in this field as well. I know you're supposed to be just moderating, but can you talk a little bit about the politics of just transition? What are the kind of coalitions that you think need to be built to kind of co-people in this direction? I know you weren't expecting that. You know me, you know the unexpected will come for me. It's true and it's one of my favorite things about you, Manuel. I think it's also maybe a good way to transition to, I'm happy to answer the question and then it just does transition to a question that has come in through the Q&A, which is, how do we square our aspirations for just transition with our current political realities? And I think the answer lies into what you have brought up, Manuel, about we need a strong diverse coalition, not just because we think more people should be involved, but because as you mentioned, we need to build power. So in the work that we have done looking at how to build power at the state level, we can't, no one group can do this alone, right? We've actually, I would argue, we've tried climate-only insider technocratic approach in the US with the Waxman-Markey bill, the last big push for climate bill, the cap and trade bill really failed spectacularly. And I think part of it was that we did not do the organizing and power building that we needed to, right? I think we need to have labor, environmental justice, environmental groups, community-based organizations, people that are really gonna be directly impacted by this energy transition, which will actually be all of us, right? And I think, as you always talk about, Manuel, it's not just that we have to build power, but we have to reduce power. We have to reduce the power of the fossil fuel industry. And the only way that we can do that is really by building these big, diverse coalitions. As we have seen in our work, if we look at New York, for instance, that big climate bill that they passed, there was over 100 groups that came together across all interest areas. And that really does create the momentum and the power to push legislators into the direction that we need them to do to embrace the ambitious policies that we need. So I think people want to hear from all of you. So maybe I'll pass it back. So what do you think? How do we advance this just transition with our current political reality? Well, I mean, sorry, I was gonna get back to the part about Canada. So we just had a national, like a federal election in Canada a couple of days ago. And 60% of the voters voted for parties that support robust climate action. And to varying degrees, but Canada, it's been a long slog in Canada, to be honest, when for years Canada's been making commitments to reduce its emissions and the not developing plans to meet them, only in the wake of the Paris Agreement have our politicians started to get more serious about this. The just re-elected liberal government brought in place a carbon pricing framework that essentially sets a national standard. It allows provinces to develop their own carbon pricing frameworks as long as they meet a certain minimum standard. And if they don't, then the federal government will impose it in their jurisdiction and return the revenues back to that jurisdiction, to actual households. So there's a direct sort of financial link, which is a little bit like the cap and dividend that's been proposed for a long time. And they brought in some other measures as well, like beyond carbon pricing. So zero emission mandates, a lot of building retrofits, phase out of coal-fired electricity has been a really big one in Canada along with the just transition planning associated with that for the workers that are actually affected. So I think we're starting to bend the curve in Canada and get away from the rhetoric around reducing emissions to actual policies. And for the first time, like this federal election, there was a substantive public debate on climate policy. It wasn't about whether climate change was happening or not or whether we should bother, but it was really around the details, even our conservative party, which had been very intransigent on climate change for a long time, felt the need to sort of embrace carbon pricing and put proposals on the table. And we had like an actual substantive public debate on that. So I think that definitely needs to happen. We need to have it be part of our politics. I would also suggest that politics is very detached from where a lot of people are at. And one of the things we did in our climate justice project was we had a conversation on climate justice. So we did believe when we took the sort of seven different Americas and we stripped out the climate hawks and we stripped out the climate deniers, but we took a lot of the people in the middle who were concerned to varying degrees, but were not really active. And we brought them together from all walks of life, all parts of the region of metropolitan Vancouver to have a conversation about how we actually move forward on this. And so Destiny talked about moving at the speed of trust. And I think to some extent we need to have some trust that people with good intentions sitting around the table can actually come up with solutions and can better understand their different perspectives on this. And getting away from sort of an economics where we know the answers and we impose it on everyone else, those need to be ground truth and the realities that people face and the day-to-day barriers they confront in their day-to-day lives. And I think if we had like a whole bunch of those like scattered across North America we could really advance the yardsticks and have much better understanding of how people are being affected and how we can develop policies that are truly inclusive rather than just saying so. I think that there's also this need to make sure that we're holding the right people accountable. And there's been talks about like leakage with carbon trading where you're not fully, like you're not fully accounting for the emissions at the generation source and that have been delivered and then like kind of leaks out because like it's not really being accounted for when you have like a lot of different entities like trading those carbon emissions. And so then, and then there's also like this like scapegoating kind of nature because a lot of people agree that climate change is bad and now we're all looking to find the perpetrators which a lot of people will agree fossil fuel companies but then they try to get out of it with like the clean coal, the clean carbon, carbon capture and storage. And even then we have to think, okay, well, where are they storing it? How is that going to create like new disparities in like these different communities? And so I think that in our current political landscape, one of the things that I've noticed since the pandemic has happened is paying a lot more attention to politics because I believe that before this and maybe it's because a lot of people are at home watching the news, but like the people are like, oh, it's politics, I don't wanna deal with it, right? And then now you see a lot more like activism. I mean, even with the Black Lives Matter movement I saw a lot more of debates going on about like what was happening in these communities that opens you up to talk more about like environmental justice impacts. And then when we're talking about wanting a diverse landscape, being brave enough when somebody says, oh, well, I wanna hire people based on merit, then actually reminding them, no, like diverse voices are valuable because if I'm trying to come up with new technologies to prevent future injustices, maybe we should have some people at the table who have been at the receiving end of past injustices or else we are going to risk exacerbating the current system and we're not going to have new creative ideas about how to solve these problems because we don't have people that have experienced those problems that we're trying to solve. And so, if I'm looking for an expert on climate in terms of lived experience, then I would go to communities where people are living in those heat islands and talk to somebody who has had trouble turning on their heat and somebody who just felt invisible for a long time because they didn't know how to get those energy subsidies and then we can talk about barriers, right? Not just resource barriers of do you and your home but do you have access to the internet in your home or do you have to go to the library and then during the pandemic, that's gonna be another challenge and then with jobs in the energy sector, you know, a big barrier to access is transportation to that job. So if those jobs are not in your public transportation and not in your bus stops, it's very hard to get to without a car, right? Now you also have these exacerbated inequalities. And so then if I could just jump back to something earlier that Mark had talked about with the green consumerism, I do want to like remind people, you know, that that is something that has been advertised and ingrained into our current way of thinking by, you know, big companies. I believe that it started with the like bottle industry when they were moving from glass bottles to plastic bottles. And before they were responsible for recollecting all those glass bottles and watching them and reusing them and disposing of them. But then when they switched to plastic, right now the ownership is on the consumer to recycle, right? And then, you know, you're bad if you don't recycle then we have now with recycling, you have a lot more emissions because the recycling process is very, is a lot more emissions intensive than actually collecting a bunch of bottles and, you know, recycling them. And so now we actually could have that risk when we're looking at the energy sector where we're doing like carbon capture and storage. It's on the consumers to buy EVs and get solar panels on their homes and, you know, get clean green batteries and, you know, buy all these energy technologies which are going to take a lot of energy to create in the first place when we actually did have this centralized system using like, you know, the economies of scale that we want to green because you can have a large swath of the population on this centralized system. And I am not saying that it's perfect. So, you know, I'm not trying to say that the centralized system is perfect but, you know, we should make sure that we're not going to put the ownership on the consumer to buy the green technologies that we should make sure that, you know, we are not going to lose focus on those fossil fuel companies when we are thinking about who is, who needs to be accountable for the greenhouse gas emissions that we're trying to reduce. So I would just add that this is a very tough problem. And I think the way you framed it, Nishin, really points to the idea that in order to change the current system in which we provide power, we need to change the system of political power. And quite often we're looking for a technological fix. There's going to be an EV, there's going to be carbon capture, there's going to be a more efficient market and that's going to change it when in fact this economy overall, particularly the way we provide energy, reflects a system of political power and that's vested in these large energy providers who have a stake in not having the current capital equipment investments kind of go to waste. So it's very, very difficult at the national level to continue to move this forward as we are seeing. I have a lot of hope and then I'll end with some skeptic or pessimism that about what's going on at a state level. You pointed to the New York example living here in California with a commitment to going completely renewable by 2035, I think it is at this point. There's quite a, there's issues with that, but climate equity issues have been taken more seriously so that the revenues from cap and trade while it's not a dividend system, there's a commitment to put 35% of it into frontline communities most affected by environmental vulnerability and social vulnerability. In fact, the state seems to be doing a little bit better than that. There's some moves toward community air monitoring to look at the questions of co-pollutants, et cetera. So I'm somewhat hopeful that these state experiments can breed success and as they are successful can help to move people along to what a just transition could look like by providing an example. One thing that I think is really critical to pay attention to is a kind of fundamental underlying shift in our ideological tension, which I think is going to make this a little bit more difficult and it means that we need to take culture a little bit more seriously. Traditionally, the way we think about the ideological divide generally, certainly right, left, Republican, Democrat, et cetera, is kind of individualism versus collectivism, whether or not you think people are acting in their own self-interest, whether or not there's markets that will coordinate that to place, et cetera, or you think that these are big collective problems, certainly climate change is and that they need state solutions. And that's traditionally been our ideological divide in the country. But over the last 10 or more years, we've moved to tribalism versus mutuality. The Trump phenomena was not about individualism. I mean, it wound up selling, getting tax cuts for corporations, but it was really about appealing to tribalism of white Americans, white working class Americans that they were about to be invaded by immigrants and the threat of demographic change, et cetera. And this tribalism is reflected too in who is opposed to climate change, sort of creating a fervor in coal mining country that someone is coming after not just your jobs because they might promise jobs, but they're coming after your tribe. They're coming after who you are, what your culture is, et cetera. Similar thing that we've done, looked together, looking in Louisiana where people identify, I mean, with the jobs and industries that are causing them so much health, pain and anxiety. And this tribalism is getting in the way of recognizing mutuality, the fact that we collectively need to solve this, not just through the state, but through sort of widening the circle of belonging and creating a bigger sense of who the we is. And so I think this is such a big task that goes beyond what economics and economic policy can do. It gets to questions of organizing, questions of narrative, questions of belonging because when we look at each other and we say we do not want at our border to have our border patrolled by people on horses whipping desperate Asian migrants, that that fundamentally violates who we are. When we develop that deep sense of empathy, then these questions of dealing with climate justice are going to become second nature. And so the fundamental questions are big, broad, political, and about who we are. I'm gonna have to sign off in about three minutes to go teach a class, which is why I'm in an office I'm not usually in, which only has one book, which my colleagues were making fun of me because they're far more learned than they are. Look at those number of books, Marquez, and that beautiful art Testineas. All I've got is one sad book. But anyway, those are my thoughts and I'll stay on for just a minute or two more and then drop off. Been so pleased to be on this panel with such brilliant visionaries. Thank you so much, Manuel. So I don't know if you wanna answer this briefly in the time that you have or we can continue on, but there are two questions that I think kind of get to what I would say is about the kind of the market implications of climate policy and also design policy design, like how are we designing our climate policies? So one is that, nature-based solutions are often touted as a way to get away from oil and gas investments. Is that another form of greenwashing? And another one, which I think is along the same lines is do you think there's a role for allocating carbon budgets for at the individual household level, particularly for those that are the top 10 most consuming of carbon? Sure, I can jump in. I don't think we should be trading nature for fossil fuel emissions. So a lot of what are billed as nature-based solutions are genuinely good things that we should be doing. We should be preventing further deforestation here in British Columbia where I am. We're down to the last strands of old growth forests, which sequester huge amounts of carbon. We should be preventing the conversion of grasslands into new croplands for big agriculture. Those are good things to do, but we shouldn't be doing that to generate credits so that big polluters can continue to pollute. We need to do both. In some ways, because we have so overshot in terms of parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, that carbon's already spoken for. We need to do a bunch of those things. We need to do reforestation. We need to do a lot of the natural stuff just to suck back some of the carbon that's already in the atmosphere. But we definitely shouldn't be using it as a means of perpetuating business as usual. We need to phase out the use of fossil fuels for energy as rapidly as possible, not even 2050, but much sooner than that. And I think we've demonstrated that we can actually do this. It's just a matter of political will. And if anything, the COVID experience tells us that we can move very quickly when it comes to policy if we're really pressed. And I would argue that we're in that moment where we're really pressed, that climate change is bearing down on us. In terms of the idea of individual carbon budgets, it's a little bit less clear to be how that would actually work in practice, but certainly there are things that we could do. So air travel is one where the benefits of air travel have been so disproportionately consumed by the top 10%, if not the top 1%. I see no reason why rich people should be flying around in private jets. And I think even just for commercial air travel, there should be a progressive carbon tax on every flight that you take. So that by the third or fourth flight a year, you're paying a massive amount of carbon tax. And so let's keep air travel, let's decarbonize it, but let's share the benefits of that much more broadly. I'm gonna go ahead and sign off, but I would echo what Mark just said, particularly the last part of that about thinking about the ways in which you could use some elements of market systems to really tax the highest users and try to figure out how to create those funds in ways that will allow for so many investments to take place. I also think that a progressive tax on air travel, the more you travel, the more your taxed would be supported by Zoom, which has shown us over the last 18 months that apparently we can have 10-minute meetings without flying for five hours. Thank y'all. So I think that I'm also really cautious of the greenwashing because planting trees and trying to make sure that we are bolstering the environment, I mean, we need to do that at a rate that is going to exceed current levels of deforestation and that is very difficult to do, as well as it taking time for the environment to reabsorb that carbon. I know that there is research in carbon removal and that's still a developing technology, but I am a really big proponent of just if we don't want carbon, let's reduce the carbon. Let's not try to worm our way around it, let's go direct, I guess that's the engineer in me, but let's just kind of go directly after the end goal, which is to have a net zero system. Great, thank you so much. We have one last question and then if you wanna have any closing comments, I think we have time for that too. And I really like this question because I think it goes to something a little bit deeper, but do we need better metrics, new metrics about genuine wellbeing in life, not simply income, unemployment, emissions, et cetera? So I would say yes. Oh, go ahead Mark, you can go first. No, no, you go. Okay, so that's what my current research is about trying to develop new metrics with the data and a part of it is needing better data collection because we know that inequality and equity is really at the local level. And so aggregating it up to the state level, sometimes even to the census track or the county level is going to mute that variability in people's lived experiences. And we wanna make sure that we are actually capturing that, which is why having data at the household level is ideal. But to do that, you need information on like what income are they, what's their minority status, what's the insulation of their home, what technologies do they have? And that can feel very invasive for people. So there is gonna be this huge balance between privacy and metrics and getting high quality data to try to say something meaningful about what people are experiencing currently and their levels of injustice that they're experiencing at their household levels. So one thing is a baseline what is a reasonable amount of energy for a household to consume? Because one of the things that we're risking is if we're looking at a household over time and we're seeing their energy decrease over time, we may assume that they're becoming more efficient, they're adapting their behavior right there. You know, maybe they've upgraded their air conditioning system and they didn't need as much over time, but that also could show lack of financial resources. So maybe somebody lost their job, maybe their air conditioning broke and they didn't have enough money to fix it. And so that actually could be like a hidden form of poverty that may mask itself as efficiency. And so then we really want to think about, what are we trying to measure? There's another thing of, with the urban heat island effect, looking at heat waves and how that's going to affect different people. We know that the insulation in the home really does matter, but also the quality of the air conditioner matters and that indoor temperature could actually cause some people to experience heat strokes, hypothermia and other negative health effects, as well as if the humidity in the home is becoming too high, you're at a higher risk of asthma and allergens entering your home. And these are really, they could be very high quality metrics that are just really hard to get because that data is proprietary. And it's also a privacy concern for these households. And that's why trust is so important. People need to be like willing participants in that data sharing and that policymaking about what's happening with their data. But it also could open up the doors for greater incentives and different policies on helping people adapt and mitigate their experiences of poverty. Yeah, really good points all around. I think I would generally propose that we need sort of a dashboard of key indicators and we kind of know broadly what those are, but I think it's still an issue that in politics and in economic modeling, GDP is still really the dominant predictor or outcome in terms of what's stated as impact on quality of life. So even here in the Canadian elections, we just had there was some modeling that was done looking at the different party platforms and it's like, well, the liberal platform would reduce GDP by 2 percentage points relative to baseline in 2030 and the green plan would reduce it by 7.5 percentage points of GDP and it's like, well, so what? That same growth in GDP that's been rewarding the super rich, like that's not necessarily a helpful indicator. So, I'm wary of approaches that try to create like one big alternative indicator. I've done a lot of looking at those various efforts over many, many economists over the past few decades and they always sort of lead to the question, well, if the indicator is going up or down, well, what's actually driving that? And what are the priorities that are baked into that particular assessment and how do you come up with the numbers in terms of like developing indices and stuff like that? So, I think there's a lot of like just really core things and incomes, poverty, trying to break those down into like different impacts on different groups, particularly vulnerable groups and have a better understanding of how that's all playing out. But yeah, I think it's important that we measure progress across a number of different indicators but I'm just wary of trying to like pin it all down on one alternative to GDP indicator. Thank you both so much. We have a couple of minutes. So I wondered if you wanted to have a closing statement and perhaps a prompt could be, I think a lot of folks come to this work and they're not quite sure what to do first. I think it's kind of a terrible frame because you need to do lots of things but what would be your advice for like what is one thing or even I hate this one thing too but how do you get involved? How do we start this momentum and this movement? Destiny, let's start with you. So when I'm talking to people about where to start because it does feel really overwhelming. One of the first things I tell people is that some of us have had our entire lives to deal with this because it's a part of the lived experience and others are just coming in straight off the gate. So take a step and just breathe because it's okay to be overwhelmed. And then really I think it's about getting educated in like what the definitions are, how it's evolved and really getting clear on what impact do you wanna have? Because if you're trying to like, make everybody better all at the same time you're going to end up missing that community aspect missing focusing on the people that you were trying to help. And I think that with equity and equality it's about trying to make the worst off community better. And if you are always working to make the people who are the worst off better eventually everybody is going to get to a really good place. Yeah, really good points and great conversation overall. Thanks so much. It seems to me like a lot of like climate change itself and climate policy become very technocratic very quickly with a lot of jargon and it makes it very inaccessible for people who are listening. It also makes it easy for politicians to kind of bullshit their way through it. And I think in the world we live in and even with COVID just the sheer amount of misinformation and that's been reinforced through social media and it's posed like a huge challenge. And we've seen the origins of that in climate change pre COVID but I think that is gonna be a really big barrier and it's kind of linked to some of the tribalism that Manuel talked about in his final comment. So how do we get around that? How do we have like genuine conversations where people can see each other as people can listen to each other's lived experiences listen to the circumstances they're facing in their lives that are barriers to making change and to have means by which they can co-develop policies about how things are gonna work at a little really micro neighborhood or like urban scale. I have some faith that people can actually do that. That if we have good processes and good facilitation and people going in with good intentions that even if they're divided in terms of political party or right and left that if we have these conversations that we can actually make substantial progress. So hopefully we can do that. And in the meantime, there's strong rules for the public sector in terms of investments that are gonna improve people's lives, things like public transit regulations and shifting away from like market incentives to actual rules. You can't build a new house that's connected to the natural gas grid. You can't build new plants that are powered by coal. You know, you can't buy after a certain year a car with an internal combustion engine. I know all of those things, I think, are part and parcel of that, but ultimately comes down to humans and trust and conversations. Great, well, thank you all so much. Thank you to our fantastic speakers and our audience for a wonderful session. This ends Inet Live's climate debates. While there will be informal discussion happening on the discussion lounge, if you wish to continue this conversation, we do wanna invite you to register for the next Inet Live events, Just Transition and the Transition to Justice, which is happening on September 28th. You can find out more on the Inet website or within the reception area of the event. Thank you all again and have a lovely day.