 from Sunny Honolulu, Howard Wigg, Code Green, Think Tech, Hawaii, welcome one and all. The world is facing a myriad of problems. We have Ukraine, we have Gaza, we have starvation in Africa. But people who have really studied the issue know that there is an 800-pound gorilla above all the problems. And that is climate change. It is already affecting us, costing us billions of dollars. It'll probably cost us trillions of dollars down the road. And thank goodness, we have young leaders emerging who are going to focus on solving the climate change problems we have with us today. Rena Camarillo and Mira Fujii of the Climate Change Forum. And I'm not going to go into any more. I'm going to let these wonderful high school students take it away from here. So, Mira, I believe you're going to do the introductions and the explanations. Yes. Hi, my name is Mira. I was the climate justice policy area leader for the Climate Future Forum this past December. So this past December, we had the Climate Future Forum. So we brought in a bunch of high school students along with policymakers and other organizations. And we all kind of gathered together and focusing on different areas like regenerative food systems and clean energy and transportation. And our group was focusing on climate justice and human rights. So in our group this past year, we talked a lot about what climate justice means to us and kind of like our priorities in this area specifically. And we did talk a lot about education and finding ways to bring climate change education into legislation and just encouraging more education on climate change in order to further climate justice. One of the other things that we did focus on as well was with the Navahine trials that happened earlier and other aims or lawsuits or legislation that is focusing on bringing more awareness to climate change and ensuring that all people, all of all socioeconomic status can receive the benefits of fighting climate change. So yeah. Aloha, everyone. My name is Reina. I first became involved in climate activism, this past year when I joined the Hawaii Youth Climate Coalition. Last year, I also had the chance to serve as one of the youth organizers of the Climate Future Forum. And this year, I was honored to serve as one of the co-chairs for our climate justice working group. So as Mira touched on, a large part of our working group discussion was focused around the idea of what is climate justice. We determined there are several avenues through which you can approach this concept. The precise technical definitions from the UN Development Program is, quote, climate justice means putting equity and human rights at the core of decision making and action on climate change, end quote. Basically, the societal or human side of the actions we take to combat climate change. And we also decided that climate justice also means approaching climate change through the courts. So for example, as Mira mentioned, the Nava Hina versus Hawaii Department of Transportation trial just this past April marks the first efforts among youth to kind of push for climate justice in the courts. And Howard, as a matter of fact, we were wondering what would be your take on this notion of climate justice? OK. I like to give examples instead of speaking abstractly. So I'll give an example of something I'm working on, namely the urban heat island effect, where if you have a rural area and in a suburban area and in an urban area and measure the temperature, you will find that the temperature goes up and up when it's concentrated in the urban area. And then within the urban area and suburbia, you have some stark differences in temperature. And I'm thinking of Hawaii as a very warm climate. In the wealthy suburbs with plenty of trees or in the nice areas of town, again, with plenty of trees, you are cool and comfortable. Where the less fortunate people live, generally there is a lack of trees and a concentration of solar radiation, which be experienced as heat, something we're doing to mitigate that is cool roofs, cool walls, and so forth, to reflect the heat back up. That's one example. People live in hotter, more uncomfortable climates when they are of the poorer status. Another stark example is, say, Louisiana, which has a lot of oil refineries. And they are just polluting as heck the plumes from those refineries. Guess who lives in the shadows of those refineries? Poor people. And of course, they have the resulting respiratory illnesses and generally a shorter lifespan because of that. Final example, there are several different suburbs in Washington, DC. In one suburb, there is a concentration of very wealthy people. The average lifespan is 93 years old. Then you go a few other neighborhoods down, concentrate very poor people. The average lifespan is 67 years old. It's those type of problems when you're thinking of climate justice that we need to alleviate. Absolutely. It definitely seems to be a pattern that we leave out people of lower economic status or people who don't have the same resources as us. And in fact, one of the concrete examples I thought of during our working group is the problem of the ecoabilism. So even when we're determining legislation towards combating climate change, we often neglect this large portion of, the large portion of disabled people within our community and forget to encompass them within all the preventative and protective measures we take. So in all of that, we talked about the need for a just transition and ensuring that in our process of combating climate change, we don't leave anyone behind and make sure that all of our interests are represented. This is part of a much larger problem that we're seeing not in just in Hawaii, not just in the US, but worldwide. The richer getting richer, the poorer are getting poorer and the poor are living in worse and worse and worse environmental conditions. Whereas those of us who are among the fortunate, we're just comfortable as anything. So Proceed didn't mean to interrupt you there. I think we wanted to also make sure that when we're creating legislation that we're not placing an unfair burden on people who are of lower socioeconomic statuses. So I think when we're considering a lot of this legislation, we wanna make sure that we're not just making the less fortunate people pay for our problems and ensure that that gap doesn't widen even more. So I think Raina was gonna talk about one of the legislation that we were talking about in our groups. All right, so one concrete piece of legislation we all determined is crucial to climate justice is this idea of carbon cashback. Now, unfortunately, the carbon cashback bill of this year has been deferred by the Agricultural and Environment Committee, I think, and the Energy Economic Development and Tourism Committee. So it looks like it won't make much more headway this year, but it's something we're hoping will certainly resurface in the coming years. So in any case, carbon cashback as stated here is part of SB number 2525 and establishes a carbon barrel tax system in which proceeds are distributed among all Hawaii residents. So that applies to you even if you're on the wealthy side or on the poorer side. And what's special about this program is that it will deliberately target low-income residents. A quote here says that, quote, the 20% of households with lowest incomes would gain more than $1,000. So alongside combatting climate change, what carbon cashback really does is ensure that we're not leaving anyone behind economically. That's going to raise the price of oil and price of gasoline. Did you people actually get to the capital and sit in the hearing rooms and testify and listen to the other people testifying? Yeah, I think a lot of more youth have made efforts to go directly to the capital. And especially with Zoom testimony these days, it's become a lot easier to express our voices. Yeah, good, good, good. That's a tremendous experience, yeah. Absolutely. And what more do you have for us? So another one of the bills that we were talked about that we think is important during our session was the climate impact fee, which used to be called the green fee, I believe, but it wasn't passed last session. So this year it's being called the climate impact fee. And this one, I think it was proposed by our governor, Josh Green. And it's a $25 fee, but the exact price of it has kind of changed as it's gone on. But it's basically a fee that would be charged to visitors who stay in hotels or vacation rentals. And it would create a fund and a new kind of, yeah, a new fund and a program to implement those funds to go to different, go into reducing climate change impacts such as, I think a lot of emphasis has been put onto the Lahaina wildfires and also addressing flooding, pollution, other shoreline issues and things like that. So this would kind of create like a new kind of way to put money back into our own land and I guess take some of the resources from our, and I guess some of the damage caused by our tourism department. So I think we thought that this bill was really important because it would provide a way to fund these projects. Like all the reducing climate change impacts like the fires, the flooding, all of that. But in a way, that would not, I guess, take more money or taxes from the local population in Hawaii. And then in fact, a lot of those dollars would have created more jobs, maybe and including environmental jobs, perhaps. Yes, yes, that would be. So onto the next slide. During our workshop, we also touched on the idea of research and how important it is to kind of focus our efforts on this somewhat neglected area of climate research. And when you think of climate research, you probably think of scientific or technological research, but we think it's equally as important to place emphasis on the societal implications of that research and of our efforts in combating climate change. So some bills we've pointed out here are SB number 657 and HB 441. And these are companion bills. They create a database of research included in a climate justice report, specifically on the social vulnerability to climate change. So it focuses on things like the income gap and data indicators. So it's based in empirical evidence and it's at least finally shedding some light on what we can do on the human side of climate change to mitigate the impacts of our efforts in combating climate change. And some core questions at the base of this issue are that of which groups are the most vulnerable and how do we ensure a just transition? How do we ensure and transition to a sustainable future without leaving anyone behind, whether that be in the job market or members of the disabled community as I was talking about earlier? Howard, if you have any input on either of these questions, we'd love to hear it. Well, President Biden pushed through the IRA, the Inflation Reduction Act, which in fact is very, very environmentally oriented and it has attached to it hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars. And I was at a conference in Atlanta not long ago sponsored by the Environmental Protection Agency and the big push there was for heat pump water heaters. I don't know if you've ever heard of those, but those are air conditioners in reverse which create hot water in a much more efficient manner than do your conventional old fashioned water heaters where they are up to four and four and a half times as efficient. And in low income homes, very often, well, low income homes usually have a lot of people under one roof. The more people you have under that roof, the more hot water you're going to be consuming and water heating can account for 40% of the utility bill of a lower income home. The use of the federal funds, the IRA funds would engage the manufacturers of heat pump water heaters to get into the lower income neighborhoods and meet with community leaders so they gain trust and then sit down with the individual homeowners and say we can take out this old water heater of yours, very, very inefficient. Stick in a heat pump water heater and the cost of that would be in Hawaii over $3,000. And immediately the homeowner is going to say I do not have $3,000 just sitting around to do this wonderful thing. So there's something called an instant rebate where if you agree to install this, the government writes you a check. In essence, it's not quite that simple, on the spot for $3,000. So you're getting a free heat pump water heater and your utility bill is going to drop like a rock. Does that sound like a good climate justice? And this is confined only to people, the AMI, average medium income, I think of a 1% or less, you have to be below the average income in order to qualify for this. Does that sound like a good climate justice initiative? And you multiply that by thousands of homes and you've got some real savings there. Yeah, that sounds great. Yeah. Absolutely, I think it's clear there's kind of a correlation between initiatives that take on that effort of redistributing the wealth while simultaneously leveraging those practices to combat climate change. So for sure that sounds like a fantastic initiative. Your fossil fuel use will go way, way, way down. That actually wraps up our section on climate justice legislation, but another important area of climate justice we talked about and touched upon a little earlier is that of fighting climate change in the courts. So we saw this, for instance, in the Navejina versus Hawaii Department of Transportation trial, which featured 14 youth plaintiffs fighting for their right to a quote, helpful environment. And so it's interesting, we were talking to, I think now retired Supreme Court, Hawaii State Supreme Court Justice Michael Wilson, and he's talking about how efforts to combat climate change nowadays don't always have to go through the legislature, but also in our courts and in our judicial system. So even at a technical level, the word climate justice can mean a lot. Howard, what do you think about the possibility of fighting climate justice not through legislation but in the courts? That would be fine. The instances I've heard about have to do with pollution and the fact that people in lower income neighborhoods usually live in dirtier environments with more pollution in the air. And that has its effect on more sickness in these lower income communities. And these are exactly the people who cannot afford to be sick and pay doctors bills. So that's definitely one instance. And I'm wondering, this was Department of Transportation. How did transportation get mixed in here? Yes, I believe it was, they were suing the Department of Transportation for the pollution caused by their systems. And I think that the kind of, although yes, it was like, I think it was very symbolic and like a show of how I guess, how far we could push the court system and just push climate justice further. I think there was a couple other instances in a couple other states that tried to do the same thing. So I think we're hoping that more will pop up around the country and around the globe and that kind of awareness around it will also help to make, I guess, government change their mindsets and other organizations think more green, I guess, yeah. On a specific note, I think what the plaintiffs pointed out is the series of Aloha Plus goals set for the year 2030. They argued that the Hawaii Department of Transportation specifically is not on track to reach those goals. So we're hoping to see some progress there. Would this be referring to electric buses or? Partly, I think that's one of the core initiatives alongside the transportation system currently is shifting towards renewable energy in their bus system. Yeah, I know that there's at least one electric bus out there, the inauguration of it was right outside of our office in downtown Honolulu. And another transportation equity situation is indeed in our bus system, where some of us feel that when you get on the bus, you have to pay for it. And if the bus system were free and if the rail system were free, this would incentivize low-income people to go out of their way to use the bus and the rail. Is that possibly a good idea? There's other systems worldwide who charge either little or nothing for writing public transportation. And the main way that we middle-class citizens do cause pollution and do use energy is via our cars with one person in the car. Absolutely. In fact, I was in Japan and Switzerland this summer. Both countries have incredibly robust transportation systems and they consider it their main means of transportation at that point. So it's interesting how the more we invest into public transportation, the better it is for our environment. Yeah, and that also involves more walking. You have to walk to the bus stop, from the bus stop and so forth. And guess what? Walking is great exercise. Yeah, when I was a kid here in Honolulu, we had an electric bus system on trolleys and there was electric lines up above and the bus was connected to them. And I think it was the automobile industry who said, no, that's too good. So we no longer have that. And Switzerland, Japan, yeah. Two of the best, best, best countries for public transportation. And if you look at the energy use index for the average American versus the average Swiss or the average Japanese, you will find that we are usually about double. We use each one of us uses about twice as much. Energy is the average citizen in those countries and they have the same standard of living that we do. That's a good indicator. And finally, well, let's see, we need to wrap up. Do you have any final words of great wisdom? Well, I think Howard, we'd just like to thank you for offering us the chance to speak, especially as youth, it's not often that we get this opportunity to share our voices and what we discovered throughout the forum. Oh, and final note, what is in the future? Climate-wise for you two? Well, we're both off to college next year. Hopefully we'll get involved in climate activism there. I'm certainly hoping to continue working with youth organizations. I really like kind of being a part of that band of youth to stand up for ourselves and what we believe in. Yeah, yeah. Now in any given city, you will find that there's a concentration of green and that concentration of green as in green culture centers right around college campuses. You are the optimistic, dynamic-driven people. And mostly the colleges very much encourage that because the professors are educated people. They know that climate change is the 800-pound gorilla and they want to encourage you to get after it with activism. Yeah, I think we also hope to stay like still involved with Hawaii climate change politics and legislation as well though, because I think Hawaii has started to be the kind of leader in that area and we wanna, I think, encourage other states to do so. And I think by staying involved in all, wherever we are would be really great for us, yeah. And thank you for having us here. That's something that gives me satisfaction is Hawaii was the first state in the nation to declare the goal of zero net energy where on average, we will not be using any fossil fuel energy within 25 years, very ambitious. So on that very, very cheery note, we must bid fond of you, Rena and Mira, thank you so much and take the leadership role and run with it. That's all from Think Tech Hawaii, Howard Wigg. See you next time.