 Well, today we're recording our podcast episode from Capitol Hill in the office of Representative Jennifer McClellan from the 4th district of Virginia and that includes the capital city of Richmond. Representative McClellan is a lifelong Virginia native. She was born in Petersburg and has served at the Greater Richmond area and elected office for nearly 20 years. She was first elected to the Virginia House of Delegates in 2005 and served that post until she was elected to the Virginia State Senate in 2017 where she succeeded the late great Representative A. Dallin McKeechin after his election to the U.S. House. In Congress today, she sits on the House Armed Services Committee and the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee. Throughout her 18 sessions in the Virginia's General Assembly, Representative McClellan passed over 370 pieces of legislation including landmark bills to combat climate change. She lives in Richmond with her husband Dave Mills and their two children Jackson and Samantha. Representative McClellan, welcome to the Climate Conversation podcast. We're so happy that you made time to talk with Allison and me today. Thank you for having me. So I'd like to get started by talking to you or asking you about sort of what your deep roots in Virginia mean to you as a public servant. How did your upbringing and education in Virginia help shape your approach to issues of climate change and resilience and environmental justice? So a couple of different ways, you know, I grew up sort of in the country suburbs of the city of Richmond where I went to high school in Matoaca, there were lots of farms, lots of open space, and I always felt a connection to nature. My father also was a minister and in my faith humans are charged with being stewards of God's creation. So I take that very seriously. But I also grew up listening to my parents' stories of what life was like for them living in the segregated South under Jim Crow, living during the Depression, and I came to understand two things from that. One is that government can either be a force for solving problems and helping people or it can be a force that oppresses some for the benefit of others, which led to an understanding that government has a responsibility to respond to climate change. But it also taught me how every issue, every government decision through our country's history has been through a lens that marginalized communities didn't have a voice, whether they were African-American communities, whether they were indigenous communities, and you see that play out in where power plants are sited, where chemical plants are, and now as a public servant who represents areas like Charles City County and Hopewell, that have some of the poorest health outcomes in the state, and they also happen to have high concentrations of facilities that are impacting the environment and climate change. You start to connect those dots. You've been a legislator for a long time here on Capitol Hill, but also back in Richmond, and while you're in the Virginia State Senate, you sponsored the Virginia Clean Economy Act that Bill passed in 2020 and was enacted into law. Why was that legislation such a high priority for you, and what are the kinds of benefits that it's delivering to the people of Virginia today? Yeah, I mean it was it really was transformative for energy policy in Virginia. It may not only Virginia, but in the South. It made Virginia the first state in the South to have 100% clean energy standard that was one of the strongest in the country that has become a model for other states. I mean immediately after that session, I started hearing from legislators in other states sort of wanting to see how they could replicate it in theirs. So from a policy perspective, when the bill passed, I literally wanted to jump out of my seat and say the eagle has landed, because number one, it was that hard to get it passed, and number two, it was that transformative. Since then, though, we have, you know, still early, but we have begun to see some huge impacts, whether it's a very large utility scale solar farm in Charleston County. We have, you know, LEGO moved to Virginia, moved one of its brick-making facilities into Chesterfield County specifically because of the clean energy policy that we had. They said in their announcement that that was a big reason why they chose Virginia. And so those are, those are, and we see what's happening off the off the coast of Virginia Beach with the, with the wind project out there. So each of those in its own right is creating new jobs while addressing climate change and more to come. I'd like to talk about the climate threats that are most affecting Virginians specifically. How do you, as a member of Congress, ensure that effective resilience measures for Virginia are included in federal policy? Well, a number of ways. I mean, first, making sure that whether it's infrastructure policy or funding that we are thinking holistically and long-term about how are we going to shift our planning or shift construction and infrastructure projects to match how climate is changing. I think when you think about whether it's building codes or standards for bridges or roads that were designed decades ago assuming different climate patterns, we need to revisit those. So that's one way. But then it's also little things like we know climate change is not, it's not just going to affect, it's going to affect every policy because of this kind of second and third effects. You know that as climate changes around the world, it's going to affect migration and immigration patterns. It's going to affect agriculture as land that used to grow one crop won't be able to grow that crop anymore or gets flooded. And so we need to think through, and in some cases rethink, long-term planning around everything from agriculture to energy generation to transportation planning to evacuation planning. You mentioned infrastructure in that. I'd like to expand a little bit. I think that sometimes the Infrastructure Investment in Jobs Act feels almost like old news because it passed a couple years ago but it's still very much, there's a lot of details that are just going to take years to be hammered out. Could you expand a bit on what you see as the biggest opportunities for improvement regarding infrastructure? Yeah, I touched on a little bit of it. And it's things people don't think about, but when you think about when our highways, our bridges were built and thoughts about how long they would last, we've got to revisit those because heat affects concrete. And so the degradation of bridges or roads is happening faster than we expected. Now the Infrastructure Bill gives us the ability to invest in improving that infrastructure. But there's also the historic investments in addressing climate change overall in investing in utility infrastructure that helps with that transition. So in both ways it's critically important legislation. Speaking about infrastructure, you've made the Mountain Valley Pipeline a priority of yours since you've been in Congress. And for example, last summer you and several other members of the Virginia delegation submitted an amicus brief to the Fourth Circuit. And you talked about, in that amicus brief, you talked about a lot of things, but including ensuring that voices are heard, especially voices that might be, I think the words were, where there's imposed harm on Virginia families and communities. I'm curious what you're hearing from your constituents in the Fourth District about that project and what are those voices and what are they saying and why is it so important that they're heard as that moves forward? Well, I mean, first of all, they've been loud for a very long time. They've opposed the project from the beginning all over Virginia and I think back almost a decade ago, hearing people raise the concern that by the time they found out that the pipeline was happening, it was so far down the road that they had no input, which is another reason why environmental justice is so important to me because I hear that time and time again. And what they feared, we're starting to see and that is impacts on drinking water and of course, just the impact on the community, where the pipeline is being built and on the land out there. And so they're still pretty upset, not only about the pipeline per se, but the precedent that it sets that Congress says, we're going to just bypass our permitting process and all of the public notification and comment period that goes along with it and just by legislative fiat say, this is going to happen. And what does that say for future projects? And I think it's really important that communities that will bear the brunt of the building of a project be brought in in the beginning, not only so they can voice their opposition, but I mean, even it's in the, it's in the business's best interest because I can think of other projects where it's like, if you had brought the community in from the beginning, they could tell you, you are likely to be building on African burial ground. You are likely to be building on, you know, sacred land for our indigenous tribes. And if it's a lot easier to address that at the beginning of the process than when you're digging shovels in the ground. Yeah, that idea of bringing people in, we did a briefing a few years ago about coastal resilience in Louisiana. And there was a panelist, he's a church elder, his name is Donald Bogan. I talk about this anecdote quite a bit because it really stuck with me, but he said that they were talking about a project that was moving forward in the community engagement. And he said what made this different was that he was asked what he thought before the decision was made. And I was like, Oh, actually, okay, now I understand. Which so many of us take for granted, like, of course, you're going to do that. But unfortunately, in many communities, the people who are least equipped to make their voice heard, that's exactly where these projects go. So environmental justice is something that is important to you. It's important to lots of lots of us who are tracking the implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment Jobs Act implementation. There are also sort of standalone, if you will, environmental justice bills. And one of those is the Environmental Justice for All Act. And you're a big proponent of that bill. How would that legislation, if it were enacted, improve our ability to build the necessary infrastructure for the decarbonized clean energy economy that we all think we need to have? Yeah, well, first, I need to pay homage to my predecessor who the bill is is named for a Donna McKee-Chin, who we worked very closely together when both of us were in the legislature. And these issues were important to him. Then a couple of different ways. One, we just talked about making sure that that in the permitting process underneath you are creating a more robust environmentally just comment period and bringing that input in and that consultation at the beginning of the process. And then strengthening the Civil Rights Act so that if a project has a disproportionate impact on a protected community under the Civil Rights Act, that they can bring, first of all, that that disparate impact is recognized as a Civil Rights Act violation. And two, making sure that they have the ability to bring a lawsuit to enforce the Civil Rights Act. So our two big pieces of that legislation that are critically important. I'm curious about sort of the idea of health disparities and one of the impacts of these types of projects is that they can cause adverse health impacts for sure. As you're working to build climate resilience for communities in Virginia and across the country, how does the issue of health disparities and health impacts, how does that inform your thinking? It is critically important to think through not only how do we redress the harm that has caused these disproportionate impacts, but how do we keep it from happening going forward. And when you look whether it's a city like Richmond, decisions as simple as where are we planting tree canomies or where are we putting projects and tearing down trees and how is that increasing areas that are already facing higher temperatures as temperatures are rising? Or again, I hope well. Trial City County are two areas where you have high incidences of asthma. That is not a coincidence when you have facilities in those areas that are contributing to air pollution. And so I think we need to make sure that whether it's citing decisions, whether it is building decisions, building codes that we are looking at, what is the impact what we are doing? Could it be as simple as building a road? What is the impact of what we are doing going to have on the community that we are going through? Where these are decisions on top of decisions that were made over decades that didn't take that into account and has led to some pretty poor health effects for those communities? As a relatively new member of Congress, we are really curious to hear about what it has been like to get to know some of your colleagues. In particular, you have prioritized working on a bipartisan basis, including within the Virginia delegation. Are there some issues where you have found it easier to build bridges? Yes, there are. I mean, there are some we know we just don't talk about. And even with climate change and climate resiliency, sometimes it's about the language you use. I think Republicans tend, well, some tend to be skeptical that climate change is a result of human activity at all. I don't waste my breath trying to convince them. But they are concerned about sea level rise or they are concerned about how are we going to counter the effects of rising temperatures on the health of our constituents? So those are areas you may not agree on how to address the cause, but you do agree more readily on how do we address the effects. So one example is I have a soil carbon sequestration bill that is very bipartisan because both Democrats and Republicans are focused on if we can figure out ways to streamline research around how to address carbon in the soil, that's a win-win because it helps reduce that carbon getting into the atmosphere and exacerbating climate change, but it also helps our farmers to address what's happening in the soil and how can they, in some cases, have best practices to avoid increasing their carbon footprint. So that's one example where even on an issue that on its face is very partisan, there's room for bipartisan cooperation. We recently just had a podcast guest who works at a vineyard talk about how soil health is so important for resilience, so that's actually a really nice segue into this next question. So as Dan mentioned, you are on the Science, Space, and Technology Committee, which has jurisdiction over energy and environmental research. How have you used your position in that committee to advance climate resilience? Couple ways. I mean, one, I'm really focused on making sure overall that the STEM workforce is diverse, and when you have a diverse work force, STEM workforce, you're more likely to think about environmental justice issues because you have people from those communities who are now, you know, have a seat at the table. So that's one way. And then I alluded to it earlier, but looking at, you know, making sure that we are highlighting and facilitating partnerships like VCU in my district, the Science Museum, and NASA to create heat maps for the city so that you can say, all right, where are there pockets of heat that will be exacerbated by climate change, and what can we do in our planning process to help alleviate those? Or partnerships with NASA and their tempo project to help identify the effects of climate change at a very granular level so that at some point you can get a forecast, just like you get a weather forecast on your phone, you can look and say, oh, like there's likely to be either pollution or increased temperature here, it'll be fascinating to get that sort of real-time forecast, and that's only possible through the work that NASA is doing with Tempo. So those are a couple of examples of what we're doing. We had a briefing a couple of weeks ago and Representative Sorensen joined us, and of course he's a meteorologist, and that briefing was all about advanced weather forecasting, and we had a panel specifically talking about how AI can be used to improve, you know, sort of physics-based modeling and how do we get those, exactly what you just said, these new types of forecasts, new information that maybe people hadn't thought of before but actually have a big impact on how they go about their days. So this has been a real treat. I would like to just say thanks so much for talking with Allison and me today about your time in Congress and your priorities, and as a former staff person, I would also like to say thanks to your great staff who helped make the connection. We really, really appreciate it. It's been a real delight to work with them, and if there's anything else you'd like to say to wrap us up, you can have the last word, but thanks so much. This was really fun. Well, thank you. You know, I think just to say it's been very interesting transitioning from the state legislature here to Congress, focusing on addressing climate change, because it really takes everybody. It is not something that government alone can do, but government plays a critically important role, but we've got a partner with our state and local governments. We've got a partner with the business community. We've got a partner with the nonprofit community, the higher ed, because everybody has an impact on the environment and on climate, and everybody's got to be part of the solution, but now I see as a member of Congress, not only am I in a position to help address that through policy, but being a convener to bring all those people together, and so I think that's a part of the job a lot of people don't focus on, but I've found pretty exciting. That's a perfect place to leave it. Thanks so much, and good luck. Thank you. Thanks.