 Good afternoon congressional climate campers. Welcome to the third installment of ESI's congressional climate camp. I am Dan Berset, the Executive Director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. Oops, screen sharing. There we go. ESI was founded in 1984 on a bipartisan basis by members of Congress to provide science-based information about environmental energy and climate change policies to policy makers. We've also developed a program to provide technical assistance to rural utilities interested in on-bill financing programs for their customers. Whether briefings or fact sheets, everything we do and produce is freely available and accessible online. As always, the best way to stay up-to-date and never miss a thing is to visit our website at www.esa.org and sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter, Climate Change Solutions. It is a little hard to believe that we are already at congressional climate camp number three. That means March is just about done and April is just about to start. Time moves incredibly fast these days for sure. I hope everyone is doing well and feeling good about our chances to get back to normal after a few more months of caution and precautions. Please take care and be safe during this time of transition. The date today, March 26, is also evidence for the urgency of the topic of our session. Congress is hitting its stride. Following the passage of the COVID-19 relief package, eyes are turning to other priorities, from voting rights to infrastructure to climate change. Our first congressional climate camp was all about process and specifically how Congress and the administration enact appropriations, budget, and stimulus to advance climate solutions. It was the perfect way to kick off our briefing series. Last month, for congressional climate camp number two, we considered federal policies for high-emitting sectors and specifically these five sectors, agriculture, power generation, buildings, industry, and transportation. Next month, at the end of April, we will study examples of federal policy for mitigation and adaptation win-wins. Each of these four online briefings is structured so we can break out individual presentations to help the busy staff in our audience target their learning. Everything, including slides and written summaries, will be posted online at www.eesi.org. And a condensed audio-only version of each congressional climate camp is available as an episode of our bi-weekly podcast, The Climate Conversation. And the episode for this edition of Climate Camp will be out next Tuesday. Today, we take a step back to remember where have we been and recall how we've got to where we are today. This is not an excuse for mindless nostalgia, not at all, but while there is perceptible urgency for climate action today that I think we all feel, we've been on the verge of major climate action before. And even when former initiatives fell short of the finish line, there are many, many lessons to learn from those past experiences. This is not to say that we need to recreate the magic of days gone past. And it is also not to say that we can afford to ignore the good ideas that have contributed to progress so far. But how can we possibly move ahead without knowing the story of how we got here? What happened? What worked? What didn't work? What were the contours of the debate? What should we do differently this time? That deserves to be part of the debate we're about to start having these days. Sure, we could just host a reading of the Wikipedia entries of the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990 or Waxman Markey, but that is not what ESI does. No, we assemble panels of people who are the best in their fields at sharing their knowledge with policymakers and their staff. And for Congressional Climate Camp number three, we will hear in just a minute from people who were there at the time to share their perspectives of what happened before and why this time is different. And people who can also help frame and focus the debate yet to happen. If we're going to do different, if we're going to do things differently this time, do things better to increase our odds for success, we just have to understand the past. And that's what Congressional Climate Camp number three is all about. Before I turn to our first segment, let me address some logistics. Even though we have a very busy agenda today, you can still send us questions and we'll try to incorporate those questions into our discussion. If you have a question, there are two ways you can ask it. First is by sending us a message on Twitter at EESI online. You can also send us an email EESI at EESI.org. And just to set realistic expectations with the number of you watching right now, we're not going to be able to get to every question, but ask away. We'll follow up and do our best to answer every question submitted during Congressional Climate Camp. And now on to our first panelist. Katie McGinty is the Vice President and Chief Sustainability Officer and Government and Regulatory Affairs Officer at Johnson Controls. Along with her current role, she is also the Director of at FSEP Investments Inc. And prior to this, she was a Senior Vice President and Environmental Defense Fund, a candidate for the United States Senate, a Chief of Staff to the Governor of Pennsylvania and much, much more. So I'm going to turn this portion of our conversation over to my colleague, Anna McGinty. She's going to be running the segment with Katie today. So Anna, let me turn it over to you. Thanks so much, Dan and Katie. Thanks so much for joining us today. We're really excited to have this conversation with you and I think we'll just jump right in. So we are really in a new era of policymaking on climate change. But at ESI, we also think it's really important to remember how we got here. So we're wondering if you can outline for us what you see as some key turning points in the effort to design and pass climate policy at the federal level and kind of reflect on why this context and information is important for informing our current efforts to design and pass policy. Well, thanks, Anna. And thank you very much for having me. Just first to shout out to ESI. Too long ago to count the years, but when I was a staff person on Capitol Hill, way back in the day, and continuing until today ESI is just such a vital resource and really efficient and effective way to get information. It's a pleasure to be back in the ESI family. Look, I think the first question is really important because so much of what was building block over the last couple of decades remains foundational to how we're thinking about an acting on climate change. Although I did very exciting to see the kind of maturation of how rich the thinking has become and the action. So to toss out two kinds of foundational building blocks. So from the earliest days of environmental policy broadly, it was about understanding those point sources, those particular sources of environmental insult, if you will, of sources of pollution and going after them with particularized regulation. The big change from that came in something called Project 88 in 1988 that said, you know, some elements of challenge to the environment don't operate just in a discrete way but operate in a regional or global basis. And there we need some new tools. How about if we harness the forces of the market to be aligned with what's needed for environmental protection instead of there being attention. And it was in that process that the idea of cap and trade was born as the original kind of one of the original kinds of market mechanisms and boy did it hit the ground running. 1988 just an academic paper 1990 the centerpiece of the Clean Air Act amendments, and very shortly thereafter, proving its effectiveness in driving, for example, acid rain at those sulfurous emissions out improving to be very effective. Now fast forward to what those foundational blocks have led to you can really trace right back some of the key policies that are so effective today. Market mechanisms became important, not just because of cap and trade, but because it started to talk the language of finance. And so today, when you think about things like Germany having jumped in with with their feed in tariffs, 15 years or so ago, and then our own production tax credits and investment tax credits. And now the real greening of capital markets, we at Johnson Controls were a pioneer in being one of the first industrials to float a green bond in the US capital markets. These are brave new tools, but they definitely have their roots in those policies that took root 30 plus years ago. Last piece I would say as we kick off is the the individualized pieces of regulation also remain absolutely foundational. So that as we try to use market mechanisms and get a macro signal in terms of cutting carbon across big ranges nations and the globe. We still need mandates, for example, for buildings where Johnson Controls were to be more efficient and equipment to be more efficient. Those are critical companion pieces of the equation, cutting edge new but with roots back to those innovations 30 plus years ago. Thanks for helping us to kind of draw those lines from back in the 80s today. I think that's really helpful to kind of see how ideas have evolved over time to design policies. So you mentioned market mechanisms, one that might come to people's minds is Waxman Markey, and that effort to establish a cap and trade program for at the federal level. I'm wondering for efforts like Waxman Markey, maybe also the Clean Power Plan that never became law. Did they still have an impact on US greenhouse gas emissions reductions. If so, how how did they have an impact even without becoming law and why is it important for us to still be thinking about kind of what played out in those conversations. The effort was extremely important solidifying the notion that climate is an environmental challenge that can be tackled we have policy tools to tackle it and can be tackled at scale and tackled in a way that again harnesses the force of finance, instead of trying to be at odds with it. Now, let's talk about how that innovation and insight today is at the heart of some of the most interesting policies that I see coming to the fourth. So at the national level, and I'll give you one at the local level the national level, when we see things now like clean energy standards being proposed, at least some versions of those approaches, what enable some tradeability. So where you would have a meet more than meeting the requirement for a source of clean energy and one arena, able to boost a more lag group performance in another arena, so that you get action further faster. The innovations continue might sound like a different piece, but one of the most beautiful blendings of a mandate with some market mechanism is unfolding at a local level in building performance standards. I'm in love with these building performance standards, because climate so often has been about the big three solar, wind, electric vehicles, and that's that's great. We're all for it. But being in the buildings business, we know buildings are a huge part of the problem, 40% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and they haven't been front and center in terms of tackling climate. But this is where those foundational pieces of a direct mandate with some market mechanism come into place. So these building performance standards are saying, Huh, you have to reduce your carbon per square foot of your building by a determined amount, every five year chunk, or you're going to face a significant penalty. Now, some of them though capture in that the trading ability so that if you have a portfolio of buildings and the one in Midtown Manhattan, you can get to net zero next year. But the one in Southern Manhattan is going to take a little longer, you can balance it out. Those kinds of initiatives are so critical, because assets like buildings are tough to green with just a generalized market signal, you really have to have those particularized regulations. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense that I like your thoughts on kind of blending the different tools that we have available to us. So, I'm wondering if we can next go to kind of your reflections on how things have changed over the course of your time working on these issues. And if you could talk about what you see has shifted over time. Is it more possible now to advance climate policy at the federal level than perhaps it was when we were considering Waxman-Markey or when the Clean Power Plant was being discussed in the EPA? You know, as you were talking, I was thinking that boy, it's a tale of two cities in terms of what's changed from my perspective. And part of it is an encouraging tale and part of it actually is a discouraging tale, although auguring for fraction. So part of what has changed to take the more challenging first is Mother Nature herself is removing all the health that climate change is a problem. No more kind of if it's as and now. And unfortunately, you know, many people, many families and many properties have suffered, you know, the consequences of what we're seeing by way of climatic imbalance. That has certainly changed. I think COVID has changed us as well in our sensibilities, our appreciation that things that we might have thought were impervious are fragile. You know, we've seen the fragility of our socioeconomic system. We've seen the fragility of human health. We've seen the fragility of our political system. And I think it enables people to see a little more clearly that ecological systems are fragile too. And when we are not proper stewards of those systems, bad things happen. So I think COVID has changed and in a way that's related to climate. Another one that not so happy side and makes action harder is the unfortunate polarization partisanship, you know, around this issue. And, you know, others on your panels here, I think we'll have better insight than me in terms of maybe some green shoots, where we can find that common ground but the common ground needs to be found it's urgent on a matter of such consequences as the climate. Now on the encouraging side, there I just have a whole lot of confidence now in the stick and stay of the action we're seeing. So technology, the price points in terms of how the cost of meaningfully slashing climate pollution has just so dramatically come down. I keep talking buildings, my goodness, you know, you can cut the efficiency of just about any building 50% that totally pays for itself. So technology is another is a is a positive forcing function. And, you know, I've seen we've seen action now by companies that is deeper, richer, realer than I've seen in my 30 years of working these issues. And I think it's because going back to those fragile systems going back to the real financial impact companies have had on their own assets, their operations, their supply chains. They're getting really real, you know, about this Johnson Controls is, you know, we're a net zero committed company. And it is an all enterprise activity, right, we've got those plans, we have our actions. This is serious. And then I see some other things that just should any of that get shaky will really reinforce the seriousness of action. In the financial industry, for example, when you have the biggest equity investors in the world, like we have right now, making very clear that if you don't have a net zero plan, and if your board is not taking direct responsibility for ensuring the capital is needed, that those biggest movers of capital in the world are going to vote against you. That catalyzes seriousness of purpose. And I think the action by the SEC to begin to put the rules and regulations for mandatory disclosure in place will will doubly and triply reinforce that this is a C sweet taken enormously seriously. And all of that I think taken together the negatives and the positives put us in a place today where the imperative for action I believe has never been stronger. Yeah, it seems like the shift in how corporate America is looking at climate has just changed so significantly and that's the need for federal alignment with the real interest in moving forward on climate action. Exactly. That's a beautiful point. It's a beautiful point. I really hope we don't get stuck in terms of old stereotypes that if it's good for the environment, you know, it must be bad for business jobs and growth because companies aren't seeing it that way anymore. Right. Yeah, that change. So, you know, to be stereotypical for a second, you know, so from a Republican point of view, hopefully the very determined action of companies across the country and across the globe will give space for Republicans to say, okay, this is an agenda I can before and hopefully for Democrats committed to the most effective environmental action, they'll have confidence to know that I can actually trust companies to come in and give real perspective and actually be part of trying to see progress happen. This is the moment where we can bridge the partisan divide. And I think corporate America can be part of the glue in bridging that divide and enabling common ground to be found. Perfect segue to our next point of discussion. So, of course, you've worked part of your career in the public sector part of the private sector. I'm wondering, you know, from where you sit today at Johnson controls, what are the priorities for federal climate policy? What are you all thinking about in your day to day work on this topic. Yeah, absolutely. Well, first of all, in terms of bipartisan action, I think that there were some terrific building blocks put in place in the energy bill that was successfully passed at the end of the last Congress. So smart buildings build back better, making the tax incentives around energy efficiency permanent. All of those things are incredibly important. So what are we looking for and hoping to see now, a couple of things. We'd love to see a decarbonization title in the infrastructure bill. We hope there will be a comprehensive infrastructure bill. And we'd love to see an approach that would maybe set some performance standards so that if you want to build infrastructure that will decarbonize, you know, a building a transportation system, whatever it is, but will significantly be carbonized, then there could be some accelerated permitting, for example, to get that infrastructure built. So we'd love to see a very significant decarbonization title to the infrastructure bill. Second, we really do hope we'll see federal legislation to green the grid, you know, to drive that solar that when that smart grid that we need and enable everyone to be able to plug into a grid that is actually delivering green electrons. And, you know, we get so disaggregated in terms of things electricity being state or even local, but there's a huge role for the Department of Energy to play for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to play to enable us to get to an expedited green grid. I would also say I hope we take that on in a net zero carbon way so that we are incentivizing, you know, carbon capture direct air capture natural systems to capture carbon as well. But a third of big thing for us coming back to the reality that buildings are tough not to crack and always get left behind and have to be decarbonized. For us, we're going to be looking at 40% of that carbon footprint that is still brown, you know, not green. We love to see a push towards electrification in federal legislation. And here's what's really important. If we're going to electrify buildings which we think we should, you've got to mandate that those buildings become super efficient first. We're not demanding that they are smart that they are buildings that are flexible and can talk to the grid. The reason being that if we just dump all of that additional demand on the grid, the grid is going to crash. And the fact that we have to electrify buildings, we should do that by requiring that those buildings become super efficient, and that all buildings and equipment and buildings are smart so that they become a grid stabilizing asset. We love to see federal legislation like that California is moving on legislation many states are requiring electrification requiring smart equipment and buildings. Let's see that at the federal level together with a clean energy standard and a decarbonization title in an infrastructure bill. Great, so that leads pretty closely into my last question for you this afternoon, which is we have a lot of Hill staffers on live casting today and we are some some staffers might be new to these issue areas some may have worked on them for a long time. But what would you say are kind of the key takeaways from looking back at the history of climate policy for staffers on the Hill today who are looking to figure out how to move forward work on climate during this Congress. Yeah, so I would say first of all, there are some tried and true and proven tools that have worked so effectively to not only clean our environment, but also have obviously led to technology innovations and job creation. So, so tried and true tools, number one, number two, that there are new and different allies that can be brought to the table, including the business community, and frankly, including state and local government that especially in the last four years have really jumped to the four. Now with innovative new tools like these building performance standards or electrification mandates for example so tried and true tools, some new friends and allies with them. So new and innovative ideas. And I think in that mix, more than enough room to find common ground for some very meaningful pieces to enable us to work together to protect the climate. And I guess I would just say that the time is now. You know, on the one hand, if we fail to act, we've seen some of the negative consequences but on the other hand, the innovation that's happening, digitalization, renewable energy, new kinds of approaches to how we move, how we travel, how we live our lives. Let's get it, let's get it, get at it, and let's lead the world. I think that's a great note to wrap it up on. Thank you so much for joining us. It's wonderful to have you as a part of our congressional climate camp briefing series, and we really appreciate you being with us today so thank you so much. As I said it's a joy to be back with ESI so thank you. Well, you're welcome anytime. And back over to you Dan thanks so much. Great. Thank you Anna for leading such a great conversation and thank you Katie for helping our audience. Understand where we've been and I think it's also really, really important for our audience today to hear the perspective of someone in the in the private sector with a lot of public sector experience there's a lot. Perhaps there's more overlap. In terms of attitudes toward climate solutions there than maybe we think so thank you so much. And it's great to have you back with ESI today too. We are going to begin our second segment in just a moment. Before I introduce our second speaker and turn it over to her. Let me just provide a reminder that if you have questions over the course of today's sessions. You can follow us on Twitter at ESI online and ask us a question that way you can also send us an email ESI at ESI.org. If you missed anything that Anna and Katie talked about. No worries, everything is available online www.esi.org. You can watch the video you can watch the whole webcast of the entire congressional climate camp session today all four speakers you can watch individual segments. You can also access written summaries and presentation materials as well. So we have it all there for you. I hope you'll take a moment to visit us online and make use of our resources and all of that is generally available for most every other briefing that we do as well you can find an awful lot of resources on our website. Now to introduce our second speaker of the day, Tina Johnson. Tina is the director of the National Black Environmental Justice Network and principle of Johnson strategy and development consultants, which works with a broad international network including groups from Europe and the United States top NGOs governments international foundations and businesses. Tina specializes in us and international climate change policy diplomacy international climate change strategic development and advocacy. Mark investigates domestic and international policies around climate justice, sustainability, economics, energy and climate change. Tina, it is great to see you or soon to see you you're turning your video on. It's great to see you. Thank you so much for joining our panel today I'm really really looking forward to your presentation take it away. Yeah, thanks Dan, nice to be here. So, and I can myself useful with this. I actually am really excited to actually talk about the stakeholder impact on climate policy today with everyone. Because it's such an important part of the work that that you all do. If you're on the hill or if you're in any way shape or form engaged in being part of transforming or impacting policy and in general not just climate policy. But I actually want to root the conversation a bit in the stakeholder engagement space and just to note how important this is because of the methodology that it brings to bear on stakeholder engagement and the role of stakeholder participation around the clinical the public health policy decision making aspects of things. And just to also just note that you know that civil society stakeholders, you know the goal right we all have this goal that we want to shape the direction and the outcomes of, in this instance the climate processes but whether you're working on the black lives engagement and you're working on police reform or if you're you know mothers and mothers against drunk drivers and the work that they're doing around driving under the influence of alcohol or any other substance that these processes are really rooted in the role of stakeholders and their desire to shape and direct the way our policies actually work for us as a community. It's super important because if we don't have these kinds of stakeholder engagement opportunities or folks that want to do this work we have just a bunch of politicians sitting around the table are in a pool of water, debating things and getting stuck in of what they think that people want versus hearing from the people themselves. And one of the examples that I like to use or just to sort of capture how important and how effective stakeholder engagement can be is is even if you're one person there's a guy called Captain climate I think he's still around but when John McCain was running for president against George W Bush, this guy would show up at every event and asked this question what's your plan until john McCain's like okay, I'll look into it and he looked into it and came up with the McCain Lieberman climate stewardship act. So you know this one act by this one person. As a stakeholder and caring about the planet actually did something that was transformative. And so I just to note again that civil societies cooperation is critical and I use this civil society to be inclusive of stakeholders right and it's it's super important because of what this cooperation brings together from not just the outside approach but also the inside approach. So if you have governments and civil society cooperating together, they're able to achieve a lot. And there are just a few points that I want to just view can read but I just want to just add no conducting that scientific analysis, the agenda and norm setting for policy that that direct pressure that we have come to really appreciate and value around mobilization and the moral force to get things done is super important. And then the narrative shaping, you know that media storytelling that communications aspect. These are all key components of how we actually in the realm of governance can influence the the policy pieces, and that NGOs have become really important in this space stakeholders as a whole are super important in this space. But it's also good to note that you know there are moments in which that that relationship between the government and civil society, sometimes actually doesn't succeed in the way that one might hope. And so I want to just take us do a couple of pivotal moments within stakeholder advocacy and look back at COP 15 and Copenhagen in 2009, and you have the failure of countries to actually be ambitious and come up with meaningful agreements, but then you also have a failure of civil society at this cop as well. So, although civil society had, you know, immensely been effective in shaping the meta narrative and the political expectations of the legally binding deal and Copenhagen. And so they had to pack it up with the outside influence and didn't have sufficiently. They didn't have a sufficient robust effort to change the politics on the inside of the negotiations, and for that matter they were not really doing a much a good job at influencing the stakeholders prior to the summit would be responding to this. And so a lot of this in efficacy that is attributed to this, this, this failure is the deep fragmentation of civil society over fundamental issues. And so, for example, there was a division over the respective responsibilities of developing and developed countries, which manifested themselves in the split between climate justice and climate action coalitions. And so there was also this absence of unified civil society voices providing consistent pressure contributed is also contributed in turn to the clash of governments that characterize COP 15. So this failure actually helped to do a really important thing for civil society at the international level which also trickles down to the national level here in the United States, it helped to read the help the community to reimagine itself to really reinvent itself and reinvigorate itself to becoming more effective. And, you know, post Copenhagen, that they really decided that we need to decide how we as a community can have develop a global civil society that actually pulls the connection of not just Western stakeholder campaigns but also from the broader global community. And so it started to encompass developing country groups, as well as group seeking policy intersections on issues like health, development, the economy, health, women and youth. And so this was really important because this was the lead up to what many of you might recall the largest climate march in history. So you have in 2014 the climate summit and a new multi level governance architecture. Two moments in climate change or climate policy advocacy is super important because most folks who think about climate change or climate change policy or climate policy think about it in the context of the United Nations framework on climate change. And then we think about it more on the domestic level but these two events really helped to shape how we could build a movement in a moment around influencing policymakers at the highest level. And so you had in 2014 the new climate environment, I'm sorry climate economy report, which helped to create the conditions for this really pivotal moment that led up to that was a precursor to the 20 COP 21. And so in 2014 and September 2014 you have the climate march but at the same time you have the UN general secretary generals summit as well. And civil society at this point is deeply engaged in shaping both the external and internal strategies for both of these events. And they accomplished a great deal they accomplished one they organized the global marches that poured 400,000 people into the streets and thousands into hundreds of parallel activist events around the world, but then they were also instrumental in mobilizing this input into the climate, the climate change narrative on by putting it on the front pages of every major summit in the days before the summit that ensure that the heads of state attending the summit knew that they were being watched that they needed to demonstrate responsiveness to the citizens. And it is said that you know why they were meeting in their summit and in the UN building that they could hear the voices of the people calling to them to do to act boldly on climate change. And so civil society proved to be particularly effective at harnessing the twin narratives of climate science and economics and at leveraging and emerging multi level governance architecture to create this political space for climate leadership. You know there's work to be done and there's a really, really amazing opportunity coming out of what we saw accomplished in 2015 during the the cop. And we had the, you know, the Paris agreement, domestically we have a lot of opportunities here domestically in particular to shift the more nationally grounded implementation regime regime that's focused on individual states climate commitments, while also requiring that we as civil society that stakeholders become more effective at influencing domestic politics so I just say that to say that we did a lot of work but we still have work to do but this was a great success. Here and then post Paris, we know we have other great things that took place with stakeholders you have the Greta factor of the work of the young people around the world taking up the the band the banner of Fridays for future. We have the Green New Deal and the fact that it's rooted started by a group of young people so again we want to transform the way in which we understand how our nation governs and and develops itself into this new green reality this new green democracy. And these are super important moments to be aware of because they all are culminated in this understanding that it takes not just the boots on the ground but also the work of the end of the analysis of the actual policy walks to really come together to create these opportunities that we can shift the paradigm to a place that we want. I just want to focus a little bit on environmental justice. Because right now in the US, this is a movement and a moment that is happening front and center, and it's something that is really influencing the current administration in the White House and maybe some of the offices on the hill as well. I'd like to just preface this that you know environmental justice is not a new movement it's been around since the 80s. You know it really got a lot of exposure because there was an explosive report that came out around the burdens that disproportionately impacted communities that were in that were minority and low income it really showed the importance of disparities and the burden that these communities were were shouldering for environmental degradation. And so the issues existed and had been recognized previously but what happened was in 1982 in a county in North Carolina called Warren County. There were thousands of tons of PCP ridden soil, which was intentionally dumped in a facility in an African American community, even though the community is like we don't want this. There was an incident and others like it really sparked this movement into addressing the health burdens and that were being born by these communities that were culminating and it culminated in the publishing of a report called toxic waste and 1987. And so, over the decades this work and this this movement really started to gain momentum, and the group saw, you know, governmental action to ensure that the hardships of the pollution would not actually that it wouldn't go beyond what they were suffering. They really were seeking a way to find a way in which that they could prevent other communities that were like them in the sense that they were already being disproportionately impacted, and we're already facing discrimination that they would be able to create a means by which they can empower themselves to stop these things from continuing so they use legal means they use legislative action. And they also stayed really true to if it has stayed true to its roots it's rooted in community activism. Leading this narrative currently from the grass grass roots up to the federal government around the need to take these issues seriously not just in the context of of local government but also in national policy approaches. And one of the most successful wins for the environmental justice movement is the executive order 12898 which was signed in signed by Clinton, and this established the environmental justice offices in the EPA and DOJ, and across other federal agencies. So, where we are now with this movement is that it is, you know, I like to call it the golden child at the moment. You know, it is currently really influence influencing the approach and the way in which not just the, the government is looking at equity and justice, and the needs of environmental communities whether you're looking at air pollution or water, water or the totality of it, but you're also seeing as being sort of a reckoning of sorts within the environmental movement as a whole, to really bring together the need to, to have environmental justice at the core of the framework that we're designing and developing. And so I like to say that EJ, the environmental justice movement is a moment that has been a long time coming. And so what we're seeing is the work of 30 years for some of these folks of really digging deep and digging in to get to this place where we can see how stakeholder engagement really can be transformative and has the potential to be to progress us to a further space in which we have more equity and justice across the board. I want to just conclude and just say that stakeholders are effective. When they can strategically integrate their issues into the broader concerns that we're facing and I would say that within the context of climate change stakeholders have been really successful in integrating the climate change framing of the issues that that I've just laid out for across the board for many communities, many countries, with more traditional concerns around air pollution, land rights and environmental justice. And so the role of stakeholders, I cannot impress upon you enough that collectively we do a lot more when more effectively when we are fighting for things and engage in things that really resonate for across communities and not just across silos. And so I want to say thank you for just the opportunity to be here and and I will open it up or give it back to you Dan for questions if there are any. Thank you so much Tina for a great presentation. Really appreciate you joining us today. We do have some time for a discussion and I'm interested in digging a little bit deeper into a couple of the things you said. Maybe I'll start with sort of one of the last points you made and I'm going to paraphrase a little bit because I can only write so fast. You said something to the effect of this work has done best when there is a strategic integration of climate change into ongoing debates and I'm wondering if you can think from your experience of times when that's been successfully done when climate has been strategically integrated into the federal policymaking process. I'm wondering if you could provide an example or two that you've seen that work well and perhaps an example to where it didn't work well or it was too much of an afterthought to make much of a difference. Yeah, I think that it's a good question because the answer is course there are things that have worked well when you've integrated policy I mean California California is a really wonderful example of climate a state that gets the need to really integrate climate policy into the way in which it wants to integrate whether it's through electric vehicle. Electric vehicles or greenhouse gas reduction and taking the lead when the federal government has sort of lacks behind and now as the poster child for all things green you look to California. You know they have this you have these are not done. These are not necessarily policies that I would support I want to just practice that but that they are there so you have Reggie in some states where you know they're looking at ways that they can use this system that's part of the international community to to bring down greenhouse gas emissions and to really find a way that communities that state level action can take hold and really start to look at what the needs are at the local level to engage in this approach to to being a champion on on the climate and also looking at ways to enhance innovation and opportunities for communities as we're moving into this this new future that looks green for all of us. But there are always these these caveats because not most of the policy that we see that's implemented doesn't always take a multi stakeholder approach into consideration. It's usually your first speaker spoke about business and you know business is super important the economic development is super important but when that is more important than the actual cumulative impacts on communities that are suffering the most or disproportionately impacted because the modeling that's done doesn't represent the need to take into consideration equity justice health impacts or cumulative impacts. The policies even though they're promising at reducing greenhouse gases don't necessarily promise a healthier cleaner safer solution free environment for communities that need it the most. So I just like to put that in context because there is a lot of really good policy that we are seeing enacted, but there are flaws in that because of what they leave out in in their implementation and and the impacts. Over time, different stakeholders have been invited to these conversations they've invited to they've been invited to the policymaking table. How has the landscape of advocates and stakeholders that are included early in the policymaking process how is that landscape changed. And in your opinion has it. Is it changed enough where would you. How would you like to see that landscape, perhaps evolve even further. I think that, you know, there's always something to be said for our humbling the moments that humble us. I think the 2016 election was a humbling moment for many folks on one side. There was a champion moment but for a lot of folks who work in the space around climate policy, going from an administration that was really pro. Well, as much as pro as Obama was but doing a lot more on climate than he had done in the beginning and ending in a really strong way at the end of his term, and then going into the next administration where this didn't this same commitment did not exist. It really caused the community to take a moment back and reflect on, you know, all that it accomplished. Who did they accomplish it with and were enough of the people that should be at the table at the table. And I think those moments those humbling moments make it so that you have to think through when your policy is like this is good for everybody, but you don't have everyone there. So like, yeah, I can support it, but it doesn't really meet our needs, you really create a disconnect between the folks on the ground and their needs, and the policy approach and what you tell people they need. And what I found is that people, people know what what works in their communities they know what they're looking for, and doing that little bit of work, which is the hard work of actually engaging stakeholders, meaningfully, actually taking the time and sitting like a weekend and just saying give tell us what you're thinking let's have relationship let's communicate with each other. Share with us your ideals share with us your ideas share with us your fears your concerns, the buying at the end of that is immense because most people just want to be heard. They want to know that you heard them that you're considering them in the process that you're taking up that you're taking up, and that they can see themselves reflected in the outcome. So I think that genuine engagement that connection connecting to, you know, each other in a different way that's not transactional. I think that that's the biggest change, but that's also the, again, it's the biggest change that still needs a lot of work, but I think it's there I think it's starting. Great, I love that point when we were working on our coastal resilience briefing series in 2019 and 2020 that issue came up over and over and over again. The idea that community engagement is not just sending out a one way communication it's actually engaging it implies a two way and we had a speaker in our Louisiana briefing coastal briefing. I think it's something to the effect of when he was actually when his community was actually engaged, he felt like he was being included, rather than just being told about what the decision was, and it just meant so much to him that someone actually really valued his input. And I just that that really stuck with me through the rest of the series and it's something that I think comes out in our report. I have one more question for you. Before we pivot to our next speaker. There are a lot of congressional staff watching us right now. And many of them are going to be involved in all sorts of climate related policy deliberations in the next couple months. What would you from your experience, what are the one, what are the most important lessons that you've learned about how to do this the right way that you would like them to keep in mind, as they talk to their constituents as they talk to interest groups as they talk to their bosses about how climate policy should take shape this Congress. I think that one congressional staffers, they have a they have a heavy left right I mean I don't think anyone's overstaffed in these offices and their the issues are are are plenty. But I would say that I do think it's important to understand. I think if this is my personal thing. I think if the question is, is there equity, is there justice in what we are putting forward, like having that be a framework, not just the lens of framework. And we, and have we consulted the folks that are going to be most impacted by this in a way that we can actually hear them, versus in a way that we just need to say that we heard them check that box, push out legislation, or push out a bill that doesn't take into consideration the broader space. And I think it's super important for folks to realize that just because it comes from a think tank doesn't mean that it's well thought. Right, like, and that that extra those extra eyes from other stakeholders outside of the, I guess what they call them the brain trust expand that brain trust, because even if you aren't an economist, you do know what you what your community wants if you're on the ground doing the work, you have a different perspective you bring something to the table that resonates with the people who actually are going to vote for it in in the space that your that your congressperson or your senator is in, and that those folks are not engaged in a meaningful authentic way. It really makes it hard for people to hold on to something and say I can champion this because I see myself reflected in it. So I do think if anything it's really that authentic, the heavy the easy lift but the heavy lift of engaging from a place of wanting to do to be effective, and you can be effective when you engage people and get their input. They may not buy in 100%, but if they feel like they've given you input felt like they've been heard. Maybe they don't come out and say, Oh, this so and so didn't do this but they can say we had a conversation we weren't in agreement, but we can see where they're coming from. I call it alignment, you don't always get agreement but maybe you get alignment. And that's I think it's really important. Thank you so much, Tina for sharing your time with us today and your perspective and expertise. It means a lot for you to join us today. Thank you so much, and I thank you very much for your presentation. If you missed any of Tina's presentation, and trust me if you did you will need to go back and watch it. We're going to be archived along with Katie's presentation on the website. We've reached the halfway point ish in our panel today so Katie begin to with Johnson controls. She spoke about turning points are key turning points in climate policy history we just heard Tina about an advocates perspective climate policy here and then and now and what's changed and what needs to continue to change in order for us to get what we need to get done. Now we are going to hear from our third panelist. It is my privilege to introduce Laurel Harvard young. She is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science and a faculty fellow at the Institute for policy research at Northwestern University. She received her PhD in 2009 from Stanford University her research focuses on the challenges to reaching bipartisan compromises and American politics. In her research she studied Congress state legislator late legislatures legislatures and legislatures, as well as the American public. Laurel, thank you so much for joining us today and I can't wait for your presentation I'll turn it over to you. All right, well thank you all so much for the opportunity to be here today. I'm going to be taking a slightly different perspective than the previous panelists, drawn on my work as a political science scholar. And so I want to share a couple of insights from my research about the importance of building bipartisan coalitions in Congress, and about public views on bipartisanship and compromise, because especially with the very narrow majorities that the current Democratic Party has in Congress. So thinking about how to tackle legislative initiatives on energy the environment and climate change. It's going to be particularly important to think about where bipartisanship and compromise is possible. I think unfortunately there's often a perception in contemporary politics that bipartisanship and compromise is bad politics that we hear about legislators fearing primary challengers if they compromise or if they work with the other side. I think that maybe their legislation might be ignored in favor of you know the types of priorities that are the messaging priorities of majority party or minority party. And my work suggests that it's not necessarily bad politics, and that Congress as a whole that individual legislators that both of them can benefit from crafting bipartisan compromises. And we'll leave some time for a Q&A kind of back and forth discussion after my opening remarks here. We can talk a little bit more there about this misperception and the fact that legislators do seem to have a misperception about how the public thinks about compromise. So I want to begin by thinking about the value of bipartisanship. So, first off, bipartisanship is important for Congress as a whole. So when we think about the need for Congress to govern with majority party in particular cares about a record of success that even in the highly polarized period that we're in today. It's important to keep in mind that most major laws still pass with significant bipartisan support in at least one chamber. In fact, there's recent work by fellow political scientist James Curry and Francis Lee, who point out and you know show with convincing evidence that over time bipartisanship is roughly the same now as it was 30 years ago in terms of the bills that become law. There are lots of bills that don't become law that are party line votes messaging bills and so forth. But things like the affordable care after the Trump tax cut that passed on party line votes are the exception, not the rule. In these recent time periods, it's also important to keep in mind that the successful cases of bipartisanship often entail working with party leaders in both parties early in the legislative process, and not simply trying to pick off a few legislators from the minority party late in the process, basically just by making you know a few concessions at the end. Sometimes that can work, but oftentimes it may be more valuable to kind of build a broader stakeholder process and bipartisanship earlier on. Second, bipartisanship can be valuable for individual legislators to so legislators who can draw in more bipartisan co sponsors on their bills, have higher legislative effectiveness, measured as their success in moving the bills they introduced through committee to floor votes and into So the figure here shows some estimates from some ongoing work I have with Craig Voldman Alan Wiseman, who run the Center for effective lawmaking. And we looked at how legislators ability to draw in bipartisan co sponsors on their bills affected their legislative effectiveness at each stage. So action and committee with the AIC action beyond committee marked by ABC bills that pass one chamber and bills that become law. In the House and the Senate, the figure shows that an increase in bipartisanship boosts members legislative effectiveness. So for instance, House representatives who attract a one standard deviation larger proportion of bipartisan co sponsors, co sponsors on their bills, experience about an eight to 14% increase in their bills receiving committee attention passing the House and becoming law for the Senate it's about a 10% increase in these activities. And of course for all many of you watching you know a staffers that the staffers play a really important role in building these bipartisan collaborations. They build the relationships over time with other offices and other staffers. And this is why longer tenure can matter and evidence suggests that staffers who do have longer tenure, maybe more effective at helping build bipartisan collaborations. The next point I want to focus on is thinking about what my research has found about public opinion on bipartisanship and compromise, and how particularly this may relate in the domains of energy environment and climate policy. So first and more generally speaking, in both my work and in the work of others, for instance Jennifer Wolack at the University of Colorado research consistently finds that the public does generally prefer compromise. It's especially true when the alternative is policy gridlock. You know, of course, people might prefer victory for their own preferred side, but compromise is generally viewed favorably. Whereas gridlock typically is viewed unfavorably people are frustrated by inaction, and they do see compromise as a necessary step to getting things done. However, just how bad gridlock is seen can depend on the issue. In one study that we conducted, we ran a survey experiment where we varied the outcome of the legislative process, either resulted in a successful compromise between the two parties in a policy victory for one party or the other, or in legislative gridlock. And we ran this study on two different issues. So study one was on energy policy. And this is something that you might think about as being a consensus issue. So people on both sides of the aisle share the end goal of greater energy independence. But also on a second issue study two, which was gun control, which is not a consensus issue, that partisans on each side of the aisle tend to want a different end goal and don't necessarily share the same kind of outcome in terms of, you know, having fewer guns in the hands of citizens. And then we asked people's approval of how Congress was handling each of the issues. And what we see in both studies is that a win for one's own party boosts congressional approval slightly relative to a compromise. So we see that the predicted or the mean approval is slightly higher for the own win relative to compromise. And so this suggests that, yes, you know, sure, people want their side to kind of win their preferred policy to be the victory, but compromise is a pretty good alternative to the really I think interesting thing here and kind of about why it matters kind of what issue we're tackling and also how we frame these issues is that on the consensus issue of energy so shown here in study one gridlock was viewed as the worst outcome. So people even prefer to policy that favored the opposing party to gridlock on the legislation. And this points I think to the importance of appealing to shared end goals that people might have the public support for action, even through the means that are not their most preferred can be higher when you do appeal to the shared end goals. And of course in the domain of energy and environment, this may be an easier strategy on some issues than on others. The recent Pew survey show that both Democrats and Republicans have increased their support for making environmental protections of priority, though a significant partisan gap still remains. And climate change in particular has a very large partisan gap. So here of all the issues that Pew recently surveyed it had the largest gap in terms of people just think it should be a priority so not even necessarily what should be done about it but even just as a 21% of Republicans versus 78% of Democrats thought it should be a priority. And so I think maybe this speaks a little bit back to some of the earlier speakers with Katie McGinty and others thinking about, where can we find aspects of climate policy where there is more of a shared end goal places where in corporate America their interests and incentives in kind of moving towards kind of greener buildings may align with climate activists and others. And it's not necessarily to mean that this is going to be a possible route to appeal and shared end goals on every issue, but it's one possibility for thinking about how to get broader broader support for compromise and for action from people on both sides of the aisle. But again, I think the other point here is just keeping in mind that regardless of the issue successful compromises tend to be viewed favorably by the public result in higher evaluations how Congress is handling an issue. The research in this area has found that people on average reward individual legislators for supporting these compromises. So as part of my recent book with my collaborator Sarah Anderson and Daniel Butler, we surveyed a national sample of Americans, and we asked that their stance on several issues. And then we shared that their senator had either voted for a compromise on the issue that led to the bills passage or voted against a compromise leading to the bills failure. And then we asked people about their approval of the senator, as well as their vote intention in the next general election and for co partisans in the next primary election. And what we found was that supporting compromise boosts evaluations of the senator relative to rejecting compromise. This is true for approval shown here in the top panel, and also for their general election vote in the bottom panel. It also holds for the full sample for just co partisans who share the partisanship of the senator for opposing partisans and for independence and for co partisans also boots boost the primary election vote share as well. And even among co partisans self identified primary voters boost their evaluations of the senator when learning that he or she supported the compromise. So here approval is in the top panel and primary vote intention is in the bottom panel. So we see primary voters on the first group here. We also see a positive effect for strong partisans for individual donors for those who view the tea party or indivisible movement favorably. It's only for the most ideological voters that we don't see a positive effect. But there's also no punishment either. So here it's just suggesting that it doesn't really matter to people's evaluations, whether the senator compromised or doesn't compromise. But for all of these other groups on average, people reward the legislator who engaged in compromise and helped pass legislation, as opposed to one who rejected the compromise and helped kill the piece of legislation. So I think these findings highlight that bipartisanship and compromise can help members find legislative success can help parties pass major public laws, and also can help legislators boost their support in the public. And I'll go ahead and wrap up my introductory remarks here, and then we can kind of continue some conversation with Anna organ. Fantastic. Thank you so much. We need to have more political science panel says so interesting I love your research and congratulations on your book published last year, congratulations. Thank you. I have lots of questions. One of my questions is you talked about successful compromise. And I think, you know, I'm curious about what factors might sabotage compromise or derail compromise, and also whether those are more common at the beginning of maybe as compromise is forming or if those are risks, sort of as compromises are trying to endure, you know, sort of various political pressures from, you know, the pressure cooker of the Capitol. Yeah, so I think we think about where kind of compromises can fail. So this is going to turn a little bit from what I was talking about before about kind of where public opinion stands to drawing on some of my other work that's looked at the legislators as well as the actions of legislators processes within Congress and state legislatures. And so one of the challenges and places where compromise can break down is that legislators have a perception sometimes that primary voters will punish them for making compromises. So, as I just showed with the evidence here that there's not actually a lot of evidence for that this is I think more of a misperception that it isn't accurate perception. But I think that when legislators worry that some of these kind of most committed activists in an area would kind of turn their back on them and kind of support a primary challenge, kind of stop supporting them because of their efforts to build a compromise. That can be a place that it can be derailed. Another and this, I guess I don't know if it's necessarily at odds with the previous speakers but you know I think, you know that having the stakeholders involved is obviously really important to having good policy into getting broader buy in. I think one of the challenges with you know some stakeholders involved is that some stakeholders can kind of have more of a approach focused on principles rather than pragmatism. And I think that for legislators pragmatism is often what is needed that they need to focus on what can be incrementally done to move policy in a direction that achieves a goal even if they can't get everything. You know we might think that they need to accept half a loaf rather than hold out to try to get the whole loaf. And sometimes I think that interest groups both early in the process as well as late in the process can kind of prove stumbling blocks here. So you can have you know instances where interest groups score votes in ways that tell legislators not to support a compromise because it kind of only goes part way but not all the way towards what they want. They can also you know try to muddy the waters earlier on and kind of they pick off legislators and you know get members who might be more ideologically extreme to stop supporting the legislation and you know I think we saw this historically. So back in the early 2000s when Congress was considering legislation to improve wilderness protections for the San Rafael swell in Utah. There were some environmental interests who oppose the legislation because it did not provide full wilderness designation. So even though the proposal had considerably more protection for the land that existed at the time. It didn't provide full wilderness designation. And so they oppose the legislation. It led to many liberal legislators kind of losing their support for this legislation ultimately the sponsor of the legislation pulled it from the floor. So nothing was done, instead of kind of an incremental approach, again because of this kind of perfect being the enemy of the goods in a sense. You said something that sort of made me think individual members are, you know they have. I'm curious if you if your research found any tension between maybe what an individual member feels is in her in his or her best interest. With respect to his or her constituents or district. Versus maybe what, maybe what the party is hoping for an outcome. Would your research uncover like where are there some issues that maybe you've studied where individual members have maybe a little bit more leeway to become compromisers or to become to show an independent streak. Or there are others that may be the party to the extent of the party or apparatus has, you know that amount of control they can say no actually this isn't we're going to move on from this one and not compromise a whole lot here. I think certainly there are a lot of places where we can think about some cases where legislators interest in the party's interest align and other cases where legislators interest in the party's don't align. It gets to be I think a little bit of a complex scenario because I think it also matters whether their party is in the majority or the minority, and also whether they have unified government or divided government. So, the more you have divided government particularly in the times that we've had split control of the House and Senate, neither party cares as much about getting stuff done, and they can focus a lot more on what we might call messaging priorities. So they don't actually care about compromising because they're just going to pass the buck and blame the other party and chamber for why things don't get done. So there the parties don't necessarily care about compromising and it might be some individual legislators, particularly in more kind of competitive, you know swing districts who want to show, I am willing to work across the aisle. I'm trying to really tackle issues that are important to my constituents. On the other hand, you might have a scenario with unified government where the majority party does have an incentive to govern and produce a record of success, even if it is a more incremental policy. It may be particularly attentive to what the needs are of the kind of more moderate members, the kind of pivotal legislators who might be needed to make deals. And there it actually might be the legislators on the more ideological wing of the party who don't want to work with the party leaders who get frustrated by all the concessions that are being had, or having to be made to get the you know pivotal issues. So, you know, how does, you know, Bernie Sanders feel about the concessions being made to Joe Manchin, or on issues where the filibuster holds to nine more Republicans in terms of what policy would need to look like. Great thanks and I should have mentioned before I asked that question that one of the members of our audience had a similar question so I tried to weave those two together. So our touches on the connection between public polling, and sort of how individual members themselves understand their political standing with their constituents. What are those linkages, how does polling affect how a politician, how a member of Congress positions him or herself with respect to issues and deciding whether or not compromises in their interest or not. This is a really interesting question and I think a challenging one, because on the one hand we have pretty good public opinion polls at a national level, maybe even at a state level, but at a district level we don't have as good a polling. And so I think as a result, legislators and their staff end up relying a lot more on the people who contact them. But we know that the people who contact the offices are not a random sample of their constituents. And of course, you know, legislation, their staff on the one hand can recognize that they can say, Oh, of course these people aren't a random sample. But we also have evidence that seems to suggest that their voices still end up being disproportionately important. And so, you know, when they hear from these engaged and vocal people, they're going to tend to hear from the people who maybe do oppose the compromise or who, you know, care so much about the issue that this is the only issues that matters to them and the government doesn't vote the way they want, you know, they're not going to support the legislator. And as I alluded to before in my previous comments, I think this is where we can end up with legislators having misperceptions of what constituents want. So, in the research that I mentioned for my book, we focused on compromises that move policy partway but not all the way to what legislators wanted. So in the book that we studied state legislators. What we found was that 58% of state legislators thought that their primary voters were either somewhat or very likely to punish them for compromising on policy. Only 26% thought that general election voters would want them to compromise. And a similar question found that 59% of legislators thought that a primary voter would want a member of Congress to vote no on a compromise bill killing it. And so that was actually the exact same scenario that we had then used in the public opinion survey that I showed in the slides. The state legislators, and I think this lesson applies to federal legislators as well, overwhelmingly thought that primary voters opposed the compromise. But when we surveyed their very primary voters, we found, no, primary voters on average still favored the compromise. And so I think this misperception can lead them to be I think fearful of kind of what would happen in primary election, especially right now, you know, where so many districts are safe for parties in the general election. And this misperception spills over into kind of views on issues more broadly. So drawing on some work by some other political scientists. So from work by hurdle Fernandez Mildenberger and Stokes, they asked congressional staffers, what percent of constituents in your members district would agree with a following set of policy statements. And then they looked at district level polling to compare it. So they looked at views on carbon regulation on repealing the Affordable Care Act on gun sale background checks minimum wage level and infrastructure spending. And what they found was that staffer perceptions were far more extreme than the public's actual policy preferences. So Democratic staffers would overestimate constituents support for carbon regulation, Republicans would underestimate constituent support, and they would have bigger misperceptions, the more they had contact with interest groups in these areas. That's really interesting. And actually that kind of leads into my last question. Today, we have you heard me ask Tina and Anna asked Katie, there are a lot of staff watching us this is a very popular briefing today. Based on your research based on your experience based on your sort of expertise. What advice would you give to staff people who are either currently working or about to start working on climate policy. How do you help them navigate sort of the tricky waters around bipartisanship and compromise over the course of the rest of the Congress. Yeah, so I think that there are a couple of things that are emphasized so the first is to just emphasize what I said earlier, which is that building bipartisan coalitions and compromises can be good for policy making and for good for politics that it can help the Congress as a whole past legislation, it can help individual legislators develop a record of legislative success, and it can be good for them electorally as well. The second point, which ties to the last thing we were talking about it's kind of misperceptions is that I think that legislators and their staff should do more to seek out the opinions of a broader kind of group of constituents than just those who call the office or who strive and respond to constituent newsletter polls. And I think here there's some really interesting work by Michael nevro at Ohio State and his colleagues, who have partnered with some members of Congress to hold virtual town halls with representative samples of constituents. And I think that he actually testified before the House select committee on modernization yesterday. He talked about some of his work on civic engagement and getting more people to kind of know what their member of Congress is doing and more of their members of Congress to know what the people think. And then the very last thing that I would mention is that sometimes negotiations that are lead to successful compromises might have more success if some element of those are conducted in private. So, transparency is often touted as a real gold standard in the policymaking process and that privacy is a problem. But even the founding fathers had recognized that they needed privacy to work out the deals of writing the Constitution. This wasn't something that could be done with kind of prying eyes and everybody tearing apart every part of the kind of negotiation. So, by no means am I saying that legislators should hide their votes, legislators should take their roll call votes and be on the record, and constituents should know what stances they take. But I also think that we should make it more acceptable that some elements of these negotiations happened behind closed doors that the stakeholders come together, and you hash out details and you say, you know, here's what I'd be willing to give me part way and say that in a real kind of truthful way without having the media or the closest kind of lobbying interest groups or primary voters or stuff like that, watching and saying, oh, this person is giving up the principles. So, I'll wrap it up there and thank you again for the indication to be part of this. Well, thank you so much and you're just making me think that that's really only possible with trust, right? Members have to know and trust each other to have those frank conversations without, you know, fear of, you know, someone under the table live tweeting the conversation or making a conference call publicly available or something like that. Laurel, thank you so much for bringing your research to our audience today. And congressional staff in the audience, Laurel gave you lots of practical advice but it's actually really fun to read political science research about how these institutions function. So, Laurel has a book out but there's lots of other great histories and treatises out there have always been a Ross Baker fan, Ross K Baker fan. And the House and Senate is just so fascinating so definitely encourage everybody to take a look at that so go visit your local library when it's safe again to do so. Thank you Laurel. We are going to turn now to our fourth speaker in our fourth segment. And it is my, I have lots of privileges today I get to introduce wonderful people to this panel. My fourth privilege of the day is to introduce Anna unruh Cohen. Anna is staff director of the United States House of Representatives select committee on the climate crisis. Previously she was managing director of government affairs at the Natural Resources Defense Council and the energy action fund. During nearly two decades of policy experience including many on Capitol Hill, she has served as the director of energy climate natural resources for Senator Edward Markey ed Markey deputy staff director of the Natural Resource Committee Democratic staff deputy staff director and chief scientist of the select committee on energy independence and global warming and as an LA legislative assistance and then representative Markey's personal office on it's great to see you today. Thank you for joining our panel I'll turn it over to you. Thanks Dan thanks for that invitation it's always great to join ESI who have always been a resource for me through my whole career on Capitol Hill, and also to be on a panel with three of their really fantastic women. And to learn from them and their perspectives today, of course just as I start my kitten boomie wants to join so here's boomie will put him down. Hopefully everybody's also having great working from home experiences still. So, as you heard from my bio I've been around a while up here and seen, seen a lot. I'm actually my educational background is in climate science, and then many of you probably familiar with the American Association for the advancement of science fellowship so I got my start on Capitol Hill, kind of fresh out of grad school and have been mostly on Capitol Hill since then, but working on climate and policy. All of that time, since the fall of 2001. So I think one of the main points I want to make to start is that there is a climate policy is. Almost every policy. You know, we look to back to 2009 when the House passed wax from Markey. We're looking to hopefully here in a few months when we do some more work. And we think of those as climate bills. But in reality, especially in the energy space every energy bill is a climate bill because what we decide to do on energy, you know means emissions going up or going down, or changing in some way. So, you know, that's sort of my first point to everyone is. It's always been the case that much of the legislation we pass has an impact on the climate and in this day and age we have to really be cognizant and of that and as we're moving. This is a legislation that we, we may be able to move, you know, as, as people who want to advance climate actions we need to be about what, what can we put in here or how is this going to bring benefits to the climate or people who are, you know, trying to address issues in their in their own communities. And, you know, I think that's pretty clear when you're talking about climate and energy bills. Obviously, it's not dealing with the climate crisis is not just about reducing emissions, we already have impacts that we're feeling already. And so, I would also add that, you know, whenever we're dealing with a disaster bill or thinking about some of our responses to natural hazards that that is another opportunity and something we need to deal consciously with to think about climate adaptation and resilience. So really, you know, in my time on the hill, we, you know, not only did we have, we had an energy bill in 2005, we had an energy bill in 2007 where we were able to increase fuel economy standards in 2008 actually in the in the response to the financial crisis then is actually one of the key moments for soul deployment because we passed a long term solar, solar tax credit extension in that late 2008, which really helped spread solar in the last decade then in 2009, you know, we had a recovery act that was really instrumental to keeping clean energy going. So, you know, even before we got to 2009 and being able to to put in to pass climate, the climate bill through the house with three, I mean with eight Republicans going to the going to the point of bipartisanship. You know, we had already been doing a lot of things that that had that impact. And so then, having failed to get a climate bill to the president's desk in the 2009 and 10 timeframe and then Republicans taking back control of the house, starting in 2011, you know, the opportunities for legislative action really fell off. And that's when the Obama administration, you know, started to look at their existing authorities. And I shouldn't say started I mean there actually had been. There's a long history of the EPA in particular looking at their Clean Air Act authority that goes right back to the Clinton administration. And it wasn't just a new thing that they they picked up at that time, and then, and there had been a number of issues around auto efficiency that that also set the stage for for the Obama EPA to then develop the clean power plan. And all along when we were legislating for trying to legislate in 2009, you know, we knew that this regulatory authority was there. But that we would be able to design a better program for dealing with greenhouse gases if if we could, if we if Congress could act. Since Congress did not act. In the end, we put together or the administration started moving on on their clean power plan. And, you know, I think had a huge amount of to to Laurel's point. You know, there's a lot of engagement with stakeholders through that process at the Obama Obama EPA. And so the proposal they put out changed in significant ways before they finalized it in 2015. And then, of course, then we hit the legal challenges, which, you know, ultimately stayed it. When the Trump administration came in, they worked to unwind it. And so, you know, we had had a long time up there of not dealing with climate and energy really on Capitol Hill until, you know, the end of 2020. And so probably many of you were here and know that we passed a massive piece of legislation right at the end of 2020. And it was important for COVID response for keeping the government running, but it also had a lot of pent up energy policy that committees and members have been working on, really for multiple Congresses. So, you know, huge amount on for innovation. We extended some of the clean energy tax credits again. And then I think really importantly at lost largely was the components to deal with HFCs, which in in driving those in having a pathway to get get rid of those will actually have a huge benefit to climate and will help us avoid on the order of a whole, you know, degree Celsius of temperature increase. I mean, not a whole a half 0.5 that we otherwise might expect so huge, huge wins comparatively on the legislation there now compared to what we need to do and what the science says today. So we obviously have a lot more that we need to go ahead to further. And, you know, on the adaptation and resilience side, the 2018 Disaster Reform Act put in place something called the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities Program over at FEMA, which is a sort of pre disaster mitigation program that now stood up and getting funding that will hopefully help communities be able to both adapt to what may be coming down the path for them, but certainly when disaster strikes that they're more resilient in return and keeping people safe so even on the resilient side of things. We, you know, we have made some progress, even though we haven't done a climate bill up on Capitol Hill. And, you know, I think those last two points that the 2018 bill and 2020, you know, underscore what Laurel was talking about with bipartisanship. I mean, a lot of that work was really done in a bipartisan manner and allowed those to move forward. So what we're looking at doing now, as we pivot to the President Biden's Build Back Better agenda, you know, is really shaped by what Tina was talking about earlier and the stakeholder advocacy that really has been a great asset to have in the last two years. You know, obviously, the climate issues, we've been, people have been concerned about them, we've been grappling with them up on Capitol Hill here for many years, decades. As you probably all have learned, whether you have a short or longer congressional career, you know, it just, you just have to have the right moment, and you have to have a confluence of issues coming together in order to advance legislation. As hard, or legislating as hard, and it's gotten harder, you know, I've seen it get harder in the course of my career up here. And so, you know, thankfully, we've had a moment where added advocacy from both traditional voices and new voices like young people in particular, but also voices that have improved, well, not improved is the wrong word, but have been able to elevate their concerns. And in there, I mean, I think especially the environmental justice groups who have often worked, you know, very locally, but have been able to build up strategic partnerships with each other. And I think some of the bigger environmental groups to really start, you know, having input and moving people up here on Capitol Hill. So, all of that is really great and has pushed climate to the forefront. And I think, you know, would be, you know, also, you know, it's unfortunate that we have a global pandemic, but it also is big disruptions from pandemics or other financial stressors often are the points in our society and in our history, what we've been able to reevaluate and change things. And so, obviously, the COVID pandemic has forced us to look at how our country operates with new eyes and new light and new energy to change things. And I would say, you know, the racial issues that the murder of George Floyd have brought forward, and unfortunately so many others, you know, has all, it's all really come together in a way that makes, you know, that we saw President Biden tie those crises together and give us hopefully the opportunity to make progress. And on all of those fronts in a, in a united way, and that's, you know, really what we as congressional staffers are facing now is, you know, can we do that. And it's going to be exciting next couple of months. I think as I close out here. Maybe the one thing to say, and this may come up in Dan's questions as well. You know, there are big differences between today and where we were in 2009 when we were able to pass Waxman Markey. And, you know, I think Katie McGinty might have mentioned it. You know, part of it is, you know, unfortunately where a dozen years deeper into the climate crisis and mother nature is making, you know, very apparent the risks and threats to people in their communities that come with that. We're also a dozen years into more clean energy development and deployment, which I think makes, makes people grasping a zero emission future easier. When I was working on the previous select committee and in 2007 through 2010, I mean, one of the things we were really trying to do is tell those stories about clean energy and what it meant in for America and in communities in America. And, you know, it was just, we had to work harder to find those stories. And now it's really, you know, pretty straightforward. And there are thankfully a lot of good news stories out there. So those are, those are definitely big changes that are influencing things. I mentioned a second ago, the outside advocacy piece, I think, you know, we have more public pressure and additional voices coming than we did in 2009. We definitely had, you know, the public asking us to act on climate back then. But it's definitely at an elevated level now. One of the key things in 2009 was, was where the business community and especially the electric utilities were, and they actually really needed certainty on how climate was going to, was going to affect their business climate policy. They had, you know, coal plants that were aging and that needed new investment and basically their investors saying, well, we don't really want to give you money until we know that the rules of the world on carbon policy are going to be. And so, you know, they were motivated to have Congress put those rules in place. And this was all just before, you know, the big natural gas bill. And so, you know, some of those terms have been alleviated in the last decade because they've just, you know, made a big switch to natural gas. So I think, you know, the business community is definitely engaged because they see Democrats in control of the White House and the House and the Senate and they know, you know, this policy discussions are happening and they want to engage. From my perspective, they don't have this, there isn't the same sort of urgent need from, from them as we saw in, in 2009. And then the difference in the margins in the House and the Senate. So as I said earlier, I was a science person. So not, didn't take much history or political science really in my education. And so I really didn't understand how, how historic the period of 2009 and 2010 was, you know, we had Democratic margins in the House and the Senate and having the White House, like we hadn't had since, you know, basically 1965 when President Johnson was able to push through so many of great society legislation that he did. So, and, you know, that's, it's, it is not, it is not that way now with the margins that we have in the House and basically no margin in the Senate. But I think, you know, the, the energy bill in the end of last year should give everyone some hope that we can find some way forward and we have, you know, things in front of us like infrastructure that do have bipartisan support or can have bipartisan support. And so, and we also have, you know, a reconciliation process that we just used for COVID response and the American Rescue Plan that obviously is not can't maybe deliver as comprehensive response to climate as we would like, but certainly can make some key investments that we know will bring big benefits, whether it's in clean energy tax, or other investments that exists for, for existing programs in energy over at the Department of Interior and Ag on the natural side of things. So, you know, I think it offers a positive way forward if we ultimately have to use that. But, you know, the President is, is pivoting to his build back better agenda. And we know that it's popular. And so, you know, I'm hopeful that our Republican colleagues will engage in a way that, you know, we can put a bipartisan infrastructure bill together that's good for for people and communities and helps advance us on the towards climate action. So I think I'll wrap up there with two reading recommendations and then Dan can ask me a question. Just this week, I think it's hard to say what happens when these days, but there was an article on Rolling Stone by Patrick Reese. I think that's how you say his last name, R E I S that I thought did is a short good kind of retrospective analysis of Waxman Markey. I find that in reading retrospectives of that time, it brings to mind that parable of the blind men in the elephant, and everybody feels a different piece of the elephant. So that article felt sort of closest to what I've seen read of the part of the elephant that I, I, I felt during that time. And then, if you want to feel the underside of the elephant. Read the chapters in Coke land by Chris Leonard, which was a book that came out in 2019. It's a pretty fascinating book, along but you can go go to the chapters. There's a couple of chapters near the back on climate and energy that are worth reading. So, thank you for the lots of book recommendations today during climate camp number three. Um, thank you wanna so much for sharing your recollections and great advice and guidance. I honestly I'll admit I'm thrown off a little bit I had a series of really really really tough questions that I was just going to hammer you with but now that I know there's a kitten in the room I wouldn't possibly bring myself to do that. I wouldn't want his, his fluffy ears to hear those tough questions so you're off the hook. Thanks to booming. I know they were there. They're pretty good. But I do have some questions before we wrap up. The first is you, you cited Tina's discussion earlier about stakeholder engagement. This is part of the select committee staff last Congress that produced a pretty comprehensive report. And there was a pretty comprehensive stakeholder engagement process that led to that report. And this, this question, there it is. I don't think I've ever seen it in print. The question kind of comes from the audience as well and so I'm going to try to weave it in what I was going to ask but what are your reflections on how you and your chairwoman and your colleagues navigated that stakeholder engagement process, leading up to that report last July. And what did you learn from that, the level of depth that you went into with stakeholder engagement that might inform where the select committee's work leads in the future. Yeah, that I was definitely an oversight of me not to mention that but so thank you for asking the question and that was a huge part of what we did in a huge benefit to us so we did actually in the fall of 2019 put out, you know, basically a big request for information and I think it was 13 question letter and we got over 700 substantive responses to that, which was great but you know also a lot it was like a dozen of us to get through. So, but in, but our team use that as kind of a launching place for some additional conversations. And, you know, we had, we stopped counting at basically 1000 stakeholder meetings that we had across, you know, all the staff. And I think, you know, that was actually really part of how we were able to be successful, just because we, one we had so many great ideas coming in, and just set up additional dialogues with those stakeholders that, you know, continue to help us today and we'll try and do more on that. And I think we probably will have some more stakeholder engagement coming soon. And then on the inside, I mean we had a members day so we heard from members and then also engaged across a number of caucuses in order to get get their input. You know, that's one reason the book is the report is so big. We tried to cover, you know, have a comprehensive response, but also, you know, put a lot in there that this Congress can build on, and probably future congresses. Thank you very much. I'm sort of touched on this towards the end of your remarks. I'm interested to learn a little bit more about your thoughts on how the legislative and the executive branches work together to produce big bills. We focus. I mean, yes, I tends to focus a little bit more on Congress and today's topic is really, you know, aimed at a congressional audience but are there things that you've seen in your experience working on all the energy bills that you've worked on over the years that you know that just examples of maybe where that legislative executive branch interaction has been really fruitful as a maybe something to look forward or look forward in the future as the Biden administration navigates a closely divided Congress. Yeah, that's a, that's a great question. I mean, ideally, and administration and Congress are, you know, working in a complimentary fashion, you know, Congress passes laws and then the, you know, the onus is on the executive branch to cut to execute the onus in that in that regard so I'm trying to think if there is a good example I mean it goes it goes back and forth. Because obviously the sometimes the administration, you know, sets something up creative that then we want to end up legislating on and honing one example there on that front is would be electrify Africa, which was some legislation that ended up passing in 2015 2016 I think, but really sprung out of the Obama administration's work in Africa on a program called power Africa, you know, really understanding this important connection between development and energy. And so then that ultimately led to some bipartisan legislation. And that program continuing another place I potentially a precursor to the brick program that I that I mentioned earlier is also during the Obama administration kind of post Sandy they had a sort of resilience competition and you know requested kind of proposals from across the country and and got you know as many red states as blue states engaging I think which is another example in this space of where we have some bipartisan agreement. And so I think, you know, learning from what happened there is a sort of pilot project from the administration really helped to inform them the development of the brick program in 2018 and hopefully, you know what we can do more here in 2020 2021. We're like almost a quarter through it's already it's crazy. My last question for you, and it's a little bit of a spin on the question that we've asked Katie and Tina and Laurel, you know, one of the, one of the things we're trying to communicate in today's session is that the past matters. And that what happened in previous Congress is relevant to today's climate debate for for someone who's sort of seen as much as you have on Capitol Hill and worked on so many bills that have passed and bills that maybe fell short at the end. What is your advice to staff or current staff, folks that you're working with on either side of the aisle about sort of in which contexts does the past matter the most. And are there is there sort of a limit to that is there is there a limit to when, you know, maybe trying to sort of take lessons from, you know, past legislative efforts, maybe there isn't maybe the relevance stops. I want to ask whether or not we're overselling this point for, for a contemporary congressional staff audience. No, I think it, I think it matters. And it continues to matter I think it's hard to say, I mean at some point it does tend to fade away but it's hard to say when that is I mean, you know, I, there's certainly been critiques valid critiques. of cap and trade and changes in both California, and in the Registrates where they have it in place over the years. But, you know, I think people still think it would be a helpful policy. But the politics just really don't line up on it right now, given the experience of not getting it across the, or across the President Obama's desk in in 2010. And, you know, I think part of that has allowed other thing, the other important aspects of climate policy to come forward. I mean one thing I think people forget about wax and marquee is it wasn't just kept in trade. I mean there was a renewable electricity standard and there was a bunch of stuff we did for buildings and for trying to move the move the needle on on transportation emissions. So, some of those things that we had in there are now kind of front and center of the policies that we're trying to trying to move. You know, I think what really matters to is just kind of where you are the other thing that has changed as I said is just our energy or electricity system in particular has changed so much and there's a lot of changes in personal vehicles happening. So we really are at a point where going forward on climate, you know, we need to reevaluate what, you know, what are really the best policies to help us reduce the emissions that we need to reduce. And then, you know, sadly, we've been just pretty negligent on adaptation and resilience for all these years. And so we really need to get going on that in a in a comprehensive way. So that, you know, maybe there's nothing to learn from the past, except that we can't keep ignoring it like we have in the past is what I would say but since you had Katie McGinty on I mean she I don't even know if she raised it but like she was in the administration when Clinton tried to do the BTU tax. So, you know, it's not just wax and market as there was a whole other, you know, decade, decade old issue then to which I think that one has largely faded as a specific thing. But obviously, America's view in Americans views on tax, taxes still influences our discussion on on carbon tax and going that way, ultimately. So, but I see my clock says four so I should probably wrap up there. Well, thank you so much for sticking with us. I can't hear you again. Oops. Is that a little bit better hopefully. Maybe it's just me. Okay, I'll keep an eye out for the chat in there in our zoom I honestly didn't do anything wrong as far as I know. We will wrap it there thank you so much. And I'll go in reverse order. Thank you, Anna. Thank you Laurel. Thank you Tina. Thank you Katie for joining us today. We're at four o'clock and so our panelists are excused. We've taken up a huge chunk of your afternoon and you've been super super generous with your time and with your thoughts. Let me just say a couple quick things to close out. First, it may be the most important thing is that if you missed any of the session today. We will have an archive posted online along with written materials presentation materials. And it'll be up shortly and so if you missed anything please visit us online at www. www.esa.org to check out everything from today's session. You know, a couple quick just very broad brushstroke takeaways that I think you'll see reflected in the notes. One is that, you know, notwithstanding my last question to Anna it does actually matter where we've been. It does, does help us understand where we are presently. And I think, you know, Katie said it, that going forward we need to, and one of the benefits of knowing where we've been is that it allows us to blend the tried and true with innovation and I think that's a really important point. I think it was all about civil society and civic engagement, just absolutely critical. And I thought one point she made is that it's critical for those communities that are affected but it's also critical to build sort of the political support for climate action. And she had lots of wonderful things to say to about the role of younger people, setting a new baseline for what's acceptable when it comes to climate solutions. You know, a while, you know, notwithstanding importance of knowing about the past it's, it's clear and I think I would agree with her 100% that the standard has shifted quite a lot over the last decade or two. You know, I think the perceptions and misperceptions about what average voters want when it comes to compromise was a really interesting point. I took away from Laurel's presentation. And obviously that's made so much more complicated these days by the role of primaries and primary opponents, relative to the general election which is for, you know, safe seats seats that don't change hands very often or late, they don't change party very often compromises hard work. It's not accidental. It's not automatic. But very often, in fact, maybe most often it's worth the effort putting it in. And I think one thing that came out over the course of multiple presentations today was, while it wasn't covered much in the news, we just had a big energy bill pass. End of 2020. And that matters. It's a data point. Not just did we get good policy with the HFCs, but we also have a recent example of where bipartisan energy policy can be enacted. And I think you were the one who brought up the BRIC program a little bit earlier as a previous example of when good things can happen around resilience. And that light's not by any stretch and a reason to settle or to think we don't have more to do, but it is important to, to point out where we've had some success. Let me begin to wrap up. Thank you to everyone in our audience for joining us today. Again, to Anna, Laurel, Tina and Katie, thanks so much. Let me also thank some of the members of team ESI I'll start with Anna McGinn for co moderating or moderating the session with Katie at the outset. I'd also like to thank Daniel Bryan, Sidney O'Shaughnessy, Amber Todorov and Omri Report, as well as our five fabulous interns, Celine Hamza, Jocelyn, Kimmy and Rachel for helping out behind the scenes today. I'm going to put a survey up. There it is. It's a link. We read every response. If you have an opportunity to take two minutes to fill out our survey. It's really, really valuable to us. It helps us understand sort of where we're hitting and where we're missing. And so if you are able to do that, please do appreciate it very much. We have a couple of things coming up. Just, I'll do a couple of ESI plugs. We will be looking at the issue of nuclear decommissioning and congressional oversight next week. If that issue appeals to you, I hope you'll sign up online. We also have one more regular climate camp. I don't want to say regular climate camp. We have one more of the originally planned four part series of climate camp. It's going to be at the end of April, and we're going to be looking at double whammy's things that we can do in the near term to deliver mitigation and adaptation benefits. It's coming together. It's going to be fabulous. I hope everyone will check it out. We are also planning and this might be the first time I have a date to announce a bonus climate camp. That's right. May 21, same bat time, same bat channel. Friday at two o'clock, we're going to convene a set of experts or panel of experts to talk about budget reconciliation and what it means for the present debate came up a couple times today. We're going to use a bonus episode of climate camp where we can dig deeper a little bit. And if you're interested, of course, in the regular budget, you can go back to climate camp number one and listen to Kari Franz and Karen talk all about budget stimulus and appropriations. If if you missed anything one last plug www.esa.org and while you're there please sign up for our newsletter climate change solutions. Thank you all for joining us today for climate camp number three. It is a gorgeous day here in DC and it's going to be a pretty nice day in Washington over the weekend so I wish everyone a happy weekend. Stay safe. And we'll see you next time. Thank you so much.