 Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for our congressional briefing, the Climate Crisis Report in Focus. We have four expert panelists who will help us in just a moment understand the highlights of this report from four different perspectives, environmental justice, public health, mitigation, and adaptation, and how the extensive recommendations fit together to inform climate change policymaking. Next slide. We have two, we have many new viewers today. So let me first take a moment to tell you a little bit about EESI and why we are tracking this so closely. First, Environmental and Energy Study Institute. I'm Dan Bresset, EESI's executive director. We were founded in 1984 to provide nonpartisan information on environmental energy and climate issues to policymakers on Capitol Hill, stakeholders, and the public. So let's go to slide number three, Troy. We do our work in different ways, including by holding briefings, sometimes in person, but more lately online webcasts, writing fact sheets and articles that are distributed by our biweekly newsletter, Climate Change Solutions. If you'd like to learn more, watch any of our archived briefing webcasts and sign up for our newsletter. Please visit us online at www.eesi.org. Next slide. Today, our focus is the majority staff report of the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis. The Select Committee was established in January 2019 at the start of the 116th Congress by House leadership to vote attention and resources to inform climate change policymaking. The Select Committee was not granted legislative authority reserved for the standing committees, like energy and commerce and transportation and infrastructure. Instead, the Select Committee was created to investigate, make findings, and develop recommendations on policies, strategies, and innovations that would, if enacted and implemented, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and help avoid the worst effects of climate change. There are 15 members of the Select Committee, which is chaired by Representative Cathy Castor of Florida and led on the Republican side by Representative Garrett Graves of Louisiana. Next slide. Since January 2019, the Select Committee has held 17 hearings and six policy roundtables and met countless times with stakeholders to collect and process information and ideas. Last fall, EESI and many other groups and individuals submitted extensive public comments to the committee in response to a public request for information. The webpage for today's briefing includes a link to EESI's submission if you'd like to take a closer look. Two weeks ago today, the majority staff of the Select Committee released a monster 538 page report solving the climate crisis. That attempts, and does so pretty successfully, I think, to pull all the information gathered together, gathered over the past 18 months in a single actionable document. Next slide. The groups represented by panelists today all contributed to the Select Committee's report. For EESI, our submission to the Select Committee was organized in two main sections. First, we identified three main climate policy principles to help guide the committee's work. One, that the urgency of climate change demands near-term actions while longer-term policies, excuse me, longer-term policies are developed and put into place. Next slide. Two, that climate change is a tremendously complicated problem to solve, which means that we have to be extremely thoughtful about how we prioritize, coordinate, and sequence our policy responses. Next slide. And three, that the federal government should continue to support state and local government's leadership, especially as their efforts relate to communities already being negatively affected by drought, extreme heat, wildfires, flooding, and sea level rise. Next slide. The second section of our submission was a collection of cross-cutting and sector-specific policy recommendations across the four issue areas we are about to learn more about. Next slide. We only have a certain amount of time today, and the select committee majority staff managed to fit in a lot more than we can cover in 90 minutes. I encourage everyone to take some time to review the report, which is organized around 12 pillars, and as you can see, it's pretty comprehensive in scope. Before we turn to our panelists, let me share with you the logistics of our question and answer period. After our fourth presentation, we will have time for questions from our online audience. Here's how that will work. Please follow, and actually, I should have said next slide. That's what happens when you don't control your own slides. Here's how that will work. Please follow EESI on Twitter at EESI online and send in your questions that way. You can also send an email to EESI at EESI.org. We will draw from your question submissions after we hear from our panelists. And now, without further ado, enough about EESI and our submission, let's turn to our panelists. Up first is Michelle Roberts. Michelle is co-director of the Environmental Justice and Health Alliance for Chemical Policy Reform. Since 1990, she has provided technical assistance and advocacy support to communities regarding the impacts of toxins on human health and the environment. She is also a spoken word artist who created ArtSlam at Sands, a community-based arts program. She has degrees in art from the University of Delaware and in biology from Morgan State University. Michelle, thank you so much for joining us today. I'm looking forward to your presentation. Today, we are pleased to be part of this process. The other national co-coordinator, along with me, is Richard Moore out of Hurricane New Mexico. I'm based in Washington, D.C. We are an affiliate network of environmental justice and environmental justice advocacy groups, fence line groups and advocacy groups who serve in. And what we'd like to do today is to share with you a story. We always begin with stories in the environmental justice health alliance. And this particular story of the community of Mossville completely tells the story of why this particular report and the inclusion of everything from systemic racism to that of the climate crisis is all inextricably linked. I ask that you listen to the community of Mossville. Mossville Environmental Advocacy now. When Mossville was established, it was equally known as the richest in biodiversity of all of Louisiana. I was built on the land. All the agriculture was livestock, fish gain, and other things that they built on. When my parents got there, the plants wasn't there. The land of the earth can't be tampered with. It was beautiful. I met the benefits in 2009. And they're part of Mossville Environmental Action now, who formed in order to fight back against the toxics that they knew were creating health issues. When Conoco came in, the facility became the new Eastern neighborhood of Mossville. And they bought up 699 acres of land, bought it for pennies. Environmental racism is the injustices that are plagued on these particular spaces where we live, work, worship, pray, and go to school in egregious forms. We were smelling different odors, but we didn't know what it was. We were ignorant of that. My parents didn't know what it was. The older people didn't know. There are roughly 18 industrial facilities that surround Mossville at Chocombe, like a donut. A lot of people's asthma, respiratory problems were kidding problems. Then all of a sudden cancer came. They were killing us every day. My niece was 15 years old. She went in for an asthma problem. They said her nasal passage needed to open it up. They took out her face off because she had cancer. And her nasal passage was 15 years old. 60% of the oil and gas refining business comes through that of the Gulf Coast. The refines are the main source of income in this area, and they will not shake that foundation, specifically the small black community that existed in the southwest of Louisiana. The most recent industrial facility, Sassaw, is out of South Africa. To build what they're proposing is the largest ever ethylene oxide cracker. So Mossville now is the experiment. The plants are growing more and more. They're getting bigger and bigger. And everybody like LNG plants are coming in. Our president was just here to welcome one of our largest LNG plants. From right here in Hackberry, Louisiana, you will very soon be exporting clean American natural gas all over the globe. And it's clean, and it's environmentally better than the alternatives. You know that. When you look at someone like the Mossville community, communities that may have formed themselves out of another injustice, such as slavery. And now here it is, they're up against another big economic engine that targets them for who they are, specifically because of the fact that they are black and brown and or poor. It's a handful of people like my wife and myself who continue to try to make things better for themselves. There's no one looking out for it. What they want is to have the beloved community to be made whole. Our life is in danger. And we need to start knowing what industries are doing to our people, especially our children. We're standing on the shoulders of the many who come before us to stand for justice. We hope that this story will help all of us dig deep into our moral courage to make sure that no community is ever left behind. Today it gives us extreme joy. It gives us extreme joy and proudness to be able to say that our communities have been heard in these 588 pages. We heard from the US Congress staff, first of all, we want to thank the staff. We want to thank the congressional representatives, but we really want to thank the staff because we know that the staff has placed tireless efforts into meeting our communities where they are. For us, environmental justice is where we live, work, worship, pray, and go to school. At times, the communities who participated in this particular process participated from their kitchens, from the playgrounds, from the fence line where they are sheltering in place and have been for decades, in spaces where, for decades, for centuries, as you heard the Moscow community, who formed themselves as slavery was still existing. These communities created their own community, what they called the beloved community, and what, at some points, were the most richest in biodiversity of all of spaces, such as Louisiana, in that particular case. However, as we fast forwarded in to our nation's history, the Industrial Revolution, and all of these other pieces, our communities were left out. In fact, our communities basically built all of these economic systems on the blood, sweat, and tears and backs of their land, from that of forced migration of our native indigenous brothers and sisters, to that of our Asian brothers and sisters, to that of our Latino brothers and sisters, our black and brown brothers and sisters, who built this country, and yet, as they come time and time with their stories, letting you know that I am sick, and yes, as Brother George Floyd said, I cannot breathe. They couldn't breathe many times, but it was OK. We have built policies based on risk, as opposed to policies addressing cumulative and legacy impacts. These are what our communities have asked for and have been asking for since the 1991 People of Color Summit when many of them, Mossville included, came to Washington, DC, to the United States Congress to bring their stories and their challenges. We are happy today to see that those very words are reflective in this document, this 588-page document. But for us, the challenge continues, because we must educate, mobilize our folks, and build the power within our communities to still be able to make sure that we do indeed have healthy communities. Right now in this country, we are in the face of three pandemics in communities of color, a pandemic on racism that has always been going on, a pandemic on democracy where we've never been a part of, and now this pandemic for this pandemic with respect to the COVID-19 and the climate crisis. Now think about this. We're in the crosshairs of all of these pandemics disproportionately impacted. We're telling folks to sing happy birthday as they wash their hands and make sure they hydrate themselves. And many of our communities don't have access to water or access to clean water or access to healthy water, let alone be able to wash their hands. So many of these things, in addition to that, now we're dealing with an administration that is rolling back the modest gains that we have been able to make with respect to protecting our communities from that, not only of the climate crisis, but equally that of chemical disasters. As we know, when the crisis hits many times, these industries are equally impacted. Now, equally on top of that with the COVID-19 experience, we are asking these facilities, what are you doing to provide that of safe distancing inside of your facilities? And how is it that your facilities are actually making sure that they are protecting the communities who are now friend-signed to them? Because oftentimes, many of these workers are coming back into the communities. All to say that we are at a very good point in time with this House Select Committee on Crisis and the health recommendations in this study, it could not have come at a better time. We are very happy to be part of this process. We look forward to working with all of you to make sure that the pieces that have been lifted up, especially addressing mandatory emissions reductions, cumulative impacts, addressing legacy pollution, making sure that our ports are healthy, and in addition to that, our infrastructures, our own infrastructures, our housing, and that we have access to health care. I'm going to leave you with this. The Mossville community right now, there's about roughly 100 community members left in that not-so-voluntary buyout. The reason why they remain was that they say they wanted to be made whole. Do you not know, with the billions and billions of dollars in this buyout for this community, they would have been sent out into the world sicker than sick, if you will. That makes sense. Because the industry was not going to provide for ongoing health deliverable systems. These folks don't even have health insurance, let alone access to health care deliverable systems. But yet, these processes are bringing in billions of dollars into communities, and yet the communities are not made healthy or whole. They're actually going from now environmental racism to environmental genocide. That is the importance of making sure that this 588-page document spans the time from that of what the challenges of systemic racism are to our communities, but in addition to that, end with that of solutions that we know can be done. And if we can only reach our moral and political courage together, we can make sure that no, not one community is left behind. Thank you. Thank you very much, Michelle, for your powerful presentation. And I will give you a peek behind the curtain. When your video was a couple of seconds in, maybe like 30 seconds in, the EESI Slack channel erupted. In virtual applause on content, production, really excellent telling of that community story. And so thank you very much for sharing that with our audience today. We're going to move on to our second speaker. Dr. Georges Benjamin is a well-known public health leader, practitioner, and administrator. He currently serves as the executive director of the American Public Health Association, the nation's oldest and largest organization of public health professionals. He is also a former secretary of health for the state of Maryland. He is board certified in internal medicine, master of the College of Physicians, a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration, fellow emeritus of the American College of Emergency Physicians, and a member of the National Academy of Medicine. We welcome you today. I really look forward to your presentation. Thank you for joining us. Listen, thank you very much for allowing me to be here today. You know, the real challenge is that Michelle just showed you the tragedy in Mooseville, which is really a justice issue. It's something that we need to speak up to every day. The ideas of environmental justice and environmental racism have to be addressed in all of our communities. I want to broaden that discussion a bit today and talk about, again, why fallful fuels and reducing our carbon dioxide is so important in our nation. So if we go to the next slide, just to point out that all of us in most of the country now is going through a heat wave. The nation is indeed warming. The planet is indeed warming. And we know there are substantial health impacts from this. You know, I spent a fair amount of my time practicing emergency medicine dealing with people who are impacted by it by heating. We've had this enormous number of deaths, particularly when you have heat waves. After about day two or three, you begin to see patients coming into hospital emergency departments with not just heat exhaustion, but actually strokes and a huge increase of things that are going to be a problem. And this is the real problem now, particularly as a dual epidemic during a COVID outbreak, because our practice is to bring people out of their homes, particularly in places like Mooseville, where they don't have air conditioning, and bringing them to heating shelters, I'm going to say cooling centers. The problem is you bring a whole bunch of people together in a cooling center. It's very difficult to mask, as well as maintain social distancing. And so that's a big issue. We also know when we have this kind of heat, the ground dries up. And the increase in number of wildfires becomes a big issue. And of course, wildfire contributes to the pollution that we have in our air. Next slide. And then the alternative to that, of course, is rainfall and drought. Drought, of course, dries the conditions. It makes it much more difficult. When we do rain for the ground to handle the rainwater, and so you get floods, you get floods resulted in mold. Particularly more and more severe storms. And we're seeing a lot of more severe storms all around the planet, each and every day. And of course, when this happens, trees fall, people get injured. You have more asthma, more chronic lung disease. People go out. And of course, to mow the grass or to run or walk, increases in heart disease, cardiovascular activity occurs. More and more we have this kind of problem. And of course, just the blueness that occurs when you have more and more rainfall and blue days so you get more mental health problems in our country. Next slide. I talked about flooding, particularly from the severe storms. But also when you get the problems with water runoff, you get more gastrointestinal illness. Again, you also have more injury because of this. We've had infrastructure failures. We saw the dam fail in Michigan just the other day. That tells us that not only we have these issues with climate change, but we have failed as a nation to really invest in our critical infrastructure. And that's gonna be important for us to do as we try to address this, to try to move to a more green nation to address some of these heat issues, some of these rain issues and some of these flood issues. And then the next slide, reminding us that we're not in the midst of a pandemic, but we already have several disease outbreaks we were already dealing with. We had Zika, we had Dengue. This warm weather results in expanded territory for vector-borne disease, primarily mosquito-borne diseases, things like more Lyme disease. We're seeing a lot more of that. And even in West Nile virus, it not only impacts not just people, but also impacts animals. Next slide. And then the Mooseville example was a very clear example of the toxins that we create through industrialized activity. So the air becomes not safe to breathe. The more wood fires, again, impacts people's problems with air. And this becomes a real problem. Of course, the air is not contained with any particular zip code, and it goes all around the planet. And we have to pay a lot more attention to this, not only where we build, but where we put people to live as part of this process because it becomes a real health impact problem for the nation. Next slide. So let's talk about some solutions. And of course, the House Select Committee on Climate Crisis did an amazing report and came up with solutions that we think were important for our nation. So if you go to that first slide and talk about solutions, and some of these health recommendations were to strengthen the planning process to address climate risk to public health. And we want to look at federal health agencies. Let me emphasize that there's an importance of supporting the climate center at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. There's a need for a lot of research, but one of the most important places, of course, is the CDC's Climate Program, which directly looks at the health impacts of climate change. And also, when we talk about planning, that we need a strategic plan to really address this to my health impact. And we hope that not only this administration, but future administrations will, of course, begin to do more strategic planning around this and empower and build that capacity in state, local, territorial, and tribal health departments. Because public health is a partnership between the federal, state, and local communities. And again, let me just emphasize the importance of dealing with this in community. Michelle pointed out that the challenges that communities are impacted. And we always have to remember, this isn't about government. This is about communities. This is about using these dollars and using these plans to improve the health and wellbeing of our communities each and every day. Data is important, and we really are collecting the kind of data that we need because we need to collect this data in order for us to look at the desperate impact. So that data needs to be done by race, ethnicity, gender, social orientation, sexual orientation, where you live, what your occupation is. We need to have a complete data set so that we can understand how we target resources and look at impact. And of course, divine programs to reduce these health burdens through all of our communities. Next slide. Next set of recommendations, including resiliency for our public health supply change. We saw this under COVID. We do not have resilience supply change in responding to the outbreak. And we certainly don't have resilience in our supply chains to address the health impact of climate change. We also have to enhance our global leadership on climate and health. It is important that we reestablish the relationship with the climate change, the National Climate Change Agreement, that's very important, that the nation does that and recognize that organizations like the World Health Organization are very important. And obviously we argue that we need to reestablish our relationship with the World Health Organization. Previous administrations have strongly supported the global health security agenda, which is a range of activities to address public health preparedness across the globe. And we need to be forward-leaning as a nation in that effort. Next slide. And when we get to communities, the idea of recognizing that communities have their own capacity. We think that the federal government needs to do everything for their communities. We need to do a lot. We need to provide the dollars. And we need to be specific about helping medically vulnerable populations, particularly those that are climate sensitive. But we need to, again, do that with communities and build on the strength of those communities each and every day. And that means when we do the planning and preparedness activities for the health and hospital systems, that we need to be sure that they have the infrastructure to address some of these problems. And that requires the use of climate-informed building codes and standards as we revitalize these buildings and support resilience planning and construction. Now, one of the things that happened tragically, we had Katrina and Rita and Superstorm Sandy. But what the health system has learned is some simple things such as, don't put your generators in the basement, move them above ground, how to address issues around floods. And as we fit our hospitals, because it's very expensive to do this, and we understand that, but we're building and revitalizing those hospitals each and every day. And we need to do those in a way that is climate-informed around the building codes to improve the capacity of those hospitals and health systems. And not just those big academic health systems, but those little community hospitals, including our rural communities and our federally qualified health centers need to be part of that process. Next slide. And as we think about all of our systems, the report specifically called out our veterans health systems, which we have an enormous health system for veterans. And they have, they have hospital, they have housing systems, they have supply chains. We need to make sure that that is part of the fix that we put in. And then finally, what we know is that mental health is always a lagging issue anytime we have a disaster in our country. And we need to expand access to mental health services, both for the acute need for things and disasters, but recognizing there's a long-term impact of that that we have to address. And recognizing that each and every day these communities, as we saw with that first video, are challenged with long-term mental health impact from chronic pollution that goes in those communities. And it's not just the pollution that causes trauma that's physical, but it's also a range of mental health traumas that those communities had experienced because of not just the things that was obvious, but just the disrespect that those communities have as they struggle to try to survive in these communities each and every day. This creates an enormous amount of long-term mental health impact, not just for the adults, but also for the children in those communities. And when someone gets cancer, that was preventable because pollution was put in the air, or we haven't really addressed the impact of climate change, that's lifelong. That doesn't get better, even if they get treatment. And I believe that's my last line. I wanna thank you very much from the American Public Health Association and all of those of us who care about public health each and every day. Great, thank you so much for that excellent presentation. Before I introduce our next panelist, just in case anyone maybe arrived a little bit late, I just wanna remind everyone how we're accepting questions from our online audience. We will have a question and answer period after our fourth panelist, so we'll have plenty of time for that. There are two different ways you can get us your questions. One is by sending us an email, EESI at EESI.org. The second way is by following us online on Twitter at EESI online, and I will give you a hint. If we have too many questions that we can't ask all during today, we almost always give preference to those that come in via Twitter. So if you're on the fence about how to get them in, that's a hint. I'm gonna introduce our third panelist now, Dr. Rachel Cletus is the Policy Director Climate and Energy Program for the Union of Concerned Scientists. She leads the program's effort in designing effective and equitable policies to address climate change and advocating for their implementation. Rachel is an expert in policies to promote clean energy and drive deep cuts and heat trapping emissions from the power sector, including carbon pricing and complementary sector-based policies. She also does research on the risks and costs of climate impacts and is an expert on policies to promote climate resilience. She has co-authored numerous reports, including the recent Underwater Rising Seas chronic floods report that the Union of Concerned Scientists released. So Rachel, I'll turn it over to you. Thanks for joining us today. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you to ESI for putting on this event today on this very important groundbreaking report from the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis. And as Michelle said, a big thank you to the staff, not just for the report, which is an amazing document, but for the incredible process that you ran in putting together this report. This was an inclusive process that brought to the table a really diverse set of stakeholders, including labor, environmental justice, environmental organizations, youth movement, representatives, businesses. It was just a really wide range of stakeholders. And I think in a nutshell, this tells us what it will take to solve the climate crisis. We're not gonna be able to solve climate in a corner by itself. This is about connecting to people's daily lives, people's daily life concerns, the ways in which climate impacts are having profound effects even now, and that those effects will worsen if climate emissions, if heat trapping emissions continue unabated. So the moment we're in, as Michelle said, is that we are facing multiple crises as a nation. We have this profound public health crisis in the form of the COVID-19 pandemic. It has triggered an economic crisis and the climate crisis continues. It hasn't gone away. So we don't get to pick one crisis. We have all of these coming at us, and all of them are laying bare the existing inequities in our society. The deep systemic racism, longstanding racism, socioeconomic inequities, all of which are contributing to particular populations being more exposed and facing a disparate impact from all of these crises. So this gives us a sense of what it'll take to solve them, what it'll take to truly confront them as a nation. We're only going to be able to confront climate change effectively if we center the science, center equity and environmental justice, center the wellbeing of working people, and make sure that we're taking care of the health of communities around the nation and the world, making sure that we're safeguarding the future of young people today who are going to be facing the consequences of our failure to act. So I was asked to speak to the mitigation section of the report, which is, it's a very, very rich document. There's a lot to say, and I'll try to give the Cliff Notes version, but I want to really start at the outset by confirming that these recommendations are very much linked to things that Michelle and George spoke about earlier, connected to health, connected to environmental justice. I work for the Union of Concerned Scientists. We're a science-based advocacy organization, a nonpartisan organization, and we're over 50 years old now, and the premise of our work is that science doesn't belong in the ivory tower. Science belongs to all of us, and when ordinary people have the science and the facts, they are in the best position to advocate for the kind of future that they want. They're in the best position to put pressure on policymakers, to do what's right, which will help improve the wellbeing of people. The climate select committee's report, select committee's charge when it first started out was to essentially start from what the science was telling us about the urgency to act. And in 2018, you might remember, it seems like a lifetime ago, but we had two huge scientific reports that came out, the Fourth National Climate Assessment, which is an authoritative assessment of the state of climate change and climate impacts here in the US, put together by 13 different federal agencies, and the IPCC 1.5 C report, which was prepared at the behest of the nations that signed the Paris Agreement, asking the IPCC to look at pathways to keep global temperature increased to as close to 1.5 C as possible and examine the impacts that the world would face. And both of these reports have very profound and stark findings, which is that climate change is already here and now. It's already affecting our lives here and now, and we need to very sharply curtail heat trapping emissions globally if we're going to stave off some of the worst impacts. So the IPCC laid out some illustrative emissions pathways, all of which point to the need to get to net zero emissions by 2050 globally, as well to make sure we're making near-term reductions. So the IPCC indicated that to stay on this 2050 pathway, we'd need to get to about 45% below 2010 levels by 2030 globally. Now, of course, the US has a disproportionate contribution to existing heat trapping emissions. It is a relatively rich nation and therefore must be at the leading edge of global climate action. So we need to make sure that we're cutting emissions on the order of 50% below 2005 levels by 2030 and getting to net zero by 2050. And the Climate Select Committee report tried to center the science by saying, we need to get to this net zero emissions economy-wide, get net negative in the second half of the century. They centered environmental justice. So this is not just about greenhouse gas emissions, but making sure that we're cutting air and water pollution across the board that's causing disproportionate harms, as Michelle pointed out, in environmental justice communities around the country. We need to, of course, be investing in job creation and worker rights because this clean energy economy that we're building needs to treat fairly the workers who have been powering our economy for decades now, making sure that they have good-being jobs, that they have a central role in this transformation in our economic system. So the Climate Select Committee report obviously is centering a transition away from fossil fuels towards cleaner forms of energy and it's centering this economy-wide. There was some modeling that was done as a part of the report and the modeling points out that not only are we helping to cut greenhouse gas emissions at the same time, we're helping to cut premature deaths, many of which are caused by pollution from our dependence on fossil fuels, particularly particulate matter pollution. We are able to gain other health and climate benefits because we're limiting the kind of runaway climate impacts that might happen and we're able to create jobs. So the report just estimated the jobs from the clean energy standard and estimated that they were roughly on the order of 530,000 jobs annually. The pillars of economy-wide deep decarbonization are something that have been long established. We know what we need to do. So this has never been a situation where we didn't know what the solutions were. What we've been lacking is political will. We need to ramp up energy efficiency. We need to decarbonize our electric sector, switching to renewable zero carbon forms of electricity. We've got to electrify as many end uses as possible across the economy in the transportation sector, buildings, industry. We do have to try to invest in figuring out how to do carbon capture and storage at scale and we also need to get to net zero emissions. Part of the challenge is figuring out how to increase carbon storage, actually drawing carbon out of the atmosphere and storing it. And this is happening naturally through trees, soils, vegetation. We've got to enhance those landstings which are being degraded by climate change through things like wildfires. And we have to invest in R&D to see if we can achieve the promise of technological means of CDR as well. So the report includes many recommendations for each of these categories of DP carbonization. And what's a really interesting facet of the report is these recommendations, it's really worth diving in if you're interested in any of these sectors. They're very detailed, very thoughtful and they're not overly prescriptive in the sense they're outcome driven and you can imagine different types of legislation from Congress that could achieve those outcomes. The report hasn't endorsed any specific legislation but has pointed to existing legislation where it exists that could achieve some of these outcomes. So energy efficiency, a key pillar that can save money on consumer electricity bills even as we're decarbonizing. There's a clean energy standard that's pointed to in the report that aims to get to a net zero power sector by 2040. It includes a range of zero emission technologies. It leaves space for states and tribal governments to go further, make even more ambitious investments if they so choose. And it speaks to the need to address the potential and risks of nuclear power if nuclear is to play any role in this future. It recognizes that the only way we're going to get to integrate a high level of renewables in our power system is if we expand and modernize the transmission grid. Our current transmission grid is deeply in need of upgrades and expansion to help bring online more of this low carbon electricity. And it points to the authorities of FERC, DOE and other federal government agencies that can help with this process of designing a grid that's modernized. There are recommendations around clean transportation including a national sales standard to achieve 100% sales of zero emission cars by 2035 and heavy duty trucks by 2040, strong GHG standards, the need to electrify their transportation system, clean up pollution at ports, invest in mass transit. So really a wide ranging set of recommendations to help a low carbon fuel standard to get at different pieces of the transportation puzzle to help lower emissions. Buildings and industry, again, a huge opportunity here to make sure new buildings are being built as efficient as possible. There is a goal of making all residential, commercial and federal buildings net zero by 2030. But we also have an existing aging building stock that we have to make sure we're investing in making more efficient, particularly targeting resources in low income communities and EJ communities that often are living in substandard housing because of our long legacy of structural and systemic racism in the country. There's also a huge need to invest in carbon capture and storage for industrial applications that might be hard to decarbonize otherwise. The report also speaks to a number of recommendations around climate smart agriculture to make sure that the agricultural sector is both cutting its emissions as well as playing a part and contributing to solutions by increasing carbon sequestration and soils. And the really interesting part of the report here, just like in many other places, it points to the win-win opportunities here to both be climate smart as well as ensuring that we're safeguarding the livelihoods of farmers, particularly small farmers, supporting organic farming and ensuring nutrition to communities around the country. And there's a range of recommendations around making sure that we're not just driving a clean energy economy, but one that serves, particularly serves the needs of rural, tribal and environmental justice communities that have long been marginalized and left out of this clean energy revolution that's already underway. And the ways we have to do that is making sure that our policies are targeted towards achieving these outcomes in these communities. Greater benefits, greater access, cleaning up the air and water in these communities as this transition happens, providing the economic opportunities in these communities so that they are on the forefront of benefiting from the transition to clean energy. Also making sure that we're investing in policies that will help reduce the terrific, the terrible poverty and energy bill burden on low-income communities and communities of color. There's a range of recommendations here around fair workforce investments that center the rights of workers to good-paying jobs, strong labor standards, making sure that we're treating fairly coal miners and coal mining communities as we make this transition away from coal to cleaner forms of energy. Both in the environmental justice and in the labor portions of this document, there's a centering of existing work that's happening through the equitable and just national climate platform and through the national economic transition platform, the Blue Green Alliance platform, other labor platforms to help that have created recommendations that are coming from the communities themselves. And finally, there is a strong nod to climate resilient energy infrastructure. So not just low-carbon infrastructure, but in the mitigation section, again, this intersectional way of talking about things that make sure that we're not just building low-carbon infrastructure, but also making sure it's climate resilient. There are a number of other recommendations around cutting non-CO2 gases, ensuring we're investing in federal climate science, R&D, and that we're doing our part in international climate action, not just to lower domestic emissions, which is what all the other recommendations add up to, but also contributing to the Green Climate Fund and other avenues of international cooperation. And finally, the report has been released in a moment where we understand that we're facing an economic crisis right now. It has led to a temporary dip in greenhouse gas emissions, both here in the US and globally. But this report released by the Rodeum Group last week makes very clear that these are a temporary dip at best. They're coming because of a very harsh economic environment that is causing a hardship to many, many people around the country, struggling with losing jobs, unable to pay bills, struggling to even feed their children. But that emissions will come right back if we don't make the right investments right now in ensuring systemic changes in our energy infrastructure, in our socioeconomic safety nets, to keep emissions down, but in the right way, not in a way that causes harm, but in a way that actually benefits communities. So we have some pretty stark choices ahead of us right now. Will Congress make the kinds of investments that actually prioritize clean energy, climate resilience, adjust and equitable recovery, or are we going to default to reinforcing fossil fuel dependence, current racial and socioeconomic inequities, and in the process dooming the well-being of future generations? This is a pivotal point where we all must play a role to put pressure on Congress to do the right thing. And what we mean by the right thing, well, we have compound intersecting crises right now. And the only way to solve them is if we recognize the intersectional nature of these crises and really are moving forward policies both in the short term through stimulus spending as well as over the long term that really center all of these needs that help improve people's well-being and their lives. So I know many of us are in different sectors and play different roles on different pieces of this. We have to recognize the continuity, how these things are all connected and why we're not gonna achieve the outcomes we want unless we move forward on all of these fronts. So I'm gonna stop there again thanking the select committee and recognizing the very diverse and broad climate movement, climate justice movement that created this phase for a report like this to even come together. And that will now build on the strong foundation to put pressure on Congress to do the right thing to implement these recommendations. Thank you. Thank you so much, Rachel, for your presentation. Thanks for joining us today. We have, before I get to our last presenter today to talk about adaptation and all of the recommendations that the report covered with that, just a quick reminder, we're getting lots of questions. Thank you. If you have one EESI at EESI.org, that's the email address, special brownie points if you send us your question on Twitter at EESI online. Also, if you've missed anything today, if you wanna go back and revisit the slides, if you wanna go back and revisit any of our discussion it's about to come up, never fear. Everything is gonna be archived at EESI.org. We'll also have a bunch of written materials and over the course of the next few days are written summary as well. So if you fear that you've missed something, don't worry about it, we've got you covered. Our fourth panelist is up next. Jesse Ritter is director of water resources and coastal policy at the National Wildlife Foundation, excuse me. There, Jesse leads the development of NWS National Water and Coastal Policy Priorities. She oversees federal campaigns to protect clean water and wetlands and increase the resilience of communities and wildlife in the face of climate change and natural disaster events. She hails from the Chicagoland area. She has a degree in zoology from North Carolina State University and environmental management from the Duke University Nicholas School. Jesse, thank you so much for joining us today. I can't wait to hear what you have to say about the adaptation portion of the report. Thank you so much, Dan. And thank you to EESI for convening this really important and timely conversation. I wanna add my congratulations to the select committee and my thanks to the staff for what is really, I believe, an incredible resource in this report. Next slide, please. For those who may not be familiar with National Wildlife Federation, we are a national conservation organization founded in 1936. And what makes us a federation is actually the network of state and territorial affiliates that we work closely with to set our policy agenda and to help both wildlife and communities thrive in what we know as a rapidly changing world. I was asked today to speak to the adaptation and resilience recommendations in the report. And to open, I wanted to start with this quote from Charles Darwin that speaks to the importance of adaptation to change. Certainly, herding climate change through all of the mitigation approaches that Rachel discussed is imperative for our future and to minimize the worst of the possible impacts. But as we know, we're going to have to find ways to confront the inevitable impacts and environmental changes that are already baked into the system, so to speak, even if we succeed in limiting warming to one and a half degrees Celsius. Next slide, please. These are the definitions that the select committee included in their report for the concepts of resilience and adaptation. And there's just a few things that I wanted to point out here. First, as you see in the definition, resilience is not only about bouncing back after a hazard or disaster event, it's about having the capability on the front end to anticipate and prepare for it, the resources to actually be ready for that event. And as we've discussed already today, those resources and that capability is very unevenly distributed throughout society, which is something many of the reports and recommendations seek to address. The other thing I'd highlight is the adaptation definition and the specific point that it includes the language beneficial opportunities. I believe that if we're doing this correctly, we're not only moderating negative impacts, but hopefully also in many places, we can be adapting to climate change in a way that creates wins on multiple fronts, including overcoming historic injustices, creating new employment and economic opportunities and actually improving rather than impairing the health of our natural environment. Next slide. Just a few other overarching concepts that I wanted to mention before I dive into the details of a couple of the 12 report pillars that I'm gonna go into more detail on today. As Rachel and others have already suggested, resilience is woven throughout this entire report. For example, some of the various sectors and systems that generate the emissions that we need to curb, like the transportation sector, for example, are themselves incredibly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and therefore any investment and solutions in these spaces need themselves to be accounting for climate resilience. Second, nature itself is a really critical part of the solution here. And I'm gonna speak a lot more to the potential benefits of natural climate solutions a bit later in the presentation. And finally, because climate vulnerability is not evenly distributed across society, our solutions for resilience need to be responsive to communities at greatest risk and with greatest need. Next slide. So here you have an image from the devastation in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, which if you can believe it, it was actually 15 years ago this August. Pillar nine in the report is addressing how we can make communities more resilient to the impacts of climate change, including all of these more frequent and increasingly intense severe weather and disaster events. I wanna acknowledge that many states and localities are taking really important actions on their own. For one example, many states have actually set floodplain management standards and that are higher or more strict than current federal requirements. But nevertheless, federal action and partnership with other sectors is gonna be essential for us to get where we need to go. Next slide. So there are a few categories of solutions that I'm going to try to summarize for pillar nine. First, it's really hard for communities to prepare for impacts that they don't fully understand or don't necessarily have all of the best information about. The federal government already does support some really important climate risk information and data services and tools, but the majority report points out that there are still barriers to decision makers obtaining the information they need, especially for state and local decision-making needs. So to that end, the report recommends that we create a central national climate risk information service that can serve as kind of a storage hub for that actionable and accessible information to inform local decision-making. Additionally, we know that inadequate funding continues to constrain the needed collection of real-time earth monitoring observations and other data products that ultimately underpin smart disaster planning and resource management decisions. For example, currently only about a third of the nation's river and stream miles actually have blood hazard information available for them. We really need additional resources pumped into the various data collection programs across agencies that can inform these maps and other climate-related tools that we need for decision-making. In this photo here, you can actually see Buffalo Bayou in downtown Houston, Texas during Hurricane Harvey, where they designed these stream-side setbacks to help reduce the impacts of urban development flooding. And I understand that they performed fairly well. Land use planning decisions like this really rely on that accurate data. But lastly, and I think Dr. Benjamin talked to the importance of this as well, it's really essential that we have up-to-date building standards and codes and guidelines. And so the report recommends that the federal family work with those organizations that set codes and standards to make sure that they reflect the latest climate information. Next slide. The report also discusses the reality that the US currently lacks a comprehensive climate resilience plan. And that with limited resources available, we really need to be deliberate and innovative in how we invest taxpayer dollars moving forward and leverage the different strengths of various federal agencies as well as private sector and other partners. To do this, the report recommends the establishment of a National Climate Adaptation Commission which would be tasked with developing a national climate adaptation plan that could really embed climate adaptation into all federal programs and activities. In addition, the report recommends we establish a corresponding adaptation program that could provide a combination of means tested grants, loans, including through Revolving Loan Fund type models and other support to actually finance and ensure the projects we need for resilience. To be eligible for these funds, the report suggests that Congress might require local governments to actually develop and obtain approval for climate resilience plans as part of their normal hazard mitigation planning process. Something that started happening selectively in certain states around the nation and could be a uniform requirement. But importantly, in order to ensure that communities are getting the technical assistance they actually need to develop these plans and apply and be competitive for these loans, the report suggests we create an interagency technical assistance program that could deploy teams on the ground to these communities to actually provide support for local planning development. Next slide. So since 2005, the federal government has spent at least $450 billion on disaster assistance which is just a phenomenal amount of money. And we know that those costs are only expected to increase. The report has a whole slew of recommendations that seek to reduce disaster costs and accelerate smarter and faster recovery for communities. And just a few things that I'll raise up here. First, the majority staff underscore the importance of pre-disaster mitigation expenditures and the fact that we must dramatically increase and provide stable federal investment in pre-disaster mitigation to protect communities. It also emphasizes how essential it is that our federal housing assistance programs are required to ensure that any future investments in affordable housing are resilient against flood and wildfire and other climate risks and that we're providing greater support for families, businesses and communities, especially those that are particularly vulnerable who want to proactively move out of harm's way. We need to provide that relocation assistance. The report also contains a whole section on the necessary reforms to the National Blood Insurance Program which has gone through a long chain of short-term extensions and truly needs to be fully reauthorized and reformed given how critical of an underpinning it is to so much of our disaster spending and disaster policy. Wildfire is another major hazard that the report addresses recommending a national wildfire mitigation strategy and improving our mapping efforts of the wildland-urban interface to inform smarter mitigation efforts in those spaces. Finally, the report calls on Congress to require federal agencies to undertake their own adaptation planning, something that this national climate adaptation plan would also help with to minimize disruption to their mission and activities. And many of you probably recall that some of these efforts did start during the Obama administration, but unfortunately much of that has largely stalled out over the past several years. Next slide, please. So nature itself is actually one of the most cost-effective and enduring solutions that we have for confronting the climate crisis. If we maximize these natural climate solutions, we have the potential to sequester up to one-fifth of net annual carbon dioxide emissions, making protection and restoration of our land and water resources a really critical part of a successful comprehensive climate strategy. So pillar 10 in the report covers a lot of ground and I'm only gonna focus on the recommendations that are most directly linked and relevant for kind of the resilience side, but a few points that I just wanna make first. Resilience considerations here are really two-fold. First, healthy natural systems are themselves more resilient to the impacts of climate change and more able to provide protective services to communities to reduce communities' climate risk. At the same time though, these natural systems are themselves susceptible to a large amount of stress from a changing climate and we need to account for that and sometimes manage these systems accordingly if we hope they'll be able to continue to provide the services that we hope to get from them. Next slide. The report does a really great job of describing how many of the broader conservation community priorities, including the 30 by 30 initiative to protect at least 30% of US lands and ocean areas by 2030, as well as other active efforts to protect America's networks of national parks, including in public lands, including things like land and water conservation fund, permanent funding, how these efforts are themselves climate solutions with carbon sequestration benefits and enhancing the resilience of the broader ecosystems that they anchor. The report also discusses the incredible potential that we see in coastal and ocean features of something we commonly call blue carbon, things like mangroves and marshes and seagrass, both to sequester enormous amounts of carbon but also to provide those measurable and significant risk reduction benefits to communities. And to that end, the report suggests establishing coastal carbon areas of significance that we might identify and then seek to strive to protect or restore to really maximize our blue carbon benefits. Relatedly, as communities confront all of these increasing weather and disaster events, the committee recommends that we increase how we are using natural features or natural nature-based infrastructure as part of our resilience toolbox. There's a few different ways that we can do this. We can create new or enhanced existing federal grant programs that help state and local government implement these nature-based features, sometimes getting over the hump of trying out a newer approach or what might be considered a less familiar approach for resilience is part of the challenge. So making sure there's discreet money available for this and accessible to all communities is really important. There's also things we can do to change some policies at federal agency levels to encourage those agencies to make decisions about projects or project funding that elevate and prioritize natural solutions where those solutions make sense and where they can provide adequate level of protection for the communities that need protection. Lastly, the report suggests that we might revisit the idea of civilian conservation for as a mechanism for creating millions of jobs and for restoring the natural systems, all the while alleviating or helping to alleviate the employment crisis that we now find ourselves in. Next slide. I would be remiss if I didn't just briefly mention where wildlife fit into all of this. In May of 2019, the UN released a deeply troubling report that found that an estimated 1 million species have threatened with extinction many within decades and climate change is a top driver for species decline. If we're going to try to address this biodiversity crisis, we also have to undertake actions to help wildlife like the endangered Florida panther that you see here adapt to climate change. We know habitat fragmentation is a really key obstacle for wildlife as they try to cross roads and pipelines and other man-made barriers can really impede their ability to move and to change their necessary behaviors and adapt as conditions change in their environment. To address this, the committee recommends establishment of a national wildlife corridor and connectivity system, including highways and road crossings on federal lands and waters. It also recommends that we increase funding to state wildlife agencies and tribal wildlife managers to implement wildlife action plans, which we could achieve by passing Recovering America's Wildlife Act, as an example. Finally, this current administration has taken some very significant steps to weaken many critical foundational environmental laws that support not only biodiversity, but also our success in combating climate change overall and ensuring that communities stay healthy and have a voice in major federal decisions. This includes changes to the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act, just to name a few. So re-establishing some of these cornerstone protections is really critical to informing climate-smart decisions and engaging communities in the process moving forward. Next slide. And I'll just leave you with this quote that was part of the introduction of the Select Committee's report. By addressing the causes of climate change now, we can at once minimize risks and emerge stronger. Today we have the unique chance to create a future where things not only stabilize but actually get better, achieving the mindset needed to attain this improved environment with signal and maturation of humanity. I wanted to end on that hopeful and positive note. I do think there are a lot of win-win solutions and this report is chock-full of them. Thank you again for having me and thank you again to the Majority Committee for their hard work. Thank you so much, Jessie. And apologies, I said foundation. I actually said federation, I think and then corrected it to foundation. Sorry about that. I'm gonna blame autocorrect. That's gonna be my story. So if we can all just be consistent on that, that would be helpful for me. We have way more questions than we could possibly get to in the next 20 or so minutes. Thank you for everyone in our online audience, all several hundred of you for sending in your questions. I'm gonna kick off the question and answer period with sort of something that a little bit higher level and then I'll dig into some of the questions that we've received. If everyone's been watching, there is so much in this report. It's almost too much in a way. And I'd like to go back. We'll start with Michelle and then we'll go to George's. We'll sort of go through the order again so that we sort of make sure that we, it's been a while since Michelle's had an opportunity to speak for the long presentations. Thank you. What do we do now? So we have this wonderful report. It was released by the majority staff. The select committee will be with us for a few more months. The standing committees have been doing their own thing. I think we may want to talk a little bit about sort of what we see from the minority on the select committee, but what comes next to Michelle for this report? What do you want to see the next couple of steps be in this report's life? I think we all would agree that we don't want it to see just sitting on a shelf sometime. We want it to see it put into action. So Michelle, what do we think, what would you like to see if this report happened next? Sure, thank you for that. We, you know, fortunately for us, we are ready to really engage and work on pieces within that report. One thing I have to give a shout out to my father for my father always challenged in our lives. My dad always said, you have to be ready for monumental opportunities. And this monumental opportunity, I want to say ready, we being the Environmental Justice Health Alliance because we are a small but mighty alliance, but we are affiliated and have been affiliating ourselves with, you heard Rachel mention, the equitable and just climate platform process. And so with that, we are small and mighty within a larger space that has been actually intentionally creating relationships one with the other. And that's so very important in lifting up a heavy piece like this because it's going to take a great deal of trust and respect on knowing that all of these different moving parts and pieces, you have everyone from environmental justice, as you heard to that of wanting and making sure that conservation is protected. And who is it that defines what conservation is? And so we have to have real clear understandings and even being able to be respectful and knowing that there are times when one or all of us may have failed the other. And how is it that we are now equally able to look at those challenges of the past and use them as a path forward to build on to be able to make sure that this very large, well-intended document is fully implemented. I'll leave it there. Great, thank you. George, is from your perspective, what would you like to see happen to this staff report going forward? Yeah, I hope it will and current appropriate right now. So, you know, Congress right now is debating the 2020, the 2021 budget, the 2022 budget, I guess, it starts in the fall. And what I'm hoping, for example, is that they put in the dollars to enhance the CDC climate put in would be enough so they can begin the planning process at, again, all around health. I would see as a debate, the transportation funding, that they look at infrastructure funding and putting dollars for both mitigation and adaption. Again, from my perspective, from a health perspective. And I think it finally, and the strategic planning ideas, of course, go along with that. But I think finally, we've got to think much more strategically about these issues of environmental racism and justice. And that tells me that we need to move with a lot faster speed than we're doing right now. So I'm hoping that doing the next several months as people are thinking about these issues around the important parts of environmental justice, that they begin to talk to communities about what their needs are so that we can hit the ground running, this fall and early next year, as we begin thinking about how we build this nation to be a much stronger place. Thanks. Rachel? I was just thinking about the moment we're in. We have over 3.3 million cases of COVID-19 now in our country, over 135,000 deaths. And disproportionately wherever we look in the country, the impact of COVID-19 is falling on communities of color, particularly African-American communities, Native American communities, Latino communities, and those who live in poverty. And it is a stark reminder of how our current status quo has not been working for a lot of people and why we have to do better going forward. And we have to do better going forward, both in terms of the climate crisis, but also these immediate crises that are killing people, frankly, right now. Congress has at this moment a very important charge to demonstrate leadership, a past legislation that will address this moment of crisis that we're in, making sure that people who are unemployed continue to receive benefits, that we're making sure people are getting adequate nutrition, access to healthcare, that we're investing in clean energy. There's a lot of talk about investing in infrastructure. Let's make sure that that infrastructure is clean and it's climate resilient. We have, everywhere in the country, climate impacts that are playing out right now, a huge heat wave moving across the country this week. We have an above average hurricane season that's anticipated this year. All of these are gonna collide with COVID-19 to create compounding risks. Let's get out ahead of this. And what we have here is an incredible action plan, a blueprint for action. We have stakeholders who, as Michelle and George and others are pointing out, who've already been engaged, who are already developing great ideas. Let Congress actually step up to this moment, demonstrate the political will to do what constituents are asking right now. Jesse? I couldn't agree more with everything that's been said. The one thing I would add is that, I think the breadth of policy solutions in this report shows that there are so many entry points to the issue of climate mitigation and climate adaptation and the needs of communities. And I think one of the things that I believe is the strength of the report is that it points to specific and tangible pieces of legislation in many cases that have already been introduced that can help to advance some of the top line policy solutions that it's talking about. And so, Rachel said roadmap, we do have a roadmap here. And people coming from all different backgrounds and perspectives and focus areas should be able to look at this report and find a place that they can plug in and help to move the conversation forward. That's a great point. That's an excellent point. And I suppose that's one benefit of how comprehensive it is, is there is a little something for everyone. And in order to do this, in order to make any progress, everyone will have a role to play. That's something that we talk about a lot. This is an opportunity as much as it's a challenge. It's just that we have to get over that. I'm gonna dig into the questions that have been submitted to us online. And I'm gonna start with one that came in very early. But it gets to one of the more cross-cutting or one of the more cross-cutting policy recommendations that's in the report. And that is a price on carbon. From your perspectives, from where you are coming at this, what kind of role would a price on carbon or what would the benefits of a price on carbon be from your perspectives, whether it's greenhouse gas reductions, whether it's adaptation, whether it's mitigation, whether it's improving sort of the livelihoods of those in some disadvantaged communities. I'm gonna open that up. Whoever wants to jump in is welcome, but we'll start there. Well, hi, this is George. I mean, the challenge is, of course, for some communities is aggressive. And we have to just make sure that the fact that minority communities pay more for energy than more wealthy communities. And so one has to make sure that it's not done in a way that penalizes people that, quite frankly, have to drive to go to work, even though we don't want them driving for further use public transportation, or people who are paying disproportionate amount of their income for energy. So there has to be offsets and subsidies and ways to address that so that we don't create basically, well, a regressive tax system for those individuals. Other comments from around the panel? I mean, if you look at the report, the section on common pricing is about two pages long, if I remember right, in this 550-odd page report. And I think that the committee is appropriately recognizing that common pricing is not a solvable solution. And we really need a comprehensive suite of policies to help really address all of the different dimensions of climate change and climate impacts. The report does include a set of principles. Should there be a common price where it talks about making sure that's, of course, robust, but that it's only one tool that as George was saying, low income and moderate income communities must be protected, that this won't address the environmental justice concerns that many communities have. So on its own, it's not gonna be enough and it has to be complimented with policies that address those legacy longstanding challenges that environmental justice communities have, and that it shouldn't be traded off for any kind of poison pills, like letting fossil fuel company off the hook in terms of their legal liabilities. So again, it can play a role, it can play a powerful role as one tool and a suite of policies, but policy design is everything. A common price for the sake of a common price is not gonna achieve the outcomes we need and it must be complimented with equity and justice considerations. I just wanna say to everything that was said and then just equally, we have found in some of the modeling that where we looked at carbon pricing, it actually increased emissions in other areas and ways in our communities. So that's why just to re-emphasize what Rachel said it is, it can't just be considered the only piece and silver bullet. Great, thanks. Jessie, if you'd like to jump in, otherwise we'll move on, but I wanna make sure you have an opportunity to offer any comments as well. No, I agree with everything said, let's keep rolling. Okay, that's great. So this one comes from us from one of our Twitter followers. It acknowledges that the select committee staff report is one of many plans that are out there and specifically this audience member asked sort of where this fits in to the landscape that is populated with other proposals like the Green New Deal with various proposals that have been sort of mentioned in the political process that we're about to undertake this fall. Any commentary about where you see this report fitting in with them and maybe how it juxtaposes to some of the recommendations and maybe some of the top line proposals that some of those plans contain? Let me just talk about saying there's a whole lot of overlap. So let's now pretend like these plans are all very, very different. There's a lot of overlap. And more importantly, there's a whole lot of little hanging fruit, particularly moving to green energy projects, creating jobs, all those kinds of things are very, very important. We have infrastructure that is falling down around us. So as we start doing repairs, we can certainly do those repairs in a way that addresses the many of our climate change concerns. Obviously, there are existing dollars out there, although they're getting tight. And as Congress begins to think about appropriating new dollars, they need to do that in a way that is climate sensitive and is green to the extent that it can be. So I think that there's many, many things that we can do with the existing dollars and lots of whole, low hanging fruit. The problem is we go out and start, we just gotta start doing it. I think to add to that, what is very important is in this process, people see themselves. This is beyond that statement that was written by a lot of scientists. And don't get me wrong, I am a scientist, but I think that people, everyday people, including the scientists, need to see themselves in this. When people see themselves, and especially the critical crisis and the conundrums that people have been articulating for decades. I wanna go back to something that Rachel said that is very important, that we have failed just as powerful and brilliant and rich as this country is. We have failed a large majority of people. And we need to be clear about that. And this gives us the opportunity for people to see themselves in a renewed sense of hope that shows a renewed sense of optimism to bring about a more perfect union as opposed to the same old thing. I mean, we are at that point. And so this is the tipping point. And we would hope that no disrespect, but this low hanging fruit phenomenon must leave us on the boat from yesterday because we have failed communities deeply by we are only left with that tree that is so deadly and poisonous that it is expensive to get rid of. However, if we don't get rid of it, it will be the detriment to us all. And that's why I encourage us to reach deep in our moral and not saying we haven't, but deeper in our moral and political courage to really move us to being able to bring the hope that people have and are standing with and have been failed on for a very long time. Yeah, I mean, I couldn't agree more. And I think these should not be partisan issues. The welfare of people around our nation is the primary thing that we're asking policy makers here to take care of. And that is their role. That is their role to demonstrate this leadership. And the other important piece is recognizing that the solutions are there for the taking. It's been the lack of political will and the systemic structures of oppression that have prevented the solutions from flourishing. So anytime somebody tells you, we can't solve this. Just remember what they're telling you is I don't have the courage to do the right thing. The solutions are there for the taking. The people are ready. Now we need our policy makers to take care of and we need our policy makers to step up in a bipartisan way. And I would just add that I think it's actually really positive, encouraging the more places we start to see these ideas cropping up. I know that people get planning fatigue. People say it's another plan. What does this plan mean versus the last plan? I think that it's so good when we see more and more people kind of singing from the same song sheet here. And as Michelle said, seeing themselves in these solutions. Great, thanks. Thanks, that was great. We are just about out of time, but I do kind of wanna give everyone an opportunity to go around the horn once more, to share any final thoughts or takeaways just in a few seconds with our audience today. Michelle, why don't we start with you and sort of go through the cycle? Please feel free to share along any concluding sentiments and thanks so much for everything you said. We just wanna thank you for providing the space for the Environmental Justice Health Alliance to be here. And we just wanna ask you, can George Floyd be the last person that says, I can't breathe? Can we reach to our moral and political courage? Can we lock our hearts together? And can we dig deep into this and make this 588 page a reality? Thank you. Thank you. George? Sure, it's a point to remind everyone that climate change is here and is impacting the health of all of us today and that we have solutions and we can implement solutions in an equitable and just way. Thank you. Rachel? Yeah, thank you so much for creating the space and thank you to the committee staff and the committee for this report. I know we're in a very challenging and daunting time but I am personally hopeful because now we're talking about the real stuff. We're talking about the real problems, not the superficial. And if we can talk about it as Michelle and George have been saying, by centering people in their daily lives, we really can be a better nation for everybody. Jesse, please, you have the last word. Well, thank you and thank you again, EESI. I think that the fact that we're focusing so much in this conversation on the intersectionality of these issues is so critical and key to our success as a country in confronting this challenge. So I think that's key. I think that we need to be asking with every decision we make moving forward what the implications are for environmental justice, for public health, for the environment and for our communities at large. And so this is spot on, right questions to ask and I just really appreciate being a part of it. Great, well, on behalf of EESI, I appreciate you and your co-panelists for being with us today. Couldn't have been a better briefing. Thank you so much for bringing your expertise in perspective to join us, to help interpret this report, help explain how all of the pieces fit together like Jesse just said. And 90 Minutes doesn't really do it justice. So like I said, I hope everyone has an opportunity to go back and take a look at it. We've been doing a lot of writing about it. We've written about nature-based solutions recommendations, energy efficiency recommendations, we've got resilience recommendations coming out shortly, on-go financing recommendations coming out shortly, all sorts of writing at EESI.org. And you can also sign up for our newsletter, Climate Change Solutions by visiting us online. Comes out every two weeks. Let me thank you again, Michelle, Georges, Rachel and Jesse for joining us. Let me also say thank you to Troy, our videographer, to Omri, Anna, Amber, Allen, Bridget, Abby, Maeve, Maya, everybody at EESI. I should just have a picture of the staff page and just say thank you. Wiley Coyote style, just hold up a sign. Thank you so much for everyone who is able to help us pull this off today. Really tremendous briefing. We'll go ahead and close it there. Troy, if you could put up the last slide, we are always looking to get better. If you have a few moments and you'd be willing to share your thoughts with us by taking a short survey, we'd really appreciate that. You can, their web address is right there. Let us know what you thought. We have, the next thing coming up on our schedule is July 30th. We have the Congressional Clean Energy Expo and Policy Forum in the past that's been an in-person all day event. Now it will be an all day virtual event. July 30th, I hope you're able to join us online. We're gonna be with six panels, including one on climate action through environmental justice. So something sort of a continuation of the conversation that we started today. Thank you all. I hope everyone has a great rest of your Tuesday. Happy Bastille Day and we'll go ahead and end it there. Thank you.