 Stanford University. Good morning, everybody. I'm happy to see you connecting with each other. I was here yesterday for the California Energy Summit, and it was just breathtaking, the number of people who had arrived to share their insights of experience and expertise. I want to recognize Dean Arun Majumdar for his gravity, the ability for Dean Majumdar to convene through Stanford University. People from so many different sectors, industries, walks of life, and his commitment to integration of academic enterprise across all of the schools at Stanford, the business school, the law school, the engineering school, his vision for the School of Sustainability has given us a sense of place for an entire category of academic work that may have been seen as peripheral or out in the stardust of the galaxy. And with his gravity and with the generosity of the Door family, the Stanford Door School has given us a new platform for convening. And we're experiencing that yesterday and today in a way that I found truly exhilarating. Can I ask you to give some appreciation to the School of Sustainability's leadership team and the institutes hosting us today? Every place is a place of importance to first peoples who know it better than anyone in human heritage. Stanford's location is on the site of the Muakma Oloni homelands. We acknowledge the importance and the value and the continuing significance of these lands to the Muakma Oloni people who have a relationship to Stanford's land management team and the way that the lands are stewarded with their heritage and their interests in mind. This is a continuing journey. Recognition is only the first step on a pathway to restorative and transformative justice. A journey that Stanford has only just begun with recognition. It's an open challenge to all of us to remind ourselves that wherever we go, we are in places that have deep histories. And I want you to open your mind to what's possible to learn from the depth of those human histories when they are with us in living spirit through oral and verbal and written traditions that span generations, truly untold. That's the invitation I bring to you as you open your mind to what you can learn at an R1 research institution here in the next hour. My name is Holmes Hummel. I'm a three-time graduate from Stanford, which some people might consider remedial. I was first here more than a quarter century ago when the only energy degree available to me was petroleum engineering. That was the entire breadth of energy education that was ABET accredited at that time. Straight forward, I'm the resident fellow of a theme house with 80 residents hailing for more than 20 countries that are majoring in energy and other majors offered in more than 20 different departmental tracks. It's been a breathtaking journey of transition both for Stanford as an institution and for me as a participant in it. That's why I was so honored when Ines Acevedos asked me if I would support the earnest consortium's pursuit of the Department of Energy's recognition of the worthiness of trying to connect 16 or 17 different academic institutions in three different countries to do place-based research in right relations with communities. Ines' thought leadership for the consortium defines the scope that you just heard about in her opening remarks. But truly, the people who will define what happened in the next half decade are the communities that are the bellwethers and the guides for their partner institutions funded through the Department of Energy's consortium to try to look for the pathways to an equitable and affordable, resilient, nationwide energy system transition, the full unpacking of earnest. It's my honor to be the moderator for this opening plenary in service of what Ines called for as the opening, opening move in today's kickoff. And that is to ask ourselves the question, how, how can we make sure that the university research ecosystems support the federal goals for decarbonization recently reaffirmed with pledges to the world of a transition away from fossil fuels and to deliver a decarbonized, resilient, affordable, and clean energy future with justice at its center? If that is our opening, there may be no better people to help us find our way in it than those who are with us now on stage. Mary Rose Taruk is a person of transformative effect working in campaigns with organizations that you may have known, if you study the field of energy transition, the Asian Pacific environmental network, the Southwest network for environmental and economic justice, the Filipino-American Coalition for Environmental Solidarity, the California Environmental Justice Alliance, her current affiliation as energy equity director, and the Reclaim Our Power campaign for utility justice, a part of the Climate Justice Alliance formation. These are transformative organizations, and Mary Rose Taruk has been a transformative figure in them. We're so pleased to have you here this morning, we're gonna hear more about your work and the advice that you can offer based on that experience. I'd like to next acknowledge Lisa Redsteer. Lisa has traveled. Woo! Lisa! Lisa! Lisa! Lisa! Lisa! Mary Rose bringing the spirit again. I love it. Lisa Redsteer has arrived here from Washington State, a territory that is home to her now at the Northwest Indian College, but as Lisa will share with us, her heritage is with the Navajo Nation, and she has deep roots and a strong commitment to preserving her cultural teachings in incorporating traditional ecological knowledge, traditional foods and tribal energy into the classes and the projects that she offers the fortunate students of Northwest Indian College. She serves now as the engineer outreach coordinator and advises its space center where she organizes for summer youth camps at all ages, I understand, experiences that push their boundaries and bring them into the possibility of a sustainable energy future. We are going to hear from Lisa Redsteer alongside Chad Nadlam. And... Chad! I love the way that he's bringing it up. Chad is also a person who brings us a deep history and heritage in place from Katsabui, Alaska, on the shores of the Cherkisi. I want you to think about living on the shores of this geographically isolated waterfront and being faced with the dramatic changes in weather and conditions that have hurt the shorelines of Shishmaraf, not far from there geographically, and others in that vulnerable area. Chad Nadlam has a career that includes being the director of Parks and Recreation, which you might think of as being a TV show, but if you are the director of Parks and Recreation, you are in control of community assets that are actually places where people go when they are in most jeopardy. The places where they gather and assemble, the places where they find connection and mutual aid. Chad's service to his community includes also being an elected board member to the Katsabui Electric Association, organized as an energy democracy, governing the assets for energy services that keep that community in habitable condition throughout harsh weather cycles. He's deeply in touch with Katsabui community members and among his interests, renewable energy is one, and we're glad that he's a part of the earnest consortium. And last but certainly not least, a hometown hero, Michael Wara. We're gonna give him a hand. Yes! Michael is a Stanford alumni lawyer by trade and training, a former associate professor at Stanford Law School, now director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program at the Woods Institute for the Environment, and he is also the policy director for Stanford's Sustainability Accelerator. I wanna pause there for a moment because not everyone, especially our guests, are aware that when the Stanford Door School for Sustainability was launched, it came with it a dedication to a new type of engagement between the research university and the rest of the field. That's the accelerator. It is still very much information and we are fortunate to have Michael's influence on the way that the policy portfolio and policy integration is a part of that. In California, Michael Wara has a practice of community-engaged research and learning that focuses on wildfire risk mitigation, among other things, and we'll be hearing about that today. With that, I'm gonna turn to our excellent expert speakers and ask them to introduce themselves in their own words with a leading question about how you relate to the experience of co-creating knowledge with academic institutions in a way that respects traditional sources of knowledge and underrepresented communities. I'm asking you to combine your introduction by leaning into the theme of our discussion this morning. Who would like to begin? I'm gonna call on Chad. Okay. Hey, Chad. Yeah, thank you. All right, my name is Chad Nordlum. I'm the Energy Project Manager for the native village of Kotsibiu. As you said, Kotsibiu is 30 miles above the Arctic Circle. It's a village of about 3,000 people in the Nanna region. It's the hub community of 11 other communities that surround it, smaller communities. We have been a leader in renewable energy for the last 25 years. We've been pursuing wind for about 25 years and recently added some solar into the mix. The energy mix in Kotsibiu is about 25% renewables and about 75% imported diesel. So the electric utility where I sit on the board, we buy about $3 million worth of diesel every year, burn that and that's kind of what motivated me to get into renewable energy. I think it's an opportunity to change the economics of our region, especially tribally-owned renewable energy. We can do quite a bit. I mean, imagine that $3 million that we send to Hong Kong to get our fuel. Imagine if that was spent in our region to a tribe who's, you know, the tribe's main goals within our village. We have many, many different organizations, but the tribe is a service provider. We provide housing. We do a lot of, over the years that's just a lot of housing and just all of the grass roots kind of things the community needs. So I think I look at this energy transition as an opportunity for tribes to really become part of the solution and bring that value to their communities. The native village of Katsubu is one of 229 tribes in the state of Alaska. Beyond tribes, there are also over 220 Alaska native corporations, which we have a unique history in that respect. 1971, basically the native corporations were invention of Congress so that, you know, to kind of separate the tribes and the land in a way, so to make tribal people more capitalistic, let's say. So, and you know, it hasn't gone bad, but the tribes in Alaska do not own land. And that's one of the things I struggle with in trying to produce, you know, to promote renewable energy is figuring out the land issues for the tribe. So, and Katsubu is one of the bigger villages, like I said, we're a hub community. There are a lot of small villages and when we talk about underserved communities, those are the communities I think about because, you know, the tribes, a lot of times we'll just have a tribal administrator and maybe another part-time employee, they don't have the capacity to go after, you know, Department of Energy grants. I mean, you look at the Department of Energy and there are so many different parts and pieces. I've been at this at a year and a half and I don't think I've even touched on all the Department of Energy kind of granting agencies. So, and then you've got the EPA, which also does renewable energy and the USDA. So it's a daunting task for small villages in Alaska to who desperately want renewable energy. We all import fuel for both home heating and for electricity and we would all love to have more renewables, but I think I'll, so yeah, there's a, there's an, I don't think the rollout of renewable energy has been done in an equitable way so far. It's all based on competitive grants, which, you know, gives an opportunity to the more, the larger organizations like My Tribe or the Native Corporations who have the human capacity, they can hire grant writers, they can hire engineers to help write the grants. Most tribes don't have that. So I think it could be done in a much, much more equitable way than it's been done so far, but I'll leave it at that. Thank you, thank you Chad. In fact, institutional capacity is one of the dimensions of inequity that's often in the power dynamics between communities and research institutions. I wanna continue inviting you into the conversation, each of you with an introduction and a word on your experience with co-creating knowledge with communities that have been historically underrepresented. Who would like to join us next in this conversation? Mary Rose is voting for Lisa. Yeah, it's been a Lisa Red Steer, Yeneshia. Ashgana Zoha Nishle, Dota Baha Vashisin, Kintlachitni Dashache, Auto-Kliziflana Dashinalet. Good morning, everybody. My name is Lisa Red Steer. I am Yucca fruit strung out on a line born for waters edge. My maternal grandparents are of the Red House people clan and my paternal grandparents are of the mini goats clan. I am a Danelle woman, was born and raised in Flagstaff, Arizona and a graduate of Northwest Indian College in the BSNES program. I currently serve as the engineering outreach coordinator. So I do a lot of youth outreach to the local tribes and local community. I do a lot of like summer youth programs where we bring a lot of our solar equipment that we have. We have a lot of hands-on activities for the kids because a lot of us are hands-on learners in the community. We also have a mock roof that we got installed during my time at Northwest Indian College. So I've been working as the outreach coordinator for a little over two years now. And we've had the mock roof get installed where we are able to offer hands-on solar installation on campus. And we've also got an off-grid system that we just recently got installed. So we're now currently offering a lot of solar installation training for the community and for the students of Northwest Indian College. Mary Rose, would you like to keep us moving? Is it my turn? Yes, it is. Good morning, Maganda Amaga to everyone. Mary Rose Turuk, I drove here from Oakland, Aloni land. And I'm originally from a rice growing region in the Philippines where we would have brownouts because we were expected to not have energy access or electricity access all the time. And so this informs my advocacy for energy justice in California as the energy justice director of the largest coalition of environmental justice groups here in this state. And the state of California is over, is more than half people of color. And so I look around the audience and you're in a place where the ideas of communities of color, including low income communities of color who are under a lot of pollution burden and energy violence are actually growing our power to write energy and climate policy in the state. And so this question around co-creation of knowledge, I wanna bring into the space of story 12 years ago when a group of five younger women of color and I were introduced our first energy justice bill into the California legislature. It was called Solar for All carried by an assembly member from Silicon Valley. And we're like, so California has laws and programs in place for a million solar roofs, but where are those for communities of color and low income communities? And so Solar for All was to actually try to get solar onto apartment buildings because a lot of us lower income folks are renters. And so, and can we get jobs out of those because a lot of our folks were unemployed or underemployed. And so our Solar for All bill, we are first policy hearing. So imagine colorful younger women going into the state legislature and the decision makers were all older white men. And so we're like, we have this idea for how we should get our energy programs yeah, co-created in the state. And they weren't happy to see us, but we're like, we have a charge from the community to make energy accessible to our people. And so from there, from 2012 to now, we have changed the culture of how we pass energy policies and programs in the state of California because we not only were five women in that hearing pushing for Solar for All, but we have dozens of environmental justice groups from the communities of California who also have relationships to decision makers in the state legislature to make these programs more equitable and eventually include environmental justice. And so I offer that in that the experts in the room may not know, probably don't know the realities in the community and that we have to have win-win solutions that aren't only energy solutions for our communities. We're talking about whole communities and programs. We're talking about housing. We're talking about the economic conditions of our communities. And we know that from the ground. I know a lot of you have lofty degrees and on the ground though, the wisdom from the community is where you need to come down to. And so I think I offer that from Seha, the California Environmental Justice Alliance and other communities who you may wanna partner with and you're gonna have to have more emotional intelligence to come into solidarity relationships with us. Mary Rose, thank you. 100%. Thank you. Michael, you've had some experience working with members of the California Environmental Justice Alliance and seeing the transition over the past decade that Mary Rose is referring. How can you reflect on the experience of co-creating knowledge with communities that have been historically underrepresented? Well, I think where myself and my team start is by going to the communities and trying to listen. I was thinking as you were speaking, Mary Rose, about the first time that I was invited to be a part of a sort of a, it was almost like a teach-in, but it ended up, I was the one that ended up getting learning. More, I mean, I showed up as, and let me just stop and say first, thank you to the three of you for coming to Stanford today. This is not a comfortable place for folks that come from the Environmental Justice Community. We need to recognize who we are. We are an elite university and all of you traveled far to be here and this is not necessarily the milieu, like when we, now when we try to organize many, and I'm proud to say the new school and the accelerator have done this quite intentionally, we put our meetings in Stockton rather than here because this is not always a comfortable place. And so I just wanna acknowledge that and say thank you for bringing your voices to this conversation. I am of this place too, just as Holmes is and have been here a long time. For me, a transformational moment was the invitation to bring a team of students to talk to APEN and CRPE and other EJ organizations in the lead up to reauthorization of Cap and Trade in California. And we served as sort of an informal advisor, I think one of multiple advisors, but one voice in the conversation that was helping the EJ community is to think through the options. But what I really took away from that was something for me and I think is relevant maybe to folks that are participating in this program, which is the need to go to the organizations that you would like to, and I believe everyone in this room, sincerely, if you're engaged in this kind of work, you want to bring environmental justice into your research, you wanna embody those values. Maybe you think that, do you think that because it's the right thing to do? I feel that way very strongly. You might also think that that's the case because if we're gonna actually solve the climate crisis, we need to build a bunch of stuff and we can't build it in the way we built it in the 1960s on the back of structural racism, right? Did you rate structural racism, I would add, like the state using its power to enforce racist ideas in our society, that's not something we're gonna do in the 21st. So you might have multiple reasons for being here, but I think everybody here has good intentions. I certainly come with them. In my experience, going to that meeting that was above this little bodega in a little rented room in Oakland was a transformational moment in my career because I was allowed to come and to listen and to learn from people who live in a very different circumstance than I do here and in this place. And to see and hear from people whose day to day lives, you know, I mean, I think I often think about people's kids. Like I have kids, I think about, you know, I care very much for the safety of my children, the health of my children, and I always, I talk to my kids, I look across the bay at Richmond and I see the flaring events that occur at the various refineries in Contra Costa County when they occur, we can see them across the bay. My kids will text me from the soccer field and say, Dad, what's, because he knows, they also know that I care a lot about wildfire. They'll say, what's going on over there? And what's going on is someone's kids are at their soccer practice or waiting at the bus stop and there's a shelter in place being declared, right? Because, you know, leaving intention aside, right? There is something happening over there that jeopardizes the health and safety of people and their kids. And I think it was a really transformational moment for me to be allowed into that conversation, to learn, and moving from it, we, I certainly pivoted my research and have been fortunate enough with a lot of support to build a team where we start our research by asking what questions do the organizations that Mari Rose has built in California and been a part of building, what are their questions? And how can we bring Stanford analytical capacity to bear in answering those questions? Sometimes that can be uncomfortable because the answers aren't necessarily what the state of California wants to hear. But that's what we can do as an elite institution. Practically speaking, it is also essential that we develop a new model for how we are gonna build the infrastructure that we need to build if we're all gonna avoid the worst effects of climate change. And that may be not less true in places that are not a democratic society. I will choose a democracy over any other option, but like if we're gonna do this here, we need to find new ways. We can't just run over communities like we did in the 1950s and 40s and 30s and 20s and the 19th century and in California as we state-sponsored militias ran off, ran and killed Native American tribes and took away their land. And so I think starting with the questions that the communities have is just the essential start for good work here. And I'm really excited that this program is oriented in that direction. Michael, thank you for that first-person testimony of your own experience co-creating knowledge. And we're going to move into a second round that's really designed to speak to the participants and even those that might want to participate in learning or contributing research in the earnest consortium itself. You've heard from Professor Acevedos about the vision that the Department of Energy has supported through its awards spanning the next half decade of work and engagement. And I'd like to solicit from each of you a piece of advice. Now, you might have a lot of advice and because we're running short on time, I'm going to ask you to speak to every person on this stage all day long and ask them for advice. But in this moment, I'm going to ask you for views about mechanisms of accountability in the relationship that is inherently challenged by the power dynamics that we've heard about in this first round. We're a research institution that's in the position to even receive Department of Energy dollars as Chad has noted, that's not easy to do and especially not easy to do for community-based groups that are now partnering with those research institutions. The earnest consortium recipients each have community-based colleagues that they're working with. What advice could you offer about maintaining relations that are accountable, that communities with navigational aid are actually heard, seen, and heeded? If you could say a word about how the journey of the consortium participants over the next half decade would be benefited by your experience in mechanisms of accountability and advice for how to have right relations, that would be helpful. Chad? Yeah, so when I think about co-creation of knowledge and accountability, I think about our environmental department, we've had an environmental department for about 25 years. Shout out to Alex Whiting. They had a project several years ago where they worked with Columbia University and the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the native village of Kotzebue. And the way they designed, I think the really interesting part of the whole thing, you could actually go on YouTube and find it if you look, the project's name was Ekagvik Sikukun, which means ice edge in our language. And you could find that, they did a documentary and you could find that on YouTube if you go ice edge Kotzebue. I looked for it last night just to make sure I could find it, but it's really interesting the way they designed this study is that they took a bunch of elders and inupac folks and it was looking at the decreasing ice shelf in our Kotzebue sound. It wasn't freezing the way it used to, which really affects our hunting. But anyway, they talked to a bunch of hunters and kind of took their traditional knowledge and based on that traditional knowledge, they designed the research questions and then they had local people involved throughout the study in data gathering and other things. But really I think starting with traditional knowledge and designing your research questions from that start I think is a very powerful way to go. Thank you. Mary Rose. I'm curious, I know I'm like, oh, look at all the people looking down. Are you looking at us? Who has read the principles of environmental justice? Okay, please go read the principles of environmental justice because, so the 30 year environmental justice movement have actually created principles of how we approach our campaigns, our work and if you are to come in solidarity relationship with us, do your homework in what we've already created as principles from the community. So the principles of environmental justice is one. The principles of working together from the environmental justice movement is another. The just transition strategy. So this is where I wanna point out a just transition from our very extractive economy where power and money is centralized to a just transition for those who have been left out of that economy or who have been extracted from moving into a generative economy where we can actually own our labor and own our things is that I wanna point out the extractive relationship of what currently exists and do not replicate that. So please go read the just transition strategies. You can find all this online. So come in solidarity where you actually have done some homework so that when we create agreements with each other that we can be accountable to each other in that way. I do wanna point out so SEHA has one of our major energy justice campaigns is to retire all the gas fired power plants in the state of California. There's more than 200 of them. There's more than 200. So wait I'm like who are our friends who are gonna help us do that. And so there was this opportunity last year where an academic reached out to SEHA and they were like so they did some homework. They're like we heard that you wanna retire gas fired power plants. We have this idea for an engineering thing. I'm not gonna disclose this. That could help your campaign because we wanna help your campaign. We wanna help your communities. And so we studied it and we had conversations and we're like we do wanna try this and they did get funding to do it. And that's like they did their homework. So that's one and they approached us with an idea that was already going to help a campaign because we're not a blank slate on the community. We have our ideas, our solutions and how are you coming in to be in solidarity with that. And so that's an example of a good way to enter the partnership as you've done your homework. You know what we're trying to do. We wanna help you with technology or research to get this done. And we're still looking for friends, especially on maximizing DERs in California because we think that's actually like the biggest place where we wanna make environmental justice change in the energy field. DERs, the distributed energy resources. I would love to hear from Lisa and then Michael in this room. I think just definitely emphasizing doing your homework, doing your research, learning which land that you reside on for sure just because that this might be a little chaotic but just where I'm thinking is a lot of us are losing our traditional languages. Our languages are definitely connected to the land. Our languages bring us back to our ceremony. Our language connects us to our culture. So it's all interconnected with the land, with the environment, with the plants. We have all of these relationships with these entities and we see them as living beings and we see even our language as a living being. It's definitely all connected and if you don't know who you're talking to or which land you're on or any of the research, like there's really no moving forward from there. You're kind of at a standstill and until you do that research. Lisa, thank you. I'm not gonna let Michael talk just yet because I'm putting you all on notice. Every one of you has an opportunity in about two minutes to put into the space a line of inquiry that draws from your own interest and experience. Some of you are a part of the earnest project that will last the next five years. Some of you are learning about it for the first time. What are the lines of inquiry that you would like to have in this room in two minutes and there'll be someone with a microphone who's coming around for that purpose? Michael, advice on accountability. It's gonna be one minute. What I would say, one change that we've made and we struggle to maintain, and this is hard for the research community but I think it's very important is to recognize that when you work with environmental justice advocates as you're trying to do partner-engaged research, your partner has fewer resources than you do and that's more true the more marginalized the communities that you're working with and we have come to the conclusion on our team that it's really important to bring resources to our partners. We cannot show up and be like, we're Stanford and we're here to help. We need to show up and say with the resources that allow fiscally allow our partners to work with us and that has meant funding positions at as subawards with our partners and I think that really creates a different kind of partner-engaged research relationship because you're not asking someone for their time for free. We wouldn't in this room necessarily donate our time for free if someone showed up and say, hey, I'm here to help you. You should give me your time for free. Our time is our most precious asset. The exact same thing is actually more true for many community organizations where you've got people who have two jobs and they have a family and they're trying to contribute to a community advocacy organization that's improving outcomes in their place. And so our philosophy has been to try to bring resources to the organizations that we really want to partner with and I think that's a value that I would recommend to the room to think about. It can be in lots of different ways. It doesn't necessarily mean funding a position there. It can mean funding RA ships here that are really dedicated support for that organization. But to think creatively about how to bring more to the table than you ask for in return. I second that. I think that's a great approach. Thank you. Michael's last reference there. I think RA ship would be research assistantship. Sorry, yeah. So the idea of dedicating dollars to graduate students who can be dedicated in the relationship with the community and enable a counterparty also receiving some supplemental support so they can stay at that table. So just to make that concrete, just to give one example, we work really closely with the Kauruk tribe in Northern California on prescribed fire, culture fire, broader land sovereignty and stewardship issues in their ancestral territory. Bill Tripp, who is the head of director the director of natural resources for the Kauruk tribe was appointed to the U.S. Wildfire Commission to be the tribal representative. He needed capacity to be really briefed when he would show up to these giant meetings where the secretary of agriculture and representative of the secretary of the interior were there and we hired three RAs to help Bill answer the questions that he needed answered, right? And so that he could show up to these meetings and be much better prepared and resourced than he otherwise could have been given that he has a million things to do. He has a small staff in happy camp where he's based and there's no one to hire in Orleans or happy camp that could meet the need. And so you have to be creative and think outside the box but I think there are ways to, and I should just say those three students had an incredible experience as well like getting to work with that team from the Kauruk tribe and also our legal fellows. Thank you for sharing that. I'm turning next to you and I believe that my colleague and friend, Jenny Milne, there you are, has a microphone. Who can I see out here who'd like to join us in the conversation? What is your name? Oh, thank you, Audrey Yauz. Yep, we can hear you. My name is Claudio Canizares. I'm a professor at the University of Waterloo, Canada, part of the earnest effort, which I very much welcome and was quite a surprise to see the U.S. is motivating these instructions with their neighbors. Now, I've done quite a bit of work in remote communities, electrification microgets and I'm particularly interested on one of Chad's comments. We've told, my experience for now over a decade is being that unless there is an environmental or a renewable energy champion in the community, very little, nothing much happens. And I think you hinted into that issue and my question is, can you elaborate on that and maybe provide some guidance on how to develop these leadership, these leaders within these communities? Thank you. Wonderful. You might not have expected it, but I'm gonna take three questions before we turn to the panels and they're gonna get to choose the questions that they spend their time answering or at least engaging. I would like to know who else had their hand raised over here on Jenny Milne's side of the room. Thank you. What's your name? Oh, terrific. All right, so we're about to hear from a journalist. Thank you for allowing me to be here. I'm wondering kind of going back to what you were discussing about extraction, Mary Rose. To what extent is the energy transition still based in extraction that has adverse impacts on lower income communities of color and how can we find a balance between needing to create these new technologies, many of which are still based in extraction, but also in ways that can have positive impacts for disadvantaged communities and is there a balance between that? A direct question to Mary Rose. I love it. I know you're prepared. Who's got the third question? We haven't exhausted the minds in this room. I'm certain. I'm blinded by the light. Tell us who you are. Hi, I'm Ben Hiddle and I had an interesting idea. I'm with CH4.AI, we work with different groups trying to collaborate because the issues of climate change are actually worldwide and we're not gonna be able to do it in a community estate or a federal government. So AI tends to go through those borders and I encourage everybody to use it, but I had a really weird idea because the Amazon effect, some people might know it from the trash industry. When Amazon came, we had tons of cardboard boxes. Why don't we turn that into methane gas and run our gas companies? Not the 200 that are going out of business, but a nice one on renewable gas because getting rid of all that seems really difficult, but cardboard from Amazon to renewable gas. Terrific. Ben is with CH4.AI, which if I unpack the acronym would be Methane Artificial Intelligence. Okay. Got it, got it. Ines is getting in on the action. Wow. So if you want to add one more question over here would be, so we've heard a few examples on things that work, things that didn't work so well previously with communities. If you could outlove to elaborate on in the success stories that you had previously, how it will be important to understand how can we grow those and generalize the lessons that are learned from interactions with one community to the next one, given the magnitude of the transition that we need. So we're facing with this issue of being able to meet the needs of local and contextual specific challenges, but also understanding how and whether we can replicate that in order to accelerate the energy transition. I would love to hear your guidance on, are there some ways to do so that we should think about from the beginning of this project? Thank you. The principal investigator speaks. In fact, I think these are central research questions that could span years or a whole career, but we don't have time for that. We only have two minutes. So what I would like to do is to acknowledge that we have opportunities to be together throughout the day. And I'm going to ask our panelists to give us a closing word as they choose which questions they want to address. You won't be able to address all four of them. You choose your favorite. I can't. You could go first and you could choose your question and we're going to wrap it up with respect for our next folks on time. All right. Yeah, I'll answer that question about the energy champions and a little bit about the kind of an approach to this energy transition. One thing we've had success at in our region, in our area of Alaska is our regional corporation, NAN, a regional corporation which represents 11 villages in our area and our Northwest Arctic Bureau who also represent them same 11 villages. The bureau is a subdivision of the state much like a county government here. And it's basically the same thing. So they've worked together for the last 12 years to try to get more renewable energy into our smaller villages. And our smaller villages have 100 people to 300 people per village or up to 1,000 I guess is our largest village outside of Kotzebue. So having them kind of regionalizing the approach and having those two regional organizations work together to provide the human capacity and then kind of what they do at the end is once the solar panels are built is they give it to the tribe to operate and then they do ongoing trading and things like that. So I think that's a potential model to going forward. Thank you. Thank you for sharing. Michael, do you want to answer? I defer to that. Defer? Yeah. All right. Lisa or Mayroz? I'll just address Ina's question. I feel like I work in a really fortunate position. I work at a tribal college. So we serve Washington, Oregon and Idaho and we're the only tribal college within those states. Our student population consists of a lot of non-traditional students. So we're able to serve those students and it varies from all across the US. We're located on the Lummi Nation and near the Lummi Nation High School. So I get to interact with a lot of the native community there. And that's just kind of like an example of how I've been able to interact there and establish our solar training program. We have a lot of solar suitcases that we get to provide hands-on training for the high schoolers there and local high schools. And we also offer summer youth camps for youth that are going into college or need any type of college preparedness, but also incorporating the science, technology, engineering, art, and math into our program. So, trying to make it short. Thank you. I want to address the extraction question and the combustion question. I think an extractive economy or approach comes in many ways. It's like, are you trying to extract our time and energy to be partners with you? Are you giving anything back? Are you extracting our labor to install these energy systems? Are you extracting from the earth? And what are you giving back? Or maybe the land stewards don't want that. There's actually a lawsuit filed by an environmental justice group on the lithium project in the Salton Sea in California because they didn't address the impacts to the communities very well. And so, your projects will or probably will run into delays if you didn't think about these extractive relationships or issues ahead of time. Having conversations with communities, especially the most impacted communities, will probably help speed up your projects if there's alignment there. I think that, so like the identified needs and the solutions of the community is what you want to enter into. And in California, for instance, when we said we want solar for all and we want renters to be able to enjoy the benefits of our solar revolution, we are able to find friends who are like, okay, let's dedicate a billion dollars to rooftop solar and affordable housing buildings in California with a workforce development part of that. And so that, to me, like existing solar that's already around with companies or the materials that already exist is going to fulfill a need that the environmental justice community is already asking. So that's, those are the kinds of win-win situations so that we need. And if you go to the basics of reduce reuse, recycle on the combustion of cardboard boxes, none of our communities want to be next to a plant that's going to burn anything because that has huge health impacts. So we're probably going to oppose those kinds of projects. So just, yeah, like can we reduce first, you know? Yeah, I think that we're going to get out, so we're not going to burn the boxes. We have compost and it's compost. It produces methane gas and that we want to take out. There's a whole environmental justice movement against biogas and it's being burned. And it's being burned. So, I mean, we can get into, we're in overtime, I'm going to call time out for Ben to give the last word to our panelists here. I want to thank you all for the steadiness of attention that you gave us after our first round of questions. The respect that was due to the folks that have traveled as far as they have in every dimension you could imagine, not just distance, but social, cultural, history, political, and personal education to give us the best of what they could and wish the earnest consortium all well on its way today. Can I ask you to help me thank Mary Rose, Taruk, Lisa Redsteer, Chad Nordlum, and Michael Wara.