 Hi, everyone. I'm glad to be introducing Senator Skinner and stepping in a little bit. I am a graduate of Stanford long time ago in Humboldt, so I'm always happy to help out. And I've had several affiliations with Stanford. I used to be an actual senior researcher with the Precourt Institute. I continue as a member of George Holtz's Energy and Climate Task Force and a scholar with the Bill Lane Center. And I was a state policymaker in California with the California Public Utilities Commission. I'm going to go ahead and introduce, just talk about, I don't have a slide for this, your speaker today, because I want to make sure as soon as she's ready to come on, we've got her ready to go. So I've had the honor of knowing Senator Skinner probably 40 years that I actually live in Berkeley. And she was very active and a host of things in Berkeley. And she became a member of the assembly. And I was one of her constituents. And then she became a member of the state Senate. And I continue to be a very proud constituent. She is absolutely a leader in California and frankly internationally on climate and clean energy. It's not on the blurb that was sent around, but one of her early achievements was she set up an NGO called ICLEI, which was basically to get local governments involved in climate action. And this again was 25 years ago. And it was the first time somebody focused on let's get local governments involved. And from there, she's had just a host of bills that she has sponsored. She has chaired many of the most influential committees in the California legislature on both the budget and on the environment. So I'm going to leave it to Senator Skinner to tell us what's going on in California these days. But think of her as a voice of knowing not just California, but nationally and internationally on sort of what are the leading edge policies and programs to adopt for clean energy and climate. So I'm taking up my little time that I now have because Senator Skinner is going to have to join us a little bit late. And as soon as she's ready to come in, we'll stop. But I decided instead of trying to talk about some of the pending things in California because Senator Skinner will talk about. I'm going to talk about a very precise area that I've been involved with in studying recently. And it's called extreme heat. And this is probably something most of you have never thought of. And what's interesting is there is not a definition of extreme heat because it depends upon the location it's happening, the duration of it is a single day and multi days and sort of a host of weather patterns. Generally, it's something at least 100 degrees or more. And the point being with climate change, you may think mostly about drought, or you think about flooding or you think about wildfires. But extreme heat is one of the worst impacts that we are now experiencing from climate change. Deaths happen because of extreme heat because vulnerable people get affected. There's a lot of health issues, visits to the emergency room, productivity is impacted. We have a lot of outdoor workers, construction, agriculture, and it's darn hard to be working when it's 104 degrees. And natural resource impacts and Professor Wein and I were just talking and I was thrilled to learn that he has a project going on in this area, actually about the impacts of extreme heat on agricultural production and productivity. So point everyone to Professor Wein if you want to get involved in that area. One of the other really concerning things is this happens in terms of populated areas, almost always in low income areas. Because study after study shows they don't have trees shading the neighborhood and they don't have air conditioned houses and they may not have well insulated houses as well. So it's something that is sort of this triple whammy of it's really focused on the low income disadvantaged communities. There was an assessment by California recently that said by 2050 extreme heat is going to be costing the state at least $100 billion a year. And so I didn't get a number for right now, but this is not a small issue. So that's what I really want to say. You may not have heard of it, but you're going to be hearing about next slide. So California not surprisingly is a leader in this area that there was a budget deal that was worked out last year that basically is giving us about $800 million over three years to implement what's called the California extreme heat action plan. And that's by far the biggest amount of funding that we're seeing anywhere, at least in the United States. And there's a lot of different agencies involved. I won't try to go through them, but those agencies have to plan what to do develop programs. Good news is there is money for research. So I wanted to target especially those students here and faculty that this is an area that actually has some money to be doing research because it is so new in the thinking there are grants for education for adaptation. And in terms of adaptation, we have a lot of the technology, fans, heat pumps, air conditioners, and what we call cool services, white roofs or lightly colored roofs. Pavements are a big area now because our cities are so paved over, but there's new materials being developed and even on walls thinking about the paint that's used. But again, this is an area where we need a lot more technology and a lot more understanding of how effective is the technology. But there's still a really some major gaps in programs and agency coordination because bottom line is there is no single agency in California or frankly at the federal level or anywhere that's in charge of thinking about and dealing with extreme heat. And then sort of the flip side is it's really actions at the local level and by individuals that have to deal with this that in a city it is the local building department that will be looking at what is the pavement that can be put in. You also have what are the permits that are required in terms of roofs. So that's a lot of action locally and then individually. Can I think about if I'm going to finally get an air conditioner that I get the most efficient air conditioning? How am I going to make that decision? Who's going to help me in making it? So huge amounts of effort that are needed but it's really starting to get attention. Next slide please. So then there are two important bills in the legislature that I wanted to mention and I don't think Senator Skinner is going to be talking about them because they're in the Assembly and she's a Senator but AB which stands for Assembly Bill 2076 and 2238. It would establish among these they would establish a new program right in the governor's office in the Office of Planning and Research or OPR and then within that there's another group called the Strategic Growth Council SGC that's really done some great work in my mind with local communities. So we would have finally sort of a place where this lives and we call the new extreme heat and community resilience program. But there would also be a lot of work with two other agencies. One would be with the natural resources agency because there's a lot of need to green up our cities and especially areas that are poor that don't have trees or canopies and so they would be hosting a lot of the effort in that area. And then the third major agency at least in my mind is one you unless you're involved in this you're not going to know it's called Communities Services CST. Community Services and Development it handles a lot of the low income energy programs and rate relief programs and so they're going to have a major role since the communities of our low income areas are so impacted by this. But this is a major thing getting a whole new program set up. They will be given then the authority to be giving out grants and technical assistance. And I just want to say again this is an area that I think is ripe for researchers and academic experts to be helping out that I work with Lawrence Berkeley National Lab has a heat island group where their work in this area is situated and they really are sort of an expert on call when some new like the city of Phoenix is getting very involved in this San Francisco is when you're trying to think of what to do how do you know what the performance is how do you evaluate it. This is an area where you want unbiased experts and I'm really hoping we'll get a group going in at Stanford as well. The bills call for development of a statewide extreme heat ranking system and that's because we don't know sort of just off the top of the head what do we mean and so the the talk is to develop something like what we have for hurricanes and our other adverse weather events so that there will be a way of saying you know we're in code red on extreme heat or we're going to be looking at code yellow and these are the areas that are going to be affected. Nothing like this exists that we know of so it's going to take a lot of effort of thinking about it but we've got to have a way that we then can communicate to the public be prepared this heat is coming here's how long we think it may last and here are the steps that you can be taking. The other part and this is I think important to say this is not just engineering or public policy there's a huge amount on public health and again Stanford with this wonderful hospital and whole health care system I think could be a major player because it would call for developing a hospitalization and death reporting system so we really start to understand what are these horrible impacts but it's not clear sort of how that system is going to be developed how those reports are going to be made if you also have a heart attack sort of like with COVID what do you say are the causes and very very important to think then how we target our efforts but it's going to take a lot of work and then interesting the Department of Insurance in California is likely to get involved they're going to be called upon to put in an extreme heat cost report because there are lots of costs for this but we're not sure at all now who's paying for them and eventually it is believed there will be insurance coverage for these events but we have to start with understanding what are the costs what are the causes and who's paying and possibly we may be looking at more funding there have been very specific requests made to increase it but we don't know yet if that's going to be happening so I think that is the end of what I prepared if Senator Skinner is not around I am more than happy to talk if that's what folks want me to do or answer questions any questions on what Diane just presented or her illustrious career at the BUC and that's the effort yeah you can ask me anything when she was at the BUC Diane was for many years I hope I got this right the kind of leading voice on energy efficiency I want to talk about that and how you orchestrated that whole effort here yeah right no I actually just talked with Jeff St. John of Canary Media today about energy efficiency so I wore that hat for a couple hours today California was where energy efficiency was developed and frankly Senator Skinner was very important in that area we developed the first building codes appliance standards we did the first utility programs when I had the good fortune to become a commissioner at the PUC we were overseeing over a billion dollars in spending that was raised from rates that utility customers pay that the utilities then administered and there was 200 separate programs and what I became concerned with is that we didn't have a good plan for where we were going and I said billion dollars a year 10 years that's 10 billion dollars if we were a corporation somebody would have a strategic plan so we developed a strategic plan which I'm happy to say is you know continue to be implemented in various ways some of the most interesting new developments in efficiency I think are that we have a lot of effort going into building decarbonization and specifically heat pumps and getting them out there and getting contractors involved in that the other thing is the data analytics and I had a great pleasure while I've been at Sanford even now working with Professor Rishi Jane so if anyone's interested in buildings efficiency and data analytics he's your go-to person doing some really wonderful wonderful work in this area but we are starting to see now in the private marketplace private companies that have as an example I gave this morning was just one company NRV that it has what's called an online marketplace that if you go on to it's a state sponsored website CAFTA which I won't try to talk tell you what it's about but you actually can then put in if you are thinking oh I need a new air conditioner or my water heater died and I got to get one today um it it very much develops algorithms that look at your location you're interested have you go to the least to the most efficient appliances and you can then also do it by cost etc and they partnered with contractors and companies so Best Buy helps out and the important thing I think is that it then offers very low cost financing so what it's doing is micro loans that we have not seen in the state before that somebody can get up to a five-year loan for a new furnace or a new air conditioner there's automatic transfer of payment monthly from a checking account the default rates appear to be very very little and you can qualify with extremely low credit scores so we're starting to penetrate we hope the renters market and low low income so that's just an example of how we wouldn't have known how to do this five years ago without the great data analytics that have developed and then thinking through sort of what's the marketing and having then instant feedback about what's working and what isn't so that's an example of what excites me in in this area is this is a good example to advance cooling that can decarbonize us yes that's what we're talking about is um heat pumps but getting more and more heat pumps put in that will cool um split systems so they both heat and and cool and it says another question should we I'm going to just keep talking John till you tell me not to shall we reconsider earth sheltering housing and other building buildings as we did experimentally in Alaska 10 years ago um I am certainly not an expert in this area but I think how we're going to be looking at the housing we build um may change dramatically over the next decade as we understand there's no standard for example um for how cool buildings have to be whereas on the heat side there are state laws all over the map that if you have a house or an apartment its furnace or other equipment needs to be sufficient that it can heat you to I don't know what you know the standard is but some level of standard so that people aren't getting too cold or getting sick and so what's being talked about is we probably need to develop some standards for buildings for the cooling aspect and that again will open up a whole another level I think of thinking about how we are building the buildings and what our technologies are going to be would engineering student projects to design new types of easily installed efficient low power cooling heating pumps be useful in California absolutely um with our new school coming out um it's going to have as I understand a lot of focus on doing student led or student involved projects that can then be implemented and tested out and this is an area where all hands on board um and I'm sure there's people connected but if not somebody can figure out how to get in touch with you do I have any thoughts on the current heat wave in California I am not familiar with what's going on though I've done work in India and that's you know in some ways the problems in California are so small compared to places like India and other places that have these terrible terrible um heat issues but we work closely with India and other places and so some of our solutions hopefully can be adopted um with prices increasing how will people stay stay cool that's that's a big problem and that's why there's talk about oh there's Senator Skinner hello I'm going to immediately stop can you hi Diane great well I took the time they asked me to talk so you know what I just did was a primer on California extreme heat efforts in California because I figured it won't you know I didn't at all get into anything else going on in California so please stop we're glad to have you thank you and I don't need to remind all of you who are part of this that the climate crisis is real and it's already upon us so you know fortunately California has been more of a leader than most every other government in the US in terms of taking it seriously and advancing policies and programs to reduce emissions what we've done a little less on but we're starting to amp this up is in the area of adaptation and uh investments that to help California be more resilient and now we're realizing that we have to because look at these wildfires that we're experiencing look at our ongoing droughts um California's always had droughts it's not new but it's much more challenging the the high heat extremes the uh you know you can get a record snowfall like we did this year but then it melts immediately then we do not have the water storage capacity we don't get the slow um runoff melting of the snow that normally would provide us the water ongoing so you know we're and of course sea level rise so we're right in the middle of in real time experiencing these impacts which are only going to be aggravated um but let's get back to this the realness of the crisis what now personally i've been involved in this issue since about 1990 and i started a program called cities for climate protection where back in the 90s we were recruiting cities all over the world to make commitments to make decisions that they were going to set goals for ghg reduction that they would do inventories of emissions in their communities and they would do inventories as to what how their policies impacted those emissions so in other words were they adopting policies that increased emissions or were they adopting policies that would help reverse them and so i was counting carbon back in the 90s and for all through the 90s and even up through you know 2010 2015 that we had high resistance to adapt to pushing adaptation because we really wanted to stop the climate crisis we wanted to reverse those emissions and avoid that that the most catastrophic impacts well i still hope that we can avoid the most catastrophic but we're in it now and did i believe that when i started in this work that in my lifetime i would so so immediately experience these climatic changes no no and i can tell you just from someone who hikes a lot the just the the changes in places where i used to go and have wildflowers at a certain time of year or certain species that don't exist or places that i snorkel where the coral is all dead and various things that did i sure i knew that those were potential impacts but did i think that i would personally experience them no so we have got to double down on emissions reductions no questions double down but it's not going to be enough we also have to do everything we can to capture carbon and when i say that i mean not just within those things that are emission producing and i'll explain a bill that i'm carrying right now on cement for example which has process emissions that even if you switch cement over to the if you even you were powering your cement production with 100 renewable energy you would still be producing process emissions because of the nature of the content of cement so we got to capture that but we also have to maximize nature's ability to capture when i say that we mean that's clearly what we talk about when we say protect forest protect the amazon but there's also great capacity within soils soils are alive at least the optimal soil and if we can bring back that regenerative regenerative practice whether it's in ag agriculture practices or even grasslands forests you name it to keep soil alive the microorganisms in soil have great capacity to capture carbon there's also a lot of research now showing that that fungus mycorrhizal mycorrhizae from fungus has great capacity for this as do of course microorganisms in our oceans and waterways and plants so we need to understand that better and maximize that capture or sequestration of carbon as well as direct air capture which is only being really experimented with there are you know some places you know projects in iceland a project in germany a project here and there but it's not yet commercially viable but we've got to send the right type of market signals to get the research and the development because we've got to pull carbon out of the air at the same time we're doubling down on emissions reductions to really avoid the most catastrophic and now is california doing all of that yet no but the governor knew some in the budget that he proposed in january and he will be revising that proposal in may but in january you saw and you can see if you go up in the governor's website that he's proposing some very very significant investments to to completely transform our transportation sector so that vehicles are zeb zero mission primarily electric and putting a lot of money towards electric vehicle infrastructure charging infrastructure and also support for people to be able to purchase electric vehicles and convert to electric vehicles but the the other things that the governor had in his january budget along these lines are 100 million for green hydrogen electrolyzers so we can use renewable energy that we at times were more over producing it to then produce hydrogen money for offshore wind and there's some spots around the california coast that are really good for offshore wind 380 million for long duration storage which we're hoping will be beyond just battery but certainly battery has a huge role and we have utility grade batteries now for long for they're a little shorter duration we want we obviously need longer duration hydrogen's a great capacity for long duration storage as some other things and he's put in a billion for building decarbonization and what i'm expecting is that when the governor puts out his budget for may that he will be building on those he won't be reducing any of those but we may see some additional investments because revenues are up right now now in the meantime the air resources board california air resources board which is the agency responsible to basically put together the plans and implement most of california's very ambitious climate protection goals including ab 32 sb third sb what was the number 32 are 32 i mean ab 32 sb 32 sb 32 which doubled up so ab 32 had a was very ambitious when it was adopted back in 2007 but the uh but sb 32 doubles up those and gets us an even bigger uh ghg reduction target and then of course there's targets around carbon neutrality and uh zero emission vehicles and various things like that most of which are in the responsibility of the air resources board to develop the programs and plans for implementation so how the air resources board does that primarily is through something they call the scoping plan and carb just updated the scoping plan for california it's on their website now they just released their newest version and their plan is to get california to be carbon neutral by 2045 and in that scenario that scoping plan scenario they include reliance on both emissions reductions and natural and what i'll call for now technological carbon sequestration or carbon capture so exactly what i was talking about before um now i'm the budget chair for the state senate and the state senate we have the r pro tem tony akins senator tony akins just decided that she wanted the senate to be very ambitious and aggressive around climate the climate crisis this year so she set up a working group in the state senate which is headed up by senator john laird and there's a number a lot of different senators who are participating in it and they are rolling out bills right now and at the same time that they're rolling out some policy bills we're also looking at a budget plan that would add to the investments that the governor is um arguing for and some of the investments we're going to be um asking for are investments that would have california the state put its money where its mouth is and move its own vehicles the states the vehicles we purchase to zev at a quicker timeline than we had previously because we figure if we're expecting the private sector to do it then we need to use our market power to affect that which also can help bring down prices and clearly we'll invest in infrastructure for charging because we'll need to charge those state vehicles so we want to move that up we also want to we're going to put a lot of infrastructure capital money in the whole adaptation and resiliency around drought around improving drinking water wildfire mitigation including fuel reduction and also sea level rise because if you look at a lot of california's economic engines whether it's our ports our airports various others they're all the major ones are all on the coast and very very vulnerable to sea level rise so we have we are probably going to propose sometime this week a multi and i'm talking multi multi billion dollar investment in those areas the senate working group on climates that i just referenced just release their first bill and their first bill is sp 1020 and you can go on the what's called the legislative data site and see all the language for that bill but i'll give you the highlights of what it's going to do it accelerates our clean energy goals so in other words our renewable electricity portfolio goals for electricity purchased by the state or generated in the state to 100 by 2030 rather than 2045 so it jumps it up and it sets a goal of 95 renewable for all retail sales by 2040 and the existing law is 100 by 2045 and we're trying to increase the coordination between our various agencies responsible for transmission because we're going to need transmission upgrades as we expand our reliance on renewable generation for electricity and as we expand our reliance on using electricity to power vehicles and to switch buildings over now we don't expect all buildings to be switched over quickly to be coming all electric but we need to plan for that and we need to get off of natural gas and you need the infrastructure to do that so that's the bill sp 1020 everything i mentioned only the first things are clear components of it the other things i mentioned are going to be more in some other bills that come forward and in the budget proposals that we make to add to the governor's proposals the other thing that our working group is recommending is establishing a california affordable decarbonization authority that would administer a climate and equity trust fund to help you know certain of these things are going to have higher costs and we do not want to put undue burden on our lowest income residents and while california's revenues are really healthy we're a very strong economy we have a lot of residents who are still struggling and who are with our high costs of living and such that if we as we pursue our very important climate goals add more cost burden to them it can be it's it's really unfair and so we want to try to to establish mechanisms to help them be able to participate in this decarbonized economy and society in a way that doesn't hurt their quality of life in the short term now i'll jump over to the bills that i've introduced this year on this question meaning on uh on addressing our climate crisis and here's the bills that i'm carrying this year i have sb and just putting it in a context i have not carried um i've been in the legislature since 2008 so i came in after our first really big signature bill which was ab 32 but i was a core part of the negotiations around our all of our renewable portfolio standards and our renewable portfolio standards is that rps is the term for our goals for switching our electricity sector to renewable so we started out first with 25 percent and we went up to 50 percent now we're at the 100 percent and now we're moving dates to get to that even faster but the some of the other bills that i've carried in the past i'm the person that carried the bill that established california's utilities buying energy storage so the first time that california put uh utility grade batteries onto the you know within the um utility sector within the transmission sector was due to a bill that i carried and at the point that i carried it which was in 2009 people were like you know this will never happen batteries are too expensive you can't expect this but within very few years california had the largest market share of this utility grade storage and we completely changed the landscape around that technology and its use not only in the california and the us but worldwide um so now i'm trying to do similar things around hydrogen and around carbon sequestration when it comes to certain industrial processes so i'll mention i'll describe those bills now so i'm carrying sb 1075 on hydrogen and the reason i'm interested in green hydrogen is because we you know we're trying to decarbonize everything but you take long haul trucking port operations ships planes they're harder to electrify we don't yet we haven't made the breakthroughs and battery yet uh i'm hoping that we will someday but hydrogen has that capacity but it's no good if we produce that hydrogen from fossil fuels and given that we've really brought down the cost of the generation of electricity from renewable sources and also those sources are at oftentimes they're generating more electricity than we need at the point that they're at their maximum generation so wind or solar for example we can in effect capture that excess generation and utilize it rather than directly onto the grid utilize it to produce hydrogen whether it's electrolysis or other means and then that hydrogen is very flexible that hydrogen then can be used to store energy that hydrogen can be used to fuel transportation a variety of different applications and it's one of the few renewable sources that has that different kind of flexible capacity so 1075 jump starts california's use of green hydrogen and it also pushes california towards trying to invest some state matching money so that we could compete with the federal government or rather we could compete for the federal dollars that were in the the infrastructure bill that got passed that is is providing some funding including for hydrogen and i want california to maximize that and potentially have be selected as one of the hydrogen hubs so that's a purpose of sp 1075 and then i have sp 1010 which i a little bit referenced which is my clean fleets bill and that is to get california we own 40 000 vehicles and most of which are still fueled by fossil fuels um so i want to accelerate the purchase of our state agency it's called dgs department of governmental services they're the ones who buy those vehicles and i want to make sure that we are accelerating and amping up the date for when we will buy all zeps because when we use our market power that way we helped bring down prices and we helped make it easier for others to do the same thing so that's my bill sp 1010 then i've got sp 905 which would i referenced in the opening of this talk about the process emissions from cement manufacturer so what this bill does would allow for a few of the cement manufacturing facilities in california to pilot capturing carbon and then geologically sequestering it and we're not doing that right now in california so i want to do that because there's a lot of fear around geologic sequestration when you think about the eliso canyon some of you may be familiar a few years ago eliso canyon was a place where natural gas was being stored and the the thought was that okay this is completely uh this these caverns are completely safe they're uh you know nothing's going to escape and they started it started escaping and it created many many problems and i think it was so cal gas that was it was their facility i can't remember it was southern california edison or so cal gas and it just added to people's fear that if you sequester carbon it will just escape and then people have fears that carbon itself would be dangerous in the immediate way meaning have an immediate pollution on that neighborhood now we know that that's not the case though certainly it does for the atmosphere but we don't we need to pilot some projects to show that it can work and then to learn what it is we have to do to make sure that it works so my bill sp905 would allow a few california cement manufacturing facilities to pilot capturing that carbon released from their process emissions and store it geologically then lastly i have sp1206 now when i said we have to double down on emissions reductions one of the things that i think california should do is focus on the short-lived climate pollutants and when i say that the short-lived climate pollutants are things like methane diesel so the dirty the black carbon refrigerants like hcfcs those short-lived climate pollutants will only have a bad effect in the atmosphere for maybe 20 years but there are thousands of times more powerful than co2 and if we can do everything we can to keep those out of the atmosphere in this next 10 20 year period we buy time for that transition to get fully off of fossil fuels so my bill sp1206 would move california more aggressively off the the short-lived climate polluting refrigerants so right now we've moved the refrigerants from 20 years ago were called cfcs and they were very damaging to the ozone layer and they were short-lived climate pollutants however in replacing them we got rid of a thing that damaged the ozone layer but we replaced them with something that was still a short-lived climate pollutant meaning an hfc and what i want to do now is try to get even away from those and uh and if we can't in those applications where we can't completely eliminate its use then require that it be captured when you repair it or when you dispose of it that it's never released so um that's my bill sp1206 and let me see if there was anything else i wanted to to point out um um back to the governor's uh budget i said that very significant investments in the electric vehicles and zero emission vehicles but let me state what they are it was his january proposal had six billion in investments over five years a billion for light duty vehicles four billion for medium and heavy so we're getting into the goods movement type area and one billion for school buses and infrastructure and i was really glad to see that for school buses um just an important message to kids and uh good one so that's what i wanted to highlight for you and then i am happy to take questions there is much more that california is doing there's also much more california could be doing and uh maybe in our dialogue we can get into some of that if you could wave a magic wand so we're not in the immediate political fight of the budget and the legislature right what are the barriers with our current um government structure do you think you've had long history of working with a lot of different agencies um i think one of the values is we have deep expertise within the agencies and you can't just reach a hold there's very different cultures but are there you know two or three things that you think that maybe california should be working on to achieve these um tremendously ambitious goals i didn't plant this question so okay um you know that's a good question um or do you think we're doing it's not worth you know basically things are moving along and life's not perfect i mean that's another well you know life is definitely not perfect and any human endeavor whether it's business government families schools i mean it's human endeavor so it's gonna have its foibles right and i actually think that our air resources board is doing a great job and i i feel like they there's lots you know anybody could complain about whatever process of a government but they they when i think about what you need to do to address the climate crisis number one you better understand it what's driving it what are the emissions that are causing it what are the sources so that's one of the core things that a rb does in the scoping plan is they update they do an analysis all right here's california's emissions profile these are where it's coming from so if we're if we are trying to achieve a 50 reduction or a 60 we better be targeting this now when you look at where are the emissions coming from they're coming from transportation that's the highest amount our while i am 100 supportive of our electricity goals in moving to um to fully to non-carbon to fully renewable electricity our electricity is the least worry to be perfectly blunt of in our of our carbon profile so in other words if i for example if you're a homeowner right now i would tell you get rid of your gas appliances before you put solar in your roof why if you hadn't got solar already the reason is because our electricity that's coming into your house already is pretty much solar not 100 but close enough it's got a very low carbon coefficient but your water heater your stove and your uh your home heater are all gas and there's where your carbon is that's your carbon in the household in california by and large so but you think about how do you change that and every individual either homeowner or building owner making those changes that's those are it's easier in a way to uh to fix the big generation of electricity even if we really have to get at this you know this other thing um so it's partly just the number of actors that you have in order to affect the change and then you take the same thing about transportation you've got all these vehicles out there huge number of vehicles and how is it that i mean most of us don't i mean we might love a new vehicle but most of us will keep our vehicle for a good number of years before we switch it out so you know how fast are people going to switch over to an ev and will they switch to the ev if they don't feel like it's easy just right there to charge it at home or if they feel like you know there's a lot of misperception about most of us don't drive that far we really an ev with a hundred mile range is more than enough for us but of course now today on the market there's evs with way longer range so all these range anxieties are really um not needed but that's hard still to get a consumer to really embrace so a lot of this is just um trying to get at how how how do we make the big changes and yet still support all the individual actors meaning you know the people in their homes or the vehicle owner or whatever to also make the changes in order to affect it and that's not easy right but we're i think ARB is doing a good is doing a good job with always like any of us always room for improvement i would say the thing that and these are um you know this this horse got out of the wagon a long time ago uh but california is the reason our transportation emissions are so high yes because our vehicles are dependent on fossil fuels but because our land use policies encouraged long drives meaning encouraged growth of VMT rather than non-growth and when i say that i mean you look at the the typical land use policy up and down california housing is segregated from jobs and segregated from services so you have to take kids to school you have to go to work you have to get you know buy groceries or whatever you know other than now the switch to online you had to drive all different places and you had to drive far and by not building housing and for 40 years we pretty much did not build enough housing we we pushed housing further and further away from job centers which of course made you dependent on your car that much more and so you know the fossil fuel vehicles never that great but the fossil fuel vehicle where you only have to drive six miles compared to the fossil fuel vehicle where you have to drive round trip 125 each day that's a big difference in terms of emissions so land use policies and housing policies are two very very core reasons why california has high emissions in the transportation sector and those we're working on changing those they aren't necessarily arbs per view but there's enough of us in the legislature who are understanding it we're pushing it but local governments are not always amenable thank you so much for being here senator skinner it's an honor i have a question about something you mentioned about median and heavy vehicles you mentioned the problems you have to be carbonizing them and you also mentioned your interest in hydrogen live as the 1075 but i'm also interested in what do you think the rule of renewable natural gas is in this landscape of medium and heavy beauty vehicles given that you know by utilizing this renewable natural gas it would also be reducing short-lived forest service like methane that you will also mentioned um and given that california is also very interested in installing any rocket digest there's some theories um so just your perspective on hydrogen and renewable natural right well i clearly as i described i clearly think we you know we need to use every tool in the toolbox i think that we should be utilizing um renewable natural gas and hydrogen the concern about um the renewable natural gas is there's fears by um on the one hand we have a great infrastructure already pipes and and everything to move that kind of stuff around to get it where we need it however the fear is that you know how much can we actually produce of renewable and and are we just prolonging the use of natural gas if we in effect integrate those sources and i think that's one of those questions where i feel like as long as we have clear enough goals to move off of the fossil fuel natural gas we should not be limiting the thing that can be utilized right away to replace it it just you have to have those belts and suspenders on everything but it's been an area that's been a little bit stuck i think for some people i see a question in the chat of who might have the responsibility for developing cool building standards that's the energy commission and uh those are needed and i'm glad that diane mentioned them because they not only would help us all of us be more comfortable in those horrible heat waves they would contribute less that um my real mentor brilliant brilliant man art rosenfeldt who um was really the founder of all of california's efficiency policies he and steven chou who was uh head of doe and obama they did a brilliant research that showed that just applying cool roof and other cool community strategies not only help you know the quality of life but it would hugely reduce emissions because it would reduce our demand of air conditioning and other things so it had it was a and diane probably can cite the data on it better than i but i've been disappointed that california has not been more aggressive in that area but it's the california energy commission who has that response one more quick question it is needed to be more aggressive if you ever want thoughts hi there senator skinner first thanks so much for taking time to talk to us today um so my question is on uh california's outlook on carbon offsets specifically um in terms of both the offsets on the compliance market um so you know those that are contained within the in the capricade system and then also um you know over the past couple years we've seen the voluntary carbon offset markets grow quite significantly um it seems like especially with california's commitments to increase carbon removal and in other forms of sequestration these offset markets are going to be very important um but could you talk to your sort of outlook on how you think these markets will best develop in what california's role um in in uh in helping them develop will be of the next sort of decade so i'm not sure if i caught everything um it was around offsets but yeah i was having a little hard time hearing maybe you could just say so in in essence you want to know what specific thing about um the offsets um just how you see the role of offsets developing in california's capricade um system you know right now they're right they can be four percent of of uh utilities uh emissions scoring right and then also if you could touch on uh how california views regulating the voluntary carbon offset markets um right um i did a bill last year to so there's a trend right now a lot of companies in trying to be responsive to the climate crisis are indicating that they're going to be you know 100 carbon neutral by certain you know date and or the intention to go carbon neutral and to do that for many of them they're going to need offsets and so there's the potential and there already is a private sector market around offsets but i wanted to make sure that there were standards and quality offsets that when a company made an investment that they you know you could have some integrity for the quality of those offsets so i did a bill last year in that area asking arb to set those to set up such standards um now california's there's been criticism around our both use of offsets that they haven't been the type of quality that people were hoping um i have not really looked into that in detail recently so i can't quite answer that though i feel that there's also been a a strong feeling that california should only invest in offsets that benefit californians are so more immediate to california and part of that is around the issues of environmental justice that we have so many communities that have had to bear the burden of the environmental damage and environmental pollutants more than other communities and that one the i am not opposed to that but when i was a when i used to work internationally as the head of this program called cities for climate protection i was struck so this i'll end with this little analogy so i had a couple of small cities from sweden in my project and one of the cities i'm going to forget its name it's very small community maybe 12 000 people and they decided they were going to go 100 fossil free and they so they used biomass they used i mean they were they were very very creative and very brilliant and they pulled it off and but they spent a lot of money their their cost per capita was very high and they were presenting what they had done to one of our workshops where we had city representatives from south africa from india from various countries and the south africans stood up and they were aghast they said it's lovely that you've done this now you are now you've reduced this amount of carbon at this cost if you had given us that same amount of money we could have 10 times reduced the carbon in our community than what you did and so in effect they were arguing for you you know offsets and such where and it was a very interesting discussion because i had not thought of it in that context and given that this is a global crisis we should be thinking about where we make our investments to get the biggest reductions because the atmosphere is global but i also think equity is an important factor to it's equity to do that but it's also equity to reinvest in communities that have suffered the the most significant brunt of your environmental problems great with that said thank you so much senators skinner for that rapid grand tour of climate and energy policy here in california and i think i'd speak for everybody here online thank you for your role in making it all happen as both citizens and analysts thank you very much for joining us you're welcome and diane's been a great contributor to all of this also she deserves uh equal thanks