 Good afternoon, Howard Wigg, Code Greens, Think Tech, Hawaii, coming to you from the state, which was the first to declare the goal of 100% clean energy by the year 2045. But wait a minute, a lot of us are not going to be still employed by the year 2045. What do we do about that? We add the ball to our younger people and who could be younger than high school students and we're very honored to have Chisato Taruri of Ilani School, a junior who is one of the climate change forum leaders or high school students. So welcome Chisato, so honored to have you here. And she's going to be talking about a very, very simple subject. No, it's a joke. That's not very simple. It's about an energy infrastructure. And Chisato is one of the activists here in the state of Hawaii and we're so blessed to have young people like her to hand the energy efficiency and resource efficiency ball over to. So Chisato, why don't you introduce yourself and just take it away and fly. Great. Hi, my name is Chisato. I'm a junior at Ilani, one of the directors for the Climate Future Forum or CFF, as well as the youth policy leader for the Sustainable Infrastructure and Development Policy Group at CFF, which I hope to cover today. And sorry, do you mind showing the presentation? Thank you. So first, I'm going to give a brief summary of what happened last year on December 9th. The Climate Future Forum held their annual youth organized event at the state capitol with over 80 youth, 25 nonprofits, and nine legislative offices participating. And the purpose was to empower the youth in Hawaii to engage more effectively in our democracy, take a seat at the table, along with experts and lawmakers in discussions of climate policy. And we did this by holding workshops each one dedicated to a distinct policy angle of climate change. We also taught them how to navigate the legislative process and provided them with the opportunity to make meaningful connection with their lawmakers, as well as fellow activists in their community. And by the end, the students came up with their own policy agenda for the upcoming legislative session, which they presented to their lawmakers and fellow youth. And of course, while this event is a very crucial and emblematic of our mission, the Climate Future Forum is a lot more than this one event. We know climate policy needs to be a constant dialogue within different groups. And that's why CFF works both in and out of the legislative session to make sure we're maintaining the momentum to push forward the environmental legislation that we urgently need. All right, so I can go to the next slide. So our long-term mission is to ultimately empower youth and democracy to provide them with the resources they need to follow their climate policy agenda, to bridge that gap between ourselves and our elected officials, and to build and maintain our pressure on government. And the reason for CFF's mission is because, you know, at the end of the day, we know climate change and intergenerational crisis, and that's why climate action has to be an intergenerational movement. And our youth today are keenly aware of this. There's a collective obligation, a collective urgency for us to do anything. You know, Greta Thunberg gives an outstanding example, but I mean, you go to any school campus today and you'll see so many students desperate to do their part. And too often, that desperation is taken advantage of. And the burden of climate change is placed on us individually. You know, there's endless messaging out there urging individual accountability to clean up beaches, to recycle, to reduce race, to stop using plastic, to be ethical consumers. But the bottom line is that in order for any of these individual efforts to be meaningful, we need systemic reform. And we need institutional policy changes. We need huge changes to our system from our government. I get these demanding efforts for a reliable systemic solution that our governments are tasked with has in many ways been passed on to the shoulders of ordinary citizens and youth especially. And also in it makes us critical of each other instead of the system of the people in power. And our hope is that the climate future forum can reduce these types of distractions and keep our youths focused on our government, our legislature, and our elected officials. Yeah, and I hope if there's one takeaway in this presentation, I hope it's that. Yeah, can you go to the next slide? So before going to the policy group, I just want to emphasize our appreciation for everyone who made the climate future forum happen. So many amazing grassroots organizations are supporting us and the event could not have happened without them. And if you go to our next slide, you'll see the lawmakers who spoke at our event, Senator Lee, Senator Rhodes, Senator Gammer, Representative Russo who have been incredibly supportive of our mission from the very start. We also want to thank our national legislators for giving incredible speeches about the importance of youth participation. It was a very inspiration off of the youth that day to be reminded of the power our voices hold. If you go to the next slide, you'll see, like I mentioned earlier, we have five different workshops each dedicated to a distinct policy angle of climate change. And that's because we organize our entire forum that way to find different policy groups. Each group is led by two youth policy leaders and adult mentors. One of the youth policy leaders from the Sustainable Infrastructure and Development Group, which I'll be talking about today. Fortunately, my partner, Sochi, who is also a policy leader, she couldn't make it today. To go to the next slide, I want to go to our policy group's mentors, Professor Renard and Estanis, Professor Kauffman and Representative Garrett for all the guidance they've provided for our group. But yeah, it's about time I started talking about our policy priorities. So if you go to the next slide, you'll see that as a policy group, we focused on the sustainability of our infrastructure. You know, we're primarily concerned with the energy efficiency of our infrastructure and urban development. And there are two different ways to accomplish this. One, to expand usage of renewable energy and two, directly reduce our usage of energy. When it comes to the first way, expanding our use of renewable energy, our goal is to make renewables accessible and affordable. And this could be done through subsidies. This could be done by creating more EV charging infrastructure, making sure our infrastructure is EV and PV ready to begin with. And of course, we're forming our current permitting process. Right now, solar panel approvals can be delayed for more than a year. And it doesn't have to be that way. You know, the technology, such as SolarApp Plus, which is an online automated permitting platform, it streamlines the process down to weeks and even days. So the technology is there. It's just a matter of making sure the state agencies that are issuing the permits are using them. Chisato, could you define for the audience EV and PV? Right. EV means electric vehicle and PV means photovoltaic energy. Thank you. Yeah. So that was the first part. But if you go to the next slide, we'll see our second part, which is reducing our usage of energy to begin with. So a lot of us have fallen prey in the assumption that we're going to stop climate change with purely technology. You know, with with Will D and I and batteries and smart grids and carbon sequestration to put it another way by changing the way it's built. That isn't entirely the case. A lot of it comes down to why we even do things in the first place. You know, why do we consume so much land? Why do we consume so much energy? Why do we consume so much material for each person? You know, after all, the U.S. has one of the highest emissions per capita in the world. Why does one family have to own multiple cars? You know, why do we need a car to do anything? Why can't we walk to school or to work or to the park or the library or the grocery store? And when we start asking those questions, it ultimately comes down to land use or the way we use land, which in our case means zoning. And to briefly explain what zoning law is, there's basically the rules that divide our land into different areas that we can determine what can be built on each area of land or a zone. And the U.S. or land is basically divided by their functional uses. So one zone is just for commercial buildings, one is for apartments, one is for single family homes. And we call these single use zones that you might be more familiar with as the basically low density suburban areas. And going back to that question, you know, why do we do things this way? You know, it's because so much of our land is zoned for single use, single family homes. Our urban landscape is dominated by by these low density, single use, single family zoning, which means all aspects of our life, all our needs and our wants and our uses are segregated and spread far apart from one another. You know, our grocery stores in one place, our offices and other, our schools and parks and yet another area. And the only thing that connects them are the endless, complicated networks and roads and highways, you know, which means we need more cars, which means we need huge parking lots everywhere. And I could go on and on and on, but you can see how wasteful this all is. And the reason why we live too large, why we consume too much, it's because that's the only lifestyle that our urban landscape allows the only thing that our zoning law allows. So if you go to the next slide, you know, let's take a look at what our zoning laws look like. Here are the residential zones for Honolulu County. And you can see I have them in order of increasing density. All the zones that start with R, you know, R5, R10, R20, these are all the single family zones with minimum lot flies and minimum parking requirements. And going down, you see zoning for multifamily housing apartments. You can go down even further and you see mixed new zones that allow commercial and residential infrastructure to be built in the same place. And so my partner, Audrey, who was on your show a while back for the climate and economy policy group, we did some research together where we ranked these residential zones by regulated density and using the geoprocessing tool called GIS. We spatially joined census trap data with these residential zones and we ran a regression analysis to observe the relationship between regulated density and average household emissions. And that's what these graphs show. As you can see, as regulated density increases, the average household emissions also decreased significantly with households in the lowest density zone at 7,000 kilograms of carbon emissions, basically emitting nearly twice the average household in the highest density zone, which is around 3,500 kilograms of carbon emissions. And we see the same trend in commutations. And the difference is even more stark when you look at total emissions. And then look, obviously, there are some caveats to our research here. You know, first, we're using data from 2020, which, you know, it was not a good year to measure emissions. A second, higher density zones were so rare in Hawaii, making the sample size for these households very small, as you can see. And third, the transportation data only accounts for committing to work. So it doesn't account for things like, you know, transportation for leisure activity or transportation for, you know, running errands and such. The fourth caveat here is that higher-income households are more likely to emit more and they're also more likely to live in single-bounded households. So there are some confounding factors that we haven't accounted for yet. But even accounting for these caveats gets the significance of the relationship. It's clear. If you go to the next slide. Oh, Tilschi Sato, could you, before we get to the next slide, could you go into some detail and see what we're looking at at the X line and what we're looking at the Y line? Oh yeah, oh yeah, of course. So the X line shows we basically orderly ranked each of the zones by their regulated density. So how dense each of the zone is, with 12 being the most dense zone and one being the least dense zone. So in one through through A, you'll see the mostly the single-family homes. So things like R5, R10, or 20, those are all single-family zones. We don't unlock size requirements. And as you go further from 8 through 10, you'll see like apartment zones and mixed-use district, which are a lot more dense and they have mixed residential and commercial buildings. And you'll see on the Y axis, that's where we see the sum of the total emissions by in kilograms. And so you'll see a trend where as we increase the regulated density, you see an interest relationship where the sum of total emissions actually decreases. And let me point out that somebody who lives in a rural area, if they need a loaf of bread, they might have to hop in the car and drive 10 miles to get an initial bread. Whereas somebody who lives in a dense area, like Maikiki or Waikiki, they want a loaf of bread, they walk two blocks away and boom, there's their loaf of bread. So much more energy-efficient to get a loaf of bread in a high-density area. Anything? Yeah, that's basically it. It's about walkability, how much we're dependent on cars. It's all very much determined by the zone that we live in. But yeah, our research only looked at Honolulu County. But if you look at slide 12, we see this relationship on the national level as well. Where the amount of energy consumption in apartments is far lower than their actual proportion of total households. And in fact, the National Residential Energy Consumption Survey found that households in apartments with five or more units sees about half as much energy as other types of plants. And if you go to the next slide, you'll see another separate study finds the same thing with per capita water consumption being far lower in higher densities. And what's even more fascinating is that it found the even green suburban single-family households. They used hybrids and retrofitted clean energy. Even those households ended up consuming more than households in denser urban areas. Go to the next slide and you'll see that UC Berkeley, they used advanced modeling to display the average carbon footprint in each neighborhood. And they also consistently find higher emissions in lower density suburban areas. And in fact, the average carbon footprint in the dense urban core of these cities emit about 15% below average while households in distant suburbs were about twice the average. And if you go to the next slide, you'll see that I've appeared in another way. Suburban households emit up to four times the emissions that households in denser areas. And that's more than enough to wipe out the energy saved from lower emission households in higher density areas. And we know why this phenomenon exists. It's because lower density single-family homes require more physical capital per person, more building materials, concrete, asphalt, all the roads and parking lots more. That also means more storm water and flash flooding, you know, more traffic congestion means higher utility bills because more energy is needed to heat up and cool down these homes. And if you go to slide 16, you'll see I put a quote here on by Andres Duane, a leader of the New Yorkist Movement and the author of one of my favorite books and quoting him like all the time, Suburban Nation. And he puts it very eloquently. In Suburbia, there's only one available lifestyle to own a car and to need it for everything. So if you go to slide 17, you'll see a map of our zones. And you might be asking, you know, so what's the problem? You know, can we just build more density or multi-family homes and mix different building types in there? And well, the thing is, we actually can't. This here is an exclusively American phenomenon where only over 75% of all residential land in the U.S. is zoned only for single-use single-family homes. And it's even more severe here in Honolulu, as you can see, you know, all the colored areas are zoned for residential zones where you're allowed to build the residential infrastructure. And if it's a shade of red, that means it's a single-family single-use area. And the blue and greens are the multi-family mixed-use areas. And you can hardly make them out with how little there is. And so that's, you know, the problem that we're dealing with here. So if you go to the next slide, you'll see, you know, we need to reform our city zoning laws on the state level so that this type of, you know, gratuitously unnecessarily wasteful lifestyle is not our only option. We like to think of the American lifestyle as being so free and independent. But the irony is it really isn't, you know, we treat our cars like vehicles of freedom when in reality it's the only option we're given. And we think we're independent, but we're utterly dependent on our cars. So our Sustainable Infrastructure and Development Policy Group, we've created a list of bills to match our policy agenda around 60 in total to address over these issues. And I just want to highlight some of the major bills that we'll be tracking for this session. So we go to slide 19. You'll see that we're starting off with, you know, electrification and focusing the renewable energy. So first one, require state contracts or school buses to be electric. We're providing rebates for ED charging infrastructure and new affordable housing, funding ED charging systems and infrastructure, requiring rooftop solar and all these new single-family homes and have the bill numbers listed there. If you go to the next slide, you'll see we're requiring new residential construction to be PV-ready and uncertain new residential construction to be EV-ready and requiring agencies, you know, issuing the permits to use solar panels, to use SolarApp Plus, which is an online platform that will streamline the whole permitting process a lot more. If you go to the next slide, that's when we go into, you know, reducing our energy consumption, which means, you know, requiring strategies to, you know, reduce our vehicle miles traveled and create a rapport for the legislature, you know, tracking those strategies. We also have bills in place that want to allow four-plexes in residential zones because currently in most of our residential zones, they only allow single-family homes. So upping that density of it, you know, four-plexes, they're not even that dense, but just increasing it by that much will reduce our energy consumption by a lot. And the next one is legalizing mixed-use residential zones in all commercial zones. So in other words, allowing residential construction to be built in commercial zones. And of course, there's going to be exceptions. The county will be allowed to, you know, put in their individual restrictions, but ultimately, by building residential on construction in commercial zones, what we're doing is we're promoting walkability. We're promoting, you know, being less dependent on the car, you know, walking to the destinations that you, you know, like activity centers. And what we're also doing is we're promoting the growth of small businesses because people will be engaging and interacting with the businesses. But yeah, if you want to track these bills, I'll go to the next slide to show basically the, how to, you know, turn on your serial unification to basically go to the participate section and then you write in the bill that you want to follow. If we go to the next slide, you can see that you just click one button to submit testimony and all you have to say is I support the bill and that's going to be enough to show your support. And if you go to the next slide, you'll see a lot of different ways in support CFF and join CFF and, you know, join movement. But, um, yeah, I guess that's basically it. If you have any questions. Well, can you define CFFs? Oh, yeah, CFF is the climate that you're for. That's the acronym we use. And can you give us a little background? Is this Hawaii centric or is it part of a national program? All right. So, you know, the climate change forum, you know, as I mentioned earlier, it's Hawaii centric and the mission is to basically promote and encourage our youth to engage more effectively in our democracy and because the state centric means engage more effectively in our state legislature and to really make sure that, you know, that relationship between our elected officials and our youth, make sure that it's strong and make sure that our youth are maintaining their focus on our government. Yeah. And here's a larger question. We know about global warming and we know about bad things happening in the ocean and the air and so forth, so forth. Some of us say in 20, 30 years, we will not be on the planet anymore. But people your age are going to be on this planet, believe it or not, for at least 50 or 60 more years. What is the all over trend with each successive years? What happens to our planet? Or what is happening to our planet? Well, we're seeing right now what's happening to our planet with all the natural disasters that are occurring, the wildfires in Maui, and that's only part of a pattern that we're seeing everywhere. And honestly, we're very privileged in the U.S. because despite being the main emitters, the second largest cumulative emitter of carbon emissions, we're probably going to be the nation that suffers the least from these consequences because we aren't as vulnerable to the destruction. I guess Hawaii more so is vulnerable, but ultimately, it's the lower income nations, the nations surrounded by water that are going to be more vulnerable to these adverse effects. And so, definitely, targeting climate changing and mitigating it, it's definitely an issue of equality and an issue of justice as much as it is the issue of you know, stating the planet. And something that my office, I'm with the Hawaii State Energy Office, is involved in, we've got a lot of federal funds coming down the pike and we are ordered by the Feds who are giving us this money to focus on disadvantaged communities or low income communities. Is your group focused on that also? Yeah. So, as I mentioned before, our Sunday Future Forum, we have five different policy groups. The policy group that I discussed today is only the Sustainable Infrastructure and Development Group, but we have an entire policy group called the Climate Justice Group, which is dedicated to justice and equality and making sure that no one gets left behind in the transition towards a cleaner economy. And even the Climate Economy Group, they're promoting, one of their main bills that they're promoting is a carbon cashback and carbon cashback deals heavily with, you know, rebates and recycling the revenue back to individuals. And what that does is it basically makes sure that all of it is no one gets left behind. And even in this Sustainable Infrastructure Group, a lot of it is involved with equality and justice because one of the main issues with zoning that I didn't mention today is actually that it pricing out a lot of people from living in certain areas and it concentrates well in one area and inequality in the other because we're building these zones that only allow for a certain type of house. So a lot of it is, you know, zoning law and land use is one of the most multi-disciplinary issues because it involves racial injustice, racial inequality, income inequality, and, you know, inclusionary zoning and exclusionary zoning are a big part of it. Yeah. Let me just give us as an example, have you comment on one of the big, big programs coming out from the federal government involves something called heat pumps, hot water heat pumps. And that is where you take the heat out of the air and use it to heat water. And for especially the low-income houses, they still have what are called resistance water heaters. That's just where you have your tank and you put a lot of electricity into the heating element at the bottom of the tank and that makes hot water. And that is extremely inefficient compared to heat pump water heaters. They are about, the new breed is about 4.5 times more efficient than your standard old resistance heater. And what the federal government is planning to do is partner with the manufacturers and bring this technology especially into the low-income areas. And the low-income are the people who are most liable to have these old-fashioned water heaters and just take them out and replace them with the heat pump water heaters. But you say, this is low income. They can't afford such a thing. It costs at least $2,000 where they're going to give what's called an instant rebate. The minute a household agrees to have this replacement, the workmen come in and they replace the heater and a representative, maybe it's a non-profit group like yours, goes to the household and arranges for them to get, they say, a $2,000 rebate right on the spot. Very, very little paperwork. What do you think about programs like that? I think it's excellent. You know, I think it's amazing that we're making sure that low-income groups aren't being left behind. And, you know, while back the inflation reduction act was passed under the Biden administration and it was one of the biggest federal government investments in climate mitigation and industry. And so I'm sure that, you know, as a result of that kind of investment, we're going to see a lot more programs like this aiding that process to, you know, make sure everyone is transitioning to clean energy no matter the income group that they fall under. And I'm really looking forward to that. But, you know, as much as we see, you know, these investments in things like renewable energy, things like these energy efficient programs, I really hope to see some changes to the system that we have here of, you know, of urban planning and of zoning law because, you know, the fact of the matter is, our current, there currently is no legal framework that allows for the construction of truly energy efficient homes which is, you know, higher density urban homes. And hopefully, you know, we're going to see, you know, as the momentum for more higher density homes increases, I hope to see more, yeah. Well, what we and other government agencies are looking at is taking advantage of the fact that we have the rail system though and presumably one of these days the rail system will go the full length and the idea is to place high rise residential right next to the rail system and then allow retail right see in those same buildings the first one or two floors of the high rise residential will be retail, things like convenience stores and then the rest will be for individual residences. And then we would connect the rail with more urban transportation, the bus system and so forth. So that's what we're aiming for. Yeah, it's really exciting. I actually used to live in Tokyo for a while and having that kind of transportation integrating into infrastructure, it's really not only sustainable, but it's just, it's so much more livable and so much more great in terms of lifestyle. And so I'm looking forward to that. Yeah, I mean, investment in public transit doesn't even have to be rail. It can be our bus system making sure that under bus stops available everywhere and more funding for that kind of thing. Yeah. And finally, we need to leave, but I would end on a cheery note. The type of neighborhood you're describing involved, it makes people feel part of a community. They see the same people all the time and they start striking up conversations, becoming friends and feeling like they are. This is their community. Exactly. Convenience store, their little restaurant and so forth. And same time, be much, much, much more energy efficient. And on that very, very cheery note, Shisato Torori, thank you so much. You are an inspiration to us all. Again, Shisato is a junior, repeat a junior in high school and she knows far more than the best majority of us and she will be fighting the good fight for at least the next 50, if not 60 years. So thank you so, so much, Shisato. And Howard Wing, Code Green, Think Tech, Hawaii. See you next time.