 I'm your host, Dr. Grace O'Neill. Joining me today is Daniel Brissette from the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. Welcome, Daniel. Hi, Grace. It's great to see you. Thanks for having me. Thank you for being on the show. So tell us about how you got involved in environmental work. Oh, well, that goes back a little ways. I originally moved to Washington after college in 2001. I worked for a senator from Vermont. I'm from Vermont. And at the time, he was, his name is Jim Jeffords, and he retired in 2006, and has since passed away, which is really too bad, because he was a really great guy, and a great public servant. He was notable because in May 2001, he defected from the Republican Party and joined the Democrats, or began caucusing with the Democrats. He was an independent. And part of that came with his, with new leadership on the Environment Public Works Committee. And so within a few short weeks of my arrival on Capitol Hill, to be as deputy press secretary, I was staffing environment committee things. And that is kind of where I learned, sort of the first of all the stuff I've learned about some of these topics. And I've always kind of had an interest in it. I did some time in the state energy office in Maryland, learning about energy policy and energy efficiency in particular. And I returned to DC to work in the advocacy space around energy efficiency. And ESI is an organization that's been around for a long time. And when I had an opportunity to join it, I jumped at the chance because we do a great combination of policy work, but also education work. And I'm endlessly fascinated by Capitol Hill and a lot of our work happens there. And so this is a really great place for me to express my interest in climate policy, but also express my interest in article one in the first branch of government and all of that that goes along with Congress. So tell us about what the environmental and energy study institute, what do you guys do? How did you guys get started? Well, we are celebrating 40 years in 2024. We were originally created in the early 80s as a nonprofit to provide educational materials, educational resources to members of Congress and their staff. Originally about environmental energy topics. And then later in the 80s, it became more focused on climate change, which is kind of everything. So it kind of works. Our origins actually go back a little further into the 70s. There was originally a conference that was started, but we were spun off as a 501C3 in the early 80s. And our work involves a few different things. We're probably best known for our congressional briefings. So we do in-person and virtual convenings of panelists, of experts and leaders around the climate space, including business leaders who come to Capitol Hill and provide our congressional audience with science-based, non-partisan information about these topics. We do a lot of writing. We do a lot of articles. We do a lot of fact sheets. There's a photo of my team. We took a Friday afternoon off back in December and visited the Anacostia Community Museum and the Women in Environmental Justice exhibit, which is a great thing if you haven't checked it out. I think it's actually over now, but it's probably archived. We try to do team-building things from time to time and that was a great, and of course we had a happy hour afterwards. And there's the team. Again, we standing on a roof deck overlooking the White House on a pretty nice fall day. So we do a lot of writing. We do a lot of fact sheets and issue briefs and podcasts and things like that, but it's always designed to help congressional staff get up to speak quickly on climate topics. Over the last decade or so, we've also gained some experience working in rural areas with cooperatives, electric cooperatives, and other rural utilities. And we've developed a program to help them access federal resources to set up inclusive financing programs. I mentioned that because it's a part of what we do, but also one of the programs we've worked most closely with is the Hawaii Green Energy Money Savers, or Hawaii GEMS program, that is a cooperation, collaboration between the Hawaii Green Bank and HECO. So we actually know, or think we know Hawaii, at least in the on-bill financing space fairly well. It's a program that we always take time to highlight because it is one of the most innovative of these on-bill financing programs in the country. And the Hawaii Green Bank was the first of its kind entity in the country to receive a federal rural energy savings program loan. So trend setting out there in Hawaii. Haven't actually been on a field visit. It's been a while since I've been to Hawaii. I'll have to figure that out one of these days. So I am not familiar with the Hawaii Green Bank. Can you tell me more about that? Yeah, it is a sort of a standalone entity that the state set up a few years ago now to help leverage private capital. So the Green Bank model, every Green Bank is a little different. My little joke is they're neither green nor banks, but they all kind of have their own model. Hawaii has one, Connecticut has one, New York has one, Maryland has one. They're all over the place and they're gonna become a lot more common actually following now that the Inflation Reduction Act has been enacted. There's a program called the, or initiative called the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund that will encourage a lot of these types of entities to be set up. But generally what they do is they dedicate scarce public resources to innovative financing and they attract capital from other sources. So the program that we've worked with, with GEMS, in Hawaii is actually a solar program. And if you visit our website, you can read a case study about it and learn all about the really, really innovative work that they've done to bring really cool financing to solve problems like energy affordability and clean energy access and things like that. Wonderful. I mean, this might be a good chance to go to the website, Michael, if you wanna scroll through the website and you can show us where that is on the website. Yeah, so if you hover over, well actually probably the easiest thing to do would be to, in the search bar, just search for Hawaii Green Bank. I haven't tested that, but I assume it comes right up. But if you go to the initiatives tab along the top there, you'll see something called on-bill financing. And if you clicked on that, you would find your way to our main page and eventually to the, probably at the bottom of the case studies page, the GEMS case study. Yeah, all of our stuff is free, all online. So not just a congressional audience can use it, but ordinary people, professors, activists, all sorts of people from all walks use our resources. And we're really, really proud of that. That's wonderful. So can I ask you, it says on your website that you advance science-based solutions for climate change, energy, and environmental challenges. How do you guys do that? We do it in a couple of different ways. I mean, for our policy work that's based in Washington, it really does all revolve around Congress. And so those briefings that we put on, we do about two dozen of them a year, and we try to cover as many topics as possible. So what we try to do is bring these experts to Capitol Hill. That's a photo of a briefing we did last June, I think it was, on Green Hydrogen with our friends at the Environmental Defense Fund. And so all of those people, or most of those people in the audience are congressional staff who are interested in Green Hydrogen. And we pulled together a panel that included EDF and Peanair Task Force and Natural Resources Defense Council, who could sort of talk about their work on Green Hydrogen, especially around issues that would ensure that hydrogen is actually a climate solution and is not contributing to the problem by emitting or risk emitting additional greenhouse gases into the atmosphere from combusting fossil fuels. So that's largely how we go about doing our work. Certainly the highest profile way we do our work. But we also do a lot of writing, we do a lot of fact sheets. When you're a congressional staff person, it's a great, Capitol Hill is a great place to be if you're curious because it is just an overload of information. Literally you snap your fingers and you have 10 groups, 10 people who just can't wait to give you everything you need to know on the topic. However, a lot of those groups are interest groups, which is fine, special interests. Everyone has a right to be there for sure. ESI isn't a special interest. And so when a congressional staff person turns to ESI, we're able to provide them information that hasn't been filtered by an industry trade group or a special interest. And so that gives us a lot of credibility on Capitol Hill. We might have someone from a clean energy group or an energy efficiency group or another sector across the climate space participate in a briefing, but they're participating in our briefing. And so it's really important that we lend that third-party credibility. It's also really important that we give these staff people the information they need before they even know they need it. So we can't predict what Congress is gonna do, but we can figure out, if we think hard enough, what they'll be working on at any given moment. And so we typically try to time our briefings so that when February or March rolls around, for example, that's the beginning of the appropriation cycle. So that's when we'll be doing briefings on process and things like that. At the beginning of a Congress, which is every two-year period following election, we're in the 118th Congress right now, second session. But last year at this time, we were in the middle of congressional climate camp. So trying to put together a series of briefings really kind of covered the basics of climate policy. We work with the members, we work with the staff, we work with our other groups, but that's largely how we try to go about our work. So this is kind of an apropos moment to talk about fossil fuels. Since we talked a little bit about hydrogen fuel, how do you think we can decrease our dependency on fossil fuels in general as a nation? Well, there's all sorts of ways we can do it. The U.S. has actually been in an energy transition now for some time. The energy economy or the energy sector looked very different 20 years ago. It looks very different today. Part of that is because, and we've covered this in our briefings, part of that is because we use less coal to generate electricity. We use relatively more natural gas. We also use a lot more renewable energy to generate electricity. And so we're always kind of in this state of flux. Fossil fuels, when you combust them, they release carbon dioxide and other pollutants, other emissions into the atmosphere, they build up. And even though they take up a relatively small part of the atmosphere, the fact that we're adding them at basically an unabated rate has really consequences for kind of the global system for the climate, right? Because we're really talking about Earth and then a couple of miles above Earth. And so what we've been emitting over a lot of time, you know, basically since the industrial period, has really started it up. And it's really, really important for us to move away from consuming fossil fuels and to find alternatives. One way we can do that is by electrifying. And part of that electrification only works if the electricity is carbon free. So there are things like burning gasoline in your cars to fuel it, you can move to an electric vehicle. But then there's also just electrifying things generally. For example, maybe this isn't as big of a thing in Hawaii, but right now it's pretty cold in Washington. And a lot of people have gas furnaces. I have a gas furnace in our house, eventually we'll transition away from it. But, you know, moving away from fossil fuel consumption sort of onsite, whether it's a solar installation like this that can help offset energy from the grid, especially when that grid is dirty, or the electricity is coming from fossil fuels. That's one alternative electrifying end uses, like moving away from furnaces to things like heat pumps and other electric technologies is another. But this is really an economy wide challenge. If you think about how dependent we are on fossil fuels, not just for our energy, but also for plastics and for other products, it is a massive challenge. And unfortunately, we have to be moving much, much faster than we currently are moving. And so we're doing, what we try to do is we try to highlight solutions of where this is actually happening and working to help illustrate how it's possible at scale, at scope, and at a rapid enough pace that allow us to avoid the worst outcomes of climate change. Yeah, I mean, I know one of the alternatives is wind, like they have these windmills, wind power. So can you talk about the pros and cons of the wind power? Because we had a big area, kind of on the North Shore where they were thinking about doing that, but there was a lot of opposition. I don't know exactly what's going on with that now, but what are the pros and cons of something like wind power? Well, I won't pretend to understand the dynamics on the North Shore at all. A lot of these installations are, they're talked about, some of them are controversial at the local level and that's fine, but it's important for people to sort this stuff out because these are significant investments that will be there for a long time. And we also have to make sure that communities that are impacted have a seat at the table from the very beginning as these deployment decisions are being made. So wind power has a lot going for it. There are wind installations offshore and onshore. There aren't that many offshore currently in the United States. Most wind is deployed on land and you see them, they're often hundreds of feet tall. They have enormous blades that spin. The pros is that they're generating carbon-free electricity and they're doing so in a way that is fairly deployable. You can have a wind installation fairly close to where that energy needs to be consumed. Unfortunately, where wind resources are, not always were population centers. And so where you see a lot of wind energy, you see a lot of wind energy in the Midwest, you see a lot of wind energy in Texas, through Oklahoma, all those places. While there are certainly population centers in those states, most of the population centers are not next door to those wind turbines. And so you have to think very carefully about where you're developing them and then how you're gonna move the electricity from where it's produced to where it's actually gonna be consumed. And right now in Washington, that's a huge debate transmission and permitting challenges to get the energy from where it's actually being made to where it's needed. I'm not gonna say downside because it's pretty much better than the alternatives, but wind is an intermittent resource. The wind isn't always blowing and those big wind turbines obviously require a fair amount of wind to move the blades. It's kind of funny that wind and solar often are sort of talked about having, the resources stronger for solar during the day for obvious reasons. Wind resources are actually stronger at night for less obvious reasons, but there's typically more wind at night. And so we've actually done briefings where you can see, there are models that are out there that you can actually see the continental United States and you can see where the sun is rising and where the sun is moving over the landscape and where solar resources are popping on. And then when the sun goes down, you can see the wind resources start to pick up. And so they're complementary resources. But there are some people in this area that feel that wind interferes with military training. There's a big controversy in Maryland over wind turbines and Pax River, which is a big military installation in Maryland. There are some people who are concerned about its effects on birds and migratory birds. There are people who are concerned about the siting of wind offshore and sort of what that does to the habitat on the seabed. These are real issues, but there's issues that when, especially when you have a collaborative process, then you include people from the very beginning, sort of in the entire decision-making. And as long as we're thinking about the goal of this is not to erect a wind turbine, it's to stop putting carbon dioxide and other pollutants into the atmosphere. I think there's a lot of optimism that we can get over some of these challenges and we can solve challenges and we can kind of, but what we like to say to ESI is transition to a decarbonized clean energy economy and you can't really have that without wind. So just shifting gears a bit and going back since it seems like we will be dependent on fossil fuels at least for a bit until we can completely transition. Why are, you know, why is it so much cheaper to buy fuel in the United States than it is in Europe? Well, there are reasons for that. We have a lot of resources here. United States is a big country, geographically very diverse and we have petroleum resources here that would power our country for many, many years if we wanted it to. There's, you know, we obviously export petroleum, but that's certainly a driver. Not all petroleum resources are liquid petroleum resources and so, you know, the gasoline you put in your car, for example, or the diesel you put in your car is different than what you would get out of the ground if you're extracting natural gas. Another thing is that our economy is kind of set up around quick and easy transportation and often that comes in single passenger vehicles. And when that happens, it is sort of, you can kind of, you know, take that to the end, which is, you know, gas is relatively inexpensive here because it's allowed to be relatively inexpensive here. You know, it isn't heavily taxed compared to where it is in Europe and that means that there are fewer resources to spend on other priorities, especially climate priorities. When you start manipulating gas prices with taxes or when you start, I mean, gas prices, when they go above $4 or $5 or whatever it is, it's always front page news. Well, that's because people need gasoline to get around. They need to get to work. And unfortunately, gas is one of those things, gas prices are one of those things that tend to impact families who can sort of least afford it the most. You know, it's a, if it's a fixed expense in a family's budget, that's one thing, but if it's a variable expense and it goes way, way up and all of a sudden it takes 20% more resources to, you know, drive around and do all of that, especially in rural areas where there are fewer options for public transportation. It's something that people really feel and there are some genuine affordability issues that policymakers have to think about as we move away so that the next alternative, the electric alternative, for example, is just as a, is more affordable and more accessible. We like to say at ESI, we're talking about trading up, not trading off. And so how do we come up with policies? How do we come up with investments that allow us to trade up to alternative fuel vehicles, especially electric vehicles? And actually that's a photo of a tax incentive briefing we did last September. The gentleman there in the blue tie, that's Chris, he works for growth energy, which is the biofuels trade group. And so, you know, there are all additional alternative fuels that are out there, especially when it comes to like aviation and sustainable aviation fuel and things like that. So isn't there some kind of fossil fuel subsidy? Can you tell us about that? There are billions of dollars of fossil fuel subsidies. We actually have a fact sheet that we'll be sending out very shortly. It's an update to one that we've been working on for and had different updates over the last couple years. Yes, there are subsidies. Some of those subsidies are direct. Some of them are, you know, indirect. So we would consider a subsidy, you know, basically along the lines of fossil fuel externalities. So, you know, when a fossil fuel producer is not absorbing the cost of the consumption and all of the harms that fossil fuel consumption causes, we would consider that an externality. If we had our way, we wouldn't also subsidize fossil fuels. We would be using those billions of dollars of resources for other things, like deploying clean energy, like helping people make their homes more energy efficient by helping them install solar panels on their roofs, you know, to really help address energy affordability and accessibility issues. You know, I haven't heard of a super compelling case for keeping fossil fuel subsidies other than fossil fuel subsidies make fossil fuel production more profitable. And once you have something, it's very difficult to take it away. But there are well more than a dozen proposals in last year's federal budget proposal from the Biden-Harris administration to repeal those subsidies. There's legislation that's been introduced over the last several years that would do that. And we also have to think about our subsidization of fossil fuels in the context of international climate agreements, like the Paris Agreement. You know, how on earth can we possibly stand a chance to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by more than 50% by 2030 if we're also subsidizing fossil fuels and we're also making the problem incrementally worse. So yeah, we have a lot of problems with fossil fuel subsidies at ESI. It's not a good use of resources and it's making the problem a little worse and actually quite a bit worse. And it would be really, really nice if we could reuse those resources for other things that help the problem. Yeah, I mean, if you ever noticed in Europe, their cars are super, super tiny. It's hard to fit an American car in their spot. Honestly, the average size, especially here in Hawaii, it seems like everyone has a truck. So you go somewhere and you have a normal four-door sedan and your car is the smallest on the lot, you know? And all these big trucks are parking next to you, you know? So I feel like if there was some kind of way to eliminate these subsidies, maybe people would choose more wisely what kind of car they get and only get a truck if they really needed it, you know? So I mean, I don't know if any of these things will pass, but I surely hope if people have more awareness about it that maybe eventually we can eliminate these subsidies. So I wanted to ask you about your allies on Capitol Hill. Who are your allies? Is it along party lines? Do you find that there's people in both parties that are interested in the environment? How is that working out? We do our best to get along with everyone and we try very hard to cultivate allies and on both sides of the aisle in both chambers. It's really important for us to, you know, have those relationships so that when we, you know, it gives us credibility, but it also, you know, there are a lot of climate solutions out there. Many of them are bipartisan and so we want to find examples of where people can work together. The Inflation Reduction Act was not a bipartisan bill, but the infrastructure bill was. And there was a lot of really good stuff that was included in that bipartisan infrastructure bill. And it was something that we really welcomed at the time. And so we try really hard to cultivate allies of all sorts. Sometimes that's the members themselves. Sometimes that's the senators or representatives, but oftentimes it's the staff. And so that's a photo of Representative Jim Clyburn. He's one of our top allies, one of our best friends on the Hill. He is responsible for the Rural Energy Savings Program, which helps rural utilities provide inclusive on-bill financing programs for the customers. That was our big energy efficiency expo that happens every summer. He was a speaker at the one that we held last July. So we try really hard to make friends wherever we can on pretty much whatever issue we can. We also try really hard to play really well with the other people in the sandbox. So Capitol Hill is an ecosystem. The members are part of it, the staff are part of it, but so are all of the different groups that are engaged on Capitol Hill. And so we try really hard to work with organizations of all political affiliations from across the entire energy space. That photo of the briefing you showed a little earlier, I pointed out Chris, he works on biofuels with growth energy, but he was seated next to someone who works on hydrogen. He was seated next to someone who works on nuclear. And we had nine panelists, US Green Building Council, US Conference of Mayors. We had nine panelists talking about all of the different tax incentives that were enacted as part of the Inflation Reduction Act. And part of the reason why we had nine panelists, which is like more than twice we normally would have, is to give the idea, to communicate visually the idea that the climate sector is really big and broad and that there are places for everyone to bring their solutions to the table to help us reduce emissions. And so we try to make friends wherever we can. It's a big part of what we do. It's actually a core strategy of everything that we try to do at ESI. So what would you say has been the biggest contributor to climate change? Well, it's not close. It's burning fossil fuels and then the emissions find their way into the atmosphere. But we've spent a lot of time thinking about sort of other causes as well. And one I was thinking about before we started our chat today is the loss of biodiversity. And we've been covering nature-based solutions or natural climate solutions, partially because of the amount of interest being paid to the Farm Bill right now, which is still sort of being developed. But when you pair lots and lots of carbon dioxide and lots and lots of methane being emitted into the atmosphere from fossil fuels and when you pair that with unsustainable conservation practices and a lack of biodiversity, we're really harming sort of the entire ecosystem of the planet. And that is something that, individually those would be really bad things but when they're taken together they're even worse. And so it's really important for us to be thinking not just about fossil fuels and not just about emissions but also sort of the impact that we're having on nature and also the impact that we're having on our own communities. It's easy I think to kind of focus, maybe over focus a bit on mitigating greenhouse gas emissions. But even if we were to stop emitting greenhouse gases tomorrow which there's a pretty low chance of that happening there is enough CO2 and enough methane in the atmosphere that we will have climate change, we'll have global warming for decades. It's built up. And so we have to also be thinking about resilience. We have to be thinking about adaptation. We have to be thinking and a lot of those there's a lot of overlap with resilience and adaptation and those natural climate solutions. We actually did a briefing a couple of years ago on coastal resilience in Hawaii and featured the Hawaii Green Bank and featured some of the resilience work that's being done. In Hawaii that's a photo of some of the installations that the GEMS program has made possible. But it's really important that we're focusing on sort of the whole picture because it is a truly holistic issue. Climate change is a really holistic threat. And everything that we can do pretty much anything we can do will help us get to where we need to be and avoid the worst outcomes. So we try to think pretty broadly and not just about fossil fuels. So just because we're out of time, do you have a takeaway as to what an individual can do themselves at home to slow down climate change? And also what our country can do to slow down climate change? Sure, well I think on the individual level the more that people are concerned I think that's one thing that people ask themselves a lot what can I do? There are certainly things that we can do individually and some of them are selecting what's it called? Digital is not the right word. Paperless billing, things like that. My credit card companies are always trying to get me to do paperless billing, things like that. But I think a lot of the discourse around climate solutions actually puts a lot on the individual. And I think when you actually think about what one individual's ability to change things is, yes, there's absolutely things that we can all individually do. But I don't have a lot of say in terms of like what stuff I buy comes in in terms of packaging. I was talking to a reporter once about sustainable aviation. And the reporter asked like, well, what can you do? And I'm like, nothing, I'm a passenger. Literally, I walk on a plane. I don't have a whole lot of say in terms of how that plane is gonna be flown or how that plane is gonna be handled on the ground or any of the operations that go into moving passengers and freight and cargo and all of that through the air. I can make certain choices in terms of how I travel but ultimately I don't have a lot of say in terms of how green or how not green the aviation industry is. And I think that actually extends to a lot of other things. I think about packaging a lot. Why is it my responsibility to take care of the packaging? Why aren't companies that make the products that go into the packaging required to be more accountable for what goes into that packaging and its effect on the environment? I think in terms of what we can do as a country, obviously moving towards decarbonized clean energy as quickly as possible, we have a lot of great work happening right now in all parts of the country with deploying renewable energy but there could be so much more when you look at the actual percentages of renewable energy, there's still so much room to grow. You look at electric vehicle adoption, there's so much room to go. And then you look at other things like think about our buildings and how inefficient most of these buildings are and how important buildings are to everything we do. I'm in a building, you're in a building. We spend a lot of time in our buildings and the building sector is a major contributor to emissions and it's also a connecting sort of node for transportation sector and the power sector. It's where a lot of things come together. So I think there's certainly a lot of things that we could do there. We've already talked about ending fossil fuel subsidies that would be really, really high on my wish list. But one thing that we really absolutely have to do is we have to be very mindful that as we transition away from fossil fuels, as we transition to a decarbonized energy economy, that transition will have different impacts on different communities and it will have different impacts on different people. And most of some of those will be positive, some of those will not be positive. And for people who are negatively affected by that transition, we have to as I think as a society, as a country, we have to be really focused on sort of taking care of them and being compassionate as we move through the transition. Because there will be people who are currently dependent and communities that are currently dependent on fossil fuel production. If that stops being a thing, what's gonna happen to them? We have to be really mindful. There are also people who have been really, really badly harmed by environmental degradation and climate change over the years. We also need to keep in mind how we can do a lot better by them. And a lot of that includes including them in decision-making from the beginning, ensuring that we're not just telling communities how they should behave, but we're talking with them about how they want to behave and what kind of opportunities they want. There's a lot of sort of human challenges to this transition. And I would really like us to be mindful of how we deal with that because a lot of these things are choices and we have the ability to make optimal choices or suboptimal choices. And especially as we're dealing with communities and individuals impacted, I think it's really worth taking the time and really devoting the resources to helping them manage this transition so that we all come out of it better. So that our decarbonized clean energy future is a better future. I think it's possible, but it's not gonna happen automatically. It's gonna have to be something that's deliberate and that's done with purpose. Well, thank you so much. We're out of time, so we have to wrap it up. I'm Dr. Brace Neal. This is Healthy Planet on the Think Tank of Hawaii. We've been talking with Danny Wissett, president of the Environmental Energy Institute about climate change and environmental challenges. Thanks for being here. If you enjoyed this coverage and conversation, please hit the like button below and subscribe to our channel, youtube.com slash thinktankhawaii for more great content on Think Tank. Sign up for our email advisories and get a complete listing of all our shows. Make a donation and keep us going. Visit our website thinktankhawaii.com. We'll be back in two weeks, so please tune in and tell your friends to tune in then. Check out my website at www.graceandhawaii.com or Instagram at graceandhawaii.com 365 for more information about my show guests. Thank you so much for watching. I'm Dr. Brace Neal. Aloha.