 I'm Tim Appichella, your host for Moving Hawaii Forward. Today we look at the other side of traffic, the cars that we sit in as we wait and get into town or wherever we're trying to go to. An innovative bill was introduced in the 2017 legislature, Senate Bill 1186 and its companion bill, House Bill 1580, and it encouraged the state of Hawaii to avoid most fossil fuel burning vehicles by the year 2045. An aggressive goal, but in light of the governor's goal of being non-fossil fuel dependent, and perhaps it's more than reasonable to consider. Unfortunately the bill did not advance, but it is worth our time to look at it and what it was trying to accomplish. Our guest this week is Jeff Mikalina, Executive Director, Blue Planet Foundation, who's here to discuss these bills and the state of Hawaii's goals of being free of fossil fuels by the year 2045. Jeff, thank you so much for coming on our show and I know you worked hard in the legislature this year to try to get these bills passed, so we'd like to talk about that a bit, but thank you for coming on. Yeah, thanks Tim. I appreciate the opportunity. Yeah, it's great. Hey, before we get into talking about these bills, could you just describe for our audience what is Blue Planet Foundation and its mission, its goals? Sure, we're a local based nonprofit and we're committed to ending the use of fossil fuel here in Hawaii, but what we really hope to accomplish in our vision as an organization is to use Hawaii as that model for the globe. We're in a climate crisis right now. We need solutions for clean energy, but we think Hawaii's the right place to demonstrate those solutions and really invent what the future looks like for energy. So, we had a new story here recently about our higher tides and the fact that that created some problems. Is that part of, did that help? It does help, I think it gets people a little more aware of our vulnerability to climate changes. Sea level rise is one of those changes. Now, the kingtides, it's a phenomenon that has a lot of factors, but for people to experience that and see how vulnerable we are, I think it is a useful sort of important into the future what we might be seeing more of with rising sea level. Right. Well, I'm sure you guys are going to have more involvement as we move forward, particularly, and we'll talk about this a little bit, but the governor's initiative to join the Paris Climate Accord, and I think that was a pretty dramatic and great thing for him to do, so we'll talk a little bit about more during the program. We have a slide here for you. Let's take a look at that. And what we're going to see here is a big challenge that we have. You know, we talk a lot about our 100% by 2045, and that addresses the electricity side of the equation. But a big chunk of our fossil fuel use is for cars and trucks and getting around. In fact, last year we went through about a half a billion gallons of gasoline in Hawaii to fuel our over one million passenger vehicles and trucks. That amounts to about one gallon per person per day, which is, I mean, when you think about it, that's a lot of fuel. And that's actually up from 2015, and that's what's most concerning to us is, you know, we have these great goals. We're heading in the wrong direction though. We're using more fossil fuel for our cars and trucks than the previous year in 2015. Right. I actually did some work on just how much the state of Hawaii did import, and I was kind of surprised to see that about 28% pertain to ground transportation, and then about 31% was dedicated to air transportation. And then of course you have a breakdown of, you know, residential, commercial. But about 26%, I correct me wrong on these numbers, about 26% on the generation of electricity. These numbers sound about right. It's roughly, we say about a third, a third, a third. Yeah. But, you know, these electricity, we have a goal and we're making great progress. In fact, last year about 26% of our electricity came from renewable sources. But if you look at the transportation side, really less than one tenth of one percent is coming from, you know, what we could consider renewable sources. So our work has cut out for us on the transportation side, particularly the ground transportation side of things. Did you happen to catch the news story yesterday about the study of the University of Hawaii, Manoa? I didn't. On the use of electric cars and its increase, I believe they were reporting about 5,800 that are registered here on this island. Sounds right. That's pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's probably about statewide, close to 6,000. 6,000 statewide? Yeah. That's pretty remarkable, isn't it? It is. It's good progress. Given our per capita numbers that we're dealing with. Right. And I believe we're probably second in the nation for per capita electric vehicle registrations, which should be number one, I think California. California? Yeah. And they have a different set of policies. We're one of the few states that doesn't have a state incentive for electric vehicles. You know, there are incentives here and there. I know Nissan and Hawaiian Electric were offering a $10,000 rebate for, you know, one model. We need to do more to encourage electric vehicles. And we'll talk about a little bit, I think, just how it pairs so well with our overall system. Yeah. Okay. So, given the slide, we were looking at one gallon per person. Per day. Per day. Yeah. That's a lot. That is a lot. And we love driving in Hawaii, too. You know, we have over a million registered vehicles. We have more registered vehicles than registered drivers. That's for one. And then we like driving. We drive about 26 million miles per day. Per day. Hawaii residents. So, when you think about that, that's, you know, about 54 round trips to the moon or so every day. We also did some math and figured out, you know, if we took every registered car in Hawaii and put it bumper to bumper, you know, how long of a line of cars that would be... We're going to the moon? We're not going to the moon, but we're going to Denver. We're going to Denver. Okay. It's just, I mean, baffling that we have that many vehicles on these small islands. That is amazing. So, I think, like, just, you know, I know we're going to get a little bit off track here. But why do you think there's a love affair with the vehicle here in Hawaii, other than a lot of other states? I mean, it's, well, there are a lot of factors for that. One is, I think the way we've designed the islands, it's difficult to do simple tasks without jumping in a car. So, there's some structural issues there. If we're going to go get a gallon of milk or take the kids to school, it's probably going to require a car. And we could be much better at, you know, alternative modes or making it more pedestrian or bicycle friendly or just designing our communities differently. And it's exciting to see some projects that are more, you know, work, play, live in one area. A red village concept. Exactly. Yeah. And we have infill opportunities to do that. But the second thing is, I mean, cars have evolved in America and elsewhere as status symbols in a way. And even with the cost of housing and the cost of things in Hawaii, you know, vehicles are relatively, relatively now, you know, in context more affordable, I would say, than some of those other things. So, you can, you might not afford that million dollar, you know, condo, but you can afford a nice vehicle. Right. And so, I think it is a little more of a status symbol here. Yeah. Well, I noticed that vehicles here are cleaner than any other state I've ever been. Yeah. No salt on the roads. They really kept up quite well. Okay. Well, great. Let's talk about the bills, because I know that takes a lot of work. And so, go ahead and just let us know about your experience of the introduction of those bills and how far they progressed and what some of the key issues that were involved. Sure. When trying to get this bill passed. So, our primary goal this session was to do for ground transportation what we did for electricity, which is, you know, put a signpost out there, put a line in the sand for, we're going to achieve a 100 percent, you know, clean energy future by a certain date. We have that for electricity. This would do that for ground transportation. So, saying, you know, by 2045, 100 percent, our transportation will be renewable. Now, this renewable is key. It doesn't mean everyone's going to drive electric vehicles. We might have hydrogen vehicles on the road. It could be a biofuel vehicle, like something that, you know, I drive using Pacific biodiesel made from, you know, everything from waste oil to macadamia nuts. It could be, you know, more people are out of cars using alternative modes of transit or biking or walking. Or it could be something we haven't even thought of yet. And that's what's so exciting about this. But all the bill did was set a planning target for the state. And once we have that target set, then we can start to devise the policies and the programs, the incentives, whatever it's going to take to achieve that target. But just like anything, we need to, you know, set the goal first and then you devise the plan to get there. Right now, we have no goal for our transportation future. We're really leading up to the market and hoping for the best. We saw what happened when we set a goal for electricity. You know, at first, you know, the utility in others said, this is going to be difficult if not impossible. The next year, you know, it's going to be a challenge that dates, you know, and now we pass the bill and the conversation change. So that leads me to this question is, you know, a lot of times it's a change of attitude, change of values, change of heart. Sure. And that helps makes the implementation so much easier because there's synergy behind, you know, the powers to be a change of a change of heart, change of energy. So why did we go with a bill versus like a resolution? I think a bill is necessary because it has that force of law and really, you know, directs what we're doing is amending the State Planning Act. So it would really direct the agencies to, you know, kind of set those policies and those goals. Well, you know, we could do a resolution, but we think it's, I mean, we could have gone further and actually had a mandate that said, you know, by this date, there will be no sales of gasoline-powered vehicles. We didn't go that far. Some other places are considering that, you know, particularly Netherlands, Norway, even some other states are talking about, you know, setting a date where you can no longer sell an internal combustion vehicle or one that's powered by, you know, fossil sources. And that's something to consider. So this was kind of a, I wouldn't say a soft sell, but more kind of the Hawaii approach of saying, let's set that target. We saw how effective it was for electricity because that really, you know, aligned the planning, really fostered collaboration, brought people together and said, man, now we have to achieve this. How do we actually get there? And again, the exciting thing was, you know, the utility went from some resistance to acceptance. And last year we heard them say, not only is 2045 possible, we can do it by 2040 and it's going to be billions of dollars cheaper than our business's usual case. That's pretty exciting. So that conversation shifted dramatically and we expect to hear the same thing with transportation. Well, speaking of, you mentioned support and I went on the website and looked at the public testimony that was submitted in, I think, for both the Senate bill and the House bill. And I was impressed on who came out to support this. You had the Department of Transportation, you had the Executive Director, if I'm not mistaken, come out for this. You had HECO, correct? Winelectric, yeah, they were supportive. You had the Department of Business and Economic Development and Tourism. So you had some major, major organizations. You had the Auto Dealers Association? Interesting, yeah. The local Hawaii Auto Dealers Association. I got to tell you, I would not expect the Auto Dealers Association to come in and support it as robust as they did. So that was really a pleasure to see that testimony. It was. And I think there are folks who understand that this is the direction that things are heading in and to the extent that they can get out front and, you know, support these positive, you know, policies, the better it is, and to really start to adapt and look at where this future is heading. There were other groups that did come out in opposition. One was the Alliance for Auto Manufacturers, really representing a subset of the auto manufacturers on the mainland and international. What was their key disagreement with the? I think anything that somehow meddles in the market causes them to, you know, set up. But again, I think there's some folks, legacy companies, that this is the way we've been doing things for a hundred years. And here we're coming out saying, actually, in the next quarter century, things are going to change dramatically. And you'll be selling a different type of car. People don't want to be told what to do. Right. But with this. We have things in place. We have the cafe standards, right? That says you will be making cars more efficient so that they can get more mileage per gallon. That's right. Now there's loopholes to the cafe standards, of course. Right. That's big trucks. But I'm glad you mentioned that because that's a federal standard that is really executive branch. And we know what's happening with executive branch right now and any environmental or or, you know, clean energy standard. That could very well change those cafe standards. That's why it's even more incumbent on states like Hawaii to set their own future and say, this is what we want our transportation future to look like. Regardless of what happens in D.C. and, you know, if they roll back any regulations, we're setting our course for clean transportation and clean energy. Well, it looks like they are going to set back standards. And so that's what we worry about. Yeah, I think everyone's worried about that and concerns. So we are going to address more of the bill when we come back from our break. But this is Tim Apachella. This is Moving Hawaii Forward and we'll be right back. Hi, welcome back. I'm Tim Apachella, your host for Moving Hawaii Forward. My guest this week is Jeff Mikulina and he is the executive director with Blue Planet Foundation. And before the commercial break, we were talking about the bills and specifically how much support that was garnished before these bills. And so I guess the question on my mind is what happened? What happened? We have the same question. And it's frustrating for us because this is the second year working on this bill. And again, as we saw it, it was just setting a planning target saying, hey, by 2045, let's put that marker out there that we hope to achieve a 100% clean transportation future, our far ground transportation. So we didn't think it was a big lift. But unfortunately, it failed to pass. It made it to that final day of session like many bills, got caught up in some of this horse trading. But really what it came down to is legislators just didn't support the setting that date. Now, I noticed one provision was in section eight that there was a specific 5% reduction of ground transportation between the years 2017 and 2025. Let's get specifically to that. What did that entail, section eight? Interesting because our original bill simply set a date for 2045 and didn't have any interim targets. I think the state D-bed came in and said, well, we'd really like to have some short term targets. And that was their proposal to put in this 5% reduction. Did that scare other legislators away from it? It may have, but again, looking at, that's something that's readily achievable, we think. Some people came out and said, whoa, 5% equates to maybe 60,000 EVs on a road. And as you mentioned, we have just about 6,000 today. So are we going to see a 10-fold increase? But it's not that. It's more efficient vehicles. It's maybe getting folks out of vehicles or biofuel or something like that. Well, yeah. I mean, I look at your different sections here and I didn't see anything. I didn't see a poison pill in this bill at all. Generic things to develop strategic partnerships, research, development testing for clean and renewable technologies. That doesn't seem too onerous. No, it doesn't. And all of this in service of just moving Hawaii forward and getting to a place where our vehicles are clean, it matches with our overall image of achieving a 100% renewable energy future. We also think it pairs really well with our hospitality industry. People could come here and get on buses or in cars that are electric or otherwise, renewably powered. It'd be a pretty cool image for the state. So in the Senate, was it Senator Les Zihara, Jr. that sponsored this? Yeah, I'm not sure if he was a sponsor, but I believe he was a supporter. Yeah, he was a supporter. Okay. So have you done a kind of a playbook analysis on where this thing went right and where it didn't go? We have. And what was your analysis? As you mentioned, we had a good head of steam with a lot of support. We need to magnify that support and really expand it and have a good cross-section of folks who believe that this is the right direction for Hawaii to go in. And a lot of it is keeping it on the front burner for legislators. And we can do a better job of making sure that this is a top of mind issue. There are a lot of other issues at the legislature over at the end. Sometimes it's hard to cut through all that noise and really make this a key issue. Now, this did not get to the second reading or did it? 1580 made it to the last day of the session, so it did make it all the way through. We just need to bring up that support, particularly in the Senate, and make them feel comfortable and confident that this is the right thing to do for Hawaii. You got a lot of news play out of this, too, if I recall. I mean, you got a lot of publicity on this. Yeah, and part of it was that we did a fun rally on Earth Day, or right around Earth Day, with about 600-700 kids from around the island that came to support it. And it was a lot of fun. We also had those students do postcards from the future. So we asked them to kind of sketch what they want their transportation future to look like. And I think we have a couple of these sample postcards here. Yeah, let's take a look at that. Kids did these illustrations, and then they wrote a note on the back, from the future, essentially, from 1245, thanking the legislators or, you know... So here's one, and what you'd expect, you know, some cool... Who knows what's powering this car? It's renewable transportation. But, you know, you let these kids go, and the ideas that they come up with... I think I saw this in Kahala Mall. Oh, could have been. Yeah, that was really great. And we took all these postcards. We made a book for legislators, kind of a coffee table book. So it was a lot of fun. Then here's the back of the postcard, and here you see a student graduating in 24, writing to Senator Lesihara. Thank you for passing this bill. Unfortunately, the bill didn't pass, but hopefully 2018. We can just change that date, you know. Oh, it's from the future, so we have time, right? That's right. But again, you can see what they're referring to here. You know, I think it's great. How old are these kids? All ages, from fourth grade to eighth grade. And again, they don't get it. We don't have to explain this to them. They get it. Well, I remember in the early days of recycling, we didn't have any government intervention. We didn't have... The EPA was basically brand new, yet in certain parts of the country, I'm from Seattle, that was a voluntary mindset that we're going to start recycling, even though recycling stations weren't really set up. But that's what I was saying earlier, is that a lot of times it's a change of heart and attitude. And I think that's... I think you guys are there. I think people get it. I think so, too. But it is a challenge for us to really change that culture of energy. I think that's what you're kind of thinking of with recycling. Some of it is kind of normative pressure, too. We take social cues from other people, and you see them, they're recycling. Your neighbors are recycling. You have a little more pressure to... I should recycle, too. I think we'll see with electric vehicles, at first, it was some of the early adopters. But now you look around, and electric vehicles are really becoming much more mainstream. And I think when you see the models coming out in the next year or two, it's going to be the new normal. You had mentioned also hydrogen vehicles. We have our own Stan Osterman, who is a big supporter of hydrogen usage. And looking at the technology for those cars is really phenomenal. And it's safe. That's the thing. It's much more safer than what people's old opinions and ideas and attitudes are about hydrogen energy, but you don't care what energy it is, do you? No, as long as it's clean. And hydrogen is a good example of something that makes it pair really well with our renewable energy future. Because I think one criticism is, well, electric vehicles are great, but you're still plugging them into the power grid. And that power grid is, right now, 70, 74 percent fossil fuel. The truth is, two things. One, electric vehicles or hydrogen vehicles make use of that electricity in a better way than gas. Stores are longer. Yeah, they're more efficient. You know, they're not idling at the stop light. They're regenerating energy when you put the brakes on. So in that way, they use every drop of oil better. Another way, and this is the future that's really coming, is those vehicles pair really well with the renewable energy system. They're essentially batteries on wheels. They store energy. So maybe they can suck up some of that extra solar during the day and put it back on the grid in the evening. Or more likely in the near term, you have all these chargers plugged in. And when we have a cloud come over and a dip in energy production, all those chargers can turn off for 10 minutes or so, and then turn back on when the, you know, solar comes back on. So it really helps to smooth out the variability in the grid. The variability, sure. And just make it, you said synergy before, I mean, there's great synergy between our transportation system and our electricity system. And that's why the 2045 date was key. Let's achieve 100 percent for both sectors by that time and really capitalize on these synergies between the two. Do you get criticism that there's not an infrastructure in place to support this lofty goal? This is why we set goals, so we can start to do that. So we get the infrastructure going. Right. I mean, when Kendi said we're going to the moon and, you know, eight years or by the end of the decade, we didn't even know how to dock in space and to, you know, figure out those sorts of things. So we set the goal and then we devise the plans, the policies, the programs to get there. Do we have enough charging stations right now? To support the 5,800 vehicles that are out there? To support, I would say yes. You know, many people are just charging at home. A lot of folks are just charging with a regular outlet at home. And that's just fine. I think as the batteries have greater capacity, you know, this idea of range anxiety where it's, I can't make it to the North Shore because, you know, I'll just be barely making it home. I think that's going to go away. So the 94. Range anxiety. I haven't heard that term, but I like it. Yeah, I guess people, you know, I can only get 80 miles in my leaf or so. But that's changing. And the bolt that just came out, the Chevy bolt, you know, over 200 miles per charge. So that's going to free up a lot. And you're not going to be so needing a charging station wherever you go. And again, the technology's evolving so quickly. I mean, in five or 10 years, who knows what it's going to look like for onboard storage or for the vehicles themselves with autonomous vehicles coming and other technologies. A lot of us don't probably keep up on this as well as we might. How's battery technology advancing? It changes by the week. By the weeks. It's incredible how rapidly that's advancing. So that's where we're getting the 200 mile range. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Smaller, lighter, longer charge, cheaper. That's the main thing. What was it? What was one of the first cars that came out of the leaf? The leaf, what? I mean, the Prius. Right. The Prius had battery because it was a hybrid. And then Tesla had their Roadster in 2008, which is a phenomenal car too. But obviously, it's an early adopter car. But now we're seeing, you know, they can compete head to head with a, you know, gasoline internal combustion engine like the Chevy Bolt. And then the coming Tesla Model 3, which is in the $35,000 range. But that's going to be coming down. And shortly, it'll be just a question of economics. I mean, do you want to pay extra for that, you know, that gas burning car? What I'm excited about is when we start seeing trucks, because that's going to be that last, like, hold out. That's the last hold. And you have a, you know, big beefy truck. But tell you what, those electric trucks, They're fast. They're going to be fast. They're going to have more torque. They're going to have more towing capacity. And you'll have a choice. Do I want the strong, tough electric or do I want, you know, kind of a weak diesel that's going to, so that'll be an exciting evolution. Well, you hit the truck market here and you'll have success because that seems to be a predominant vehicle on not only this island, but every other island too. So we'll just have to do something to like tune the pipes or make it somehow. So it's not silent. You have to trade my silence. Well, I think, so you're going to hit it hard at the next session. We're going to keep this alive and keep pushing it. It's, we need to set a goal for transportation. We're suffering without it right now. As I mentioned, you know, with low oil prices, we saw an increase in gasoline use last year. It's going to be curious to see what happens this year. But we saw an article in the paper not too long ago that it's on track for, you know, record sales of SUVs and trucks in Hawaii. Now, no one wants to take those away, but we can evolve those into cleaner burning or 100% renewable vehicles. But right now we're heading the wrong direction. We haven't set that goal. So how does the governor's acknowledgement of the Paris Climate Accord help this effort? Well, this is all completely in line with the same thing. Right. I mean, was his office helped leverage this in the legislature in the next session? We hope so. We hope so because it's firmly in line with that vision that was set when he signed that bill last week. What we need though is not just statements and pronouncements. We really need laws in place that are going to, you know, get us to where we need to be. Not resolutions. You want laws. We need laws. We need laws. And that's what other states and nations are going to respect and see. You guys are serious. You're not just making statements that this is a good thing or you're actually taking tangible steps. And then the proof is in the pudding. I mean, as soon as we become the number one per capita, as soon as we have that those policies and those programs that really show an accelerating trend towards clean energy, then we'll be a place where people really want to say, how do they do it? Because we have the same challenge in Beijing or, you know, elsewhere. And how do we really make it happen? People are going to be hungry for these ideas and Hawaii is well placed to provide. How closely do you work with the Auto Dealership Association for these concepts? I mean, we have a good relationship. Yeah. Good report. We can always, you know, strengthen that. Right. And making sure that we're interested in their marketing dollars. Yeah. And further this effort, probably much greater than any. That's something that, you know, Dave Ralph, the head of the Hawaii Auto Dealers Association is very bullish on is, you know, we need to have a fund that really markets these clean vehicles. And I'd agree. It's all about the attitudes in the hearts. That's right. Well, we run out of time and I want to thank you very much for sharing your efforts here in the legislature and I wish you great success in the next session to the 2018 legislature session. Thank you so much for coming. I'm Tim Mapacheo. That's what we have for this week and we'll see you in a couple. This is Hawaii Moving Forward. Aloha.