 Well, welcome everybody to this call and my name is Rachel Schwam. I'm an associate professor at Rutgers University in the Department of Human Ecology and acting director of the Rutgers Energy Institute. And on behalf of the National Academies Committee to advise the US Global Change Research Program. And I welcome you to this listening session on global change issues with a specific focus on energy related challenges and opportunities through USG CRP federal agencies coordinate and global change research and use results to create tools and assessments to help people make decisions in the context of global changes. Through this session and others in this five part series, we aim to connect more directly with users and researchers who are building on and applying global change information and tools and their work. And gather insights and information that the USG CRP can consider as it plans the implementation of its work over the coming decade. In these sessions we are welcoming staff from the USG CRP and agencies that compromise it. And I welcome the guests of the National Academies Committee to advise the USG CRP of which I am a member, and all of you who are users and researchers who are engaged in building on and applying the types of knowledge and tools that the USG CRP is charged with developing and supporting. Can we start the slides. So, in today's session, we have a series of speakers who will provide remarks all of whom expressed interest in contributing when registering for this session. Everyone here will have opportunities to contribute through an engagement platform that we will introduce shortly representatives from the USG CRP and the committee to advise the USG CRP are attending and listening mode today. Thank you for joining us, and we look forward to hearing from you over the next 90 minutes. Next slide. To start, I'd like to acknowledge that while today we are gathered virtually, the National Academies is physically housed on the traditional land of the Necoch tank and Piscata wave peoples past and present. We honor with gratitude the land itself and the people who have stewarded it through generations. We honor and respect the enduring relationship that exists between these peoples and nations and this land. We thank them for the resilience and protecting this land and aspire to uphold our responsibilities to their example. We also acknowledge that our understandings of energy and global change issues are closely related to an important by indigenous knowledge and experience, and that many native communities are on the frontline of impacts from these hosts. Today, I am joining from Highlands, New Jersey, the traditional land of the Navasink and Lenape people. Next slide please. I and other and the other members of the committee to advise the USG CRP are looking forward to these sessions to connect directly with researchers and users who are using and applying global change information in their work. As part of our regular meetings throughout the year, we provide this and other opportunities to engage with and hear from broader audiences to inform this important work. This series of the series of listening sessions include to gather useful actionable input for USG CRP for implementation of its work, to make connections and expand group of researchers and users who are directly engaging with the USG CRP and its work to recognize connections across researchers users and themes of USG CRP work and products and inform a potential future engagement mechanisms and opportunities, including forms approaches and participants for such engagement. Next slide please. We are seeking input on how USG CRP may implement its work better to understand and address global change issues. You do not need to be familiar with USG CRP to provide input. We are specifically seeking to connect with a broader audience in these sessions. If you are unfamiliar with USG CRP, we hope you had a chance to view the introduction video on our event page is before the session or encourage you to view it afterwards. In preparing for these listening sessions USG CRP requested input and insights on the following themes to inform the implementation of its strategic priorities and activities. First, diversity, equity and inclusion, which actions should be prioritized to fully incorporate these values in research, community engagement and workforce development. How do we implement them. Third, advancing science. What are the priority gaps and foundational science methods that require enhanced long term investments. Third, use inspired research. How do we ensure that USG CRP science and products are better driven by and connected to users, including for example, improved use of consultation collaboration translation dissemination informing climate services. And finally socioeconomic sciences integration. What are these priorities for integrating socioeconomic sciences into our program and to inform critical decisions. Particularly helpful feedback might include ideas on emerging large scale scientific questions related to global change and or response, especially those where interagency collaboration will be critical. And the information on how science is or is not being used to inform societal response to global change and why in knowledge gaps and obstacles to implementing scientific tools or knowledge. The USG CRP is developing its next decadal strategic plan and expects to release a draft prospectus for the public comment opportunity before the end of 2021. The planning sessions might help inform the development or implementation of this plan. Individual feedback on the prospectus should be submitted through the public comment mechanism to ensure we all have time to speak today we will be holding you to the five minute limit. Next slide. In this session, we are committed to fostering a professional respectful inclusive environment, where all participants can participate fully in an atmosphere that is free of harassment and discrimination based on any identity based factors. Please report, miscontact immediately to Steven Stichter as hopefully it's there on the yes it's there on the slide. And I'll turn this back to us, Steven for further discussion. Right. Thank you, Rachel and welcome to everybody who's joining us today. Next slide please maybe. I, I'm here to talk about some logistics and want to first go over zoom we're all everyone who is here has successfully joined the zoom platform and we're happy to happy to see you here. Thank you to set your screen to speaker view we will have a series of speakers who are talking throughout this session, providing oral comments they've signed up for to provide oral comments to this session. And at the same time we have available a platform, Slido to capture key points from the speakers and contributions from all of you. And the interaction from all of you will be through the Slido platform which I will discuss next. If you have any issues with either this zoom platform or Slido, please send a chat to the host via the zoom, or an email to Rob Greenway, whose email is listed on the slide. I encourage you to update your name to have your full name and affiliation within the zoom platform. And today, we have a series of speakers who will provide oral remarks on the theme of global change and energy. The first set of speakers were were the first ones to indicate during registration and interest in providing oral remarks. These speakers will all appear with video. While remaining we will draw additional speakers from the waitlist and from the broader audience that's joined us today all of you. Any such speakers will be audio only. We also have closed captioning us available throughout the session the transcript is available through the live transcript icon in the zoom menu bar. And so please, please access that that resource if you are interested or need that. Next slide please. So we, as I noted in addition to the zoom video and audio contributions we will we are running the Slido engagement platform. Slido allows you to interact with to provide comments and interact with comments of other participants. There are a number of ways that you can join Slido. One is through this QR code, or you can go to Slido.com and enter the event code this listed on the screen. 219036. In addition, if you look in the chat, there'll be a link for joining Slido directly in the chat. Within Slido we'll be using the Q&A mode. It's a little, we're not using it exactly as design so we're actually looking for insights recommendations opportunities gaps and challenges that you have to contribute around this theme of global change and energy. So even though we're using Q&A we're looking for thoughts and statements and recommendations rather than questions. As noted previously, the USGCRP and the committee are here in listening mode so we won't be specifically addressing questions that are raised either in the oral comments or in the Slido platform. There is just a note a 300 character limit on entries. And so if you have longer entries you can enter a start a thread or reply to an existing thread and then add additional comments through the reply. So again, start by hitting the ask button even though we're asking you to provide comments and thoughts. Next slide please. So this is just what you will see when you are signing in the last for your name and email address and then you select join event. Next slide please. And then once once you're on whether it's mobile or on the web. You'll see a sign that says ask the speaker but again it's in that box type your question is where we asked you to give your contributions. Next slide please. So finally, some disclaimers that we have we are recording this this event and that it's part of the information that is provided to USGCRP as they consider your remarks and and contributions going forward. So all remarks and and contributions both here and on Slido will be part of the public record for this event. Additionally, we've invited speakers and they are coming on as individuals they they may be associated with organizations but we've asked them to speak from their own behalf. So thanks again for joining us and at this point I'd like to, I'd like to invite Mike Cooper bird to provide a welcome on behalf of USGCRP. Great. Stephen thank you very much. I'm told by my computer that I can't start my video. Yes I can. Thank you so much. I'm Mike Cooper Berg. I am the executive director of the US global change research program. We call it USGCRP USGCRP is managed by the subcommittee on global change research, which consists of representatives from the 13 federal agencies that make up the program. And the subcommittee as a board of directors for USGCRP. I'm here today representing those 13 agencies and we want you to know that we're serious about our legislative mandate to assist the nation in the world to understand assess predict and respond to human induced and natural processes of global change. On behalf of USGCRP. Thank you for your interest for your time and for your expertise. The input will be heard and considered as we draft and implement a new 10 year strategic plan for USGCRP. In addition to staff from the national academies there are a number of federal agency representatives and representatives from the USGCRP National Coordination Office here today. They will be listening carefully, taking notes to inform our discussions and writing for this new plan. The new plan will be completed next year between now and then you can expect to see a prospectus that is a high level annotated outline of the plan coming out for public comment. I hope in November, and a full draft of the plan, which will be released for public comment, and also for review by the national academies in the middle of 2022. So much for these opportunities and please feel free to comment both on the prospectus and on the draft plan. Finally, on behalf of USGCRP are sincere thanks to you for taking the time to speak to us today to the committee to advise USGCRP and the staff of the national academies for organizing these listening sessions specifically. Thanks to Rachel Schwarm, Steve Stickner, Amanda Stout and Amanda Purcell from the committee and the national academies, respectively. And my sincere thanks to Katie Reeves and Julie Morris from the National Coordination Office here at USGCRP for their roles in making this possible. We very much look forward to your comments and suggestions. Thank you very much. Rachel back to you. Thank you. Alright, now we're going to hear from our first speaker. Eddie Mishra. Please join us to speak. Am I audible. Yes. Yeah. Okay, so hi, I am an architecture student from SP a mobile that's India. And I am part of the UNEP MGCY as a constituency member and I am a secretary of the Yongo which is again the official constituency for young people in UNFCCC. I'll start with what concerns me the most, which is again young people's involvement so individual scientists commitments can lead to great discoveries and for sustainable learning to but they still when working across the systems must never let rely on some key aspects of existing academic cultures, or just to maintain their authority and status. All these functions make moving out of one's profession quite hard and again it's practically difficult not to mention the academic jargon and bureaucracies that come and itself becomes jargon. It is still hard for a young person to be involved in discussing their own future. So, the point here that I'm trying to make is we need more equity across people and also the research they do. What I have seen is the research work that focuses on something fundamental be favored and become to a more immediate concern to policymakers, the ingredients that seem to do so are the ones that considered topics that either have high impact or have multiple stakeholders or affect the robustness of societies as we know under the impact of the global environmental changes, or are likely to become more important over an immediate time scale. These again affect the capacity of a certain sector or may have irreversible effects in the global environment, or on people's ability to respond so I am quite grateful for the work and opportunities that USGCRP offers, but as we all know, it is only taking those few steps that can be to move to a larger goal. It's not just the idea that the indirect conceptual impact that is usually seen as influencing the policymakers thinking but in long term it reaches to the instrumental impact which again the tools that people are making and whatever we use is mainly in this youth population as I come from India, this becomes even stronger for me. In the end, I'll just say that we need more resources we need more platforms for the impact that we the youth want to make and we need more of those platforms, not only on international levels but also on local grassroots levels because the more the voices they are the more the worse, that same goal that we will have after the COP26 and the ones that are going to leave as in, and just going to lead us together are going to then decide what impacts this future. So, people, power and climate justice, that's my message. So, thank you again for this opportunity. Thank you, Adi. I'd like to now invite our next speaker, Suzanne Singer. Hi everyone. Yeah, I am Suzanne Singer. I'm a member of the Navajo Nation, speaking to you from Northern Arizona, which is home and is a cultural significance to many tribes around the Southwestern US. I am the executive director of Native Renewables, and I have a background, a PhD in mechanical engineering, and I think sort of my experience growing up, my grandparents living without electricity, running water. My internet and my technical expertise and then leading to tribal energy research has kind of led me to form a nonprofit organization, largely because of the frustration of that lack of energy access for so many Indigenous families. And if you're unfamiliar, it is within Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona. And I'll focus on that for now, just because that's the community that I'm from, but it's about 27,000 square miles. And there's approximately 15,000 families who still do not have access to grid-tied electricity. So a big peat part of what I work and promote is energy, energy access equity. And it's really a shame if you live like in Nevada, Las Vegas, Phoenix, you have benefited from natural resources that come from tribal lands and you have gotten electricity because of what companies have been able to do and export the power. So it's just a really shame the inequity that exists that others can have power because of the resources yet we're still struggling to power our own family homes. I think some of the things I want to share or promote and I think ask for in regards to future projects, programs, research. So one is always advocating for equitable goals in being inclusive of both Indigenous communities and rural communities. You may be familiar with informed consent. So that's a really critical process of which I personally think includes educating community members on technology that's going to be proposed within a community or the technology that it is going to be used for research purposes. So that's really critical. I think being transparent about those processes. I've seen a lot of energy projects not go through and a lot of research efforts not happen because not all community members felt like they were informed or that information was not shared with them or distributed widely and it was only shared with a small group. Another thing I'll sort of ask as you're doing the work that you do is really think about the whole life cycle process of an effort, a project thinking about decommissioning land use. A lot of Indigenous people think of themselves as caretakers of the land, we don't own land, but we are caretakers of it. And so in terms of energy disposal efforts, I think thinking about how that can impact the cultural values of community members who maybe rely on the plant life that's in the area or they use those land areas for gatherings. And so just thinking about the impacts that any effort projects, future projects could have, I would encourage you to think about that as well and be transparent about it. Another point I like to share is investment in on the ground organizations is really important. I think a lot of the folks that I work with, they're from the communities there and they've been there for years, they know the issues, they know the families and they know what's not going to fly in terms of getting work done there and they understand the barriers. So I think being, making sure you're valuing that community knowledge, that cultural knowledge that a lot of times can go hand in hand with science as well. And some other things I think is if you are wanting to work within Indigenous communities, thinking about what makes good partnerships. I think engaging in leadership in the communities, be it open to collaboration, but also bring ideas if you have that technical expertise and that community does not, they might struggle a little bit to come up with some ideas. So I appreciate your time and thank you. Thank you Suzanne for your comments. I'd like to invite Trisha Youngball now to speak. Hello everyone and thank you for inviting me to speak. I am Trisha Youngball as mentioned from the MITRE Corporation, which is a nonprofit that was founded 63 years ago that operates seven FFRDCs. And I'm part of MITRE Labs Energy and Environmental Sciences Group. So I will comment on the topics of social equity and energy resiliency and civilian and military use inspired research to assist in the energy transition. So what is really needed is the deployment of the good research and tools that's being done by a scientist into user accessible formats that could be put in the hands of practitioners and decision makers to help them bridge knowledge gaps and build consensus on their energy transition plans. So as I'm sure you all know, the US needs to rapidly decarbonize its energy production to mitigate climate change. And the good news is that there are many existing technologies to produce carbon free electricity at scale. And there are lots of feasible plans to do so. But the challenging part is making this transition equitable and as painless as possible. Producing that lasting community value that the last speaker touched on from these new infrastructure investments that can be in the way of new green jobs, clean air and more reliable power. And helping to build that infrastructure that is more resilient to climate impacts. So as many of you know, underserved communities experience many injustices, including energy insecurity, both from the cost of their electricity to living in places more vulnerable to floods and fires to having a polluting power plant their backyard directly impacting community health. You know, confound this with coal plant closures leaving workers without new energy jobs and high unemployment caused by the pandemic. So what is MITRE doing to help with the energy transition. We have spent the past year building several tools and capabilities to assist those local state federal and tribal governments with their energy transition and resiliency goals. You know one issue delaying the creation of new clean energy jobs is the placement of the new power plants, which is hindered by the difficulty of creating that stakeholder consensus. And the risk of not having the available workforce to build and operate the new facilities. So after a year of work, we've nearly finished building a tool. That's geographic includes geographical data and modeling to allow local governments to plan and site these new power plant investments. It compiles many federal data sources has an economic impact model and big data labor analytics to facilitate the decisions at the community level, and therefore help build that consensus. We're also building capabilities to assess threats and vulnerabilities. You know those be cyber physical or climate events of both military and civilian energy resources. And lastly, we're in the process of building a social equity and distributional impact analysis framework for federal and state agencies to use when doing benefit cost analysis of their energy projects. You know, there are a lot of different stakeholders convening around the energy transition. So, again, creating tools that are accessible that can be used across that decision space is necessary to help make the transition equitable. And as painless as possible. That's all I have. Thank you Trisha for your comments. You're welcome. So I just wanted to jump really quickly to say that we've had some speakers who were unable to to join us at the last minute so we will have an opportunity after this initial set of speakers has given their remarks for people from the audience to also make contributions. You have the capability in the audience to raise your hand, and if you would raise your hand, then we will, we will work through contributions from audience, the audience, those will be audio only, but please let us know if you're interested in making contributions. One of the things that we recognize is though we have these sessions that are focused on a specific theme. So much of this work in global change is cross cutting and so we actually welcome comments that come across across cut across any of these themes. I'll pass it back to Rachel to continue with the, with the signed up speakers, but we will look for your raised hands for people who are interested in making contributions. Thanks. Thanks Steve. So next up we have Ronald Larson who is speaking. Good morning or good afternoon to everybody am I coming through. So I'm going to talk about the subject that I worked on for the last roughly 20 years which is biochar a form of taking carbon out of the atmosphere. Before I go into that let me give a little more of my background. Some of my present affiliations I was in the first class of Congress and fellows 1973, there were nine of us. I was representing the I triple the electrical engineers. I worked on the first solar legislation that established. What's now called an robe was then called Siri. And I worked for a year after that with the office of technology assessment. I'm a past chair of the ASIS the American solar energy society. I've worked mostly on stoves after I retired. I worked on stoves because I headed a project in cartoon Sudan for USA ID on all forms of energy, a very fine country on my dad. So I'm going to switch to my for entries and I'll just read them. I can't see any other screens, but I'll try to do this quickly. So my first of four points. Is a DOE often equates RE or normal energy to only solar PV and win a bio bioenergy is the energy source today for half the world's population, a community sure to be most armed by global warming. Biochar would be properly recognized if and when do we better includes bioenergy as RE second issue carbon dioxide removal and national labs. The Department of Energy is lumping biochar with all the other CDR approaches they're about eight of them to be handled by nettle. Designated DOE lead lab lead lab for fossil not renewable by one biomass energy. NREL with world class expertise in biomass including biochar is not being appropriate appropriately utilize for CDR. I was a branch chief I was in the proposal for today's NREL I was a branch chief and I was the first fellow or something I forgot principle scientists third point carbon negativity and energy, the cost of electricity as a co product with biochar is obviously more than its cost. More than its cost from wind and solar but the combined costs of one electricity or fuels to dispatchable stores. We're mostly talking about hydrogen these days and that's not the only option. Three carbon negativity that that is what the biochar is mostly listed as one of the seven or eight CDR options. Number four food. Number one, the fifth point into the ground is increased MPP and the fifth point jobs can be lowest with biochar. I forgot what that means that didn't make sense. Number D is more about biochar. Number one, it's going to be the least cost in developing countries where the USA should feel continuing CO2 guilt. Number two, biochar helps much of the US economy. Forest agriculture, I think agriculture is the US biggest industry, urban affairs, blue energy, the coastlines and oceans. Number three, biochar always means local jobs. Technology's cannot provide local jobs. Number four, biochar is always an investment. It's not a cost and must not be analyzed like Dax and Bex. Now I'm going back to the screen here. And I hope I'm still being here. Got no more time. That's it. Bye bye. Thank you, Ronald. And so now we'd like to open it up for questions. If folks want to raise a question, not questions, I guess comments. Folks want to raise their hand and offer some comments. Yes, we do have. And the next session, I mean, I just got a, a request or a query on and the next session is just audio only Bob Pilko, if can, Rob, can you open Bob's audio and see if we can get that to work for him. I think it may be open now I hit the unmute button. Can you hear me? We can. Great. Okay, very much. Sorry, I couldn't speak via video because of lack of connection and other issues but here on audio the reason for wanting to speak is the fact that the energy and all its forms is something that only recently is being recognized by the investment, the government agencies and other communities. It's been there for a very long time in the form of legacy geothermal especially in the West where there's very hot spots from the Salton Sea to the geysers. And of course, internationally in the ring of fire. That's great. Absolutely wonderful. It's what I call legacy of conventional geothermal we bring everything to surface. What I really want to have the DOE the NAS and others within the government agency and societal realms to start to focus on geothermal in a closed loop type system where everything stays below ground and in other type reservoirs which are medium temperature within a range of oil and gas. Well and drilling capabilities today and those capabilities are extending rapidly to much higher temperatures but basically we're talking temperatures in the 300 degree F to 500 degree F range. And if one looks at sedimentary basins. They are well spread throughout the US certainly within oil and gas reason region such as the Gulf Coast of the US other places of the world as well and the multiple uses of high temperature geothermal energy from direct heat use for heating facilities and buildings, communities and other surface areas to the use for conversion to electricity is something that has been will say not overlooked but minimized. And the most important thing about geothermal energy is it's continuous. It is not intermittent like wind and solar does not require batteries. Yes, it could be used for subsurface storage. And if one goes deep enough with today's technology. It's easy enough to drill deep enough it's not cheap though. Geothermal actually has a much water geographic footprint than originally expected. So more research continually goes into this area. Being able to drill and measure to much deeper and hotter depths, as well as the initial capital costs coming down. Right, frankly, the surface equipment continues to lower in price and get much more energy efficient. But the subsurface wells portion has a high upfront capex cost and that high upfront capex cost the wells again, because the new technology continues to drop rapidly. And I would like and advocate that NAS DOE and the other government agencies. Put more emphasis on geothermal research and geothermal development throughout the US and with US interests for all reasons including energy efficiency. And of course, and national security. Thank you very much appreciate the chance to speak. Take care. Thanks very much for those comments. Is there anyone else like to raise their hand. I haven't seen additional interest as as yet and I just, you can either raise your hand or send send a chat to me with that interest will give just a moment more and I seem to have had a series of folks who were not able to make contributions this morning after signing up. Let's just give it a moment to see if there's anybody who's interested. All right, well, let's see. All right, well this is a shorter session than we then are what we had time scheduled for but we have it is one of five sessions and we've had robust contributions for the others and look forward to engagement in the final two which will be in December. So can you bring up the final two slides. Great. So, in follow up to this and the other sessions, we will be sending an email to all registrants with another opportunity to engage and provide contributions to us DCRP through a call for input is the first questionnaire and then an evaluation for this session as well. In each listening session we will be posting on the event page, which you can find at the National Academy site referencing this address below or just searching on the National Academy site. Some of the outputs from this activity, you can find the outputs from all of the activities at the end of this session series of sessions. We will provide a video recording and transcript of the session, as well as will provide additional information as as it comes available inputs from these listening sessions will be available to us DCRP they're there. We have representatives from us DCRP participating in this. In this session and the others, but we will also be providing the recordings and and other inputs to us DCRP for their work. Next slide please. So today is our third of these listening sessions we have two more scheduled for the first full week of December on December 6 in the afternoon, we have a session focused focused on food and global change. And two days later on December 8, we have a session focused on transportation and infrastructure. And we encourage you to join us for any and all of these sessions and please spread the word about about future sessions as well. So, Mike and then Rachel, if you have some closing remarks. Steven I just wanted to repeat my thanks. Interesting comments. And we've got a lot of notes. Thank you all very much for your time and your input. It's valued and appreciated. Thanks. It's just similarly as a member of the committee to advise the US DCRP. Thank you all for your participation and insightful comments I learned a lot and was was here from you. So thank you. Great.