 Good afternoon and welcome to today's Energy Seminar. We have a real treat today. We have two speakers on a environmental justice, climate justice topic. We've had a little bit of a theme in that direction in the last couple quarters. So the movement is growing, so I'm delighted about that. And to introduce our speakers today, I have the pleasure of introducing Brandon Renate, Renate, who I found out just got a PhD in maybe he'll say a few words about that from the School of Education on top of a master's degree in aerospace, which I came from at MIT, and did thesis work relevant to today's speakers and is currently at the Haas Center for Public Service and is the head of a program that works on similar themes, justice and sustainability, the way I understand it. So Brandon, take it away. Thank you for that introduction. Hello, good afternoon, everyone. Yeah, so I guess I could say a quick few words about my dissertation, which I just finished June of last year. Essentially, I combined or created this educational intervention that integrated engineering design and speculative fiction writing to engage youth in trying to imagine more just and sustainable climate futures. So definitely relevant to a lot of the talk that we have today. And so as mentioned, I oversee this initiative called Partnerships for Climate Justice in the Bay Area. And last summer, we sponsored a full-time fellow at the Green Lining Institute. And they learned about the Green Lining's racial justice approach while analyzing a federal energy program through an equity lens. So I'm really excited to introduce our guest speakers from the Green Lining Institute today, who will share their work around advancing energy equity in California. And I think this is a topic that we should all be invested in. Communities of color and low-income communities bear disproportionate burdens from fossil fuels, and yet they still face barriers in accessing the benefits of clean energy technologies. And for the past 30 years, the Green Lining Institute has placed community members at the center of policy solutions and helped communities of color access local, state, and federal funding to advance their own community-led energy solutions. So as California takes steps towards a clean energy future, the Green Lining Institute is building the political will for policies that will center communities of color, creating and distributing valuable equity frameworks, and ultimately holding both public and private sectors accountable to deliver on their promises to communities. So our speakers today will share more about their approach to creating an affordable, reliable, and climate resilient clean energy future in California. Jordan Bishop is the senior legal counsel of energy equity and advocates for laws and regulations that center the needs of low-income communities of color. Isabella or Bella Carreño is the climate equity fellow at Green Lining and focuses on grid reliability. So please join me in welcoming Jordan Bishop and Isabella Carreño. Thank you. We're going to shift this way because we have some notes. Thank you for the invitation to be here. We are very excited to be here with you today. Again, my name is Jordan. I use she, her pronouns. I'm a member of the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe and senior legal counsel at the Green Lining Institute. And my name is Isabella Carreño. I'm from Bakersfield, California. I use she, her pronouns. And I am the energy equity fellow at the Green Lining Institute. So as you just heard, the Green Lining Institute is a policy advocacy research and leadership development program, or sorry, organization that is headquartered in Oakland, California. We just celebrated 30 years of being an organization. We work at the intersection of racial, climate and economic justice in the way that that shows up in a number of sectors, including energy, transportation, housing, climate resilience and more. Our work has primarily been statewide in California but increasingly happening in other states and as well as on a national scale, which we're very excited about. So the Green Lining Institute was created to fight the lasting legacies of redlining, which is the illegal and systematic practice of excluding communities of color purely based on their race. The term redlining refers to these color coded maps that were developed by government, banks and realtors to assess the relative risk of making loans in certain communities. Redlined areas were considered high risk and consequently denied loans, investments and financing. For decades, redlining meant that people of color were effectively locked out of the same access to opportunities that allowed white communities to build wealth, contributing to the stark racial wealth gap that we continue to see today. So we're gonna talk a lot about this practice, redlining and make the implicit explicit with how this relates to energy equity. But first I wanna share that our organization has a history that is deeply rooted in action and activism grounded by the value that race should never be a barrier to opportunity. But we know that right now it absolutely is. Race is a barrier right now. Not only to economic opportunity, but to equity and health, housing, access to clean energy and a lot of the other sectors that we work on as an organization. So greenlining works to change this. And for us it's not just about undoing redlining, but it's also about working towards opportunities for what we call greenlining, which we see as building an abundant future that proactively brings investments and opportunities into our communities. So here at Greenlining, our mission is simple. The Greenlining Institute works towards a future where communities of color can build wealth, live in healthy places filled with economic opportunity, and are ready to meet the challenges posed by climate change. And to achieve this vision, as Jordan was saying, we focus on four strategic issue areas. Economic equity, climate equity, transformative communities and transformative systems change as well as Leadership Academy, which I'm a part of. And our approach to policy change begins with problem identification, then policy analysis, then strategy and policy development, policy enactment, then policy implementation, and finally enforcement and accountability. And at the center of all of this work, and I think is what makes greenlining truly unique, is ongoing stakeholder engagement and education and strategic communication that keeps us grounded in our vision and our communities. As an organization, we operate in three main roles. First, we are advocates. We lead strategy and policy efforts. We raise the visibility of issues that impact communities of color, and we build political wealth for the policies we champion. Next, we are bridge builders. We build together diverse players from public, private and non-profit sectors to create powerful solutions for lasting change. And finally, we're incubators. We work with communities to generate and test new policies and programs. We also cultivate the next generation of racial equity leaders so they can be strong and resilient advocates for change. So today we're gonna be talking a lot about race and equity. This means that we're going to be explicitly talking about racism, and I just wanna take a moment to name that that might make some folks uncomfortable. And that's okay. Being uncomfortable, having difficult conversations is part of the necessary collective work that we all need to do to truly advance racial justice. So before we get to energy equity, I wanna first ground us all in what we at Green Lightning mean by racial equity. And I'll do that by sharing our definition because this really impacts how we approach our work as an organization. So we define racial equity as transforming the behaviors, institutions and systems that disproportionately harm people of color by increasing access to power, redistributing and providing additional resources and eliminating barriers to opportunity to empower low income communities of color to thrive. So now let me make a few clarifications about our definition. First, oops, I'm sorry, there we go. Equity is not the same as equality. Equality assumes that the playing field is level and that everyone is starting from the same place on that playing field. Equity recognizes that some are starting from very different places on that playing field and that the playing field itself is unlevel for some because of systematic injustices like redlining. Let's also not conflate race with income equality and income equity. There are certainly low income communities who are not people of color and there are certainly communities of color who are not low income. Our emphasis on racial equity is not about exclusion. We know that race intersects and compounds with other identities like socioeconomic status, gender, sexual orientation, a framing best known as intersectionality developed by Professor Kimberly Crenshaw back in 1989. So in our view, race is absolutely not the only factor to consider when we talk about equity, but understanding race, really understanding racism is essential in order to develop the policies that promote justice and undo the existing inequities that currently play a great nation. In order to effectively lead with racial equity in the energy sector, it's important to first understand the history and policies that have shaped the current unjust system. So in order to make these connections, we're gonna tell you three stories. First, I'm gonna tell a story about the past and incredibly briefly provide some examples of history of race in America and the accompanying practices that I mentioned that locked people of color out of building generational wealth and how that is related to our built environment. Then Bella's gonna tell a story about the present and how those impacts of redlining are still felt today, even though the practice has been outlawed for decades, including how that passed and manifests in increased energy burdens and disparities in health for low-income communities of color. Finally, we'll share a story and our vision for the future about what we can do now to advance an equity agenda that directly confronts those legacies of redlining to create a society that is just where all people can live and thrive in healthy communities and sustainable economies. I just wanna say that there's a lot of knowledge and power in this room and we hope that these stories, excuse me, will inform your work in whichever aspect of the energy sector you are working on, studying or interested in. So I'll go ahead and get started with the story of the past. Many of you might be familiar with this history, but when we discuss racial injustice in America, we must start by acknowledging the government's systematic and racist policies against the indigenous people of this land. The United States was built on policies rooted in racism and colonization. Federal Indian policy in this country is marked by several eras, including termination, removal, assimilation, and eventually self-determination and sovereignty, but each of these eras came with its own set of policy agendas. I'm gonna just give a couple very brief examples. One would be the Indian Removal Act era and the era of violent and forced relocation of indigenous people from their ancestral homelands. The photo that you see in the center here is actually my paternal ancestor from that time period. Another policy example I'll give a more recent is the Urban Relocation Act of the mid-1950s, which likewise has direct impact on my own family history and how we all ended up living away from our ancestral lands in the Great Plains and living in Oakland, California. I share these brief examples to highlight that from the very start of our nation, government policy choices related to community, land, and wealth were driven by race. I also wanna take this moment and opportunity to read to you Stanford's land acknowledgement statement, which reads, quote, Stanford sits on the ancestral land of the Muwekma Ohlone tribe. This land was and continues to be of great importance to the Ohlone people. Consistent with our values of community and inclusion, we have a responsibility to acknowledge, honor, and make visible the university's relationship to native peoples. And so the colonization of indigenous land and the genocide of hundreds of thousands of native people introduced racial hierarchy to justify the land and resource seizure, segregation, and capital accumulation. Both this and the simultaneous enslavement and commodification of African and Caribbean people from the foundation of our present day economic system. As with the eras of indigenous policy, century after century, African-Americans and black Americans endured slavery and race-based policies like Jim Crow and separate but equal. And so in our story of the past, in time, this brings us to the 20th century. It's the mid 1930s, and in the middle of the Great Depression, a lot of families were struggling to make ends meet and they were defaulting on their mortgages. In response, federal housing agencies started providing government-backed mortgages to help post-war families sustain and build wealth through this national crisis. Many historians credit this policy to helping families rebuild their lives, but there's also a really shameful side to this story. Not all families received this help. To figure out how to distribute these mortgages, government worked with bankers and realtors to create maps to identify which neighborhoods to invest in based on credit risk. This is an audit from surveyors hired by the city of Oakland in 1937. As you can see in the box in red, it includes extremely offensive language and explicitly names black and Asian folks as quote, a detrimental influence and the reason for this particular community's redlining. As you can see as the security grade in red. Restrictive covenants of this time use very similar language. So further illustrate just how egregious this policy was. The federal housing administration had a manual to guide these practices which said, quote, incompatible racial groups should not be permitted to live in the same communities. For good measure, this manual also recommended using highways as a good way to separate black neighborhoods from white ones and more on this point shortly. But in purpose and effect, this was state sponsored segregation. And so redlining was instituted all over the country. The neighborhoods were graded based on a color code. Green meant best, blue meant still desirable, yellow meant definitely declining and red meant hazardous. Areas that were redlined were seen as a hazardous credit risk explicitly because of the presence of people of color as you just saw on the survey on that previous slide. Between 1932 and 1962, the federal government backed $120 billion in loans. More than 98% of those loans went to white families. We know that home ownership is the primary way that families build intergenerational wealth and households of color were effectively locked out of this opportunity and at critical economic times. This lack of investment in communities of color contributes to that extreme racial wealth gap that we still see today. And to be clear, redlining was technically banned but it still exists today. It just takes different forms. For example, according to a 2021 study by the National Association of Realtors, black home buyers are twice as likely to be turned down for a loan than white home buyers today. This also means that those families are also locked out of the clean energy programs that are only available to homeowners. Another part of the story of the past is the story of highways and the systematic redesign of our cities for the vehicle, for the car. Highways were very often constructed through communities of color, destroying neighborhoods, local economies and locking in air pollution and detrimental health impacts for decades to come. Highways are just one example of environmental racism. There's large bodies of research and evidence of widespread environmental racism in this country. We don't have the time to even scratch the surface on that but what I will say is that environmental justice communities or EJ communities or frontline communities include not only these areas where highways were most likely to be built but they're also the predominant areas where toxic and polluting facilities and practices are concentrated. Landfills, waste dumps, oil and gas extraction and production refineries, chemical and industrial processing and manufacturing. All of which have deadly impacts on communities of color and nearby communities and contribute to long-term health and wealth impacts and inequitable access to clean air, clean energy, land, clean water and food. Back to the highways. This redesign enabled what's known as white flight from the inner cities and into the suburbs and as a result that also shifted the investment from the inner cities into those wider and wealthier neighborhoods. This neglect and disinvestment further disenfranchised communities of color in the inner cities across the United States. As you can see from the video, numerous communities were displaced by the construction of the highway system and hundreds of homes and businesses destroyed. This video that I'm playing comes from the segregation by design project from a New York City-based architect known as Adam, named Adam Paul Sussanek. The project is an atlas which aims to document the destruction of communities of color due to redlining, urban renewal and environmental racism in the form of freeway construction. The website reads, working synergistically with the legacy of redlining, freeway planning became the ultimate enforcement mechanism. Literal walls of concrete and smog that separated black communities from white. In the name of thinly veiled racist policies of urban renewal, the freeways took the red lines off of the map and built them into the physical world. As I said before, redlining was technically banned 40 years after that first redline map was drawn, outlawed by the Fair Housing Act of 1968, but those four decades of segregation and disinvestment left lasting legacies that are still very much the present reality of today. A 2020 study found that most redline communities are still people of color and most screened line communities are still white. So when folks talk about the need to address structural racism, this is an example of what we mean by that. We need a serious confrontation of redlining's generational damage on communities of color. And with that, I'm gonna turn it over to Bella to take us through a story of today. Thank you. So hello, everyone. I will be telling the story of our present day and how people of color were impacted by a variety of intersecting issues and how energy inequity and injustice stems directly from these racial and economic disparities. Now, America has a 400 year history that has created the unequal conditions our communities face today. And as Jordan noted as well, America has a violent foundation. It is built on the genocide of indigenous people and the enslavement of African Americans. And America's violence is woven throughout its history from policies such as the Chinese Exclusion Act, the internment of Japanese people, Jim Crow, all the way to institutional redlining, racist immigration policies and immigration camps, to the unequal policing and unequal impact of COVID-19. This country has a long legacy of injustice that we must acknowledge in order to address and create a more equitable and just future. Now the truth is, race has always been a predominant factor in determining who wins and who loses in this country. And the private and public sector worked together to build these structures of inequality that have accumulated and compounded. Let's remember that history was not just made from just a few bad actors. These were all deliberate public policy decisions carried out by federal, state, and local governments. The history that Jordan and I talked about is difficult to listen to, but we are showing these photos because knowing and acknowledging this history is absolutely essential to making the progress we need as a country. Now I'd love to say that injustice, racial injustice is a thing of the past, but the reality is it's not because our country has not confronted our history of racial injustice in any meaningful or substantial way. Now continue to tell the story of today. I'm going to talk about how redlining impacts communities today, starting with air quality and health impacts. This graph shows the results of research that analyzed air quality in 202 cities where communities were redlined and found a consistent disparity level in the level of nitrogen oxide, which forms smog, and PM 2.5 pollution, which is the small particles that can become embedded in people's lungs and arteries in specific redline communities. Now environmental racism has poisoned our communities by redlining, zoning, disenfranchisement, urban renewal, highway development, and industrial development. It is seen here that the number one indicator of living near polluting facility in the US is race and the second is income. So if you are a low income person of color, you are almost guaranteed to live near a polluting facility. And as we saw by the pandemic, this can have some catastrophic consequences. Now to demonstrate how the past ties to the present, I'm going to show you these three maps. The maps to the left shows previously redlined districts in Oakland, and the map in the middle shows communities that are most impacted by pollution. And this uses a tool called CalEnviroScreen that considers the environmental, health, and socioeconomic information to produce scores for every census tracked in the state. And as you could see, the areas in red indicate the higher areas of pollution, and they line up with the areas that were previously redlined. And as you could see in the map to the right, many of the communities that are most heavily impacted by COVID cases, which are shown in dark blue, align with the areas with the highest pollution burden. Now people of color are amongst the most impacted economically and socially by COVID-19, with Latino communities seeing some of the highest numbers of COVID cases and African-American communities making up the highest mortality rates. These maps show the interconnection between economic, environmental, and health impacts. Now this all relates to energy. For example, the COVID pandemic has worsened utility deaths and exacerbated the energy affordability and energy and security crisis in our state. Investor-owned utility consumers collectively owe more than $2 billion in past utility bills. And low-income households hold a disproportionate amount of this debt. Now let's break down what we mean by disproportionate energy burden and insecurity. Now I know some people in the room may have extensive knowledge about this, but it's helpful to provide context to people who aren't as familiar with these issues. So starting off at a high level, let's consider the racial disparities inherent in the U.S.'s energy system. There are two definitions that are relevant to this graph. First, energy and security. Energy and security is the ability to pay utility bills without sacrificing other needs, like comfort, your ability to pay rents or pay groceries or your overall health. And energy burden is a factor of energy and security. It refers to the percentage of annual household income spent on energy bills. Now this research is from a 2020 ACE study that shows the median energy burden for black, Hispanic, and Native American households are respectively 43%, 20%, and 45% higher than that of white households. And you can also see a displayed on this graph. And furthermore, black individuals are more likely to live in older and less energy-efficient homes. And this is illustrated in the chart to the right that shows that despite having lower emissions from low residential energy usage, African-American households have a higher energy use intensity. This is a direct impact of redlining, which has forced African-Americans and people of color into neighborhoods with poor housing conditions, lack of infrastructure investment, and increased exposure to pollutants. Now the cumulative impact of decades of disinvestment and restrictions to economic opportunities also results in a racial wealth gap that looks kind of like this today. Where the racial wealth gap is continuously expanding as we head into 2024. Now ironically, new research shows that higher income households actually generate more greenhouse gases on average because wealthy Americans tend to buy more products, thank utilities, fancy electronic gadgets, cars, and also travel more by car and by plane. And all of these things come with their related and respective emissions. And yet households of color are most impacted by indoor air pollutants, such as particulate matter from cooking and nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide from combustion. Now these pollutants are well documented to cause risk to respiratory health, especially among people of color who report higher rates of asthma. And you could see in this chart the percentage of total particulate matter pollution exposed to by various racial ethnic groups are the highest for cooking and residential gas combustion. And those are circled on the graph. Now residential gas combustion primarily refers to either heating from a gas water heater or through gas stove tops. Replacing gas water heaters with heat pumps and gas stove tops with electric ones are all building decarbonization measures that would reduce or eliminate these pollutants from homes, but these are not accessible for low income communities. And the last fact I'll highlight around climate change and the impacts of it are felt across the entirety of the United States. Now the 21st century is bringing the climate crisis. This is a time where we are experiencing an increase in the number and severity of heat waves as well as intense storms. Now this study from the EPA found that black individuals, it's specifically black renters, face a disproportionate impact from extreme heat. Now black individuals are 40% likely than non-black individuals to live in areas with the highest projected increase in mortality rates due to extreme temperatures. One study found that 94% of formerly red line areas are hotter than non-red line areas within the same county by as much as 12.6 degrees Fahrenheit. This is particularly relevant to building decarbonization conversations because households may not have access to a working cooling device like AC to combat the rising heat, much less more energy efficient options like a swamp cooler or a heat pump. These disparities that I'm highlighting demonstrate a need to uplift racial equity in all conversations around building decarbonization because it's clear who is being and who will continue to be impacted. A history of racist policies and systems have made it so communities of color in this country are experiencing the impacts of climate change first. So we need to make sure that our climate mitigation strategies and resources explicitly prioritize these populations so they're able to live in healthy and affordable homes. Now I know this was a lot of information to take in so I'm just gonna pause here for a moment as I switch it over to Jordan. Thank you Bella. Now that we've shared some stories of the past and the present, I wanna share our vision for the future, our just economy future and an equitable energy future. While there are many injustices in society including in our current energy system that we just named, this transition that we're undergoing towards clean energy, the accompanying emerging economy and the sweeping climate-driven policy changes that we're seeing are amount to a huge opportunity to address the racial injustice in our country. Collectively at greenlining, we work towards what we call a just economy. Our transformative systems change team led by our colleague Vivian Breckenbridge is working on an updated framework and vision for our just economy and it's rooted in principles of an economy that is participatory, sustainable, cooperative, fair and healthy. Building this will require us to fundamentally and radically transform our current systems towards an economy where everyone can live and participate regardless of their race or where they live. So how do we get there? How do we get to this vision of a just economy? I think one of the most important contributions that greenlining has made to the policy ecosystem is our making equity real framework. I had the pleasure of contributing to this back in 2017 and 2018 when I was a legal fellow at the organization led by my colleagues, Sonia Monat and Alvarez Sanchez. We developed this framework because we found that there were often equity goals or language listed in the purpose of a policy or a program but not a clear roadmap on how to actually meet those equity goals and no accountability measures or guard wells to ensure that those goals were in fact met. This framework seeks to ensure that equity is not just something that ends with that goal or that commitment by laying out some concrete steps that we need to take if we want to truly advance and operationalize equity. Greenlining equity is not just a commitment, it is a practice, an ongoing practice. This framework itself is not too complicated, evaluating equity in a goal of a program or policy or funding source, evaluating how it shows up in the process, how it's implemented and then measuring those equity goals. It's a pretty straightforward framework but coming up with the strategies or the answers to these questions can be a little bit more complicated. That's because as a state and as a country, we haven't really needed to practice equity at the scale and at the speed that we need to to ensure that the issues that our most impacted communities face can be addressed. To close the gap on the numerous race-based disparities that we've covered and with the making equity framework as one of our primary guides, Greenlining's energy equity team focuses on four main priorities. First, let's talk about affordability. California's electricity prices are among the highest in the nation and projections show that these rates are gonna continue to rise at levels even higher than inflation. Utility bills are increasingly unaffordable. I'm sure you all see the news and the PG&E increases. Families are struggling. They're struggling to pay their energy bills and low-income households are feeling that the hardest. Electricity rates are high because households are paying for a lot more than just electricity in their utility bills. Rates are used to fund and pay for excessive shareholder profits, significant increases in wildfire-related costs and a pretty long list of state-imposed policy costs. Right now, the California Public Utilities Commission is evaluating proposals to change how residential electricity bills are designed. Right now, most Californians are paying for their electricity on a volumetric basis, meaning that all costs, including those that are unrelated to electricity usage, are collected based on how much electricity a household uses. This structure is regressive because it imposes a relatively higher cost burden on lower-income households. Last year, the legislature enacted AB205, something else you might have seen in the news lately, and directed the CPUC to authorize what's called an income-graduated or income-based fixed charge to collect those fixed costs that do not vary based on electricity usage than lower the volumetric pricing and that low-income ratepayers must see a lower average monthly bill as a result of this redesign. Restructuring certain utility costs into a fixed charge isn't going to solve energy and security. It's not going to solve energy affordability. But if done correctly, greenlining believes that distributing the fixed costs of the system by income would be much less regressive than the status quo and a step in the right direction towards a more equitable rate structure. However, actual equitable outcomes will depend on the details of what the CPUC decides. With this one, the devil really is in the details. So at greenlining, we're advocating both in the regulatory space at the PUC for the equity outcomes we want to see as part of this discussion, as well as in the California State Legislature, because this proceeding has generated a significant media and public attention. There's a lot of folks wanting to see this shut down to maintain what we see as the inequitable status quo. Our second priority for our team is equitable building decarbonization. I wanna first emphasize that building electrification is just a part of the picture. For us, a holistic building upgrade includes energy efficiency, health and safety upgrades, and where possible on-site or off-site renewable energy. Just electrifying a home without taking care of these other areas can lead to higher electricity bills, which wouldn't be benefiting a low-income household. So holistic solutions are needed to holistically address the environmental, social, and economic benefits that we wanna see in our communities. On equitable building decarbonization, this means prioritizing low-income households, black and brown households that we know are disproportionately impacted, and households that are or already disproportionately impacted by extreme weather events. Second, one of the key principles of equity is do no harm, and this takes front and center for how we think about building electrification. For example, this means having strong tenant protections to prevent the potential displacement or gentrification that could occur from building decarbonization projects, as well as having strategies in place to address concerns around increased bills and make sure that we're not actually exacerbating a household's energy burden. Why does building electrification matter from an equity perspective? This graphic is from the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy and highlights just some of the benefits of building upgrades. There is a lot to unpack here, so I'm not gonna go through everything, but I will uplift a few. Starting in the green box for climate resilience. Building upgrades enables families to maintain safe indoor temperature during extreme weather events and improves overall health and safety of the home, including with better air quality. And down here in the blue box, building upgrades can strengthen the local economy by providing local jobs and opportunities for women and minority-owned businesses. And lastly, the red and the yellow boxes, we know that building upgrades can save money and energy if implemented correctly, and you can see a few examples of that listed out, including freeing up household cash flow for essentials like food and medicine, improving mental health, and long-term housing affordability and stability. Our third priority centers around emerging clean energy solutions. As we all work towards a clean energy future, how can we ensure that the transition doesn't replicate the same inequities that were created by the fossil fuel industry? How can we shape a new energy future that truly centers and is led by communities of color? One thing is for certain, if we take the same approach to the clean energy transition that we did with fossil fuel industrialization, we'll end up with the same results, where communities of color bear the brunt in what are sometimes called clean energy sacrifice zones. We often hear about low-hanging fruit or the temptation to indiscriminately adopt quick climate solutions, but some energy technologies run a risk of perpetuating harms to communities and the environment. So our team led by my colleague Fatima Abdul-Kabir developed four guiding principles to consider before advocating for investing in or otherwise supporting different emerging technologies. The first two are shown here. We look to these principles in assessing whether an emerging technology is something that advances our vision for a clean energy future. You'll see some themes with our approach to building de-carb around prioritizing communities and doing no harm, but in this framework, we believe that clean energy solutions should benefit the communities that need it most and that the solution should not continue to negatively impact communities, such as by increasing cumulative exposures to pollutants or increasing household energy burdens. The second half of the framework focuses on community and wealth building. Equitable energy solutions should be community led, including robust community engagement and decision making power. And those solutions should also advance wealth building opportunities, such as prioritizing local labor, establishing standards for high quality jobs, supporting workforce development and targeted hire programs, which brings me to our fourth and final priority, which focuses on an inclusive and resilient economy. Diverse teams are already proven to be more innovative and successful across a wide range of sectors, but within the clean energy workforce, only 8% of workers are black, 16.5% are Latinx and only 27% are women. As we've repeated throughout this presentation, there's a massive opportunity right now to address disproportionate impacts of old practices like redlining, but also the new challenges that we're facing for communities of color. At the same time, we can also create high quality jobs and access to those jobs for those frontline communities. To close some of these gaps, our team led by my colleague, Sneha Ayigati, works to advance energy equity in the workforce, and she developed some key recommendations for companies that are creating the workforces of the future. One recommendation is around DEI or Diversity, Equity and Conclusion, developing a robust internal DEI strategy with specific actions to take and goals to track that progress. Thinking back to the Making Equity Wheel framework, we're thinking about equity in the goals and measuring the progress of those equity goals. The second tip is to develop trusting and lasting relationships with community-based workforce development and local environmental justice organizations. And the third recommendation is to align with funders, partners, communities, accelerators that can support and advance those DEI values and missions. And those last two tips are aligned with the Making Equity Wheel in both the process and in the implementation of whatever it is that you're working on. And with that, I'll stop there and see if there's any time for questions. If you wanna connect with us or learn more about any of the priorities that we've discussed, please check out our website, particularly our team's blogs, which dive much deeper into those four priorities that we discussed. But please reach out. We'd love to talk to you. We'd love to hear your ideas and perspectives. Thank you for having us. Great, thanks. Thank you. I am now opening an impactful message to us all. So now we have a little bit of time for questions. I have about 30 million questions, but we'll save them for later. This is Homesome, who is actually involved in some way in the path to us finding Jordan and Bella as speakers today. So Homes, who we've seen in previous seminars. Homes. Bella and Jordan, thank you for that tour de force spanning more than a century of context that brings us to our current challenges. Two weeks ago, Stanford hosted the California Energy Summit with leaders from the Energy Commission, Air Resources Board, Public Utilities Commission, all converged here, trying to address some of the answers to questions like expansive building decarbonization. Greenlining didn't have a voice behind the microphone at that summit, but if you did, what might you have advised this audience convened for that purpose with regard specifically building decarbonization? Thanks. I was going to ask the national version of that, so thanks for starting in California. Yes, great question. I think similar to one of the recommendations I just shared around workforce, inviting community-based organizations, inviting workforce development, inviting local environmental justice communities, and particularly for the conversation around building decarb, expanding that equity focus, not just on environment or energy, but housing equity. In our space, we look to our partners who work in the housing equity space to make sure that when we talk about robust tenant protections, that we're doing that in tandem with folks who work directly on these issues. So cross-sectional approaches and community-based community voices. Thank you for your question. Other questions? Are we in the back there? Hi, thank you so much for your presentation. I am just wondering how Green Lighting Institute, which I admire so much and have been following you for a while, how do you respond to, for example, changes in policy like net metering? And how does that then, how do you kind of reframe your response to these policies? And then what kind of policies are you advocating for that would actually help you implement the work that you're doing a bit better? Great question. So you mentioned the net energy metering conversation, which is very much tied to the conversation that's happening right now in the PUC around the income-graduated fixed charge. There's a lot of voices in that conversation. There's a lot of voices around electrification, energy efficiency, solar, a wide variety of voices. What Green Lighting focuses on is making sure that the affordability piece of that conversation isn't lost in that conversation. And we're talking about affordability for all, but particularly low in communities of color who are bearing the brunt of these disproportionate energy burdens at this moment. So particularly in the income-graduated fixed charge conversation, we're not so much engaged around exactly what should be in a fixed charge versus the volumetric side. We care about those things and we're tracking that conversation, but where we're chiming in is around, how is the PUC gonna define low income? What are the income tiers that are gonna be considered for these various fixed charges? Is it gonna be considering customers who are already part of bill discount programs like the CARE program or the FAIR program, or are they gonna take a wider view of what is considered low income that is actually reflective of the wide racial disparities that we have in our state? So in that sense, we're advocating for particular low income definitions that are truly reflective of the racial wealth gap and racial wealth disparities that we see in our state. Great. Any other questions? We have time for one or two more quick ones. Lots of far ones today. Didn't know this was a workout job she had. Hi. So I really appreciate your talk and I'm glad that Energy Justice is actually in part of this seminar series that we have here. So thank you very much for being here. So my primary, well, I have two questions. The second one's really short, but the first one is, I'm curious, like what is your primary mechanism to engage with like a city council that actually do and execute the development of different areas of the city to make sure that these policies are actually implemented in a way that seem effective to you. Thank you. Great question. So part of the work that Green Lanning does and Bella touched on it briefly when she was talking about our different focus areas, but we have a team that works on transformative system change and capacity building and we're working to create stronger, better relationships with folks who are actually working in local communities so that as we develop policies, as we talk to decision makers either at the PUC or the CEC or the state legislature that we're doing that in partnership with our communities. Those partners are also working more directly at the local government, in the local government center or a sphere as well as like local CCAs for instance. And that's not an area that we've engaged too much in yet but it's absolutely part of the conversation and we're looking to do more of that in partnership with the organizations who are doing that more local based work. Yeah. Maybe if I could, just one last question. It's kind of Holmes's question at the national level. About a year ago we had Ali Zayedi who's the climate policy guy in a domestic climate policy in the White House and he described the Biden plan which I believe was people places and projects to find disadvantaged people in places and he grew up in such a neighborhood himself. I think Gary and Deanna maybe. So have you interacted with them at all and if not or if, what do you make of what they've done so far? They seem rather well intended in this general direction but not with as much of a fine navigation system as you're trying to do. Yeah, unfortunately I'm not the best person for that question. I know that greenlining is engaging on the federal level. A lot of what we saw Biden's administration adopt is based off of the great work that we've done here in California around some of the programs that we have and so my understanding is that there was a look to the organizations that have assisted in what California did to make sure that those, what they're trying to do at the national level is actually implemented in the way that it's intended. So I would love to follow up with you on that about some more specifics. Well that's great to hear. There's several people here that could probably help you a lot. Yeah, I would love that. Including Holmes on that side. Well, we're just about out of time. Sadly, we could talk about a lot of more things but with that said, let's thank Jordan and Bella and. Brandon. Brandon. Brandon. Brandon. Thank you.