 Thank you. I'm Jordan Stangard, part of the Buell Center team. If I can invite up the energy and power group while I read your short bios. Can you come on and have a seat? Okay. We have Samantha Josephad, who is the founder of Studio 397 Architecture and the president of the National Organization of Minority Architects, New York Chapter. She recently received the AIA New York Women in Architecture Award. Forrest Meggers is jointly appointed in Princeton University's School of Architecture and the new Ann Linger Center for Energy and Environment, where he founded and directs the chaos, cooling and heating for architecturally optimized systems lab. Priya Mogaukar is the resiliency planner for the NYC Environmental Justice Alliance, where she leads a city on city and state level climate justice advocacy campaign. Matt Peterson is an organizer at Woodbine, an autonomous space in Ridgewood, Queens. Anandeep Premlau is an international agroecological educator, writer, grower, and pharmacist who has mycelial roots thriving in the Caribbean, ancestral India in the USA. Gaya Sriskanthin advocates for community-led and owned climate solutions, which has included promoting indigenous rights in climate action and supporting social ownership as a critical feature of climate justice. Sean Sweeney is the director of the International Program for Labor, Climate and Environment at the School of Labor and Urban Studies at the City University of New York. And Claudia Zamora Valencia is the director of programs at New Immigrant Community Empowerment NICE, a grassroots organization that builds the individual and collective power of immigrant workers and fights for justice and dignified work for all people, regardless of immigration status. So this group is going to talk for about 20 minutes, and then I'm going to invite Costa Constantinides, who represents New York City Council's 22nd District, which includes his native Astoria, as well as Rikers Island, parts of Jackson Heights, Woodside, and East Elmhurst. He's a chair of Environmental Protection Committee since 2015. I'm going to be holding up time cards, so keep an eye out for that. And thank you so much. I just wanted to give you guys a narrative of where we started in our conversations as a group earlier, and so we started talking about Indian Point Energy Center, which is a nuclear power plant in Westchester. It's scheduled to be shut down in 2021, and it encompasses about 20% of New York City's power as a source. A few of the topics that we discussed in our group revolved around public ownership, the value of labor, creating sources of just renewables, as well as energy efficiency. And so I'll pass the mic to the others on this panel to talk a little bit further on those topics. Hello, everyone. My name is Priyambol Gaukar within New York City Environmental Justice Alliance. Just to give context, you're the first group to go in a very non-traditional, exciting public assembly format. It was really great to have a group of, I think, almost 30 people in and out, huddled around this really engaging topic and this really great background information about Indian Point. So we got a lot of really rich discussion going that really expanded upon the idea of, you know, how can we really remake our power system in the era of the pre-new deal. Some of the kind of context setting that we, as kind of the core group of folks here at this panel, offered is, you know, we're in this really important time of transition, both politically and in terms of, you know, the dire consequences we're facing with climate change. So, you know, we're here talking in the context of a federal piece of legislation, the Green New Deal. But we're also thinking through the, oh, sorry, am I even slower? Sorry. So we're also in this kind of, this precipice here in New York City and New York State of climate legislation that is requiring us to think big and bold and think justly about transitioning off of fossil fuels. So just this year, New York State passed the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, which requires that our entire economy decarbonizes here in New York State by 2050, including transitioning 100% to 100% renewable energy sources by 2040. One of the coalitions that I work with, the New York Renews Coalition, thought really hard to ensure that particular resources are dedicated to frontline and disadvantaged communities in environmental justice communities for workers who are transitioning out of the fossil fuel economy. But we still have a lot more work to do as a state. Here in New York City, we passed the Climate Mobilization Act, and our kind of champion Costa here can talk more about that. But basically, there are so many policy shifts happening that we tried to focus in as a group on kind of what are some tangible actions that we can take in this shifting landscape, given a lot of the technical challenges of transitioning our entire economy. And I think I'll turn it over to Sean to kind of share some of the thinking that we started to do about how we can really enact public ownership over our energy system as a critical first step. Thanks, everybody. First of all, I just want to acknowledge the organizers of the conference, not just for a phenomenal organizing job, but the level of the discussion is very, very high. And I think as a movement, we're getting to a point where we're all trying to share and take responsibility for the transition questions, both the social, technical, as well as the ecological dimensions. In our group, the issue of public ownership was quite a prominent discussion. And I think it also is a sea change that has been brought about by the Green New Deal narrative. If we think about what it was like 10 years ago when Barack Obama was president, the goal was for an economy-wide emissions trading system as a way of decarbonizing the U.S. economy. It didn't succeed. Congress defeated it. But one of the things that the Green New Deal has done is it said, we all need to be involved in this and leaving it to investors and developers to make money out of the Green Revolution has proven to be a catastrophic failure at the policy level. And there is a lot to be said about that, but I think it was acknowledged in our group that if we're trying to leave this to mobilize the private sector, the private sector wants guaranteed returns on investment to do any serious projects. If we're going to do that, we're not going to have control. It's going to be more expensive. And the challenge of doing it fast, do it fair, and do it in a way that can meet the social objectives of the Green New Deal becomes virtually impossible, so ownership was crucial. I would, in a couple of minutes I have left, would say that one of the most welcome things about the Green New Deal narrative from people like AOC and Bernie Sanders is the emphasis on the public. Bernie Sanders has said under the Green New Deal, renewable energy will be publicly owned, and it will work in partnership with the existing publicly owned utilities. And that's crucial because what we've got now is so-called competitive electricity markets where you have basically a lobbying effort for subsidies of all kinds which ends up getting passed down on electricity bills and doesn't create the kind of jobs we're trying to create. So that's a huge departure at the level of policy in the debate that was not there even a couple of years ago, and that's crucial. Now, but with that policy break, I think, or that rupture, we've got a situation now where we can separate out. There were two challenges with decarbonization around energy in particular. I think we all know that if you can't decarbonize the power sector, you won't be able to decarbonize the transport sector, and you won't be able to decarbonize the building sector. So that means the electricity, the power generation, has to be in tandem working alongside energy conservation and efficiencies. But that doesn't work in the market model because the whole goal of the build and sell approach for electricity is to sell as much electricity as possible in order to return profits for investors. So what this does, it puts a public goods agenda right at the front of the debate, and I think that was broadly shared throughout our group. And so now then we've got an opportunity if we can get rid of this myth of competitive electricity markets, get away from that, reclaim, fully reclaim the power sector to public ownership. We've got a chance then of isolating the real technical challenges of decarbonization. And they're not small. So Indian Point, I'll just wrap it up on this point. Two gigawatts of power, 20% of electricity. I think I was the only one in the group, but I'm not sure by the end of the conversation if I was the only one who shared this view, why are we trying to close Indian Point when if the replacement energy is going to come from fracked gas from Pennsylvania. Two wrongs don't make a right, but there is clearly an obvious problem here in terms of what is the bigger problem facing the human species right now and its climate change. So even that discussion needs to be had, like how do we assert planning over the process of energy transition to advance energy conservation and do it in a way that can isolate the market problems, get rid of the competitive market, get rid of the idea that people should make money out of electricity generation, promote efficiencies and then we've got the power sector in our grasp and that'll give us a chance to build a platform for the kind of social, economic and ecological objectives we're trying to achieve. So I think that was the, at least I think I captured some parts of the discussion and I'm sure others will be able to do the same. Sure. Yeah, just to add to what John was saying, just to put it in the story that we had to sort of work through in terms of Indian Point, you're, as Sean said, we're getting rid of the equivalent of 200 megawatts of electricity and then where does that electricity come from? Currently the front line, the front runners are natural gas and also importing hydroelectric power from Canada which has its own issues because large hydroelectric dams have issues with indigenous land, they also come with their attendant environmental problems. So when we're looking at, we have to look at the electricity system holistically and there are huge problems when we're trying to balance our needs in terms of the climate transition with trying to get a small group of shareholders the maximum profits that they can out of a private utility or a private electricity generation company. And I think this idea that we're just, we cannot get away from the private sector in solving our problems. It's really dominating the way that we're looking at climate change and I want to give an example internationally right now the UN is very wedded to this idea that we have to go through public-private partnerships to reach our goals, whether it comes to sustainable development or climate and right now when it comes to energy access, which is a huge issue for people all over the world we're not meeting our goals because the private sector, there's no money in it for them they're not going there and they're not getting the results we need. So there's a huge gap in this logic that we have to go through the private sector all the time to achieve these goals. Yeah so maybe to drill down a little bit into that power dynamic of the private sector and the generation of power, if we can all stop and think about what two gigawatts is and what New York City is, right? I think that's one of the biggest conundrums and to me we hear a lot about the changeover has to happen, 2040, 2050, zero carbon, these are our time horizons but to answer Sean's question about do we think we should really shut down India? Do we think we should shut down? So should we shut down the planter, keep it open? 2021 is pretty close, right? And that's two gigawatts, right? That's more than 1.21 gigawatts that you can time travel with. It's a lot. Thank you. But also two gigawatts is six million solar panels that would cover more than four square miles, right? And there's not four square miles at Indian point, right? But I think the impetus should be what are the things that we can do to replace two gigawatts of power if we take them offline by 2021 and I think why not put a little pressure on ourselves? And this is the biggest city in the country and I would argue we have a lot of examples of young people doing amazing things. So I think the question about should we shut it down or not is really like a question to us about what we can do and how much time and these really big numbers are not that big when you think about the population of New York and all the things that you can do and the fact that it's not necessarily just putting a sweater on when the building's too cold. There's a lot of things you can do in public housing in the bill that actually make public housing more comfortable and use way less energy. And I think those are the spaces that we have a lot of opportunities in terms of heating and cooling in buildings which I do. Most buildings would be much more comfortable and use half the energy if we just would use our heads a little bit about how we operated them. And I think in that space one of the things that we can recognize as a community is how we together make up a big number, right? Even though it's hard to grasp two gigawatts of power, when you break it down into every individual building, the number of public housing interventions that we can do, the number of any building interventions we can do, it's a really, really big number. And I think we were telling a lot of different stories about how that can happen. And at the end of the day how we do that was the last, the second part of our conversation because it takes people to do that. Those people ideally should get paid fairly and justly and get given those jobs equitably. And I think that was kind of one of the big questions that if Indian Point shuts down, the second part of that is a thousand people lose their jobs there. And how many more jobs can we make to make up for that and to do that carbon-free. And I think we had a lot of great ideas discussed about ways we can really engage the public in the labor side as well. Hi, my name is Claudia Zamora and I work for NICE, New Immigrant Community Empowerment. We are a worker center here in Jackson Heights and we work with construction workers and day laborers. And so for me, the aspect of how we bring these communities into the new, and you mentioned it, it's key, right? Like right now in the construction industry, in the past 10 years, 500 workers have died in their job sites. Last April, three people died in one month. And the workers are doing these dangers and taking these jobs because they need work, right? So if we're going to bring them into the workforce, we need to make sure that we provide the tools, they are the trainings, and organize them so they can participate in the new deal but equipped to do the work in a safe way. We receive 200 people, every week we receive around 300 people who come to look for work. And in the past three or six months, we have received 600 cases of wage theft. So workers who are in their job site, they work and then they don't get their money. So there are structural changes that need to happen. We talk about the need for thinking about policy and regulation. So these workers who don't have the same protections that union workers can fully take advantage of the development of a new, like the new Green Deal. Hi, I'm Anandi Premlal with Sustainable Queens, and one of the things we brought up was creating solutions. Solutions that center predominantly marginalized communities and all that we're doing in creating new jobs, new buildings. Creating solutions that are a replicable model for other power plants that exist in lesser affluent communities. Also utilizing, creating solutions that utilize all municipal and organic waste to generate renewable energy, because we do have a lot of that in New York City. And this could be, yeah, definitely a new solution. And many people united in taking action towards a shared goal. I think in small solutions coming together, we can definitely make this happen. Hi, excuse me, I'm Matt, and I'm not an architect or a professor or a scientist or an engineer or a politician. And I think most people in this city and country are also not those, they don't have those professions. And one of the things that was spoken about as a question here is this question of green gentrification. And I think our breakout group, one of the dangers potentially would be the level of expertise in the discourse is incredibly specific and specialized and potentially marginalizing and confusing, incomprehensible. And these ideas of what a gigawatt is and what you want to do with that or not or how you're going to replace a gigawatt is automatically reducing the kinds of people who participate knowledgeably or reasonably or confidently in such a discussion. And I think really when you think about the Green New Deal or the potential for a public ownership campaign, the opening there is really one of public education or popular education to really bring this kind of discourse like to the worker center, for example, as you mentioned in our breakout. And my concern with this question of gentrification is the emphasis on what could be so-called professional managerial class dominating the discourse of the Green New Deal in a really difficult, problematic way. And of course, I want to acknowledge the research and work people are doing to think through these questions in elite institutions and fields, but also leave space for the kinds of neighborhood, community, education, popular meetings that would need to happen really. A lot of people point towards this idea of the grassroots. It sounds nice to talk about the grassroots, but there's really a divide between Princeton and Columbia and the grassroots, and we have to think seriously or critically about how that divide is mediated or bridged. And with the Green New Deal or this idea of socialism, I think a lot of people are scared about some kind of technocratic governmental bureaucratic horizon that's going to solve everyone's problems through legislation. And I just want to think about different public educational forums like this one, but involving different voices in different communities to think through that. Some friends of ours have produced this People's Climate Plan for New York City. This is going around, and this is one effort maybe to think through that, to write about that, to think about different ways of doing education. So that's just what I wanted to bring to the table and bring to the discussion. As the day continues, it's great that so many really accomplished professionals are here among us to talk, but we also have to leave room for different people who are not architects and scientists to really think through what the Green New Deal means to them as well. Good afternoon everyone. My name is Costa Constantinitas, a New York City Council member as well as the chair of the New York City Council's Environmental Protection Committee. I'm proud to hail right here from the borough of Queens in Western Queens in Astoria. And, you know, earlier this year, we passed the Climate Mobilization Act, which was the largest emissions reduction policy, not just in New York City, but any city anywhere. And it sort of changed our conversation in city government. And this really came from a grassroots movement. We worked with so many of the great people on this panel and so many activists to make sure we got this right, because as it was talked about, big real estate wasn't too interested in doing this on their own. The buildings we regulated as part of the Climate Mobilization Act were only about 50,000 out of a building stock of 1.1 million. And yet those buildings accounted for a 30% of New York City's total emissions overall. So we needed to get these buildings under control, and we made sure that this bill was aggressive but achievable, that building owners could hit these targets. We also made sure that we weren't pitting sustainability and affordability against one another. So we gave alternative compliance to our rent-regulated buildings because we can't have situations where men and women in our communities are priced out of their neighborhoods because of policy, because of sustainability policy. We need a better model. So this bill passed back in April. It has become law. We're on the path to getting it done and implementation. But we have to sort of think about what the next horizons are. I think many of the folks on this panel have been thinking about that. We recently introduced a bill, a set of bills, called the Renewable Rikers Act. And taking a step back from that, thinking about where power plants have been sited. Power plants have been sited primarily in environmental justice communities. The last time they sited power plants in this city about 20 years ago, in the name of reliability, they sited 10 power plants in New York City Limits, no environmental review. Here in Queens, they were placed next to the Queensbridge houses, the Ravenswood houses, and the Astoria houses. With no environmental review, they were told those neighborhoods that, don't worry, we're going to close down these plants in three years because we're going to have a plan to shut them down. Well, 18 plus years later, they're old enough to vote. Those plants are still operating next to public housing, and those residents have higher than the borough average as more rates. They have higher than the borough average ER admissions and hospitalizations. This is the challenge that the conundrum that we're dealing with every single day, that all this fossil fuel infrastructure was placed in environmental justice communities, communities of color, low income communities who are bearing this burden. And those are the same communities, by the way, that were flooded during Hurricane Sandy in western Queens. The communities who can ill afford to move, the communities who need the Green New Deal most desperately, we need to come up with solutions. So the solutions we've come up with, at least one of them, is to, as we're transitioning Rikers Island, Rikers Island needs to become part of that solution. We have legislation that would transfer ownership of Rikers Island to the Department of Environmental Protection. And with that, have them start knocking down structures and building renewable energy on Rikers Island. Oh, there we go. That's exactly what I want to hear, that kind of knocking down of structures. We're in the same boat here. But we want to, you know, we were working with CUNY Law School to come up with a model, and I think we have a coalition of organizations that are in support of this model that would put down 100-plus acres of solar with utility-scale battery storage, which could potentially be enough power to replace these fossil fuel power plants that were opened 20 years ago. We need to build anaerobic digesters, move our organic waste onto Rikers Island, barge it there, not through trucks, we don't want trucks, but barge it there and create renewable energy in that way. So the legislation we have would have a renewable energy study to see how much renewable energy we can create. And we right now have, not that I don't trust city government, but we do have some money already allocated to sustainable CUNY to come up with a model to see how much renewable energy we can create beyond just solar on wind, on how we can really sort of maximize our renewable energy potential right here in Queens. The Climate Mobilization Act that I talked about earlier, Urban Green Council has estimated it's going to create 141,000 jobs over a 10-year period. How do we make sure that we're bringing communities that have been impacted by environmental racism? How do we make sure that they're the ones getting these jobs? I know here in my district we're transitioning one of our local high schools, the CTE program, the Continuing Technical Education, we're transitioning it to renewable energy. So we're teaching young people in high school how to be renewable energy installers, how to make sure that they're installing solar, they're installing wind. I just took a tour of local three, the Electrical Union, last week, and I was talking with them about how we can transition those young people. How do we can get them into unions? Because I know that my father-in-law came to this country, didn't speak a word of English. He was able to get a job, he worked on the original World Trade Center, he became a plasterer at Teamsters 237, he bought a home, put my wife and her siblings through school, supported his family when he died of a heart attack nine years ago, he left the pension. That's what union work does. It gives windows into the middle class for those who most need it. So we define these ways of transitioning, these opportunities, so if we can create a job pipeline, not a gas pipeline, we don't need those any, we don't need more fossil fuel infrastructure, but we can create a pipeline from our local schools teaching them renewable energy, having solar curriculums in our schools, having career technical education in our high schools, and then being able to transition into our unions, we can have an opportunity for young people to get these jobs, to do the solar installations on Rikers Island, to do the construction of the anaerobic digesters, and last thing I'll bring up on Rikers Island as well, it's not the terribly most sexy project, but over 100 years ago, we built our sewer system when only a million people lived in New York City. We have a lot more than that right now. Every time it rains more than a quarter of an inch, our system can't handle it. So what happens is, its fail-safe is to dump. Last year, not too far from here, Flushing Bay, Flushing Creek, five billion gallons of sewage went into Flushing Bay, Flushing Creek. Just last year, I'm not talking about lifetime, I'm talking about 2018, and we know the impacts of climate change are only going to make it wetter and hotter, which means our sewer system is going to be overwhelmed. If we take the remaining land on Rikers Island and build a state-of-the-art wastewater treatment system, we have the opportunity to close down the Bowery Bay wastewater treatment plant, the Talman Island wastewater treatment plant, the Ward's Island wastewater treatment plant, but also keep, because it's state-of-the-art, keep billions of gallons of sewage out of our waterways. And who lives next to our waterways very often? Again, it's environmental justice communities. So when we clean up our waterways, we're making our waterways swimmable and fishable, we're a city surrounded by water and yet our waterways are polluted. We need to come up with real solutions, and these real solutions can put men and women in New York City to work. And then we can have a conversation on Rikers Islands. I've heard different arguments. We should make it affordable housing. We should make it an extension on the airport. Not too much excited about that extension on the airport part. But we do need to have a conversation around affordable housing, but I'd rather have those conversations where the power plants used to be in environmental justice neighborhoods. I'd rather have those conversations about affordable housing where the waste water treatment plants in environmental justice neighborhoods used to be. That's the right place to have those conversations. And there can be community land trusts that regulate that land to make sure it doesn't fall into the hand of developers, but that communities, the communities that have been most impacted by Rikers Island through over-policing and mass incarceration can then have the strongest voice and what we do with that land in their own communities and build opportunities for affordable housing, for more green space, for renewable energy together. We can change how we power a city, and that's why when we're talking about the Green New Deal, we can power our city differently. We can do our wastewater system differently. We can create 50,000 green jobs right here in Queens. We just need to have the political courage to do so. So I'm looking forward to partnering with all of you. I want to thank everyone today who put this conference on. We need more of these conversations because I walked in today. There shouldn't be a fear about this. This is an opportunity that we have every 100 years that we need to grab and not let go of and push forward and not let big real estate and not let special interests control this conversation. The last thing I say is I put out an op-ahead last week. I know I have less than a minute. But all of this should not be regulated by Con Edison either. National Grid and Con Edison have been playing a shell game. The minute the Williams Pipeline was turned down, all of a sudden they stopped doing gas connections. They're using families that's pawns in their political game to try to bully us into an arranged marriage with fossil fuels. We need to take public ownership. I agree with the Democratic Socialists of America that we should have a public power option here in New York City. Because one of the problems I've been asked about this plan on Rikers Island is how do you plan on plugging it into the grid if Con Edison's running the grid? Well, that shouldn't be our problem. We should control our own power. And the same way when we turn on a faucet, water comes out, we control our water system, we should control our energy system. So again, my name is Costa Constantinitas. I look forward to partnering with all of you. Thank you for having me here this afternoon. Is this still on? Okay. There's more seats that have been laid out over here. And there's a few over here so everyone should filter in. We're going to open it up for about 20 minutes of questions. The panelists can also feel free to ask each other questions if you want. But I'll call on three questions at a time and then we'll do as many rounds as we have time for. If there's someone who has a mic that passed. Okay, great. I see one here. Second row. Great, thank you. Hi, thank you. I'm sorry, I don't know the gentleman very well. Yes. Hello, how do you do? Okay, so if I heard you correctly, because I've been hearing all the talk about Rikers Island. So Rikers Island will be now an energy island? Is that what you're saying? I think that is the goal. Okay, so it will no longer be for prisoners. Well, there was a... I know, local. So by 2026 there won't be any detainees on Rikers Island. So it's like what do we do with that land? 413 acres. Okay. Second, I heard you say that you were going to put a water sewer treatment plant there at least you would like to. And then in that event, you would then take away other water sewer treatment plants because there would no longer be a need for them in the various communities that they're in. Correct. Okay. So I know people who work at these treatment plants. So then what happens to their jobs? Hopefully, this whole conversation around just transition is part of that. But in addition, there's still going to be a pretty significant wastewater treatment plant that is going to be functional. So there is going to be a very large state of the art, brand new wastewater treatment plant. But I think we also have to have conversations about how we have to adjust transition. And thirdly, I heard you say that you're going to then take land trust where these water sewer treatment plants were originally should you close them down and make this for affordable housing? This land, would that not be considered superfund land? Like what would that land be? I mean, the community, community land trust, the community would make the decisions. But on so treatment- Well, they can be remediated, right? I mean, a hundred years ago, it was an amusement park. So I mean, there is opportunity. And so there's opportunity to think about these things as a community together. And maybe it's not those uses. Maybe it's more renewable energy opportunities, but it's an opportunity for a community to have those conversations, not real estate, not special interests, but the neighborhood if they own the land can have a conversation what they want to use the land for. Okay, thank you so much. I'm going to take three questions in a row, and then we'll do answers after. So I see one, and then another mic can go up here. Hi, everyone. Thanks to the panelists. I'm Amma Francis. I'm from the Saban Center at Columbia Law School. I'm just wondering if you all could break down for us what public ownership of the electric grid looks like in New York City. That would be helpful. Thanks. Okay, second question here. Yeah, and just on the point of Indian Point, there's been a movement working to shut down Indian Point for decades now, and I think it's very important that the conversation about Indian Point and about all nuclear power plants not happen in a vacuum. Indian Point is very old. It's way past its closing date, and it has had a history of just astonishing accidents. It's an accident waiting to happen, and there are tens of millions of people living in the area, in the radius area for the plant, so. Is there a third question before we go to answers? Hi, I'm John Forster from District Council 37 here in New York City. Thank you all for being here. So I'm just wondering also in this idea of the Digester Plant on Rikers Island, also perhaps be it an appropriate place to produce clean liquid hydrogen fuel that's been talked about a little bit today. And then all the second part of that is as we move towards that public ownership of energy, I think we need to back off of the power purchase agreements that we're currently using, particularly for the installation of solar power that's gone very slowly in New York and on public buildings, public schools, and I was just wondering how people feel about that because that tends to privatize the entire operation and moves us in the other direction. In terms of the first question, we did talk a lot about what it looks like, and within our group we asked everybody how many people have gotten advertisement for green mountain energy or green X energy, right, to buy energy from someone else, right? And they try and outline for you clearly, you're going to buy energy from me, it's still going to come from your local generator, and this is all part of the complexity of the current private energy system that we operate, right? So there's people that make power, sell it into a big market, and a bunch of other people can buy that including buying wind power in Texas and in theory sell it to you here. And all of those complexities are bound up in our current private system and a public system, right? Now the main difference would be that there's not a profit anymore that locally the generation has to not be tied to a private entity making money from you consuming your energy, right? Your energy is managed by a public good that everybody pays into. It's a very different system and I don't have the answer of how the complexities between the current system and a public system would all be resolved, but I think the main discussion point we ended on when we were discussing the public private part was really should electricity today and energy delivery be a public good, right? Something that is everybody has a right to and that shouldn't be something that people make money off of, right? Because there's an inherent problem in public goods profit a limited number of people. We also discussed something that I think everybody's heard about as a situation in California over the last few months where you have a privately owned utility that is basically sacrificing its entire public that are dependent on it in order to preserve its business model. So I think that's a very stock example of where a private owned utility is like the worst model for managing an essential public resource that people depend on for basic economic activity. But I wonder... Just on thinking in general principles on public ownership most of the world would be in the dark today if it wasn't for publicly owned energy which didn't produce electricity for a profit. All of the global sites, large parts of the global north we can look at the... One of the remarkable things I think about the Green New Deal is it's opened up a discussion about the old New Deal and the role of the rural electrification administration none of that, none of those experiments were perfect but let's look at some of the facts. In 1935 only 6% of rural dwellers in the United States had access to electricity. By 1955 because of the New Deal it was 95%. So if we're talking about and we are talking about speed, scale, equity we have to do this quickly. We need to take the profit motive out of it. It needs to be done because it's a public good. Emissions reductions generated anywhere will benefit people everywhere. Emissions generation anywhere will harm people everywhere. So this lays the principle for a public goods approach. But then it goes a bit more detail. We've got to talk about there's generation of power, there's transmission, distribution and then there's the whole retail and customer service operations. I've been working with the British Labour Party and the trade unions in the UK and the debate there is do we take it all back? Generation, even fossil based generation, a nuclear generation? Or do we just take over the distribution and transmission systems? I'm with the former. I think we cannot tell workers in the generation system right now that well you know you're going to wither on the vine because you're the past and the future is renewable energy so we're going to look after renewable energy. This is a social and political problem but it's also a technical problem because for the foreseeable future we will need centralized power as we phase in renewable power. The sun does not shine all the time. The wind does not blow all the time. We need to be developing grid balancing and movement of renewable power but that's a decade or two decades down the tracks. So as we phase out the fossil fuels and centralized generation and phase in the renewables we're going to need the workers in those industries to help us balance the grids and that means taking back the investor owned utilities which were publicly owned bringing them back into public ownership and having a planned transition from fossil based power to renewable based power. It's the only conceivable way in my view of actually doing it and around the world if I may conclude on this we're seeing this struggle for public energy coming back again. I mentioned the UK situation in South Africa where I'm also working with the project trade unions for energy democracy and the unions in South Africa. The environmental groups want to see the breakup and privatization of the public utility which burns coal. That's a big mistake because the most ambitious scenarios for decarbonizing South Africa is that there will still be at least 50% of its electricity produced by coal by 2030. So if you're going to have private renewables coming in and you're going to bankrupt the public utility the people will end up having to bail out the utility because you're going to need the electrical power. It's a technical challenge as much it's not a market challenge, it's a technical challenge. So that's where public ownership allows us to plan allows us to develop the technologies allows us to protect the workers and train for new skills that's the joined up kind of thinking we need if we're going to make this energy transition possible to get to zero carbon within the years we have remaining. So that's my point on that. We'll take three more questions. I see one in the front. My name is Diana Hernandez. I'm a professor of public health at Columbia University and I do research on this concept called energy and security which is basically people's inability to adequately meet their household energy needs and a lot of the stakeholders that I'm hearing in these discussions happen to be on the supply side of energy and supply communities but a lot of times like people are unable to pay their bills. So what does that actually mean and where is their room for something like basic energy where there is an opportunity for people to have a basic allocation of energy that is distributed to that household because the yellow vest in France are a really good example of how these transitions end up being unaffordable and they're really good for the economy to some extent they're really good for the climate but they're not necessarily great for people's pockets and I think we do need to kind of think about the people here in the just transition that might be economically marginalized as a result. Hi I'm a student at Hunter College and this is kind of speaking to what Matt mentioned about education how would you like what are some specific ways that you would try to educate young populations especially like really young kids about the complexities of this topic and everything that has to do with it. Do we have a third question? Oh sorry go ahead. My name is Jonathan Bailey. I'm one of the co-chairs of the Queens branch of DSA and very involved with our dual power working group. One of the, this is kind of I guess a question that's kind of directed at our political leaders and anybody who's working with labor but one of the things that's been really on our minds especially as a part of the dual power working group is kind of the context for a lot of this stuff. It's super awesome that we're talking about a green new deal and it's obviously like this reference to the new deal but one of the context for the new deal was the fact that the Communist Party USA was at its height of power and was able to actually serve as an impetus for a lot of this kind of political change then. And there's kind of two examples that we really have in mind when we're kind of thinking about this. We saw recently in the state of Oregon there was kind of a Militost environmental reform pushed by the Democrats there and we saw that the Republicans just left the state, militias threatened to shoot any cops that went after them. We saw that we didn't actually have the power to make these changes happen. Another example that we're very much thinking about is the way that Amazon workers staged a walkout and were immediately able to get reforms to Amazon, sorry, Amazon walkers staged a walkout and were immediately able to get reforms. And so our question is kind of targeted towards what are we doing right now to build the power that exists outside of the capitalist state in order to make those changes happen because if we're just relying just on passing reforms we might find in the circumstance of the state of Oregon that's not enough to actually create these changes. Thank you. Hi, so I just wanted to answer your question on education. So one of the things, and I think John Forrester, I think it ties into the question that was asked by John Forrester before but I didn't have a chance to answer it. We need to be investing in renewable energy in our city buildings. There are 4,000 city buildings in the city of New York that are city owned. One of the things that we're doing all the schools in my council district that are solar ready will be solarized by next fall. PS171 is an example. 516 solar panels. It's an elementary school. 50% of the base load will come from those solar panels but also there'll be a sort of display in the auditorium that has... Here's how much renewable energy is created. Here's how much fossil fuels we aren't burning. Here's how much greenhouse gases are being averted. So we're bringing a solar curriculum into these schools. So it's not just about we're putting on the roof. It's not just about fighting climate change but it's also about connecting those students to those renewable energy so it's building science experiments, it's building math equations around it and then every middle school in our council district will be solarized by next fall. So they'll be going from elementary school that has a solar curriculum to a middle school that has a solar curriculum and then hopefully a high school that has CTE, cure technical education. We can build that sort of basis for knowledge all the way through. That is one of the questions that we're trying to answer and we're trying to supercharge the investments that... Because John is right. There's too slow on implementation. There has to be, and I think that kind of ties a little bit into what Jonathan was talking about, that we need to have a lot more activism on the ground that's sort of holding people accountable, building structures outside of government that are holding us accountable because as fast as we're pushing, we need to go faster and there's only a limited amount of ability that one elected official can do or one policy can do. So we need to have infrastructure around that so I'm continuing to push on that as well. Yeah, I'd like to add on to that point of implementing it and having advocacy efforts to implement it within our curriculum for K through 12 schools. And whether that... We talked about it a little bit during lunch, but whether that is having a third party come in and teach some of those things within the curriculum and having it in house in each school as we wait for it to be more of a national push in the academic literature that they're providing for these students. And then to answer your question about how is it impacted by the end user, I think our policy right now requires that building owners and landlords meet these particular demands, but there isn't anything, any literature in that policy that talks about how we measure how these landlords are doing that. And a lot of times what happens is they're just offloading that burden onto the end user. And so we need to look back at that policy and say, like, how are we really articulating how this should be done on an ownership scale so that the end users, like the residents, aren't only impacted. Hello. So if I could try to respond to the energy burden question as well, because I think that's a really critical point. You know, low-income people, people of color tend to live in, you know, under-invested housing. They tend to have less efficiency and have to run their air conditioning. That kind of thing happens where the power will just be blacked out in their neighborhoods. You know, there are a lot of intense burdens placed on these communities that also result in higher energy costs and more of their paychecks. Okay. More of their paycheck being paid toward electricity. And these are just going to be compounded as we see, you know, increased heat waves, increased instances of power outages from things like Superstorm Sandys. And so, you know, one question that I have for everyone here to think about when we're talking about public control of utilities and public ownership, is there room in that model for community control and community-scale energy systems? So we need to have, you know, renewable-powered, you know, battery storage kind of in communities of color in low-income communities, particularly in areas with under-invested housing. And we need to make sure that in instances of heat emergencies and Superstorms, that when the power goes out and the grid can't support electricity supply, we have local kind of islanded sources of electricity for vulnerable communities. So that's one of the solutions that the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance is thinking through. And I would love to have more conversations with folks in the public power space about that. How can we have kind of community-controlled, local-scale, cooperatively-owned solar systems in the kind of context of the public taking back power? Maybe just to speak to your question about the education, I think, when we think about energy and power, you know, this idea of power exists, one specifically in the question there's also the idea of power just in terms of how our society is governed and organized and administered. And I think we can see it here with the questions like if AOC was here as a congresswoman, she would field more questions. Then maybe Costa would field a second tier of questions. Then maybe policymakers would field a different tier of questions. Then maybe researchers or whatever because there's a hierarchy about how we think of power and how we think of expertise and knowledge and who can actually get things done. But when Bernie kind of talks about political revolution, it would be some kind of flipping about how we would think about who we would talk to and why. And that's what the community power, community control I think or I would hope would point towards. And that's really the question of education for me is to think about how do we shift this political imaginary about who we talk to and why and who we think can change these things and why and therefore how you would build a movement with who. We say we want public power or it's up to us. Who is that we or who is that us? Do we think of purely politicians or technocrats or bureaucrats or managers or ministers and we think if we just shift the power from one set of bureaucrats to another, everything will kind of work out for us. It'll be more egalitarian. Or do we think of really empowering people in a different way, a different kind of autonomous imagination of what power would look like both in terms of electricity but also in terms of how we see ourselves as having agency in the world or agency in the city we live in. And I think on the question of education it would shift from thinking about Indian point where people may have no idea where it is or how it functions or who owns it, but maybe starting from your utility bill, you know what is con Edison or what is national grid and maybe working up the chain backwards through that and thinking about how those different infrastructural nodes or points function as a kind of process of education and that would also happen maybe in different spaces, in neighborhood spaces if they exist, community spaces church spaces outside in parks and plazas, they do try to engage people that are not already embedded in institutions of power and political kind of control or management. I think that would be for me the educational horizon of something like the Green New Deal or public ownership. I just wanted to answer, I think it's Sean's question on power in terms of organizing and I think AOC and Bernie are right on the money when they say that it's going to take a movement to implement the kinds of policies that they're trying to promote in this country and the same thing as it's critical for a Green New Deal I think we need to build up these important institutions like unions, currently our political parties are extremely opaque and not there's no entry point for normal people to participate in them I'm also from the UK originally and the Labour Party has started this massive democratization of the party and having more space for local members of the party to shape policy and we need to nurture movements like that and I think groups like the DSA unions and even environmental groups that I think my one criticism coming from the environmental field my one criticism of environmental groups is that I think for too many decades we've kind of bought the whole neoliberal model for like how are we going to fix the environment and we can just work we can just tweak around the edges and it will be fine and I think we have passionate people who could be activated but maybe like looking in the wrong direction and not looking at power analysis and we need to bring a culture of doing power analysis back into the environmental movement as well we're all out of time so thank you to our panelists