 We'll go ahead and get started. We have a lot to cover, so it's best that we get started right on time. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Dan Brasette, the Executive Director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. Special thanks to our host today, Representative Matt Cartwright from Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Thank you very much to him and his staff for helping us have this great room and all of the great setup. Today, we're going to hear from five experts about current and potential legal pathways to deep decarbonization. Which means a reduction in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80% from 1990 levels by 2050. Our panelists have a lot to tell you, so I'm going to keep this intro short. Even using these legal pathways, we have a lot of work to do. And we will increasingly be looking to Congress for leadership and judgment as the urgency to act continues to build. Our panel today isn't the only big deal in climate policy happening on the Hill today. As you might know, today is also the submission date for responses to a set of questions posed by the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis. The documents submitted today will help the members of the committee craft recommendations that will be shared by about the end of March. And then the committee's work product will be an important reference point for what follows. An intensive climate change policy making process that will probably span several years. At EESI, we took this opportunity very seriously. Let me very briefly share three high level points or principles that we encourage the committee to consider. First, we urge the committee to take near term actions to reduce emissions while more comprehensive policy takes shape. Many of the policies are bipartisan, although somewhat limited in scale and scope. But we'll pay a cost of delay if we miss the chance to take steps forward now. Second, we urge the committee to think very carefully about the staging and sequencing of policy development and implementation. Addressing climate change is a monster challenge and we need to make sure we take into account the order of operations of policies for near, medium and long term gains. And third, we urge the committee to allow states and local governments to continue to lead. Some policy options might be best handled at the subnational level. And we have seen recently that states and local governments are more than happy to step up, get creative and do what they can do to help. I encourage you, for those who aren't in the regular practice of doing this, I encourage you to visit EESI.org to read not only our submission that will be posted a little bit later today, but also take the time to sign up for our Climate Change Solutions newsletter. It comes out every two years. Best way to stay up to date of what's happening up here in climate policy and clean energy policy on the Hill. And now, without further ado, we'll turn to our panel. Our first panelist is Michael Gerard. He is a professor of environmental and energy law at Columbia Law School and director of the Saban Center for Climate Change Law. He has served as the chair of the Faculty of Columbia's Earth Institute and chair of the American Bar Association's section of Environment, Energy and Resources. He was a partner in the New York office of Arnold and Porter before joining the Columbia faculty about ten years ago. Michael is a co-editor of legal pathways to deep decarbonization in the United States, along with his fellow panelist, John, who's sitting right next to him. Michael, introduce you. Thanks so much. Thank you, Dan. It's a great pleasure to be here. So about five years ago, there was a global effort to come up with pathways for 16 major economies, including the US, for how each of these countries could reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to be in line with an 80% reduction by 2050. One of the books that resulted from that was Pathways to Deep Decarbonization in the United States. And it had a lot of all the technical details about that, how that could be achieved. John Dernbach and I then asked the question, how does US law, federal and state and local, need to change in order to be on that pathway? So we assembled a team of about 50 lawyers, law professors, practitioners and others to answer that question. A monster problem, as Dan described it, requires a monster book. We put out this book, 1,200 pages that was published in April by the Environmental Law Institute with a very large number of recommendations that you'll be hearing about. Fortunately, there's a bridge version, which is available for free download that has the most important points and the key recommendations in the book. The pathways, the technical pathways on which we relied, made certain assumptions about what the different countries of the world would do in order to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. And so this is one of the assumptions of what different countries would do out to 2050. So we see the pathways for each country out to 2050. The big pale blue area at the bottom, of course, is China. This has its emissions peaking in 2030, which is what they have pledged to do. The green band above that is India, which if it actually were to have the same per capita emissions of China would be much larger. Then the blue above that is the U.S., showing a very serious reduction in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. And the other bands are all the other countries in the list of 16. So one thing that is clear is that regardless of what anybody else does, unless the U.S. radically reduces its emissions, there's no way we're going to meet the objectives. And so the Pathways Project looks at how the U.S. can reduce its emissions. What I'm going to do is I'm going to just briefly discuss the technical basis for the report on which we relied. And then John is going to talk about the legal work that we did. And three of the authors of our chapters are going to talk about the recommendations in their particular chapters. So one of the basic conclusions is we need to avoid emissions dead ends. We need to avoid being on a pathway where we can reduce emissions to a certain extent, but then the emissions reduction stop. A principal example of that is natural gas. That if we convert everything to natural gas, we have short term and median term reductions in emissions, but then we can't go any further because natural gas is still a fossil fuel with emissions. There are three fundamental building box pillars of the decarbonization approach. The first is energy efficiency, getting the economy as efficient as possible. The second is decarbonization of the electricity supply, relying entirely on renewables and on nuclear and only using and eliminating all use of coal to generate electricity and use natural gas only if it is accompanied by carbon capture and sequestration. And the third pillar is moving away from liquid and gaseous fuels to electricity led by the transport sector and by building heating and cooling. So the technical report concluded that an 80% reduction in emissions is possible, that it requires a massive amount of work at every sector. It will require about a doubling of the electricity supply so that if we are converting transport from gasoline and diesel to electricity, possibly some hydrogen, and if we are converting building heating and cooling to electricity away from oil and gas, we need to about double the electricity supply that is needed. And all of the new electricity supply has to be clean energy as well as replacement of the old dirty energy has to be through clean energy. There are various assumptions built into the technical report. We are assuming a continuation of economic growth at the same pace, a continuation of population growth. We are assuming comparable levels of electricity reliability. We are assuming comparable levels of energy services that are provided. So all of those are important assumptions that are built into the report. Another important assumption is that people do not have to prematurely retire appliances, vehicles, other equipment. They can live out their life cycle, but when you replace it, you have to replace it with clean appliances, clean equipment, clean vehicles. So the report looks at what is the usual replacement cycle for appliances and equipment and vehicles and builds that into the calculations. People change out their air conditioning units and their freezers and their refrigerators a lot more quickly than they change out their automobiles and that's faster than they change out their buildings. And so all of that is reflected in the scenarios. There are actually four scenarios that were examined by the deep decarbonization project, so what these charts show is the assumptions, first the two tall bars are under a business as usual. And then the four scenarios for decarbonization, one relies very heavily on nuclear, one relies heavily on carbon capture and sequestration, one relies heavily on renewables. And there is a mixed scenario that has a combination of all of those. We are, in the book, are focusing on the mixed scenario pathway, but the way things are going it's more likely that the high renewables are going to be what is followed. So there are assumptions about what happens to the motor vehicle mix going forward and so as this shows the internal combustion engine for passenger vehicles is all but eliminated by 2050 in Amy Stein. We'll talk more about the details of that. And so we're moving away from gasoline and diesel powered vehicles and also moving away from fossil fuels to the extent possible for freight. We are moving away from liquid fuels away from the use of gasoline and diesel to the extent we still need liquid fuels there will be a high biofuels component in it. We are also assuming that coal is phased out entirely as a source of electricity. Natural gas remains only to the extent that it's coupled with carbon capture and sequestration. And the new energy supply is primarily by wind and solar and hydro with some geothermal. The scenarios also talk about a lot of new nuclear, the way things are going that seems unlikely in the next couple of decades. So that means even more wind and solar and other forms of clean energy. And also the associated transmission and storage which are essential parts of the picture. So I'm now going to turn it over to John Dernbacher. I'll let Dan introduce John. Great, thanks. I appreciate you wanting to introduce John but I'll do that because I have a full bio right here and I get to read it. That was great, thank you very much. Can I ask a quick follow up question, Michael? You had on the scenarios, you had GDP and populations, two of the key drivers. Was one of those more impactful in terms of where you ended up? Or were they roughly equal or just curious? I would say they both go along together and there are plenty of existing projections about what happens for both economic growth and population growth. We assumed that either of these would be affected by this. As Michael said, our next speaker is John Dernbach. He's a Commonwealth Professor of Environmental Law and Sustainability at Widener University Commonwealth Law School in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. And he's the Director of that School's Environmental Law and Sustainability Center. Professor Dernbach has written widely on sustainable development, climate change and environmental law. And he is, as I said earlier, he's one of the co-editors of the report. And we look really forward to John hearing the rest of the opening introduction presentation. Thank you. Well, thank you. And thank you all for coming. I know you have a busy schedule. What got Michael and I interested in this book was how do you translate the technical information and the economic information in the deep decarbonization pathways project into law? And the question that we wanted to know was we wanted to know that partly because we wanted to know what it looked like, but we also wanted to know what the choices were. And it turns out that there's a couple of things that come out of the book, really big picture. And that's what I want to begin by focusing on in terms of our key findings. For starters, the legal tools are out there. The laws either already exist or the laws that could be modified to get to that result. And we know that because we had every single chapter and the authors of those chapters do a couple of things. One was to identify what greenhouse gas reductions were possible in their particular topic. The second thing we asked the authors to do was describe and analyze the law that applied to that topic. And then the third thing we asked them to do was make recommendations, federal, state, local, and private. We got all done. We added them up. And lo and behold, there were 1,500 recommendations, which seemed to us like a lot. That surprised us that there were that many, but it makes sense if you think about it. There are a wide variety of different kinds of tools about which more in a minute. And one thing that's really important, I think, is that a lot of these tools have economic, social, environmental co-benefits. And that's consistent with actually about two decades worth of work on this. I did a paper with my students 20 years ago looking at state tools to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And one of the things that came out of that was that a lot of what the states are doing is reducing greenhouse gas emissions, not just because they wanted to do that, but also because it created jobs, it fostered the development of business, it created new technologies, it reduced the impact of energy prices on the poor and then people of color and businesses and all the rest. So the idea that there are co-benefits out there got repeated over and over and over again in the conclusions of our chapters. Now, if you're thinking, gosh, this is a really big book and I don't have time to read a really big book because I've got other things to do at, say, 4 o'clock or 4.30, we have an answer for you. There's an index of recommendations by actor at the end of the book. So every single recommendation that applies to, say, Congress to pick a random example is all set out at the end of the book and you can comb through those and find the ones that are relevant to you or that interest you without having to go through every single chapter to find the recommendations that are applicable. We see the book as a menu, a cookbook, a playbook. We're not endorsing every single recommendation and saying that every single one of them has to be adopted, but we're providing, I think, as many choices to policymakers as we can possibly think of. I don't think there's another book like this in terms of its comprehensiveness anywhere. Certainly not in the U.S. and I'm not aware of one anywhere else. There's nothing quite like this book in terms of the size of the thing and the number of recommendations that are possible. If you're thinking from what Michael's presentation, gosh, I don't want to go to 80%, I want to go to 100%, I want to go negative. Well, okay, we can do that, too. You can design the Green New Deal through this and put all the legal mechanisms together for that particular version of the Green New Deal, the famous one, of course, where you can build something else to 80%. There's a bunch of different ways you can use the cookbook. Now, there are a lot of different kinds of legal tools. And when we got all done, we looked at, well, what are the tools that are out there? And of course, one of the tools that you see a lot of is additional regulation, no surprise there. Market-based tools, no surprise there. But what surprised me a bit reading the chapters, editing the chapters, was the extent to which the chapters said, look, on hydropower, on nuclear power, on distributed renewables, on utility-scale renewables, on carbon capture, laws getting in the way. And it turned out that there's a removal of legal barriers, I think, is worth identifying as an additional legal tool. I'm not going to go through all of these, but part of the reason I want you to see this, and part of the reason why we think this is an important conclusion, is it changes or ought to change the way we think about what we do on climate change. It's not just about additional regulation. It's about a lot of other things. You could design, and we've talked to people in Washington about this, you could design a libertarian approach to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. I don't know how far it would get you, but you could begin with that. And you could do a fair bit of work with that. And we could walk you through that if you wanted to. There are different ways of addressing this. Each one of the bullets on the next several slides is the name of a chapter. And you see right at the top, light duty vehicles. Amy Stein is going to talk more about that in a bit. But what I want to give you a sense of when you look at this is that the first five tools are about sources that move, transportation, and the last four are about sources that don't move. And what we tried to do was to go as wide and as deep on these as we possibly could. And there are lots of things that Amy's going to talk to you about. I'm not going to talk about as well, but I can just pick one out, new buildings. Congress passed a law some years ago and sort of pushed the country toward net zero for commercial buildings. Well, there's a lot more Congress could do on that. There's certainly room for state and local activity there as well, but that gives you at least a bit of a flavor for what we did on those chapters. One of the other big issues that a lot of people talk about is electricity. And this chapter makes as clear as I think you could possibly make it that we're not picking sides in terms of what particular approaches ought to be taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the electricity sector. There are a bunch of different options that are out there. Nuclear is certainly one of them. And it reinforces a point that I made a few minutes ago that we're not providing a cookbook or a playbook for decision makers. If you like hydropower, there are things you can do with hydropower. I should add, by the way, that Michael wrote the chapter on utility scale renewables and it's excellent. And he did not pay me to say that. The liquid fuels is, I know, a tough issue at the federal level. The recommendations on liquid fuels are basically be summarized along two lines. One is to move the use of biofuels from cars and trucks toward modes of transportation where it's a lot harder to find a replacement right now like air. And the second is to make the production of biofuels much more sustainable than they are at present. Carbon capture and negative emissions is an interesting area because when the Deep Decarbonization Pathways Project people wrote their reports in 2014 and 2015 about the United States, an 80% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 looked like a reasonable goal. Now it's looking more like the number ought to be zero or ought to be negative emissions. And we built the book to take those possibilities into account. And so we have chapters on agriculture and forestry about what agriculture and Peter will talk about. But for direct air capture, for example, a lot of the recommendations are about really empowering and incentivizing small businesses, all sorts of businesses and entrepreneurs to develop the technologies will enable us to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions that are already in the atmosphere and that are something like higher than they've been in at least 800,000 years. Finally, we looked at non-carbon dioxide pollutants. A lot of you are familiar with a number of the issues that go with this. The fluorinated gases, of course, implicate the Cagalli agreement, and there's certainly more to do on a lot of these. I know folks are looking at some of these gases as high potent to see greenhouse gases that were perhaps we could work if we can't figure out how we all can agree on carbon dioxide and fossil fuels. Maybe we can make some progress on those. And then I said, finally, a second ago I lied. This is the final list of the chapters. And what we did, we found a bunch of chapters that really cut across all sectors. Carbon pricing, of course, is one of those behaviors another. Michael had a nice slide that said, well, what we're looking at is the normal replacement rate for technologies. The normal replacement rate for technologies works if people behave that way. If you can use behavior to speed up the phase out of old technologies and the introduction of new technologies, and so that's one set of options. Two of the chapters are on financing. Financing is, I think, an under discussed part of the overall picture. An awful lot of money needs to get spent over the next couple of decades to make the deep decarbonization actually work. And Monica Lamb is going to talk about one of those chapters. One point to make, and this came up again and again in the book, is that carbon pricing isn't going to solve everything. The theory, of course, is if you push up the price of carbon, you encourage people to do other things. That works to a point, but it only works so far. Getting a lot out of the way would make carbon pricing work better. And there are other issues, of course. I'm not going to go through this list. But the point of the long list is just to make you aware that there's a pretty strong argument that you can make from a lot of different positions that carbon pricing isn't the magic bullet. Among the people that I talk to, we say maybe not a silver bullet, but a silver buckshot. There are a lot of different things that need to be done, and I think our book project reinforces that. What we've been doing as well is working with law firms around the country, something like 20 law firms around the country, to turn a lot of the recommendations into draft legislation. Arnold and Porter has also a Renewable Energy and Legal Defense Initiative, and Michael has been working with them. This particular slide tells you where you can find some of the things that we're talking about. The 12 legal pathways, types of pathways, articles actually in the Energy Law Journal, which is published by the Energy Bar Association. That's in a separate source if you're interested. You see the article there with the dozen types of legal tools in the deep decarbonization toolbox. Finally, if you want to find Michael and me, we're not that hard to find. The other fellow here is Rick Horst. He's leading the project itself, the legal drafting project, and he's been really very active on that. I was trading emails with him this morning on the train coming in, and there's a lot of work that we're doing here. The take-home message that I would have about the book is that this is intended and was written as a resource for every single one of you, and so I'm glad to see you here, and I'm on to the next speaker. Thanks, John, that was great. So you have the links here. And when someone opens up the book, how easy is it for them to navigate across the different chapters and see when I don't want to intimidate anybody because this looks like an awful lot. And there's two versions. There's the big version, and then there's the junior version. But where would you recommend someone start in terms of digging into this stuff? Is it something where you start at the beginning and you go right through or, and Michael, please feel free to chime in. I want to help people understand sort of how to access the document. Oh, I'm sorry. Oh, that's better. So there's a summary of contents at the beginning of the book, and all 35 chapters are laid out there. That takes you to the page, and so if you're working on a particular committee or a particular topic, you can look for that, and that's pretty straightforward. There's a more detailed table of contents at the beginning, and so if you're interested in particular parts of particular things, you can look at that and go right to the page. And then finally, as I said before, there's an index of recommendations by actor. When you get into an individual chapter, there are plenty of headings. You can skim it pretty well. We worked really, really hard on accessibility of the book. I don't think you're going to find anything that's written particularly in legalese. Straightforward prose, and it was written to be accessible. I'll just add that one possible place to start for the people here is that in the short book, which is available for free download at one of the links up there, pages 95 through 108 have the recommendations for Congress. So a lot of specific legislative recommendations, and so some of you might want to go through those and see how many of them might be of interest. That was really helpful. And it's the right season, so put it on your wish list, right? If you want the full version. Our next speaker is Amy Stein. Amy is a professor of law at the University of Florida, Levin College of Law. Professor Stein's recent scholarship focuses on the complex governance issues associated with regulation of an evolving electric grid composed of more diverse and distributed energy resources, including solar energy storage and electric vehicles. She's also explored impacts on the reliability of the grid and the intersection of energy and environmental law. She teaches in the areas of energy law, environmental law, climate law, and torts. Amy, welcome. Thank you so much, Dan, and EESI, and all of you for joining us on a Friday afternoon. You get points just for being here. So my part of this wonderful legal pathways project was the focus on decarbonizing part of our transportation sector. And so that meant that I thought it was pretty important that we all start with a little perspective on transportation and greenhouse gases. That means I want you all to know that the transportation sector is the largest contributor of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, followed closely behind by the electricity sector. And then within those transportation emissions, light duty vehicles are the largest source. So that is the focus of my chapter and my work here. As you could see, light duty vehicles comprise 60% almost of the emissions. There are also chapters in the book, however, on heavy duty vehicles, aircrafts, and the rest. So what do I mean by light duty vehicles? Let's start there. Well, there's actually legal definitions for it that generally focuses on a gross weight of 8,500 pounds. But for our purposes, you can think about them as passenger cars, SUVs, minivans, even pickup trucks. So my co-author, Josh Frosche and I, we tackled the legal pathways for these light duty vehicles. And that meant, of course, we were focused on the goal that Michael and John have already discussed to reduce our greenhouse gases by at least 80% from 1990 levels by 2050. So what does that mean specifically for light duty vehicles? Well, twofold. First, we need to increase fuel economy standards in excess of 100 miles per gallon. Second, we need to deploy 300 million alternative fuel vehicles. So just let that sink in for a moment. Okay, think about your fuel economy on your car and how far we have to go to get to 100. Think about, we have about 250 million vehicles on the road right now, and we're talking about needing 300 million alternative fuel vehicles. So this is not an easy ask, right? This is neither easy nor sort of perhaps painless. It is ambitious, but we think that there are pathways to get there. So let's look at the first one for a moment. First, we need to, of course, increase fuel economy standards in excess of 100 miles per gallon. The first thing I wanted you to note is that there are separate authorities over emissions and fuel economy. Each is governed by different statutes and by different agencies. When you're thinking about fuel economy standards, the Energy Policy and Conservation Act from the 70s gives NHTSA, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Authority over that. And then we also have emission standards that fall under EPA's jurisdiction, the Environmental Protection Act under the Clean Air Act. So I mentioned that only because the most recent fuel economy standards were the result of a lot of negotiations. We were able to get NHTSA and EPA and a number of stakeholders and manufacturers and the states on board to reach a combined fuel economy carbon emission standard. They're generally issued in five year increments, so we had them for model years 2012 through 2016. And then the next batch was 2017 through 2025. And yes, if you're doing math quickly in your head that is longer than five years, which leads to a couple of complications. But for our purposes, that means that historically our fuel economy standards were quite low. We started around 18 miles per gallon back in the 70s. Then we sort of hit a plateau where we were around 27.5 miles per gallon. And so this recent, these combined fuel economy standards were really a significant push in the upward trajectory where we needed to head. So they were in this phased approach and what's important here is where the two lines diverge because the top line is the fleet-wide standard that had been agreed to in the prior administration, leading us close to a 54.5 miles per gallon standard. But the bottom line is the current administration has indicated its intentions to pursue something closer to a freeze in where we are right now. So what does that mean for a decarbonization project? As you might imagine, if we do not continue to ratchet up our fuel economy standards, we will be digging ourselves into a deeper hole on our carbon goals because they are inversely proportional, one might see. You can view the dark green line are the projected emissions targets under the prior administration and the light green bars are the predicted carbon emissions under the current administration's plan to freeze. So as you can see, they are higher. And then to further complicate matters, there's a provision in the Clean Air Act that allows California as the only state that had emission standards prior to passage of the Federal Clean Clean Air Act with the ability to obtain a waiver and implement its own stricter emission standards. California has done exactly that for the last 50 years and California has been functioning under this waiver authority and has developed more stringent programs like a zero emissions vehicle program which requires a certain amount of the teams sold in those in California to have a certain amount of their vehicles be zero emission vehicles. Now just to further complicate that is that there's another provision in the Clean Air Act that allows other states to piggyback on California's stricter emission standards. And guess what? 13 states plus the District of Columbia have done exactly that which results in almost 50% of new light duty vehicle sales are comprised of within states that have these zero emission vehicle provisions. And so thinking about how why this is interesting, well the current administration has indicated that it will be revoking California's waiver which you could imagine might send these zero emission vehicle initiatives with all their accordion carbon benefits might come tumbling down or at least be complicated. To further complicate matters there are legal challenges that have been brought already on both the current administration's freezing of the fuel economy standards as well as the revocation of California's waiver. So the bottom line here is that the only thing that manufacturers might like less than stricter standards is the regulatory uncertainty into which they currently find themselves. So that means that we also need to talk about our second goal to deploy 300 million alternative fuel vehicles. Here of course we have to first say well what counts as an alternative fuel vehicle? There are many different types but for our purposes as Michael indicated the DDPP authors focused on equal parts of electric vehicles pure hybrid plug-in electric vehicles and hydrogen vehicles. So that was where we focused. The second chart shows you the carbon benefits from moving from gasoline to plug-ins to hybrid to all electrics. But also the first chart shows you sort of the momentum that already exists for electric vehicles. This one shows you that the pinkish bars and the blue bars are the plug-in hybrids in the electric vehicle lines and probably from where most of you all are sitting you can't even see the fuel cell hydrogen little blip at the bottom. So part of our thought is that we've seen that given there are limited time frames, limited resources and the momentum for electric vehicles at the moment this suggests we should try to capitalize on that. That means that I think maybe for our purposes for pathways on how to potentially reach this ambitious goal of 300 million vehicles is needed. So the first one of course is cost. This is always an obstacle for all of us when we think about transitioning these different sectors. So as just one example, the 2024 Fusion is about $23,000. Their equivalent electric version is about $34,000. So how are we gonna account for that $11,000 differential? If you're just car shopping and you walk in and you say I'd really love to get on board with this electric vehicle transition and they said great but it's gonna cost you $11,000 extra. That might cause some people to hesitate. So how do we get over that? Well that's where fiscal incentives could perhaps be one tool. As some of you may know, we have a federal tax credit of up to $7,500 on the purchase of many electric vehicles. But it is a phase in credit and it is going to be phasing out at a certain point based on the number of vehicles sold for each manufacturer. But cost doesn't just mean the cost for your sticker price for you all, it also means the cost to manufacture these vehicles. We need to also think about investing research and development dollars to help advance the battery technologies to allow these chargers charges to last longer. Our second piece of course is infrastructure. We need to think about infrastructure. This is sort of the chicken and the egg problem. The second piece that might be an obstacle for consumers is they say well I'm scared to invest in electric vehicle, what if I can't find a charger when I need it? And so it's critical, the more infrastructure we have, the more comfort consumers will hopefully feel in purchasing electric vehicles. But we need to think about charging on a comprehensive level in both the workplace, at home, as well as charging corridors. Thinking about how we can use the power of the governments to coordinate with both the private and public sectors to help think about what are the most efficient routes, how far apart can these chargers be? Instead of ad hoc approaches, it can be very useful. For instance, out west there's been a memorandum of agreement between seven of the western states to try to develop and space out the charging corridors along the major highway thoroughfares. Okay, our third one is to integrate both the electricity and the transportation sectors. And this one is important because as all of my energy students will tell you, electricity and transportation sectors have been historically distinct. That means very little oil is used for electricity. This is our sources of electricity in our country, which I show to my students almost every other week to kind of give them a pop quiz on it because what is our number one source of electricity? Anybody know? A big one on the bottom, natural gas, okay? It has bumped coal out only recently. Coal had been the number one source for a long time. Okay, but guess where oil is? It's that teeny little white bar that you can barely see where it says 1% petroleum. So most people sort of forget that, but then the flip is also true. When you look at the transportation sector, it's almost 90% petroleum. Very little electricity when you're thinking about our energy sources for transportation. Now that means a couple of things. One, utilities and this transition should be able to work together very nicely. For instance, many utilities are facing stagnant electricity demand. But how nice to think about if we've transitioned towards more electric vehicles that would increase the demand for electricity on the grid and that might make utilities happy. Similarly, as the transportation fleet becomes more electric, that makes the sources of our electricity critical to the success of our decarbonization goals. For instance, if you look at that left little outlet there, about 63% of our electricity currently comes from fossil fuels. So if we are using that type of an average grid to fuel our electric cars, the cleaner the electric grid gets, the cleaner our electric cars will get in our transportation sector. So last pathway is to also focus on education. I think this is just so important because particularly for historically, there's been an obstacle in this transition based on consumer preferences and perceptions about electric vehicles. You've probably heard it in the news with range anxiety and the rest. But it was also about the limited number of models that were available, which is of course changing, did any of you see? The Ford Mustang is now coming out with an all electric version. Pretty much every one of the big manufacturers is announced new all electric models, both SUVs, those who prior you reached to think, well, I had to have a small car to go electric. You may have followed Tesla's even working on an electric truck, right? Sort of this idea that there will be more models. And I think it's important to maybe allow folks to test these EVs in low risk environments, for instance, like rental cars, right? How nice if rental car companies could have a fleet of EVs available so you all could try them. And then you might be like, that was a really sweet ride. I'm gonna consider that the next time I'm out there. Also worker skill sets to make sure we have a worker transition force on EVs. So I thought just as a last slide, maybe some action items for you all to sort of recap, maybe maintain at least 54.5 miles per gallon fuel economy standard for 2025 and ramp up by 2050 to view electric vehicles as grid assets instead of as obstacles to work with the electric utilities to capitalize on charging patterns and rates. As just one example, California has way too much solar right now during the day, who knew? And guess what, the energy storage is the holy grail here. And we do not yet have the capabilities to store all that extra solar to then use it at night when the sun goes down. So how wonderful if we could tap into that excess by charging our electric vehicles in California during the day. What does that entail? No more home charging for all of us at work. That means you need to be charging and we need to have workplace charging capabilities in place. Okay, similarly in other areas, we can think about charging off peak at nighttime. Also maximizing our EV climate impacts through cleaner sources, investment, investment, investment. And then also to think about harnessing the government purchasing power for EVs, right? They are forced to be reckoned with. And if a number of federal, state and local entities start purchasing only alternative fuel vehicles, that can help drive demand. I also would encourage folks to plan ahead and think about battery recycling, resales for markets for our alternative vehicles. So they're more accessible to all. The cash for clunkers type program incentives to sort of trade in your internal combustion engine, EV, ready codes, autonomous vehicles even. Because guess what, right now they're all electric. So if we move towards autonomous, that's gonna be a shift. And to just sort of think creatively as we go forward in all of these different situations. So I leave it at that, because I know I'm too minute total, sorry. All right, and there's the link to my chapter. If you want to know more, I'll leave it at that. No, that was great, and that was excellent. Thank you so much. And when I think of rental cars, imagine how nice it would be not to have to get gas before you return your rental car. And I noticed on your investment side, you mentioned the Tesla truck. You didn't have window technology, anti-breaking. That would also be something we'd want to invest in. Just to dig at you on that. Seriously though, Amy, a follow up question. You said transportation sector is the biggest contributor of emissions. But that hasn't always been the case, right? That's only recently. Why, what helped cause that shift so that transportation was the larger contributor? Well, I'm not sure I even have the greatest answer as to why. Also, like in our electric sector, when you look at, well, why has coal historically been our number one source of electricity, and we've only recently moved towards natural gas? Of course, fracking was a large component of that. We often move towards our lowest and cheapest source. So transportation, is it an increase in our miles travel? Is it an increase in the, I think part of it was an increase in our drive for SUVs. I know in a lot of the research, there seemed to have been a consumer preference push towards a larger vehicle, whether that was the suburban sort of parent model where like we wanted a larger car, you know. And I think it was also that coal went down, coal went down radically because of natural gas. And that's the principal reason the lines crossed. Which didn't actually, exactly. I didn't think that said, it wasn't so much that transportation changed as much as electricity dropped. Our fourth panelist is Peter Lanner. He is the managing attorney of Earth Justices Sustainable Food and Farming Program. From 2007 through 2015, he was executive director of the Natural Resources Defense Council and NRDC Action Fund. Before that, he was chief of the New York State Attorney General's Environmental Protection Bureau. Earlier, he created and led the Environmental Prosecution Unit for New York City. And before that, he clerked for chief judge James Browning of the Ninth Circuit. He holds degrees from Harvard College in Columbia University Law School. And very interestingly, he manages two farms in Pennsylvania. So you're the right guy to talk about agriculture. Thanks. All right, I hope so, Anne. Thank you, Dan, and thank you, Mike and John, for organizing this. It was great listening to Amy. I was reminded of suing President Reagan for his rollback of fuel efficiency standards in 1988 for both local air quality and climate change reasons. And here we are, fighting for the same. You may have noticed that when John and Mike were talking, they really focus on the burning of fossil fuels. Agriculture rarely gets much play in climate change discussions. And yet, it is really quite critical that we do start addressing agriculture. Among other things, agriculture is probably the sector of the economy more affected by climate change than virtually any other. It depends on predictable weather patterns that are now rapidly changing. And these changes have enormous impacts on farmers, on local communities, and indeed, on human health, because it's our food that we're talking about. And as the climate is warming up, we are seeing many, many changes, increase of pests, pests that used to be in some parts of the country or moving into other parts of the country. Floods and extreme weather and droughts, or converse, are becoming more frequent. This year in the Midwest, 20 million acres of land weren't planted because of the ongoing flooding. You've probably seen much of the coverage of the wildfires in California, which have obviously both affected people and community, but agricultural operations as well. And so agriculture, even aside from these extremes, is affected by just a change pattern. Crops that grow in one pattern don't grow so well in a different pattern. So you may have to move from growing wheat to growing corn or vice versa as you are, as weather patterns change. At the same time, agriculture contributes to climate change quite significantly. The chart that Amy showed, and that chart, the classic EPA chart suggests that agriculture is 9% of US greenhouse gas emissions. This number is almost certainly quite low. And most other studies, including by the UN and others, say that agriculture contributes much closer to 15% or 20% or more of world greenhouse gas emissions. This doesn't include, for example, emissions from the lost carbon that's stored in soil. Healthy soil has a lot of carbon in it. And when you dig it up, you lose all that carbon, merges with the air, and becomes carbon dioxide. It doesn't include all the legacy, lat lost carbon sequestration, all the land that used to be sequestering carbon, but now it's been deforested or it's been tilled and is no longer sequestering carbon. It doesn't include the manufacturer of a lot of the inputs, such as fertilizer, which is highly energy intensive, and many others. And it's tougher to measure because unlike burning a gallon of gas or a rock of lump or fossil fuel, agriculture are living biological systems. And so often, the measurement of the greenhouse gas impact is just much less certain than with the other sectors of the economy. And also, it's not carbon dioxide. We all think of climate change as carbon dioxide, but much of the greenhouse gas effect, the climate change effect of agriculture, is methane, which is coming from the ruminant emissions of cows, their stomachs churn away and emit methane. Their waste on the ground converts into methane. Another major source is nitrous oxide. When you put too much fertilizer on the ground, on a field, which is not taken up by the plant, can either run off and cause water pollution or because of microbial action be converted to nitrous oxide, which is 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide. So these are complicated issues. And then as you continue to convert land as some programs have incentivized, you continue to lose carbon dioxide, carbon stored in the soil. The good news, though, is that there are a lot of practices that can make a difference in reducing these emissions. And these are practices that can both reduce carbon greenhouse gas emissions from year to year or, and sometimes and increase the carbon that's stored in the soil, essentially taking it out of the atmosphere and keeping it in the soil. Where among other things, it actually helps create healthier soils that become more resilient to floods and to droughts, to heat waves, that allow the microbial action, all those billions of bacteria that are in the soil, to actually help the farmer rather than be having been killed. It's important to also recognize that these are practices unlike a car, no offense, that gets 100 miles a gallon. These are practices that are well known. They have been proven and successfully demonstrated at virtually all crops in most regions of the country at most scales. And they've been found to be both productive at reducing greenhouse gas emissions and increasing soil carbon and increasing productivity and former profitability. We go into a lot of these in more detail in actually our chapter in the deep deep carbonization book, The Legal Pathways, because actually the technical book that Michael referenced really barely touched agriculture. So we had to do a lot of the technical work in the agriculture chapter to explain what is possible. And if you put all these practices together, the good news is we can actually reach carbon neutral agriculture in a way that is we can reach it pretty soon. And we can reach it in a way that is profitable for the farmers and for the communities they live in. If there's any slide you remember, at least for my presentation, this is the slide, because this shows that we can achieve carbon neutral agriculture. And this is just one of many pathways. This is an example where I take the emissions on the one hand and then show the possible emission reduction from a series of agricultural practices. Now those emission reductions, those numbers come what's called the Comet Planner, C-O-M-E-T, which is produced by Colorado State and the Natural Resources Conservation Service based on dozens and dozens of peer-reviewed studies. Those numbers are really solid. And you'll see that the line doesn't always come from the bottom of the box, because we take the midpoint range. There are a lot of studies that suggest you can do even better. And you'll see that these are only six studies, six practices. In fact, there is a dozen or more types of practices that can be employed in farms and other operations and grazing operations that give lots of different pathways where we can achieve carbon neutral agriculture. And do so again in a way that is highly productive, we need to feed people, and probably more people as we go along, and is highly profitable. And in addition, as I mentioned before, is also helps the farmers be more resilient to the extreme weather that climate change is bringing. Unfortunately, these practices aren't widely used yet. Overall, these practices are used on maybe 5%, 10% of cropland acres at most. You'll see, for example, some of the ones I mentioned there, conservation crop rotations, planting different crops, say, in a four-year cycle, which takes advantage of natural systems to fight predators and increase soil fertility, is on maybe 10% or 15% of US cropland acres. Manage advanced grazing practices, which can both be more productive and far less polluting, are used on maybe 5% of grazing. So that's where you come in, people who are involved in policy. We need policy to accelerate the adoption of these practices. These are proven, effective practices, but policy needs to help us accelerate their adoption. And also, though, the good news is that the barriers to adoption are pretty well known. People have been talking about this. Lack of knowledge, lack of transition financing, some of them cost money for the first couple years, and then start being more profitable. You have to learn how to do things differently. You don't necessarily know that unless you have some technical assistance. So we have systems in place in our existing laws that can allow all these barriers to adoption of these practices to be broken. We can use the Farm Bill, and I'll go through them a little bit quickly, but it's on the presentation, and you'll see this is all laid out more in the book as well. A lot of provisions in the Farm Bill that support farmers. Right now, many of those actually create disincentives for these practices. I think many of those, is it wasn't intended? But the Farm Bill has been accreted over 100 years, so things that might have made sense long ago don't make sense now. A lot of money goes into farming through the Farm Bill, and very little of it is targeted as effectively as it could be to get the best climate mitigation and climate resilience potential. We've got an enormous crop insurance system, which could be used in commodity payments, which could be used much better to encourage adoption of these practices, and at least stop disincentivizing these practices. We also have energy policy laws that affect bioenergy. For example, all the corn, we have an area about the size of Iowa that is going corn, largely for ethanol. A lot of environmental impacts there. That program is created by statute. It can be improved by statute. And we have pollution and land management laws, hundreds of millions of acres of federal land on which cows are brazed. That can be better managed through policy. Very briefly, you don't have to read all of this in detail. One obvious alternative opportunity is expanding R&D funding. It's about half of what it used to be. It should be doubled to former levels and focus more on climate-friendly practices. Private R&D does not take the place of public funding because it goes to patentable projects rather than practices that can be widely shared. Second, as I said, take the money that we're now spending, the almost $20 billion a year that we're now spending, and spend it a lot better. And we can do that through the existing programs through better targeting, often using data that the government has. The Natural Resource Conservation Service itself has looked through what we fund and realized that some of what we fund is actually counterproductive and some is really productive. So use that data to better target product what we're going to fund. We know some practices are enormously effective, simply protecting our waterways, which is also often the most climate-sensitive land as enormous opportunity. We have a program to take lands out of production, allow their conservation, but it's not very well-targeted. It could be dramatically expanded and improved. And states also can do the same. I mentioned the crop insurance system, which is one of the major drivers for planting decisions. That creates some disincentive and just like an insurance system for your house or your driving can have elements, little riders in your policy that make you drive a little better or put in that fire alarm. That's what can be done with the crop insurance system as well. As I mentioned, they're government and I think Amy mentioned that with respect to CART, lots of other things government can do from purchasing to other systems to provide incentives and markets for alternative crops, for new grains, for perennial crops, trees that have much deeper root systems are much more resilient to climate challenges, but also produce many fewer greenhouse gases. And as I said earlier, we can look at energy laws in terms of on-farm energy efficiency, renewable energy and other opportunities. And I want you to all study that. No, the point is of this, is this is all what's happening at the states. All of what we've talked about is largely at the federal level. The Farm Bill, these major energy laws are largely federal, but many states have programs that could be tweaked in similar ways to achieve similar results. Great opportunity here at all levels to get carbon neutral agriculture within a decade or two in a way that provides for a more secure food system, more profitable of harming and fewer greenhouse gas reductions. Thank you. Thanks, and I learned a new word, silvo pasture. It's the practice of integrating trees, forage and grazing in a beneficial way. Never heard that word before, so I appreciate that. This slide is hard to read, but that's okay. But I have to ask you about this, because it looked interesting. What is the root, can you explain a little bit? I don't know whether people in the back can see that, but that's a root, you may. Sure, that just in each of those boxes, there's the different seasons. On the left is a annual crop and then the right is a perennial crop. And very simply, you see a perennial crop, that is a crop that doesn't get replanted every year, has a lot more roots. Now imagine the land in which that crop, that plant is located, floods. The perennial will do a lot better. Imagine there's a drought, the perennial will do a lot better. Think about the carbon that's in that. The perennial does a lot better. I thought they were just really, let me scoot ahead, because our next panelist is Monica Lam. Monica is a project development and finance attorney. She represents project sponsors, banks and institutional investors. In the development, construction and financing of utility scale renewable power plants. She's worked for the law firms of Sherman and Sterling and Davis-Polkin Wardwell and for the vertically integrated solar company, the vertically integrated solar company, First Solar. Monica, welcome. And I'll find your slides. There, oh, you don't have that. Hi, my name's Monica Lam and I'm really grateful for the opportunity to speak to you today. I also wanna recognize my co-authors, Robert Friedman and Claire Melvin and several of our colleagues who contributed to our work. Claire is here today with our colleague, Nathan Bishop, and they are continuing the good work on drafting model legislation in the next part of the project that John mentioned. So what I'd like to talk to you about today are a few ideas for policy approaches to increase the amount of investment in large scale carbon reduction projects. And for purposes of today's talk, we can consider that to be an electric power sector, zero carbon electricity generating facilities, as well as the long distance transmission lines and energy storage projects that are necessary to help integrate variable, renewable energy resources into the electrical grid. So first let's think about the size of the financial need. Based on the work done by the deep decarbonization project, the amount of additional money we would need to invest in large scale carbon reduction projects each year to meet our goals is about $15 billion per year. Now that's a big number, but it's a drop in the bucket of the private financial market in the United States. So for context, that $15 billion per year is about 1% of the amount of new home mortgage loans issued every year by banks across the United States. So we are looking at an amount of capital that could easily be absorbed by the private capital market. If these investments were as appealing to banks as the alternative, why are they not? So there's two factors. One is the high upfront cost relative to long payback periods. And the second is the unique and unpredictable risks facing these projects. As a comparison, let's think about the credit analysis that a bank faces when it's issuing a home mortgage loan. First, the lender knows that it can rely on special government sponsored banks to purchase or guarantee mortgage loans, greatly reducing the risk of default and allowing lenders to redeploy their capital much sooner than the borrower is going to repay that long-term mortgage loan. Second, lenders have easy access to consumer credit scores reflecting the past behavior of each consumer and allowing the bank to price in a predictable risk or exclude high-risk borrowers altogether. These factors together increase the amount of money available that banks can make available to home buyers and they drastically reduce the cost of those loans. By contrast, large-scale carbon reduction projects have neither of these characteristics. First, while it takes a decade or more to pay off the large upfront investments in these projects, there's currently no government-sponsored bank buying up or ensuring these long-term loans like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac do for home mortgages. And the risk of these investments are not well-defined and predictable like the consumer credit risk facing mortgage lenders. Large-scale carbon reduction projects have the risk inherent in commercializing and scaling up new technologies and the risk that policies affecting the project's costs and revenues could change unexpectedly either before the projects can complete construction or over the long payback period of the investment. So if policies could be enacted to address these factors, the high upfront costs with long payback periods and unpredictable risks, these policies could help unleash the additional money we need to invest in large-scale carbon reduction projects. Fortunately, there is already a large toolbox of tried-and-true policy measures that we can use or continue using to increase the investments in large-scale carbon reduction projects. First, let's talk about how to address the risk of high upfront costs relative to long payback periods. In the electric power sector, the costs of generating electricity from renewable resources are much more upfront-loaded than the costs for power plants burning fossil fuels. This means that most of the money needed to generate energy over the plant's lifetime needs to be invested at the very beginning rather than over 20 or 30 years of operation. To the extent that the upfront costs can be reduced, more generating capacity can be installed for any given amount of available capital. So there are several well-known policy measures that we can use to reduce these costs. First, we can reduce costs by reducing or eliminating import tariffs on the necessary equipment like solar panels. Second, we can reduce costs by extending tax incentives like tax credits and depreciation for renewable energy generating equipment and by establishing new tax incentives for standalone energy storage equipment which is needed to integrate variable renewable energy resources into the grid. And we can also simplify our tax incentives so that they are less expensive to implement. Tax incentives should be structured with the reality of third-party tax financing in mind so that the project sponsor who earns the tax incentive can monetize it even if they don't have the tax liability to use it themselves. Under today's ITC and PTC, usually only large banks and other institutional investors have the tax liability to use the tax credits from a large-scale renewable energy project. This limits the availability and increases the cost of investments in these projects. If we return to making tax credits refundable, the complexity and therefore the cost of carbon reduction investments would drop and the number and type of investors that would be able to invest in carbon reduction projects would grow. Additionally, we could implement REITs or Master Limited Partnerships to use tax incentives to tap into the public capital market. A third way we can address the high upfront costs relative to long payback periods is by supporting mandates for carbon reduction projects. State-level mandates for renewable energy purchases have driven much of the investment in large-scale solar and wind projects. And PERPA's Qualified Facility mandate was very effective in driving investments until revisions in power-purchased pricing formulas and many jurisdictions undermined the QF policies effectiveness as a driver of renewable energy investment. The federal government can expand its mandates for purchases of renewable energy for its own operation and federal policy can provide support for state-level mandates. For example, by changing the ITC rules so that utilities don't need to normalize the tax benefits over a longer period of time than other investors. A fourth way to tackle the costs of carbon reduction projects is to focus on reducing the integration costs of generations from variable renewable energy sources. One way we can reduce those integration costs is by supporting investments in long-distance transmission lines. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 created certain rate rules and tax rules to incentivize utilities and transmission companies to invest in transmission. But investment in transmission is still much smaller than the amount that we need to balance variable renewable energy generation among different regions. Another way to reduce integration costs is by supporting energy storage investments. Investment tax credits could support these technologies much as they have solar PV. FERC policy can also support the role of energy storage technologies in providing grid services and make sure that market rules don't lock out clean technologies like renewable energy and energy storage from the markets for ancillary services that have traditionally been provided by fossil fuel generating plants. So to summarize, I've suggested four ways that we can think about addressing the challenge of high capital costs relative to long payback periods. First, reducing tariffs. Second, extending tax benefits and making them simpler and less expensive to use. Third, supporting carbon reduction mandates at the federal and state levels. And fourth, reducing integration costs for variable renewable energy resources. So let me turn next to address the other barrier to investment in large scale carbon reduction projects. Unpredictable risk. The first key to reducing risk is policy predictability. Just like the vehicle manufacturers that Amy mentioned, investors don't like policy uncertainty either. Developing these projects takes many years. When regulations are incomplete or unclear, when taxes and tariffs change frequently, or when the costs and mechanisms for environmental mitigation or remediation can't be predicted, investment is discouraged. And the cost of the investment increases as investors try to compensate for their unknown risk exposure. As an example, long-term stable policies have helped the oil and gas exploration sector grow steadily for the last century. Likewise, long-term stable policies could grow the carbon reduction economy even more quickly. Because we do not have a century to get where we need to go. A second way to reduce risk is to invest in technologies until they are commercially proven at a large scale. So for an example, loan guarantees and grants have been used successfully by the Department of Energy and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to mobilize private capital for the large-scale deployment of solar PV and its deployment in rural and low-income areas, which are often the last to see benefits from new technology. A third and final way to address risk would be for government-sponsored banks to buy and ensure private loans for large-scale carbon reduction projects, just like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac do for home mortgage loans. To put this idea in perspective, Fannie Mae alone invested $239 billion just in the first three quarters of this year in purchase mortgage loans for single-family home buyers. That's 15 times our annual target amount of $15 billion for carbon reduction projects, 15 times in just the first nine months of this year. So to summarize the three ways that policy can help address the risks that are barriers to investment in large-scale carbon reduction projects are, first, enact stable and predictable policies in impacting those markets. Second, invest in deploying new technologies at a large commercial scale to demonstrate their viability to private investors. And third, to purchase or ensure private loans through government-sponsored banks in order to reduce the exposure of private investors. So just to circle back to where I started, it is feasible to raise from the private capital markets the estimated $15 billion annually of additional investment that we could use to help us achieve our decarbonization goals if you here in this room can effectively address the challenges of the upfront high-cost relative to long payback period and the unique and unpredictable risks associated with large-scale carbon reduction projects. Thank you so much for the opportunity to speak to you today and I look forward to our discussion. Monica, I'm gonna spare you one of my follow-up questions because I'm gonna give you the first stab, the first question. Talked a lot about what we need to be doing and I don't want anyone here to think that this is about giving things up, this isn't about sacrifice, this isn't about losing. I see a way to do all of this as Amy and I were, Amy called earlier, a win-win proposition. So we'll start with you, Monica, and we'll move down the line. For the area of your focus in this report, how would you frame the win-win proposition? For the staff, people have to go back and talk to their bosses and their bosses say, yeah, but who's gonna lose? How would you help them craft that win-win proposition so that they can deliver that message? Sure, I would say the win-win in financing large-scale decarbonization projects is that take the example of renewable energy. These are very large utility-scale projects. The more we invest in them, the more jobs we're gonna create and the more resiliency we will create for the impacts of climate change. So it's an easy win-win, I think. Peter, what do you think for agriculture? In many ways, it's a win-win-win-win. Many of these practices, as I mentioned, will help farms be more resilient to the extreme weather that they are seeing and they will see much more of. Many of these practices also significantly improve or protect water quality, and just as farmers need clean water, so do communities they live in or the people downstream. So that will save community drinking water suppliers, municipal drinking water suppliers, treatment costs. And many of these practices, because they use natural systems, don't require as much chemical input. Many of them dramatically reduce the need for fertilizers and pesticides and mechanical activity on the farm, all of which are very expensive. So the farmer gets to spend less on inputs and use nature rather than fighting it and nature comes free. Peter, how to win-win-win-win? Can you have a win-win-win-win-win? I'm sure I have a quintecta instead of a trifecta, right? Okay, so I would say the biggest win-win is really between the utilities and the electric vehicle sector. I already mentioned sort of two ways that they can sort of have some synergies through both increasing electricity demand and thinking about trying to perhaps use some of that excess renewables that exist on the grid. But there are so many more. Grid operators are currently struggling with how to balance this transition to a different type of electric grid. And one of the ways electric vehicles are being contemplated, being used, is as batteries. So this idea, of course, one electric car, yeah, you have a battery in your car, so what? But now aggregate them and put lots of electric vehicles that the entire grid could tap into when you're not using them. So what does that mean? Well, that should already get your brain thinking about all these potential problems, like, well, what if I need my car and now the grid has drained it, right? But there are contractual mechanisms that deal with a lot of that. And it's also just thinking creatively. Like, for instance, can you think of a time where you just leave your car for a while and you really don't need it and you don't need it charged until you get back? What about at airports? Don't we aid? If you could like a contract that said, I'm gonna be gone for seven days straight, have at it. Use my grid battery, right, when you're there in ways that folks could sort of benefit from that. But additionally, to help smooth the load, the grid operators are often trying to avoid these crazy peaks and demands. Our grid functions, such that supply and demand need to coexist at the same time, instantaneously they need to be in balance. And that's what our grid operators actually do, keep it within a certain frequency. And so these ancillary services that you were mentioning, this could be a really nice component of that as well. John? Well, the model that we work from and that we've worked from pretty much my entire life is let's do something for the economy. And if the environment gets hurt, if people get hurt or their health issues along the way or our security is compromised or threatened somehow, think oil in the Middle East, well, that's okay because the economic development part of this outweighs all the rest of it. The model that we're talking about makes economic development, environmental protection, social well-being and national security all work together. Now, that doesn't happen automatically. You don't just pass one of these measures and then all this good stuff happens. A lot of this is about design and making sure that this is built in. So for example, with solar, there's a lot of interest now in community solar. Why is there interest in community solar? Because the benefits of that go back to the community and not to distant investors. And there's a lot of that kind of thing that goes on in building the new energy economy, making sure that the benefits are realized locally. There are, and that has environmental justice consequences as well. The one other thing I would mention because I come from a coal state is I think we need to pay a lot of attention to adjust transition. I don't think it really works to say, oh gosh, we're gonna do all this new cool stuff for clean energy and tough cookies for the coal miners. We'll give them a six-week class in IT or something and it'll all work. The people that are being put out of business, the coal guys, the coal miners, are people who are making 90 and $100,000 a year right out of high school in a lot of these jobs. Yes, they're dangerous. Yes, they're terrible jobs. Yes, they are not gonna be good for their health. But they really pay, they really pay. And I think what we need to pay attention to is making sure that those folks, and we pay a lot of attention to the communities and the workers that are impacted by that. And that's why we have a special section in the book. We haven't talked about it, but we've got a special section in the book about a lot of things. But we have a special section in the book about this. And I think that's part of it as well. So the Bureau of Labor Statistics has predicted that the two fastest growing occupational categories in the United States over the next decade are solar installers and wind service technicians, far above what are number three and four were various kinds of healthcare occupations. And that's on an operational basis. The construction of all this wind and solar and storage and transmission and so forth has the potential to be just a massive infrastructure public works project, creating very large numbers of jobs all over the country, creating jobs that create infrastructure that creates revenue streams and therefore can be financed through various conventional techniques. So we really do have the potential for a massive job creation program through this transition. One other thing that I would like to mention is we haven't spent much time today on energy efficiency, but energy efficiency is also a tremendous way to save consumer money. Refrigeration energy efficiency, the energy efficiency of refrigerators has soared over the last couple of decades largely because of government regulations. The cost of buying a refrigerator is about the same as it used to be, but the electricity cost of running it is only a fraction of what it used to be. So energy efficiency, one of our three pillars also has the potential for tremendous consumer savings. Yeah, they say a refrigerator today compared to when NACA was, or yeah, NACA was first, wait, 1975, the first one in California. It's about a quarter of the electricity used compared, it's bigger, has more features, has things like icemakers, has all this stuff, and a lot of that's been driven by innovation in response to that sort of efficiency. We're gonna open it up for questions. I'm gonna, usually we have a roving mic, but it's not working today. So I'm gonna repeat your question back and then we'll let the panelists have it. So we have right here in the front row. Yeah, table three in under five-way ocean energy, you're referring to a table, but I'm not sure which table that is. Oh, it's in a fact sheet. Oh, yeah, I'm not sure about that. Maybe we can take a look at it. I don't know offhand. It's a reference to any ESI fact sheet. No, do you have any comments on ocean energy? Was that a subject of the... So one of the bases for the technical report was that the technology be at commercial scale or near commercial scale. And ocean energy is not yet there yet. There's a lot of R&D that's going on, but it's not yet at the scale where they were confident enough to include it in their quantitative projections. That may be a job fact sheet you're looking at too, by the way. We can, well, there are a lot of team ESIs here. Any other questions? Oh, yeah, right here. If you adopted all your agricultural ideas, how much would yield for agriculture go down to ocean monarchy crops? So for the recording, the question is, if you implemented all your agricultural recommendations, what would happen to the crop yields? Well, two answers to that. One is that in many cases, the yield doesn't go down at all right now. Many, for example, the different management-intensive grazing yield actually goes up. A lot of the other practices yield actually goes up. And the second is that this area has been starved of research for the last 20 years. Agriculture research, as I mentioned, is a fraction of what it used to be, and no matter how you would phrase it, these sort of more sustainable agro-ecological practices get maybe 5% of the agricultural research dollars that have been spent. And so whatever is the case now, I think it is fair to say that if there was a concerted effort to increase research into this to allow the acceleration and better understanding of these practices, whatever yield hit there might be at some time could probably be remedied if we actually started paying attention to it. Now this is, I just wanna clarify, sometimes it takes a couple of years for these practices to start working. You're talking about biological systems, so it's not like turning a switch, but many, many of these practices have shown to be either equal or beneficial for yield. And some of them produce, even if they produce somewhat less, they produce a higher quality product with lower cost input. So irrespective of productivity, they may be more profitable for the farmer. We have three more questions at least that I've seen. We're gonna go in order that I saw your hands, so you get to go first. All right, can you talk about the industrial sector and what we're trying to decarbonize in that kind of a lot of challenges and it's interesting for your perspective. So for the recording questions about decarbonization policies and ideas for the industrial sector. The industrial sector, as you probably know, is a tough nut to crack. It's incredibly diverse. You move from cement to chemicals to manufacturing. And the author of that book focused a lot on improving energy efficiency within particular categories or particular sectors and focused a lot on direct regulation under the Clean Air Act. The interesting development post book you might have read about just in the last couple of days there's a project funded in part by Bill Gates that uses artificial intelligence to concentrate solar energy to get temperatures that are high enough to actually enable you to make cement if it works. You have to test that, but it looks possible that you might be able to use solar to make cement if so that would have an enormous impact because a lot of the greenhouse gas emissions that we get from the industrial sector are from cement. And we've seen other innovations like that. Michael and I spoke, well, Michael spoke that we both attended a panel a couple of months ago with the National Academy of Sciences. There was a gentleman there from Boston who talked about making steel on a carbon-free basis. And so I think there's some technological developments there in my sense is that this is an area where technological innovation could also produce significant benefits. And in the back. You can touch on the integration, the public address. So the question is about areas where there's integration across sectors. You've mentioned transportation, electric vehicles, utility sectors, and there are others as well where bioenergy and other sort of sectors have to come together to develop it to provide the solution. Well, I'll just say one thing and then I'll let others chime in. But there is a chapter on carbon dioxide removal which is now apparent is quite necessary on a massive scale. And bioenergy with carbon capture and sequestration is the technology that the IPCC talked about. There's increasing concern that the land consumption from that is just impossibly large. And so much more attention paid to other methods of direct air capture and the development of those technologies which also provide another job creation opportunity because the large numbers, the large amounts of equipment that are necessary in order to do that. I don't know if anybody else wants. Well, I'm not sure if the question, if it's what are the other synergies? Because I mean, I would just make the point that I'm sure you all understand that none of this can happen in an asylum, right? There, I mean, oh, pretty much all academics and most folks who are struggling with these issues, we are trying to enhance the interdisciplinary approach to all of these issues. And Peter and I were just saying, oh, the agricultural and energy link, we should really get together and be discussing that as well. And, you know, I mean, that's just kind of common. Now, the difficulties are that these different disciplines, I find they all speak different languages. And so that's been difficult. I know I've done some work with NSF, the National Science Foundation, and trying to help them with, for instance, their Fuse Food, Energy, Water grantees. And that's already trying to bring together just three disciplines in how difficult that has been. So we all realize we need to do more of it if your question is how do we facilitate that? That's a different palette. Peter, if you have any ideas. And I would just say on BEX, there's a lot of talk about that, but I would argue that a lot of that is hype. Not only is the CCS not proven now, that often sort of starts from the premise that bioenergy is carbon neutral, which I think most science would say it is not. And in addition, while photosynthesis is pretty wonderful, it provides life. It's actually not nearly as efficient as a solar panel. So using bioenergy for electricity really doesn't make a lot of sense. To the extent we're gonna use biology, crops for energy that probably should be used for replacing high density liquid fuels that we can't electrify. So at least from my perspective, the BEX, the bioenergy part of BEX is pretty dubious. And our last question, thank you for waiting. Sorry for making you wait. Thanks for being patient. I have a question for you from the system. I'm from the system. I'm wondering what sort of discussion they're being had with the mining industry when it comes to lithium-ion batteries, making sure that it's sustainable and something that we can do with it in their conscience, but something that's actually, as we meet the requirements that are looking for, it could be a lot more batteries and making sure that they're mined in an ethical way. I'm sure it's something that we all wanna focus on. So maybe what you've heard from industry on how to keep that. And this is LAM, the Federal Reserve has not really done a very great job in responding to why the benefits is so far behind. For example, a member of England and others who have come together with the task force of the media to look at free financing and investments. If you could have Chairman Powell and kind of have this year, what would you maybe say to him, I guess in this current climate, to give the United States on track when it comes to investing in and funding a lot of the projects that we need to get towards the city like the people. Thanks, and just for the recording, Amy, you got the first one. It's about sustainable mining practices for lithium ion batteries. And Monica, it sounds like you're gonna get the last one. And it's, if you had the head chair here and you could say, hey, Jerome, why are we lagging so far behind other countries when it comes to green investing, green banking, green bonding? What's the deal? So Amy, you get to go first and then we'll go to Monica. Great, so thank you for your wonderful question because this is something that not keeps me up at night, but I definitely feel like doesn't get enough attention when we're trying to talk about these transitions. I really encourage everyone to try to always think full life cycle from cradle to grave of each of these choices that we make. And because we do not have a lot of reserves of lithium here in the United States, that means we are going to be dependent on foreign suppliers. I don't know if you saw Bolivia, they're just the world's largest reserve lithium. They were in the coup and the international politics. It just makes me think about all the international components that we in historical impacts we've had with oil over time. And are we going to end up in the same situation with lithium? So how do we learn lessons learned from the past and make sure that we do things better in the future? As you probably know, we don't have any ability to directly impact, require safer mining practices internationally, but we can hopefully exert some leverage on our purchasing partners and things like that. So not only on the mining side, but I also, the thing we can handle is the disposal of the lithium at the end cycle of all of these batteries, just like all of our phones, right? As we become more and more dependent on these rare earth metals, what are we doing from the environmental law side of things? We have a system of like regulating and landfills and how do we make sure? And I wanna make sure we get ahead of the problem and that we, I'm making sure that we take appropriate steps and not just wait until we see problems in 2050 because we didn't think about them earlier. Okay. Both good questions. And because I have had a little bit of proximity to the lithium ion question in the energy sector too, I'll kind of hop in there and add a little bit. First, I would say Claire, who's sitting next to you can tell you a little bit about what financial institutions are doing and in order to help incentivize in the interest that mining projects are taking and working in sort of sustainable practices into their financing. International financing from public entities often applies the equator principles, which has an element of sustainability sort of examined in the process of doing the financing and a lot of these financings are international. So there are some mechanisms that we could certainly use and build on to do that. And I would say also that in the life cycle, it will very likely become profitable and necessary to recycle these materials. So at some point we'll reach the stage where we don't need to mine anymore because it's worthwhile to recycle everything. So then moving on to your other question, with regard to investment, I think there's recently been a bill proposed for a federal green bank and that's precisely the sort of thing that would increase the amount of capital available. So a green bank could, there's a lot of different models out there. Some states have started to show us how it can be done. But one of the ways is just like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac work in the mortgage loan market. So they buy up those loans so that they're not sitting on the books of the banks and then the banks can turn around and relearn that money. And that's just one way to use the treasury money, put it in there and have it sit there, earning interest for the government in the long run or for investors, some of the investors in the green banks or private investors. And they can also ensure those loans and help reduce some of the risks that I was talking about. So I think that that's a great way to just free up a bunch more capital for these investments. Thanks, that's a good note to end on. Thanks to Team EESI, raise your hands. They're gonna be around. So I hope you get a chance to meet everybody. Thank you very much to our host, Representative Cartwright. Thank you very much to our panelists. I think they deserve one last round of applause. And before you rush out to buy your very own copy of legal pathways to deep decarbonization in the United States, please take a moment to visit esi.org. All of our briefings are online. We have summaries, we have fact sheets, we have all sorts of resources and we happen to have a great bi-weekly newsletter, Climate Change Solutions. I said it before, I'll say it again, best way to stay up to date with what's happening up here. Thanks everybody. Have a great weekend and happy RFI submission day. Thanks.