 Our keynote speaker today is Scott Glenn, the newly appointed Chief Energy Officer of the Hoye State Energy Office. I'm sure, like many of you, you're very eager to hear from him, and Governor Ige gave an excellent introduction, so I'm just going to turn it over to you, Scott, now. Can you guys see that? No? No? Well, can you see that little dot in the middle? I hope you can. You know, recently we just did a strategic training with the office, and we're focusing on what are some of the strengths that we each as individuals bring to the office. And one of the strengths that one of our dearest and longest serving members, Howard Wigg, has is context setting. And if you've ever been in a meeting with Howard, you know how much Howard appreciates providing the context around a conversation. And so I thought today to honor Howard and context setting, I'd start off with a picture of planet Earth from billions of miles away. And so if you are familiar with this photo, this is the pale blue dot taken by Voyager 1, and it's about 4 billion miles from Earth. And after this picture was taken, one of the effects of it was this increasing sense of our vulnerability as humans and the isolation that we have. And Carl Sagan has a great quote, I hope you've heard it before, but please indulge me just to share it here, where he says, look at that dot, that's here, that's home, that's us, on it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who has ever lived, lived out their lives here. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and Voyager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species has lived here on a moat of dust suspended in a sunbeam. And that brings us to looking back over the past decade, we have this thin layer of the atmosphere that protects us, that protects our home and it's what has allowed life to live here and it's grown hotter. In the past decade we've now identified that the temperature has risen about one degree Celsius around the planet and the Paris Agreement that most of the world except the US has committed to, has committed to no more than a two degree and ideally only 1.5 degree increase. That leaves us half a degree of room to work with, period, two degrees at the most. When we look at that, when we closed out 2010, what did we see? It's Ruff Lohan identified, coastal erosion, sea level rise, heat days, and at the very end of 2010 we saw a continent on fire as we're watching the news come out of Australia and it's resistance to doing anything about it. So moving into 2020, we now have the opportunity to look ahead, to look forward. At the start of the climate decade where we must take the action that Governor Yegay, that Representative Lohan identified, how can we dramatically change the trajectory of our energy future and our greenhouse gas emissions both around the planet but also here at home. Here in Hawaii, we've taken a very bold commitment to it and Hawaii itself is its own dot in the vast ocean that connects us to the rest of the planet. And one of the gifts that Hawaiian has, the language has given to us is that we know that there's a lot of words we use that have these embedded meanings in them and as we think about them, they call on us to think more deeply such as malama where we think about how we are taught to cherish but not just to appreciate something but to feel our connection to it and how we exist in relation to it. And in English, we have words like that as well. And we've lost some of the meaning of those words over time because they've built up especially many of our words that have Greek and Latin roots in them. And if you've seen my resume, I have my bachelor's degree in philosophy and archaeology so this is a little bit of me loving to talk about history stuff. But one of those words that we have from ancient Greek is the word oikos. And if you're thinking about yogurt right now, there's a reason. But oikos also in ancient Greek means home. It means house, habitat, dwelling. And that word comes to us today in English in the form of the word ego, E-C-O. And oikos is the same root and economy as it is in ecology. And so even in our own English language, we have this idea of home, habitat, where we live in our words economy and ecology so that we get the words ecology. You guys know ology, right? The study of. But it's more than just the study of our home, it's the understanding and how we see ourselves living in our home. And economy is more than just the money and how it moves around. The nomi in economy is how we share things, how we distribute. And so when you think about ecology and economy together, our ancestors have given us these words that say, think about the world that you live in and how you share it with the people around you. And so when you think about these two, they're intimately intertwined together. And as we move forward, this is how I encourage us to think about these two. And many people in Hawaii already have that sense that the economy is the environment. The environment is the economy. And our ancestors had that sense of as well and bequeathed that to us in our own everyday words. And it shows up today in our conversations now about a clean economy. So what does a clean economy mean? And how do we look at it? Well, I think this past session with the passage of Act 122, House Bill 852, the legislature set up a new structure in government to really focus in on this and think about what is a clean economy. And they've made several changes to how the energy office works. A couple of them are very important but subtle. One of them is to make it an attached agency. So up until now, the energy office had been a subunit of the Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism, which meant that energy was part of a larger portfolio that the director of D-Bed had to focus on. And so energy issues sat right next on their plate with every other issue related to tourism and the economy. And by making it an attached agency, what the legislature has said that this office is important, this issue is something that both the governor and the legislature need direct visibility on to be able to talk directly about energy issues when they need to and have the flexibility to be responsive to changing things over time, changing issues and priorities. So by moving us into that role, we now have the obligation and the opportunity to stop and help work with you all and our larger communities to address energy issues as the energy office. And in particular, I think going into the passage of Act 122, a lot of folks used to ask what is the role of the energy office? What does the energy office do? And now the legislature has provided us with a mission statement. It is, and as Governor Igay said in his opening, the purpose is to promote energy efficiency, renewable energy and clean transportation to help achieve a resilient, clean energy, decarbonized economy. And that word decarbonized is something that I'd like to focus in a little bit today because we're talking about climate change and energy. In addition to that, Act 122 has now been codified, so if you weren't aware, it's now HRS 196-71 is the energy office, our establishment section. And 196-72 is the chief energy officer's obligations and duties. And I've just highlighted a few words here. We're supposed to provide analysis and planning and to develop and inform policies with the legislature, with the Public Utilities Commission, and also with state agencies and other relevant stakeholders. And I would submit that relevant stakeholders includes our broader communities and the general public. Similarly, we're also meant to help reduce costs and work with all of these goals in changing our public facilities to do that lead by example to help implement the instructions and direction from the legislature and the governor to work with our partners at state and county agencies to move the needle on public fleet conversion and proving and reducing energy and greenhouse gas emissions associated with the built environment. Project deployment and facilitation to help the private sector and those that says when aligned with state energy goals. So we're not the ones who are necessarily deciding which projects to help. And that's the Public Utilities Commission's role to see who moves forward with what projects based on the variety of criteria that they have. Our role in this respect is those projects that the Public Utilities Commission has said these should move forward. We are ready to help and facilitate moving forward with the deployment of that project as long as it's aligned with the state's energy goals. And then finally to engage the private sector to help lead efforts and especially through the Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative which is something that we will be reconvening and starting up and working on to help reinvigorate that effort because it meant so much to Hawaii achieving and starting off the whole renewable portfolio standard conversation. In addition, the Chief Energy Officer has 19 specified duties and obligations so not much to do. But I wanted to focus on four of them because I think this might be the only position at present in state government that has an explicit obligation to work on decarbonization. And so I wanted to talk a little bit about that today. And these four are those four items to identify, track and report on key performance measures and milestones, identify market gaps and innovation opportunities and to create and review proposed state actions that can move the needle on it and then also to advocate for our decarbonization goals at relevant venues including the Public Utilities Commission, the Legislature and the Consumer Advocate as well as other places where it would be appropriate to do that. And so this is something that I've kind of keyed into as that real space and direction that brings together climate and energy in very explicit statutory language for what we work on. And of course, you know how government works. So whatever the Chief Energy Officer works on, the office works on as well, right? So Howard, Chris, thanks guys. So what are our decarbonization goals? So we'll get into that in just a moment but one other thing that the Legislature instructed us to do is there is five cents of the barrel tax that goes into the Energy Security Special Fund and they instructed us to propose uses of that fund and in particular to help fund the Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation Commission and the Greenhouse Gas Sequestration Task Force. So I think there's some more direction there as well that our job is to support moving the needle with these commissions and task forces and then also to support achieving the zero emissions clean economy target. Are you guys familiar with that? You spent any time looking at that statute? Because now you get the opportunity to if you haven't. So here's the language of it and I've highlighted a few keywords in there. One of them is that the focus includes offsets. So it's atmospheric carbon and greenhouse gas emissions. So what's already in the air and what we're putting in the air, that we can look at offsets through local sequestration, pulling it out of the air and then long-term sinks and reservoirs. So those are the things that hold the carbon out of the air which are usually trees. And then we have the statewide target to sequester more than emitted and I think that's a really important phrase because we tend to talk about this as a carbon neutral standard and the idea of carbon neutral net zero is the idea that you're ending up at a zero point and our direction says to actually sequester more than emitted. So I tend to think of this as a carbon negative standard which is a higher calling and a higher obligation than net zero. And then also to look at the greenhouse gases that are emitted within the state and to hit this target as quickly as practicable which I think is an important thing to note that it's not by 2045. It's as soon as we can make it work and no later than 2045 which is a distinct standard from the RPS which has distinct milestones and target dates to hit those milestones. So this is what we are looking at now and thinking how can we put the work of the energy office in the context of this target. There's also one more decarbonization goal on the table and this is one you probably are familiar with the Global Warming Solutions Act, Act 234 from 2007. And this is the one that says we need to move the state's emissions back down to 1990 levels by the year 2020. And this is important because it also sets up the greenhouse gas inventory and if you haven't read that, the Department of Health Clean Air Branch publishes this every year. The Clean Air Branch just posted the 2016 numbers on New Year's Day, yes, the holiday, on their website and so I encourage you to go take a look at it. I'm going to get into the numbers here in a minute. I know we had some pictures and I know we got some words and I know you guys are data technical energy people so the charts are coming. Hold on just a moment. But something to note that in this returning to 1990 levels by statute we were told not to consider emissions from airplanes and that's a caveat that does not exist in the zero emissions economy target. We don't have carve outs for certain forms of emissions. It just says the state needs to sequester more than emits, writ large. So what does the inventory say? This is 2016 numbers and I've highlighted in yellow down at the bottom the net emission so this is all the caveats like taking out aviation and so based on the refigured numbers in this report in 1990 we were remaining 10.84 million metric tons of emissions based on this and so even so 2015-2016 we're at 9.3 million metric tons and notice that it ticked up a little bit from 2015 to 2016 not exactly a positive trend but at least we're under the 10 million and for that Global Warming Solutions Act law we're done but we're not, we could be done we need to verify that that so we're not fully done yet we need to get a trend going and ensure that we actually are below 10 million. You know one data point's not enough right we need a trend to feel confident about where we're going but let's say that we are and we pause at 9 million metric tons that's it, as far as that statute is concerned we can continue emitting 9 million metric tons a year and have achieved the purpose of that statute but it does not achieve the purpose of the zero emissions clean economy target to take another look at those numbers so these are those numbers now in a bar chart form and the blue part in the middle that's dominating the whole thing is what? It's energy right most of our emissions are from energy in fact about 88% of our emissions are from energy the red at the bottom that's the offsets those are trees that's forest carbon and so we have on here we have energy, industrial processes, waste emissions from agriculture and forestry and other land uses and then we have the sinks which is effectively forest carbon this is a breakdown in those sectors by category and all of this is in the greenhouse gas inventory so what we have is about 17 million metric tons of emissions from energy we have about 0.78 million metric tons from industrial processes and then we have and most of that is from the substitution of ozone depleting substances so that's HFC substitutes and then we have waste, agriculture, forestry and other land uses and then in green down here is the sinks so 6.51 million metric tons are sinks that absorb carbon compared to what we emit and so if you were to sink these so if you look at these there's a smattering of things but some of these really stand out so it's a little helpful to look at this by order of magnitude so what I did is I reconfigured that table so now the highest emissions are at the top by category and then that sector is on the right hand side and when you look at it by magnitude you can see that transportation that's ground transportation stationary combustion, aviation and international bunker fuels are the largest sources of emissions in the state and then going from there we have these other activities so if you were to balance that out and from the point of view of the zero emissions clean economy target you get this effectively if you can see this from CO2 from wood biomass down I've highlighted that in green because effectively the forest carbon that our trees absorb offset all of those items in the inventory but it still leaves international bunker fuel, aviation stationary combustion and transportation as unaccounted for unoffset emissions and one thing to note about those is that aviation and bunker fuels only count trips that originate within Hawaii so inter-island, Hawaii to California, Hawaii to another country it does not include any emissions from other places to Hawaii and that's consistent with national reporting and international reporting and that's one of the strengths of the inventories what it does is it sets it up in a way that allows us to take a look at what we do and make it comparable to the rest of the country and to the rest of the world and able to roll these numbers up to get to a global accounting of are we under two degrees, are we on our way to under 1.5 degrees so I wanted to highlight this because what we're starting to do is really marry up climate and energy and the energy office with these decarbonization requirements are now starting to put pen to paper and figure this out if you can tell from this picture we're actually looking at Hawaii from a different angle it's a little unusual of an angle these are all NASA satellite photos by the way so there's no copyright issues but I put it up here because it's the same thing we have to do we have to start looking at Hawaii and the way that we tackle energy and emissions from different points of view we've been set up the energy policy forum the clean energy initiative efforts to date through 2007 through the last decade have really brought us very far into being a climate leader as Governor Igay and Rep Loan identified but there's still a lot more to go and we need to put pencil to paper and we're here to be partners with you and pursuing this as we look at energy efficiency, clean energy both renewable energy in terms of electricity production but also in terms of alternative fuels and looking at ways to tackle ground transportation, aviation and shipping and tackling the four of those will provide I think the roadmap to help Hawaii actually decarbonize itself and achieve a clean economy so thank you very much my name is Amy Barnes and I am currently a senior advisor to California's former Governor Jerry Brown at the California China Climate Institute which focuses on facilitating cooperation on climate issues and prior to that I served in the Brown administration as a senior advisor to former Governor Brown who was at the time Governor on climate policy and prior to that I was a deputy secretary at the California Environmental Protection Agency working on climate issues and I got to know both Jeremy and Scott through the establishment of the US Climate Alliance which Governor Igay and Scott both mentioned which is this wonderful group of now 25 states bipartisan who are working together to continue to meet the objectives of the Paris Agreement amongst those states and their borders and so some of the things that I worked on when I was in Governor Brown's office included establishing the US Climate Alliance a big meeting that we held there in 2018 called the Global Climate Action Summit which brought about 5,000 people together from states, regions, cities, businesses, civil society resulted in over 500 new commitments to climate action to really help drive momentum forward on climate and also on the executive order that we passed right around the same time that that summit was happening to set a new goal for carbon neutrality by 2045 and so I'm really thrilled to be here today to talk about bending the curve for a couple of reasons first of all from a personal perspective I'm a native Hawaiian descent my father's family is from here and my dad grew up just up the hill in Nuala Valley so it always feels a little bit like coming home when I come here and so I'm really thrilled to get to be here to talk to my climate and energy people but also my Hawaiian people about what we're doing and I really can't think of a more important time to be having this conversation when I look around the state of the world today and really the knife-edge that I think we're on when it comes to climate action we have a really unique opportunity I think still to bend the curve to achieve a mission reduction that will present the opportunity to save the future for our children and we also I think for the first time in a long time are seeing public support for that action when I look at what youth around the world and across the country are doing that gives me a lot of hope when I think about the policy work that's being done here in Hawaii that's being done all over the country it's clear that we have the policy solutions we have the technology solutions we know how to tackle this problem and so it's really just about building that momentum and implementing those solutions in a way to get to the goals that we've set for ourselves and so I know Sherilyn set out some broad framing questions and I think my quick answer to those are absolutely our 2045 carbon neutrality goals are possible but they're also they've been set in a moral and scientific imperative and so it's really our responsibility to meet those goals and I believe it's absolutely possible to meet them in a way that promotes equity environmental justice economic growth and prosperity an opportunity to have a conversation thank you Amy so Jeremy same question for you if you could introduce yourself and then I know that you're here sort of right Cooper and I'd like to hear in introducing yourself can you tell us a little bit about Governor Cooper's approach to climate change in North Carolina my role in the North Carolina governor's office is I'm governor's policy advisor on a number of topics including energy, environment climate change and transportation all of my favorite topics so and that listening to Scott it sounds like here you guys have taken an opportunity to really look at what you've done thus far on climate and energy and see if the government set up the right way an optimal way to get where we need to go long term in North Carolina Governor Cooper coming has really been a similar opportunity to look at where we are as a state and chart a new path forward over the past Governor Cooper's predecessor really did not do much on climate at all and so we've been our starting place was to really de-thaw state government and unlock a lot of the just unhelpful dynamics that were present and some of these are still are in North Carolina and so then the question is how do we starting where we are which is not much momentum going what is it that makes sense for us to do in North Carolina to get us moving in a holistic way and so here's what Governor Cooper has done on that I mentioned this not because you guys are going to remember everything and maybe even care that much what North Carolina is doing but there may be things that we're doing that make sense in Hawaii so the first thing is to have an executive order by the governor that really tackles climate change directly there's a lot of conversation in North Carolina about let's talk about clean energy or energy efficiency things like that in a way that sort of getting climate solutions without saying the word climate change or I think took climate on directly by issuing executive order 80 a year ago and it does it sets out a broad framework so it identifies three goals for the state one is to achieve 40% economy wide carbon reduction by 2025 very soon from 2005 levels to have 80,000 zero emission vehicles in the state by 2025 we have about 9,000 right now so there's quite a distant ways to go and to increase building efficiency in the state by 40% we've had a 30% go on the legislature they haven't been able to pass up to 40% so governor said this is where we should be and I think should leadership there in addition this executive order established the North Carolina climate change interagency council the first time we've had a council focused directly on climate change it's comprised of the governor and his 10 cabinet secretaries and their designees so we've been meeting for a year now it's been um there's a lot there that we can unpack it if you guys are interested the executive order also has a general directive that just frankly says to all executive agencies you should be considering and integrating climate change mitigation and adaptation into all of your policies and programs the approach here is to acknowledge from the governor's office we don't know every single little thing that needs to happen but that principle needs to be incorporated into everyday decision making and the agencies themselves know that's how to do that there are also a number of specific directives so instead of say establish a climate commission that then does long term study and creates a comprehensive climate action plan to achieve the governor's goal we took a different approach we said look any such climate action plan we know is going to address energy, transportation you know buildings etc so let's just start there and so it directed the development of a clean energy plan for the state of North Carolina zero emission vehicle plan for the state a resilience plan for the for the state our department of commerce has conducted a workforce assessment because there's significant transformation of energy and transportation sectors that have workforce implications we should know what they are and be training our workforce appropriately and there's a specific directive on converting the state motor fleet to zero emission vehicles whenever feasible and happy to talk more about that so now a year later what we had is four of these plans the resilience plan is due in March and that's really given us a framework to move forward with specific recommendations based on a stakeholder process so that's what we're tackling now obviously the topics I mentioned don't cover everything that needs to be addressed to deal with climate change but we felt like those are no regret initiatives and that's really how we've started so with that I'll pause I think hopefully that gives you a framework for some of the things I'll probably talk about next forward and how that fits into the Governor's overall approach on climate terrific thank you so I know from speaking to them beforehand that both Amy and Jeremy would like to help us with one particular sort of angle looking ahead and that is how do we rally communities to be how do we deepen the role of communities in implementing these types of solutions and these types of policies that you've described and so I'm going to take these a little bit out of board from what we've described I'd like to start with you Amy could you tell us a little bit about the climate communities project in California and in particular can you tell us about how that project is sort of combining climate and energy policy with other benefits, other upsides, other problems, other issues I guess maybe just to broadly frame it community engagement has been central to California's policymaking when it comes to air quality and climate change really from the very beginning and so not to go too far back but maybe just a little bit of context so AB 32 which is California's I kind of think of it as our climate constitution which was passed back in 2006 signed by then Governor Schwarzenegger, a Republican and let me start was really the first comprehensive piece of legislation that we had dealing with climate change but it also set a number of requirements for public engagement processes and again this is something that has always been required through our administrative processes act and other regulations but with climate I think we've really sort of started a new open a new sort of era of how we think about community engagement and so jumping ahead in time to the Department of Climate Communities program this was a program that was really born out of a number of years of experience implementing policies and regulations to achieve the goals of AB 32 which originally were really simply to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 and then subsequent legislation set additional goals to do things like reduce emissions 40% by 2030 80% by 2050 a number of other complementary policies but through that process it became clear that disadvantaged communities in California did not feel like they were having a seat at the table in these conversations and some of the ways that they felt that they needed to be heard and also that we were getting into a lot of conversations about the trade off between taking action on climate change and addressing criteria pollutant issues and local air air quality and other local environmental issues in really impacted communities and so the TCC the transformative climate communities really came out of that moving away from a sort of the traditional way that we often tackle this problem which California has also done in thinking about transportation stationary source natural and working lands and looking at a community based approach and so really the first step that we took there was developing a tool called cow and virus screen and I can talk about this a little bit more later but that was critical to help identify where our disadvantaged communities actually were and what we meant by disadvantaged community and so we looked at data in communities across the state looking at everything from localized air pollution exposure to toxic but also things like visits to the hospital for asthma, academic attainment socioeconomic status within a zip code and so by looking at that suite of different metrics we were able to identify what the most disadvantaged communities were in California and to prioritize them and that tool is something that was done through a process of community engagement so the community was involved in building a tool and the tool itself also exists online so anybody can use the tool go on play around with it and it's something that we've used during community meetings ironically one of the things that happened was people would say my community is really disadvantaged, your community isn't disadvantaged, my community is the most disadvantaged and we need to have the focus and attention and so being able to have this tool to say we've looked at all of these indicators and this is these are our priorities and helped us to develop the transformative climate communities program and so what TCC does is it develops climate solutions on a community level that are cross cutting so again not just focused on transportation, not just focused on rooftop solar but really all of those things together through a process of talking to the community about what their needs are and one of the things that we found in the process of engaging the communities was that just going out to do these meetings and communities and to give them the opportunity to sort of air their grievances talk about what problems existed in their community was really part of the process, part of creating the trust and the space that then opened the door for us to develop these programs. Another lesson that we learned was that there was not a lot of trust between some of our local government agencies and the communities and so the way that the TCC program has been developed it requires a consortium applied to the program that includes local agencies but also community groups faith-based groups environmental groups to be parties to this consortium that applies for the grant funding so that we have community engagement that we're building trust between community groups and local agencies and then that we're also addressing challenges that are really priorities for the community. So again a project may be focused on improving bus transportation in a community but it may also be improving access to local health clinics. It may also be providing rooftop solar, residential rooftop solar. So really again looking at sort of a place-based way of aggregating solutions in communities and all of this is funded by I should have said before but all of this is funded by the revenue from our cap and trade program and so in the first round of the transformative climate communities program about $535 million was spent in a number of communities and subsequent to that first round we've had two additional communities developed and these are long-term programs this isn't just sort of a one or two year grant cycle these are you know three to five year investments to date in communities but that we expect will be long-term investments in transforming these communities not just from a climate perspective but also from environmental, social justice you know more holistic perspective as well. I have a follow-up question I think under the answer based on the funding but when you say we went out to these TCC communities who's the we what agency sort of does this program live with in California? So the program is administered by the Strategic Growth Council which is a specific entity that has worked on sort of thinking about how California can grow in a smart way for all is something that we've traditionally had to deal with and the so the Strategic Growth Council has really taken on the TCC program now that's one of its core initiatives but a lot of the early work even predated some of the legislation and so one of the organizations that was set out to coordinate Climate Action California from very early on actually originating in an executive order from then Governor Schwarzenegger in 2005 was something called the Climate Action Team and it sounds maybe like it's a little bit similar to what Jeremy what you have in North Carolina where the Climate Action Team brought together the heads, the secretaries of a number of relevant agencies whose work touched on climate so the Environmental Protection Agency the Public Utilities Commission, Energy Commission Natural Resources Business Consumer Services brought them all together to coordinate on a regular basis on the implementation of not just AB 32 which as I mentioned is sort of our our climate constitution if you will our sort of original founding climate document but then on subsequent policies and pieces of legislation and so you know we had both secretary level individuals from those agencies going out into communities participating in these workshops partnering with local community groups often to help facilitate bringing the right members of the community in to make sure the key decision makers were there and then also staff level individuals to help facilitate conversations the format of these conversations I think is also worth mentioning so it wasn't just this kind of format where it was the secretary of the EPA sitting behind a podium and speaking at the community we would do introductory remarks and then break down into small table discussions so that each member of the community who was there participating in the meeting had the opportunity to engage with somebody who was actually at an agency that might hold the responsibility for taking their recommendation forward and so I think that was really critical in making people feel like it wasn't just sort of taking the box activity of let's say that we've consulted the community about really hearing people and also just sort of a little administrative thing that we found was really important was holding those on nights and weekends so that people who worked full-time during the day were able to participate and really engage. I have lots more questions about the TCCC program I was hoping to ask Scott if there's any potential of launching something like that in Hawaii but he escaped us but I want to compare it then to North Carolina so I know that Jeremy you're quite proud of the work done on the North Carolina clean energy plan we have I'm told about five minutes if you could summarize sort of the key recommendations that came out of that plan but more importantly tell us more about how the how the community's input shaped those recommendations I think that we would be grateful to know more about that process. So one of the five plans that was directed in the executive order I mentioned is for our department of environmental quality to develop a clean energy plan and that clean energy plan was delivered to the governor on September 27th of this year for 2019 after an extensive stakeholder process with communities with experts etc that process included a series of meetings with 60 to 80 stakeholders representing different organizations and interest groups like I said over the course of I want to say eight months or so it included online like over 660 online comments that our department of environmental quality received numerous one-on-one meetings public listening sessions where this wasn't a formal rulemaking but to go out and have folks have information sessions around the state so different geographies again you know not just during the day but in the evening and on weekends so that folks understood what was happening these follow some of the principles that our department and I think our administration tries to follow when it comes to community engagement which includes things like making sure we're proactively letting communities know and businesses and other stakeholders at the same time know what is actually happening these are things we live with every day it's not top of mind for people who don't do this professionally so proactively letting people know through multiple venues not just putting a notice in the newspaper fewer and fewer people read but you know flyers of churches going online social media things like that having multiple avenues that the communities and stakeholders can comment on answering questions on and on just doing as much as we can so this whole process resulted in the clean energy plan which was pretty historic we haven't had a plan like this in North Carolina before we had prior iterations but particularly proud of this one some of the recommendations include the following I mean it's lengthy so I won't get through all of them but the first one is for the governor to convene a stakeholder process that is going and that is currently underway to evaluate different carbon reduction policies and see so that evaluate different carbon reduction policies with an eye toward core values like emission reductions resiliency of the energy sector prices equity etc and we are evaluating so what we've done is established this we have established this process which includes about 30 different stakeholder interests some of those individuals represent their larger community not just their particular organization we have subgroups etc and so we are working through to evaluate policies like trading program of different varieties clean energy standard energy efficiency resource standard having a carbon adder at the utilities commission proceedings in various ways so to go through all this model have modeling have legal analysis policy analysis and they will culminate in a report to the governor next December that will provide us everything that as much as we can do in a year for information that we would need in order to move forward to pursue one or more of these policies going forward another recommendation is to establish an ongoing energy process where the state and stakeholders are able to really look at our energy sector our regulatory framework our utility commission policies and programs and processes and update them for the 21st century a lot of ours are frankly created last century today we have new customer expectations we have new needs for a healthy public utility etc so we need to align our energy process and systems for today been very interesting and interested in what your commission has done with performance based rate making and we've sort of looked at that and something we're considering as we decide how to move forward with that process in short there are other recommendations like to establish an energy efficiency advisory council to move from integrated resource planning which really focuses on generation to integrated system, I saw in our system operation plans you're looking at generation transmission and distribution all in the same planning process we have a had a whole section on equity and justice to make sure that included a number of recommendations specifically responsive to some of the feedback we heard from stakeholders and especially communities during that process clean energy plan is a pretty comprehensive document and gives us a roadmap for actions that we're starting to take with the knowledge that those recommendations while they come from our department we're really grounded in stakeholder feedback along the way. We stay up here too much longer but Maria has been nice to us to hand up questions and so I'm going to ask you each to answer a question in 30 seconds and it's a hard question but it's one that I hear a lot and I think an outside perspective would be interesting so the question is this what is your response to people who say that Hawaii is too small to matter in terms of global greenhouse gas emissions and I might frame it a little bit different have you ever heard somebody say that a given community is too small to matter in this sort of universalized threat of climate change? Our individual actions are too small to matter in this global crisis and so whether it's Hawaii or North Carolina we have to do what we can do and get to where we need to be to be responsible for our portion of the problem get there in a way that can help others do the same alright so we need in the United States to get to our carbon neutrality by 2050 in a way that helps other countries do the same thing so we're exporting the solutions and technologies I'm here because I talked to Scott and looked at Hawaii and been inspired and seen lessons I mean part of the reason we joined the alliance is because we saw that Hawaii had joined in a number of other states so I would I'm not discouraged I think that Hawaii plays a really important role in fact I'm humbled to be here with California and Hawaii talking about climate leadership I would agree with everything that Jeremy said and maybe just give two examples of actually how Hawaii has inspired California and also just to say that we would have people tell us all the time in California that we were too small to make a difference and were the fifth largest economy in the world but we are responsible for less than 1% of global greenhouse gas emissions and so I think that's something that people will often trot out as an excuse to say well you shouldn't really be trying so hard because you're not going to make a difference and I think as Jeremy said you can but two specific examples one thing to loop back to what Jeremy had just been saying but so SB 100 our 100% renewable energy bill was under fire by a lot of people and not just the folks that you might have thought but also some advocates for renewable energy who just said this is doable up until you know 80-90% but wouldn't you get up any higher than that it's going to be impossible it's going to be so expensive and so having had Hawaii go first actually made it really a lot easier for us to push back and say there are other places that are doing this and it's feasible and that was really critical to us getting SB 100 passed same thing with our carbon neutrality executive order which I was very intently involved with moving and same debate you know why does it need to be carbon neutrality why does it need to be 2045 can it be 2050 can it be second half of the century and having Hawaii go first and set it at 2045 made it really easy for me to just go to Governor Brown and say this is the gold standard this is the benchmark this is what we need to do anything less than this and actually now that Scott's explained it I realize we are less because we didn't go negative but but you know anything less than this is going to set us behind and so I think it is so critical for us when we can when we have the ability when we have the courage to go forward and then to leave really clear instructions for how others can do the same and I know I'm going a little bit over but I just wanted to give a plug for what Jeremy said about the planning process we've done something similar in California it's our scoping plan I would love to talk to anybody after this about the process it is a comprehensive plan that lays out the moral imperative for why we're doing it the context for where we are in an emissions basis and then on a sector by sector example all of the major policies and objectives and how we're going to get there and it's a roadmap it's not just a roadmap for us but we talked to other states all over the country and around the world that also use this as a roadmap for how they can take action and like Jeremy said not all of it's going to work for every jurisdiction but maybe one piece is and so I think it's really important what you guys are doing here and thank you for your leadership