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>> Come everyone to another installment of the Spring Environmental Resilience Speaker Series jointly presented by Indiana University's Integrated Program on the Environment and the Environmental Resilience Institute. I'm Sarah Mincey, director of the integrated program in the environment. And I'm so pleased you're able to join us today. Both IPE and ERI are founded on the understanding that interdisciplinary learning and research are essential to teach today's scholars and to solve today's problems not to mention tomorrow's.

The natural and social sciences, the humanities and the arts are all critical and in play as we tackle climate change and the environmental challenges that we're facing. IPE was founded in 2012 by the provost and the leadership of the O'Neill school and the College of Arts and Sciences.

And the School of Public Health to bring together all of the environmental and sustainability scholarship across the various schools and departments on the Bloomington campus. And ERI was founded in 2017 as a part of the IU prepared for environmental change grand challenge. Its mission is to enhance resilience to environmental change in Indiana and beyond by accurately predicting impacts and effectively partnering with communities to implement feasible, equitable, and research informed solutions.

IPE and ERI faculty staff and students have worked together to bring us a robust set of speakers this semester. Every other Friday at noon, and in two weeks we're going to have Dr. Steward Pickett, an urban ecologist from the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies with us. And then the following week we're going to have one of our very own, Jackie MacDonald Gibson, from the School of Public Health.

So mark your calendars for these upcoming talks. You'll be able to find information about each of these talks on ERI and IPE's webpages and in the regular newsletters and events notices that our organizations regularly send out. So we encourage you to sign up for these newsletters so you'll get these reminders about upcoming talks as well as other news and events that we publicize.

Finally, logistics on how you can engage today with our speaker. Please put questions into the chat. As you think of them, we'll monitor those and we'll be we'll read those at the end as there's time. And so at long last I want to introduce today's speaker, Mary Anne Hitt.

Mary Anne is an advocate and a strategist. She's the National Director of Campaigns at the Sierra Club, where she previously served for a decade as director of the Beyond Coal Campaign, recognized as one of the most successful environmental campaigns in history. Working with partners across the nation, the campaign blocked the construction of 200 proposed US coal plants, secured retirement of over half of the existing US coal plants, and helped usher in the clean energy era.

She also co-host the climate story and telling podcast No Place Like Home. Mary Anne was listed in 2015 as one of the Politico 50. Politico's list of the top thinkers, doers, and visionaries transforming American politics. She has made numerous media appearances including Good Morning America, MSNBC, The New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, and Democracy Now.

She was featured in the National Geographic film, From the Ashes. Which was shown here on campus at IU a few years ago. And the Emmy winning climate series, Years of Living Dangerously. She's a contributor to All We Can Save a Penguin Random House anthology of essays and poetry by women climate leaders and it's a book I recommend everybody.

She is also a public voices fellow of the OpEd Project and the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. Mary Anne previously served as the executive director of several grassroots organizations, including Appalachian voices. She received her Master's of Science in Environmental Studies from the University of Montana and her bachelor's degree in the College Scholars Program at the University of Tennessee.

Where she later received the 2008 notable UT Women Award. She grew up in the mountains of East Tennessee and now lives in West Virginia with her family. So Mary Anne, we're so pleased to have you today. Thank you so much for joining us. I'll just turn it over to you now.


>> It is a pleasure to be with you all. Hello friends. It's a real treat. I of course have some slides to share. But before I do that, I just wanna note that Indiana has a special place in my heart. And my dad, who very sadly passed away about a month ago on January 27th after a long struggle with Parkinson's disease was from Indiana.

And so my dad's whole side of the family is mostly in Indiana around Indianapolis and Martinsville. And I had some of my early experiences with environmental activism with Heartwood, which is the forest protection organization, grassroots nonprofit that I think was born in Indiana. So a place very close to my heart and a place where the Beyond Coal Campaign that I have the great honor of leading for decade did some really incredible work that I'm excited to share here with you all.

And so I will have probably 30 minutes or so of a presentation. And then look forward to your questions. And it's really an honor, it's an honor to be with you all. So let me share my screen. So as you heard again, I have been the director of the Beyond Coal Campaign for a decade.

And I am now the national director of all of our campaigns at the Sierra Club. And so what I want to talk to you all about is that work. The progress that we have made in the country so far to move beyond coal and increasingly beyond fracked gas.

And the road ahead to continue to make that progress in this very critical decade for our climate. And so my agenda that I have for us here is just to tell you a little bit about the Sierra Club. I assume you're all somewhat familiar with it. But I don't want to take that for granted to share the progress of the Beyond Coal Campaign.

And then really focus on what's next as we accelerate a clean, accelerate clean energy and adjust transition as well as a global phase out of coal. So just briefly a couple slides about the Sierra Club. We are a national grassroots organization. I believe we are the only national environmental organization, where the board of directors is elected by the membership.

And then we have chapters in every state, we have 64 chapters. So every state plus several cities have a chapter or a group. And the leadership of those chapters is also elected by the members of the Sierra Club in that state. So wherever you are including in Indiana, there is an active Sierra Club with lots of volunteers close to 4 million now volunteers members and folks who are involved with the Sierra Club.

And we not only have that big reach and that grassroots foundation. But we also have deep expertise. A lot of experienced attorneys, lobbyists, campaigners, organizers, with access to key decision makers. And also access to lots of important community partners. And the many many organizations out there that Sierra Club partners with are a key part of all of our work.

And we are currently working toward these very high level goals in the organization, which is to get the electric sector shifted to 100% clean energy by 2030. And reduce oil use as well dramatically. To shift our economy in ways that address racial and economic inequity. To protect 30% of our natural ecosystems by 2030 and 50% by 2050.

Make sure everyone has access to the outdoors, the opportunity to explore and enjoy nature. And then continue to mobilize and expand this incredible base of supporters. That we have who are really the engine of everything that we that we do in the Sierra Club along with our many partners.

And so the Beyond Coal campaign has been a cornerstone of our work here at the Sierra Club for a decade for a couple of reasons. I came to the Sierra Club because of the image that you see on the left mountaintop removal coal mining. Which is this very devastating form of coal mining as you can see, where the entire mountain tops are blown up and shovelled into the valleys below.

Not only devastating are incredibly rich and diverse appalachian forests but also causing a lot of harm and health problems and economic devastation to the communities all around them. And I was, as you heard the director of a smaller nonprofit called Appalachian voices for several years. And while I was working there, we were trying to stop this form of mining called mountaintop removal.

And as we were doing that there was a proposal for a new coal fired power plant in Southwest Virginia in the heart of mountain top removal country. That we saw as a threat because if this new coal plant was built, we thought it would be even harder to stop mountain top removal.

Because there would be a coal fired power plant there that would create decades of demand for more of that coal. So we started working to stop this one new coal fired power plant only to discover it was one of over 200 that were proposed in the United States during the George W Bush years.

And there were people in every community where these new coal plants were proposed. Having them pop up in their backyards who are trying to fight back. And people were fighting back for a lot of reasons because, of course of the devastating impacts of mining that I mentioned, but also air pollution.

Existing coal plants at that time were our country's single biggest source of the sulfur dioxide pollution that contributes to heart attacks and strokes. And also our single biggest source of mercury pollution which goes from the smokestacks falls into the water gets into the aquatic ecosystem and ends up in the seafood that we eat.

And if you're pregnant, you're told not to eat certain fish because of the high mercury levels that they accumulate. Which threatens the babies as they're developing and puts them at risk of lifelong developmental problems. So coal plants were also our single biggest source of that mercury pollution. Single biggest source of toxic water pollution and unknown to many folks but they released a huge amount of toxic water pollution out of their tailpipes.

And finally, again at that time a decade ago, our single biggest source of the pollution that's causing the climate crisis. So very big, polluting source of energy and we had an alternative wind, solar renewable energy that could provide the same services and do it without creating all that pollution.

So I joined the Sierra Club when I realized that not only was there this one new coal plant that was proposed in the United States. But there were 200 and the Sierra Club was part of a network of partners that were trying to fight them all on a very shoestring scrappy budget.

But lots of folks who were being creative and putting their shoulder to the wheel on their communities because they did not want these huge industrial facilities in their backyard. So I joined the Sierra Club, for several years we worked to stop these new coal plants. Including some in Indiana we ended up stopping again, not just the Sierra Club, but over 300 partner organizations.

Ultimately, we stopped over 200 new coal plants from being built in the United States and had those been built. It would have made game over for our climate, we would have been locked into another 50 plus years of our most climate, harming energy source. But it also would have blocked out new markets for the clean energy boom that we are now experiencing.

So we stopped those coal plants and we had in the process learned a lot about how decisions get made about electricity. And we learned there primarily made in states in cities because that's where the decision points are for the fate of coal plants and other energy projects. And then that was a place where over time we could learn a lot, we could make our voice heard and we could actually affect those decisions.

So then we turned from stopping all those new coal plants to the existing energy system in the United States, which at that time was 530 existing coal plants. So here we are in that work today. So what you see here on the vertical axis is the coal capacity in megawatts.

Which is for those who are not energy nerds, that's an amount of energy generation that goes from kilowatt to a thousand of those is a megawatt, to a thousand of those is a gigawatt. And then over time you see on the horizontal axis there in time and 2010 we embarked on this work to retire the existing coal plants in the United States.

And if you fast forward today, we are two thirds of the way there we have 339 coal plants announced to retire in the United States, we have 191 remaining. Well, you see here in dark blue are the ones that are actually no longer operating. The light blue are ones that have a retirement date before 2030 but have not yet hit that retirement date.

And then the red you see that goal that we about every three years we looked at the coal fleet and set a goal for the retirements that we thought we could win through our advocacy. And the latest goal we had set in 2020 was 169,000 megawatts and we actually exceeded that goal slightly in 2020.

It was actually the biggest year ever, for Moving Beyond Coal in the United States. So we now have two thirds of the coal plants in the United States announced to retire. And we've cut in half the carbon pollution that climate warming pollution from the coal fleet in the United States.

And now instead of getting half of our electricity from coal, we're getting about 20% of our electricity from coal. And that has been the single biggest engine driving down our climate emissions in the United States. And then has also had big public health benefits. So this is the cumulative benefits over a decade of almost 30,000 lives saved.

Almost half a million asthma attacks prevented, almost 50,000 heart attacks prevented and $53 billion in health care costs saved. And I think when you think about Issue that can be polarizing like climate change, that is not always everybody's first kitchen table conversation. They're very real health harms of coal plants and other fossil fuels are sometimes more clear benefit.

And a more clear starting place for folks to understand the need to move beyond fossil fuels to clean energy. And their advocacy played a very big role in this work. And there's actually just a new study that just came out from UC boulder that found that the single biggest factor in the retirements of the coal plants that they looked at they looked at over 200 was.

The work of the Beyond Coal Campaign, which again Sierra Club has played a big role but it's over 300 partner organizations, including some partners right there in Indiana. So what this slide shows you, the vertical axis is gigawatts of coal projected to retire. The horizontal axis, all those gray bars that you see are different industry analysts or government analysts that do these projections with vast amounts of industry data.

And you se Synapse, Navigant, etc, and you could see that they were projecting by 2030 in the gray anywhere between like 40 and close to 80 gigawatts would retire by 2030. If you look at the green bar you can see in the dark that is what had retired by 2019.

The light green those are things that with locked in retirement dates. So basically we have already exceeded All of the projections of all of these experts. And our goal that we're working towards currently that were you can see here of the 140 gigawatts is also one that we are as you saw on the prior slide that is at hand.

And so the main takeaway of the slide that I wanna hopefully share with you with a little data to back it up, including here and from this recent UC boulder study, is that advocacy actually plays a pivotal role. And we created a model of the United States fleet of coal plants back in 2010, to figure out which ones should we really look at as most vulnerable for retirement based on how old they were?

What pollution controls they had, the political landscape around them and then have been using and refining that over the years. And the one thing that we would always say is that, we have an advocacy dial on our model, which none of these other experts have. So, they're looking at the economics, they're looking at the energy markets.

But we are looking at the advocacy community and we're looking at the clean air impacts and the clean water impacts. And the the network of advocates in that place that we know are committed to working towards 100% clean energy and climate justice and environmental justice. And that is why our predictions of where the coal fleet is headed have consistently been more accurate than the likes of these folks.

Goldman Sachs many more because we understand the role of advocacy in our work. And just a couple this is just a couple of key points about how we have done this work. A little bit of a deeper dive into the strategy of our advocacy. So the first has been really forcing polluters to pay the full costs of their pollution.

Again, I mentioned the mercury, the sulfur dioxide, there were all these loopholes for all of that pollution. When President Obama came into office, there were, for example, no standards at all for mercury pollution from coal plants in the United States. And those mercury standards were put in place.

That required then these coal utilities to make a decision about whether to invest in these plants to clean up the mercury pollution or to just retire them instead. And so making sure we're implementing those that we're holding them accountable for when they're violating those standards and prioritizing those in places with a high burden on communities of color.

That is pin one pathway, another has been to level the playing field. This is making the case that clean energy can do the same job as coal and to do that more cheaply. And that has something that has really, I'll talk about that more later but that is something that has been an increasing wind at our back.

Because renewable energy is now cheaper than coal in almost all parts of the country. And so we now they're in Indiana you have one of the great examples in Nipsco, which I'll talk about later. By cracking down on utilities that keep running their coal plants, even when they're more expensive than clean energy alternatives.

And then three is easing this transition as we make it, so I live in West Virginia. I know and I know Indiana is a coal mining state, we're a coal mining state. We very much care about and are putting our shoulder to the wheels around transition for workers and communities and home to coal plants and coal mines.

So that includes trying to push the federal government to release the resources that are needed to advocating for that in our work. And then lastly, federal strategy so that includes what I mentioned before, making sure our air and water standards are strong and enforced. Pushing for support around coal mining transition that needs to come from the federal level.

And really, looking at the places in like electric co-ops. They get a lot of funding from the rural utility service, where the federal government plays kinda an outsized role in how energy is financed. So it's a lot to take in, I know but just offering this to kinda give you a sense of the depth of the strategies that we have refined and honed and developed in this campaign over a decade.

And it's resulted in a lot of victories, and here just a couple of recent ones to just kinda give you a snapshot. The top here you see someone wiping their hand out a playground slide and coming up covered in coal ash. This is a South Oak Creek plant in Wisconsin, that was a big concern to the local community.

After a three-year campaign and announced retirement and the utility and also committed to replace it with no new gas, which is another polluting fossil fuel, but with solar, wind and storage. And so, this is a recent coal plant retirement that was a big concern to the community and it's gonna be replaced with clean energy solutions.

And then, at the bottom you see an example from Ohio and Illinois, which is a utility called Vistra. That announced the single biggest coal plant retirement, made the single biggest coal plant retirement in US history. They announced plans number 3, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, six coal plants and cited the coal ash and water toxics pollution as reasons that they were gonna retire these plants.

Because of the costs of dealing with that pollution, and announced again, major clean energy investments to replace that coal power. And then in Maryland, Talent Energy announced a couple of plants, three plants, Brandon shores, Wagner and Monture would retire. Again, in this case cuz of a lot of air pollution.

And both of those included big just transition and sizable clean energy investments as part of the pathway for retirement for those plants. So a lot of progress, a lot of momentum. And when we look ahead, the priorities include accelerating clean energy, adjust transition. And a global coal phase-out and that includes making sure we're leapfrogging over gas as we move beyond coal.

So here a couple key opportunities as we look forward around coal. One is around the economics because again, vlean energy is now cheaper than coal in almost all parts of the countries. So making sure that utilities are disclosing that and addressing that and actually accounting for it as they make decisions about the future of their coal plants.

Looking at different opportunities in the States in the Northeast. There's a lot of opportunities around regional commitments on climate change. Similarly in the West, a lot of climate leadership that where we wanna focus on. And in the Midwest and the Southeast, there are a lot of one of the interesting opportunities around electric co-ops.

And looking at long-term contracts they have with coal plants and how we could maybe accelerate them exiting those. And then at the federal policy level, obviously, we have a Biden administration that is committed to environmental justice. Committed to climate action, and getting the Biden administration to really make sure that we're holding these polluters accountable.

Making sure that these coal plants don't continue to harm communities, and that we're actually mapping out a robust just transition for coal communities. And as we look ahead oops, sorry, this is the threshold moment that we have arrived at. As you can see here, the vertical axis there is how much electricity we're getting from coal.

The horizontal axis is time and the brown line is coal coming down, and the green line is renewable energy coming up. And in April of last year, we got more electricity in the US from renewable energy than from coal for the first time ever. We're on track either looking back to 2020, or definitely in 2021 to achieve that over an annual basis.

And we had the biggest years ever last year for wind and solar, and had lots of states passing 100% clean energy standards. And so this is momentum a decade ago for clean energy that frankly we did not have at our backs. The economics of clean energy were not on our backs, but they now are.

And here, I have a little toolbar here that's blocking my view of the slide, so I'm just gonna move that around. Pardon me. Now, this is speaking to the places committed to clean energy, 30% of the US population living in places committed to clean energy. So again, the vertical axis there is percent of US population that has made a commitment, a city commitment, a state commitment to 100% clean energy over time.

And you can see there on the right, it's a third of the US population, 165 cities, 13 counties, 8 states, Puerto Rico, the District of Columbia. And states that have passed binding 100% clean energy legislation that requires they get to 100% include California, New Mexico, Nevada, Washington, New York, Maine, and more.

So Virginia, I didn't mention Virginia. So again, more wind at the back of clean energy. And there's a lot of changes, okay? And then as we're looking at that momentum, there's a lot of key opportunities to seize on clean energy. Holding utilities accountable that are making making big promises for 2050, but potentially not acting on them this decade.

I'll talk more about that in a minute, especially at the lay of the land in Indiana. Looking at the rules of the road for our energy markets, which have definitely come into scrutiny with all the blackouts in Texas, and making sure those rules of the road are reinforcing clean energy resilience, environmental justice.

And not just prioritizing fossil fuels that, as we saw in Texas, if not properly regulated, can't necessarily keep the lights on, and do it affordably. State opportunities to keep building on that state level progress in those commitments. And then at the federal level, we've got lots of great leaders coming into the Biden administration who are gonna make sure we're seizing every opportunity we can to accelerate clean energy.

And there is 100% clean energy standard in moving in Congress that would be a real game changer, were we to get that over the finish line. And just a couple of key victories to kinda bring this home. Last year, Virginia became the eighth state in the country to pass, you can see it, that's a picture there from Richmond, Virginia.

I was actually there on that day. It was one of the last gatherings we had before COVID shut everyone down there in Richmond on the Capitol steps. And that bill passed, and now Virginia has a 100% clean energy commitment. And we are pursuing them in many other states.

And then at the utility level, this is an example of PNM, which was looking for new energy sources. And this is a thing that happens a lot. We really pushed for them to make sure they were really looking at all sources, and not just looking at coal, and not just looking at gas, but really opening the doors for clean energy to bid for their new energy that they needed.

And resulted in a winning bid with 650 megawatts of solar, and 300 of batteries, and a billion dollars in new investments within districts that are gonna be impacted by the closure of the San Juan coal plant. I will just keep moving here. So this is a last piece of this I wanna really flag, is the threat of new gas.

And we obviously have had a significant amount of new fracked gas come on the market to replace some of this coal, which is not the pathway to solving our climate problems, because it is also a potent greenhouse gas. And it also comes with its own set of health and environmental problems, including all of the local pollution and water contamination caused by fracking, the creation of pipelines to move this stuff around that harms communities.

And then the reality that again, this is a very, very potent greenhouse gas. So you can see here there's 108 gigawatts of new gas on the drawing board. The yellow shows what's under construction. The brownish are things that have been delayed. And then the orange ones are ones that are on the drawing board to date.

And so we have kicked off some work to stop those. And one of the key arguments that we're using is, and here's an example from Indiana, is that solar and wind are actually cheaper than both coal and gas, and can do the job. So what you see here on this chart on the left is a case study from Indiana, where we looked at the price of electricity to meet the state's needs.

And existing coal was coming in at $39 a megawatt hour, which is a unit, how much it costs to provide a megawatt of electricity over an hour. New gas came in even more expensive at $42 megawatt an hour. New wind came in at $29 a megawatt hour, and new solar came in at $37 a megawatt hour.

So you can see that both the new solar is just slightly more expensive than existing coal, but cheaper than new gas, and new wind was cheaper than both existing coal and new gas. And this is we believe a conservative estimate in that actually the meaning that the gas is likely more expensive than this.

And there's a study out from Rocky Mountain Institute that found that a portfolio of clean energy solutions could provide all of the same services as a new gas plant. Including keeping grids stable, keeping the lights on for either equal cost, or less cost than a new gas plant in just about every part of the country.

And so these are the economics that we are looking at to make the case that utilities should not be investing in a lot of new gas to replace their coal plants, but should be moving forward to a suite of clean energy solutions. And a couple of highlights of that work.

This is folks in Cal in Los Angeles, in a community of color living around a gas plant, which you can see they're clearly giving down the thumbs down to some of our young leaders. So one thing about gas that's different from coal is that coal is primarily used in the US in the electric sector.

A little bit of it is used to make steel. Gas is used by a third in the electric sector, a third in different industrial applications, and a third in buildings for heating and cooking. And so tackling gas is a bigger, more complicated effort. And this is a piece of that at the Sierra Club.

But we have had progress as we've been wrapping up this worked, stopping over six gigawatts of gas, and then slowing or shrinking another two gigawatts of gas that was on the drawing board. And we now have about a third of the gas on the drawing board nationwide that is either in a delay, or has been pulled back.

And so just a couple of the opportunities are there for this work looking ahead. Sorry for the all the acronyms in here, but looking at some of the regional energy markets, and trying to push them to stop incentivizing new gas, which they currently do. Again, in the West, where we have a lot of climate commitments, really tying that tying those climate commitments to new gas, and making it clear that this is not a climate solution.

And Midwest, East, as you saw in a couple of examples, if the gas is never proposed in the first place, that's really the ideal outcome. And so trying to Trying to put forward a suite of clean energy solutions so that the gas isn't proposed in the first place.

At the federal level, there are some some opportunities around just again, getting the holding polluters accountable for the pollution from the gas plants and from fracking. And then something we call revoking the social licence. I think a lot of people view gas as clean, that's what our polling has shown us.

And there's, you know, just as one example, recent studies out that show that using a gas stove in your home creates levels of air pollution that would be illegal outdoors. But people are not aware of this and this is medical research from esteemed researchers and universities. But most people are not aware of that because there is a public perception that natural gas is quote unquote natural and that it's clean and safe to use inside your home.

And so trying to shift that narrative and get the word out about the real public health and climate cost of gases is another key piece of artwork. And a couple of key victories I would mention as we head here towards the end of our slides. One, in New Mexico there was a proposed gas replacement for the San Juan coal plant.

Which I mentioned is on its way to retirement, that we defeated it, and instead got commitment to replace the plant with 100% solar and storage. That will be built in the communities that will be impacted by the closure of that coal plant, so they will get the economic benefits of that clean energy.

And then as I mentioned challenging the new gas before it has a name before it's a specific plant. But one example, in North Carolina, Duke had big plans to build a lot of gas. We push back very hard on those and they shrunk those plans significantly so more work to do.

But in Arizona a couple of utilities there, Tucson Electric Power has committed to replacing all their coal with a combination of energy, renewable energy storage and efficiency and no new gas. And Arizona public service also has no new gas in their five year action plan, compared to having five gigawatts of new gas in their plan in 2017.

So, just a couple last slides here to kind of map out the the big picture of what's ahead and what the opportunities are. So this is a report that we just released in January and I have some Indiana specific highlights for you. About how our electric utilities which I think we all are, after what we all saw unfold in Texas, I think.

A little more painfully aware of just how reliant we all are on our electric utilities. And whether or not they are on track to just meet their own commitments, that they have set to tackle the climate crisis and move towards clean energy. And so all, every, all these utilities I have said set net 0 or 100%, or some sort of goal for 2050.

And so we looked at three things you can see on the bottom are they're going to retire their coal by 2030, which the climate science is clear we must do? Are they building new gas and are they build it building or adding new clean energy at the scale that is needed?

And we gave them all a grade. And again this is just measuring them against their own commitments. And Indiana, one of our analyst who put this report together described Indiana as being at the cross roads because literally you have a utility in regard to every single grade. So you have NIPSCO which got an, A got a score of 82 out of a 100.

You have Vectren in Indiana, which got a grade of B, they got 50 out of 100, I&M Indiana Michigan power got a grade of C, they got a 44. IPL, Indianapolis Power and Light got a grade of D, that's 30 points out of 100 and Duke, Indiana got an F they got 13 points out of 100.

And so we released this report to really again make make it clear the distance that some of these utilities have to go. And the long gap of between their words and their actions in a lot of places and you have got quite a spectrum there in Indiana. And so as we look ahead to two last pieces I'm gonna close with with an Indiana slide.

This is a picture of myself, Bruce Nellis who founded the campaign, and our volunteer leader of Rana Owen from from Wisconsin, Illinois, Wisconsin area. She lives in Illinois, but somehow she's our Wisconsin team, she's in there in my mind. Anyway, this is a picture of us in 2017 at the Bonn, UN climate talks for the launch of Europe Beyond Coal.

And in 2017, Europe Beyond Coal launched as a sister campaign to the US Beyond Coal campaign. There are now beyond call campaigns in South Korea, Japan, and Australia. And then there's an even bigger network of advocates in China, in India, Vietnam, Chile, Kenya. Folks all over the world who are working globally to move beyond coal and this really has become a global movement.

The European campaign has made similar progress to ours in the United States. And the others are not far behind and I do think that this decade It is possible that we will actually, for sure in the US we will, I think reach the end of the era of coal.

But I think in a lot of countries around the world we will hit the same targets. And in here in Indiana, the work will most definitely continue. And some of the highlights to date again, I mentioned NIPSCO. So NIPSCO made a big commitment a couple of years ago to retire all of its existing coal and solicited bids for clean energy to replace it and the bids that they got in.

We're far cheaper than run, just continuing to run their existing coal plants. And so they're now proceeding with trying to acquire this clean energy that will save customers billions of dollars while phasing out their coal plants and replacing them with clean energy. So ensuring adjust transition in those communities and kids shootings to support that transition is one of our one of our highlights.

The Indiana remains home to five super polluter coal plants some of the biggest polluting coal plants in the country. The weather channel did, if you ever want to google it up, theres a series on this. And all of those but one has been announced for retirement and we're remaining focused on the rest.

So those are some of the highlights for Indiana. And as we look ahead, I mentioned Duke Energy being the utility with an F grade we're taking them on in a coordinated campaign across Dukes entire footprint which includes other states. Including their headquarters in North Carolina, we're pushing back on plans in Indiana to build new gas plants.

And we're prioritizing making sure clean energy continues to grow including new projects in communities that have been historically burdened by fossil fuel pollution. And one last little thing here, I asked my team here to get me some stats about Indiana that I will quickly read for you. Because I forgot to get them my fingertips on time.

I'm like a person turning in their homework late. So Indiana has had 22 coal plants retired or slated to retire. That is preventing over 200 deaths, 1,400 heart attacks and 15,000 asthma attacks, I'm sorry, typo 900 live saved. So 900 live saved, preventing over 1400 heart attacks and 15,000 asthma attacks.

And there are 22 plants retired and nine coal plants remaining. So I think that is it for my slides and I'm going to stop sharing my screen, there I am marching down The streets of Philadelphia just to give a flavour of the work on the ground that makes these things happen.

And I will stop here and I look forward hearing your questions.
>> Wow, Marian, thank you so much. What a great talk and what an amazing job you've been doing, you and your team. I was just rereading your chapter in all we can save this past week thinking about your visit with us.

And you say in there that there's this thing called a false summit. When you're climbing a mountain, and it looks like you're finally summiting, but you actually have further to go. And you're very humble to say that's how you feel about your work. Because it seems like you really have reached an amazing summit.

So thank you for all you're doing. We have a lot of questions and so I'm going to just jump right into them.
>> I remiss I wrote down Wendy Bredold, she's our Indiana campaign director for Bianco. And I wrote down to myself make sure you mentioned Wendy as I'm sure probably lots of you know her.

But as one of our key leaders in this work and somebody else should definitely connect with on social media and in real life
>> Right.
>> If you want to do this work.
>> That's good to know, yes, thanks. So, one of the first questions that came in is related to the pandemic actually.

Do you see any link between the pandemic and the best year for the coal plan retirment in 2020? Not to belittle your efforts but how else do you see pandemic responses helping or hurting climate work in general?
>> I think one thing we did see in the pandemic that electricity demand obviously dropped for a while.

And coal plants faced the biggest uphill battle because they're the most expensive at this point. And so because coal plants are the most expensive if you're an electric utility facing slimmer prospects than the coal plants that they were looking at to retire as the economy slowed down. So I do think that was potentially part of it and but these are long range business decisions that are made by these utilities.

So they're not necessarily gonna do that at the at the drop of a hat but I'm sure it was a factor. I think the other big factor that we saw was an increasing awareness of the connections between pollution and public health. And environmental justice and the research that came out that showed people living in areas with high particulate matter.

Were more likely to get sicker from COVID and more likely to die from COVID. Then people in areas with less chronic air pollution and people living in areas with chronic pollution are more often communities of color. And historically those coal these coal plants have been a very big source of that pollution.

And so I think that connecting those dots with something else that has happened during during COVID that has shifted how people are thinking about these choices going forward.
>> Mm-hm, we have a couple questions, that are kind of related to storage, energy storage issues. So one is, I've heard that one of the most attractive aspects of fossil fuels, as an energy source for industrialized society, is how conveniently they store energy.

Can you talk about what strategies are being developed for storing enough energy from renewable sources, like large scale? Is this a sticking point in post fossil fuel advocacy?
>> This is one of the areas of the most rapid innovation in the energy world and there is if you wanna be nerdy about it.

It's the you can google Rocky Mountain Institute's clean energy portfolios because they did plant by plant went around to all these proposed new gas plants in the United States and compared. And also some existing coal plants and showed the portfolio of clean energy solutions that could provide the same services and storage is a big part of that.

And Nipsco that I mentioned earlier, when they put out their bids for energy to replace their coal plants. The winning bids were a lot of solar, and energy storage, and some wind, and so, energy storage is definitely a mature technology. It's definitely ready to, not only keep the lights on, and do that at the scale that's needed, but also to do so economically.

Now, I'm not an engineer and so if anybody wants to get into the engineering parts of the mechanics of how it works, you would probably have to do some googling yourself on that. I'm less of an expert on that but some states, California actually has set a pretty high target in its clean energy standard for renewable energy storage.

And those kind of targets tend to drive a lot of innovation because it's a big economic opportunity that folks are racing to meet. And so, the woman who is the head of the Energy Storage Association, Kelly Sparkman is now in the Biden administration. I forget which agency she's in but they have tapped her for an important role either DOE or maybe CEO, so there's quite a lot of activity there.

And it's I think a lot farther along technologically and economically than a lot of folks realize it's been moving very fast.
>> And this is, I think, fairly related because I think reliability really has to do with storage of energy, but the question is, there are countries with less sun and wind using more renewable energy.

And traditional utilities also failed in the recent Texas instance. The argument is still made though, that coal is more reliable. What are some of the arguments that you have found to be effective when it comes to the reliability of renewables?
>> Yes, well a couple of things. One is we do have this very big interconnected electricity grid.

And so, Texas is a is a little bit of a different situation obviously because they made a decision not to connect themselves to any other electric grids. So that they would not have to be regulated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. So by creating their own electric utility grid that is cut off from the rest of the country.

I think you can see that when things get extreme, they have fewer options, but most of our electricity grid does not operate that way. So in the PJM grid that covers a lot of the Midwest and the Mid Atlantic is a huge electric grid. With a lots of opportunity to turn things on and off when they're needed and make sure things stay stable.

So that's one piece is just how much flexibility there is on most of our electric grid. The other thing to note is that a lot of what we've seen in Texas and in California in the grid failures has actually been fossil fuel plants failing so in Texas. It was so cold, that a lot of the coal and gas plants were the ones that actually failed.

They failed at a much higher rate than wind, because they couldn't move the gas around because there were valves and other other parts of the hardware at the plants. That literally wouldn't work because it was frozen, cuz they didn't adequately invest in sort of weatherizing that infrastructure. A lot of times when we have extremely cold weather, a coal plants, the piles of coal will freeze so solidly that they can't be used.

So while yes, those things can be reliable in an ideal conditions, but they also can fail us when we need the most. And that is where, you know having a mix of wind and solar and storage especially, the more distributed, the better that you can have in the system.

People having solar panels and batteries in their own houses, using electric vehicles as kind of a backup battery for your house or for the grid. I mean, these are all things that are possible now that actually can give us a more sustainable and more reliable electricity grid. And I think we'll see a lot more progress toward that.

And I think events we've had with big outages in California and Texas, sadly, there's a lot of political finger pointing around, always wanting to blame renewables because I think that is argument that people are sort of subject to. But I think the reality is that it is often in these extreme events has been the fossil fuel plants that have failed and that's what's caused the big sort of catastrophic failures.


>> Another question related I think to that ironically is, can you talk a little bit about the strategies of coal interest organizations, like energy policy network? Where do you see them being most successful? And relatedly, can you talk a little bit about Powder River Basin coal production? I'm curious to hear about the lay of the land regarding the power players.

They're working to keep coal plants going.
>> Yes, one of the things that is a indicator of just how much things have changed is when I came to the Sierra Club in 2008. It was when we were trying to pass climate legislation in the United States Senate which we came very close to doing but did not succeed and the main reason we failed was because of the coal industry, and because of the coal lobby.

We had at that time Senator Byrd and Senator Rockefeller in office, and we had this very powerful lobby called the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity that was running ads all over the country, had plastered Washington with billboards and signs and the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity no longer exists.

They do not exist as a lobbying enterprise. And we have seen both the biggest coal mining companies in this country Arch Coal and Peabody Coal declare bankruptcy, really struggle financially quarter after quarter. And now in the Powder River Basin, you have big coal companies like Arch that are explicitly and very publicly saying they're looking for their exit strategy that they.

And one of the things about coal in the United States is we only export a little bit of it and most of what we export is for making steel. And there was a big push in the middle of the last decade to build six new coal export terminals in the northwest that were intended to take Powder River Basin coal over to Asia.

It was never clear that the economics were gonna pencil out because coal is a big heavy rock and you move it across the whole ocean and you have to, have someone willing to pay a premium for it to make that economically worthwhile. But there was huge grassroots opposition to those facilities in these Oregon and Washington port communities.

So they were all stopped, all of these coal export terminals were stopped. And so for the Powder River Basin, they're just looking at a dwindling market for their product because all the coal plants in the United States are just continuing to retire. They don't have really any other customers for their coal which is not coal for making steel, it's just coal for power plants.

And so there is a wind down happening there, but there is also as we have here in West Virginia in states that have long ties to coal mining in particular, they're politically willing to do almost anything to try to salvage the industry, and it often comes at the cost of the taxpayers in that state, comes from the cost of public health in that state.

I think West Virginia and Wyoming are gonna probably hold onto their coal plants longer. And while that may makes sense to them to keep coal mines running, it's also gonna saddle people in these very poor states with some of the most expensive electricity in the country. So, I heard that this year in the legislature, there's some in Wyoming, there's some move to somehow punish, try to punish other states that are refusing to buy their coal power in some way, which I don't think they actually have the authority to do.

So, we'll see the things like that that will happen but when you have this product in the market is just continuing to shrink down to zero. Eventually, you have to grapple with the fact that that industry is going away. And it's time to diversify the economy and to look to new economic opportunities, which is what I think we should prioritize with the buying, administration should prioritize.

I think that's the more honest and compassionate way to grapple with this transition.
>> So, being from Eastern Tennessee and now living in West Virginia, I know you know the issues that you have to face in terms of looking at someone who works in the coal industry and making these arguments, right?

I'm from Eastern Kentucky and I've felt the same pains that I'm sure you have when you have to have those kinds of conversations. So somebody asks, what happens to these workers? Do they maintain employment and receive training to work in the new clean energy factories. Often the political narrative is loss of jobs and a transition to clean energy.

So overall, I'm wondering how you're combating this from the ground.
>> Well, that's real. And I just wanna acknowledge that this transition away from coal but also ultimately other fossil fuels that the fear of folks losing their jobs and also the economic opportunities in their communities that it's very real and I have in no way wanna minimize or sugarcoat that that is a really scary prospect in a lot of places.

And I think that we can meet that challenge at the scale, in the richest country in the world we can meet that challenge at the scale that is required if we made it a priority at the federal level. Now, nonprofits can do some things and philanthropy can do some things.

But ultimately, the entity that has the resources and the rich and the leadership that we need to really do this transition right is the federal government. There is a Bill in Congress called the Reclaim Act, that would release a billion dollars from something called the Abandoned Mine Lands Fund, which is a fund the coal companies have been paying into, the money is sitting there, Congress has to approve it being released.

So the bill would release a billion dollars out of the Abandoned Mine Lands Fund for reclamation all across coal communities. That's an example of the kind of thing that we could be doing to put people back to work. There's millions of abandoned oil wells and fracking wells all around this country that we could put people to work reclaiming, so that communities wouldn't be suffering from that pollution.

And they're currently just venting huge amounts of global warming pollution, methane into the air. So, there is a lot of work like that to be done as well as opportunities in clean energy. A lot of the coal plants that have retired, I will note that workers in those plants, there was a long enough window between the announcement and the retirement date for workers to actually retire or to be moved to other facilities cuz these are big utilities with the huge workforce.

And so, while there have been some job losses at the power plants, it's been more concentrated in the coal mining communities. And that I think is something that requires a national response. And I think we owe it to these places. We've all benefited from the sacrifices that people have made in Appalachia for sacrificing their health and their lives, and their safety so that we could all enjoy affordable electricity for a couple of generations.

And now as we move into this new clean energy economy, I think we owe it to those places to make sure they're not left behind. And to help build a new economy that can sustain the next generations of folks who live there.
>> That's great. We have a really great initiative happening in Evansville called Black to Green, taking African American employees of these industries of fossil fuel industries and moving them into Green and renewable energies which is exciting and by the NAACP.

Another Indiana specific topic here that came up. Could you give us some information about how to deal with coal to diesel, which is an issue in Dale, Indiana? And also related to Indiana How can we get Indiana focused on electric co ops? Any advice about either of those topics?


>> Yes. And I would mention again Wendy bread hold who is our bred hold, she's on Twitter. She's on Instagram. She's our Indiana Bianco, campaign director and is a great resource for this. I would say In a nutshell, I'm not familiar I know about the Indiana coal the diesel project, but it's distant enough in my memory.

I don't remember the details. In general, those things have not panned out again, because they're actually not that economic. There was one here in West Virginia that was just on the drawing board and keep sort of flailing along because It's not you are to taking something that's kind of expensive and very polluting in a world where there is not really a market for that anymore.

And so I'm sorry that I don't remember, I used to at one time, actually know the details of that project and it slipped my mind. But I think that economics are, those projects tend to be their Achilles heel. And then the electric co ops really are a key focus for us in the beyond coal campaign right now because they have been a little more insulated from some of these market pressures and they also have had some incentives to keep their coal plants there's the rural utility service has this loan program that has loaned a lot of money to these utilities to build coal plants that they're now saddled with.

and, if you think about a coal plant, like your your home mortgage, if you owe the bank money on your house, you can't just walk away from your house, because you owe the bank money on your mortgage, and that a lot of these co ops are in that same position that they still owe money for these loans.

It's a check out on these coal plants and so We're pushing the rural utility service to going to reconfigure their loan program. So the coal, the CO ops can pay off these loans faster and actually benefit their customers people's benefit people's electricity bills because they're not paying forever on these big loans.

So there's definitely work to do there specifically around the CO ops for sure. Great. Great, thanks.
>> Well, it's one o'clock. So, I'm gonna close it there. Maryann, although there were many other questions for you. This is exciting to have an opportunity to talk to you. You're so, well informed and moving the needle here.

Thank you so much for all the work that you do and thank you for your time, sharing about it today. We really appreciate it.
>> Well, it has been my pleasure. And thanks to all of you. I'm sure you're here Because you care about these issues and you're trying to figure out what you can do.

And the last thing I would say is, Indiana is a really important state where we've actually had some of our most progressive utilities and some of our most backwards utilities all operating there at once and we always need more folks to get involved in. The Sierra Club and our partner organizations exists to help plug you in.

So if you want to do more, just please let us know.
>> Thank you, everyone. Thank you for joining us today there will be a recording of this This webinar on VRI and IP websites, share it broadly. And please join us on March 19, for our next installment with Dr. Stuart picket, who will be talking about urban ecology and race issues.

So thank you all. Have a great Friday and a great weekend.
>> Thank you.
>> Thanks, Marianne. Bye bye

Description of the video:

Let me first say that this is a joint speaker series today and we're really excited about this. It's the environmental policy and the ERI and IPE speaker series. And so this is a special edition specifically. The ERI IPE resilience speaker series and all future talks for the series can be found on that ERI/IPE websites. Reminder, since we're a pretty big group today, which is awesome. What a great turn out today. Please make sure to mute yourself when you are listening and for the whole time, except for when you're asking a question and feel free to put questions in the chat function while Shalanda is talking if you would like, and we can come to them later or just hold your questions to the end and we can open it up for Q&A at that point and you can jump in and we'll figure out a way to get everybody. So it is an immense pleasure to welcome our guest today, Shalanda Baker. Shalanda is a professor of law, public policy, and urban affairs at Northeastern School of Law. There are so many things that I could highlight about Shalanda that are amazing, and I'm just going to give very broad level overview. She has a BS from the United States Air Force Academy, JD from Northeastern University School of Law, and an LLM from University of Wisconsin Law School. She is the co-founder of the Initiative for Energy Justice, which supports the delivery of equity- centered energy policy research and technical assistance to policymakers and frontline communities across the country. She recently authored a book called Revolutionary Power: An Activist's Field Guide to the Energy Transition, which just came out in 2021 and is an exceptional read. And also just started a position with the Biden Harris administration as the Deputy Director of Energy Justice within the Department of Energy. So just amazing credentials, an amazing person, an amazing researcher. I have so many positive things to say, but I won't hold the floor anymore, Shalanda the floor is yours and thank you for joining us today. Oh my gosh, what a warm welcome. Thank you so much. I think if I were in the same room with all of you, I would just sort of want to do this group hug. It's been such a pleasure to know Sanya and David and to really see their scholarship flourish and their leadership in the field of energy justice. And I'm just delighted to be here to speak with all of you today. And so as Sanya mentioned, I do have a new book out and I want to focus both on the book as well as the journey to get here, right? And how energy justice has sort of become a part of our lexicon as we think about this energy transition. So I'm going to go ahead and share screen. And okay, there we go. Perfect. Okay. Okay, so again, the name of the book is Revolutionary Power: An Activist's Guide to the Energy Transition. And I like to describe it as part memoir, part policy guide, and part love letter to the planet. And Sanya, I know you've had a preview copy of it so I'd really love to get your your feedback and input on that. But I want to start with the events of the past year. In May of 2020, a store clerk in North Minneapolis called the police because a man had attempted to buy a pack of cigarettes using a counterfeit $20 bill. The police arrived on scene and proceeded to publicly execute him in the streets of northern Minneapolis. That man was George Floyd, as we all know. He was black. He had heart disease and he also had asthma. An autopsy report later revealed that he also had COVID-19. And so in many ways, George Floyd's life and his death is a reflection of this moment. And I think it's a useful prism through which to examine and explore issues of social justice. So you all remember we took to the streets to protest and in support of Black lives. But we didn't take to the streets to protest for a more just energy system. And I would argue that the reckoning on racial and social justice in this country does not leave the energy system untouched and that the energy system itself is implicated in this deeper reckoning with race, with health inequality, and with structural inequality more broadly. Today I want to provide a little bit of a prologue. How did I get here thinking about energy justice in the way that I think about it? What is energy justice and why does energy justice matter right now? And then I'd like to propose my framework, Revolutionary Power, which I think is a framework for this moment. And so my story really begins in Mexico in a place called Oaxaca. I actually- sorry, this is a touchy mouse. So this image is from the Sheraton Hotel in Mexico City, where I had the opportunity to attend a meeting hosted by the equivalent of the Secretary of Energy in Mexico. And the Secretary of Energy had invited a bunch of academics, a bunch of people from the NGO community, other government officials to the Sheraton. And the Sheraton is one of the swankiest hotels actually in Mexico City. And we're right in the heart of the center of town. And Secretary invited us all there to talk about how to share benefits with communities in Mexico's energy transition. And some of you may know that Mexico has one of the most ambitious climate and clean energy legal frameworks among its counterparts in the global south. And they wanted to understand how they could embark on this clean energy transition and share the benefits of development with communities. The only problem is they didn't invite anyone from communities into that meeting. And in fact, just as the meeting got started, a group of two dozen people from this place called Oaxaca in the Isthmus Tehuantepec filed into the room and held court for the two-day period of the meeting. And it was a quite fascinating moment for me as a researcher to see this dynamic between communities and government. And sort of the- both the very sort of real experience of communities at the periphery of decision-making with respect to issues that were so central to their lives. I want to talk a little bit about the folks in Oaxaca and the place called the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. So why were the people here finally into the room, holding court, stopping this government meeting? Why were they seeking recognition justice? Well, this is a map put together by the US Department of Energy, where I now work, showing the wind resource potential in this region. So this is Oaxaca, it's a state in Mexico. It's the second poorest state in the country. The place that's highlighted here on the map, this isthmus, is one of the windiest places in the world. Oaxaca itself is home to around 14 distinct indigenous groups that speak different indigenous languages. And the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, because of its wind energy resource, has been the site of development for the past decade. Right now it has around two dozen different projects, massive, large-scale renewable energy projects, that have come online again, really in a very short time. And so this exponential increase in wind energy development has happened without much input and consultation with the local communities. And in fact, the communities in this region are not really benefiting at all. So this is an area where energy poverty is endemic and the cost of energy is extraordinary. And so you can see here in this image, a lot of folks sort of rigging themselves to the main electricity system because they simply don't have access and they're just trying to find a way to get access. And so this is juxtaposed against these, you know, technological and technical marvels, right? Wind turbines. Right now Oaxaca has been noted as having the highest concentration of onshore wind in the world. And so I started my research in Oaxaca back in 2010 and again in the past decade, we've seen the wind energy, installed wind energy, kind of grow exponentially and now there are about 2200 megawatts of installed power. So it's extraordinary and this is sort of where I began my journey to really understand energy justice. What I have learned through my work in Mexico is that if we're relying on the same logics, institutions, and approaches to energy, to the clean energy transition, as we relied on in the fossil fuel energy system, we're doomed to replicate the inequalities that are baked into the fossil fuel system. So we really need an intervention in terms of models and approaches and parties who were engaged in this energy transition. So from Mexico, my work took me to Hawaii, which is gorgeous and amazing. And as I look out on the snow- covered yards in front of me, I sometimes wonder why I left Hawaii, but I had the opportunity to teach at the University of Hawaii School of Law from 2014 to 2017. And while I was there, I had a front row seat to one of the most extraordinary energy transitions in the country. So as soon as I landed, the Hawaii Public Utilities Commission issued what what has become known as the "Order and Inclinations," where the PUC, the regulator in the state, publicly admonished the investor-owned utility for slow walking the states clean energy transition. So Hawaii at the time had one of the highest penetrations of rooftop solar in the country, at 17% of all homes in Hawaii having rooftop solar. So this was extraordinary. But the utility said, you know, "we don't think we can actually continue to allow this rooftop solar transition to happen at this scale. You're going to blow up the grid. And there's an equity issue." I mean, there are lots of arguments that were being thrown out by the utility to really stop the transition. And the PUC said, "Look, this is a moment where we're in a climate emergency and the utility has to play a role in this or we will regulate you out of existence." And so this was an order that was issued in 2014. I don't think I'm overstating this to say that it was really a bombshell in the regulatory community and something that a lot of energy policy folks were watching around the country. Hawaii also experienced a sort of interloper from Florida coming to take over the investor-owned utility while I was there, and that was again in 2014. Next Era Energy made a play for the much hated utility, Hawaii Electric Industries. And again, that was the devil we knew. It wasn't a good actor in Hawaii, but Next Era was the parent company of Florida Power and Light, which had basically stopped rooftop solar in Florida. And so there was a lot of fear around that merger. And it really raised questions around what type of utility business model should be the best model to shepherd Hawaii into its clean energy future. It was the first state to adopt a renewable portfolio standard. Again, I had a front row seat to that. And again, as I mentioned, rooftop solar was seen as being maxed out by the technical experts and by the utility. And then community solar policy was something that folks were experimenting with. Many people in Hawaii are condo dwellers or renters. And they saw their neighbors getting rooftop solar. And they said, "well, how can I participate in this solar transition and revolution?" And so the state enacted legislation to allow for community solar. And unfortunately, that legislation kind of didn't provide enough hooks to make that program successful and it's been floundering. So why do I illustrate or why do I talk about Hawaii as an exemplar of the energy transition? Well, as I had this front row seat, I began to talk to people, stakeholders, leaders in business, regulators, other academics, people from the solar industry, and the sort of environmental community about justice. And I started to ask, "okay, we're going through this major energy transition, but where to communities fit in?" Again, thinking about the Mexico example, how do we use this energy transition as a mechanism for socioeconomic transformation? One fact that I didn't share about Hawaii is that residents there pay the highest costs for electricity in the country. So electricity and the energy system are integral parts, intimate parts of the lives of people there. All of the dirtiest energy facilities in the state are located in Black and indigenous and brown communities. This is a classic sort of environmental justice story, but it's very much an energy justice story. And I see energy justice as an opportunity to remedy prior harms as well as advance socioeconomic justice. And so Hawaii and Mexico are the foundation of my work. And they've informed me, they're my biggest teachers in terms of this energy transition. And so I will put a plug in for the organization that I started, which is very much responsive to what I saw as a gap between the communities that were fighting for justice along so many dimensions and the policymakers that were creating policy and they were thinking about policy and energy policy more as a technical domain. Whereas the communities were interested in energy, but often didn't have the technical skills or the assistance and support and capacity to participate in the energy policy debates. So I started the initiative for energy justice with two other lawyers who were witnessing similar dynamics in California and in New York. And so far, our organization has sort of been off to the races, providing technical support, research support, and legal assistance to folks who are on the ground, as well as policymakers who don't know anything about energy justice and are curious about how to advance energy justice in future energy policy. So I want to come back to the moment, right, the moment when we took to the streets to march for Black lives when energy was left out of that discourse. But it really is implicated in the injustice of this moment. We know that we're facing a reckoning. We're reckoning with all of our systems right now. And that reckoning is ongoing and particularly acute in light of the events of the past year. And as I said at the outset, I would argue that the energy system is not immune from this deeper reckoning and that nothing about it is natural or inevitable. The design and construct of our energy system are direct products of policy choices. And that energy system is inherently unjust. This provides an opportunity for us to create energy policy in service of social justice. So again, I think we're in a moment of reckoning with the injustices within our energy system, we've got to reckon with the legacy of harm. So communities like those in Hawaii that are burdened by dirty energy facilities, we've got to reckon with that and we've got to ensure that this clean energy transition does not exacerbate that harm by siting, you know, large scale, utility scale generation in those same communities and burdening them without giving them the benefits of the new system. I think we've got to reckon with our investor-owned utility model. That is absolutely a lesson that I came out of my experience in Hawaii with. We also have to think about how we construct the path to 100% clean energy. Not simply through technical or technological mechanisms, but also with issues of equity at the center. And so one of the issues that I noticed in Hawaii was that we had this very ambitious clean energy legislation, but equity was nowhere to be found. I think we're getting better around the country in sort of thinking about the myriad of issues that we should be taking into 100% renewable portfolio standards. But in Hawaii, I really saw a missed opportunity to make equity a central part of that. And we also have to reckon with energy burden and energy insecurity. I know Sanya and David are experts in this field and I will run through a couple of slides a little bit later to kind of talk about how those issues directly implicate communities of color. And then finally, we've gotta increase clean energy access in the communities who need it the most. There are many studies, well, a couple of key studies that have come out over the last couple of years showing that communities of color, even when you control for income, even when you control for homeownership, simply lack access to clean energy. And this is an injustice. So we have a real opportunity to move forward in a just way. So again, what is this moment that we're in? We have a virus that has really ravaged communities of color. Communities of color, Latinx, and Black communities are two to three times more likely to get infected and to three times more likely to die. Again, this is the underlying sort of framework in which we're thinking about energy policy. And it's interesting, COVID has become a part of my analysis. Because I think we're witnessing a moment of structural change. And I don't think there's any going back. It has revealed injustices along so many different dimensions and as I'll show in a bit, energy is no exception. So we know that communities of color had been more impacted by COVID, but we also know that environmental justice communities are more likely to face the most harmful effects of COVID-19. And so an early study at the early days of the pandemic that came out of the Harvard Chan School for Public Health show that even a small increase in long-term exposure to air pollution leads to a large increase in overall COVID-19 death rate. And so this is specifically on point to environmental justice communities. So we know that environmental justice communities are more likely to be inhabited by Black and Latinx folks. Here we see that Black and brown Americans are absorbing more pollution than they create. And white Americans are simply exposed to less pollution they produce. So this means that we are burdening communities of color with the myriad burdens of environmental justice and our- I'm sorry, with the myriad burdens of just keeping our society afloat. And so again, they're absorbing the hazards of our society. And so again, this has a direct impact on COVID-19. Well, I think we're going to see more studies kind of really teasing out the correlation between death rates and environmental justice. But this is absolutely an area of research that people are looking at. The COVID tracker project has really kind of updated the early study that I showed from The New York Times, which was in the summer, and illustrated that the exposure and death rates are simply extraordinary. I mean, when we think about the percentage of Black and Latinx folks in our society, they have just been impacted in the most devastating way from COVID, both in terms of deaths and exposures. And so again, if these are folks who were living in environmental justice communities, they're more likely to die and more likely to sort of experience the most harmful. They're more likely to have the co-morbidities that make it more difficult to recover from COVID-19. So I've been doing a little work on this in the Boston area. And again, connecting this COVID-19 pandemic to our energy system and to environmental justice issues. And so here in Boston, the COVID-19 exposure rates really align along racial dimensions here. So I've circled a couple of communities that have been the most impacted by COVID-19 We have the Roslindale, Mattapan, Dorchester communities that have high exposure rates. And then above that we also have Chelsea, Revere, and Everett. So Dorchester, Mattapan, Roslindale, they're historically Black and Latinx communities. Chelsea is an immigrant community comprised mainly of immigrants from Latin America. And at one point in the summer they had the highest COVID-19 infection rates in the country. And so a lot of the people in that community are are from our frontline workers. And so they're, you know, riding the packed buses going to work to make sure all of us can continue to work from home and not go and buy our groceries, etc. So these are, again, Black and brown communities in the Boston metro area that had been most impacted by COVID-19. And so these are also environmental justice communities, right? And so again, I'm sort of trying to give people who are not from the Boston area an idea just how impacted these communities are in terms of respiratory hazards. So the same communities, Dorchester, Mattapan, Roxbury are circled. And then just northeast, we see Chelsea and Everett also, really environmental justice communities. And so Chelsea is interesting. It is a classic environmental justice community. It stores the jet fuel for Logan Airport, which is right outside of the community. So the airport is there and that has its own impact. It stores all the jet fuel, it stores all of the salt to salt the roads in the Boston area. So it is extraordinarily impacted in terms of environmental injustices. And it's also, as I said, been impacted by COVID-19. So these are really interesting patterns to kind of observe. Again, COVID-19 exposure on the left with environmental hazards and injustice shown on the right. And so I think what this means is that we really have an opportunity to investigate- apologies for the touchy mouse. We have an opportunity to really investigate how to make these communities less burdened through energy choices and through this energy transition. Because for those communities in Dorchester, Roxbury, Mattapan, and Chelsea, they can't breathe. They haven't been able to breath since even before this summer and the murder of George Floyd and the moment when we're all marching in support of Black Lives. And so this image on the right is not from Dorchester, Mattapan, or Chelsea. It's actually an image from Port Arthur, Texas. And so this community is an environmental justice community inhabited mainly by low income Black and Latinx folks. And they live in a place called the golden triangle. Which is called the golden triangle, because when you look at a satellite image, the entire area is dotted with petrochemical facilities and refineries. And you could see that on satellite imagery. This is also the birthplace of our modern fossil fuel industry and the spine of the existing fossil fuel industry. And so these are children that are playing right in the shadows of these facilities. Port Arthur is also the place where my father grew up and I highlight him and his family and my family in the book. I mean, I got to learn a lot about Port Arthur in doing research for this, for my book project. My father grew up in the Carver Terrace Housing Projects which really were up against a facility like this, the Texaco refinery, which is one of the largest in the country and the world. So again, there's a nexus between choices that we've made about our energy system and the Black Lives Matter movement and this moment of reckoning that we're having with structural inequality. And as I'd like to argue and propose to you, none of this is natural or inevitable. And so going back to Boston, again, remember when I said, I think we have an opportunity for justice and transformation. This is just a sort of zoom into those communities that are EJ communities, those communities that have been impacted by COVID. So my team did a little bit of a rough analysis of solar access using data from the Mass. Clean Energy Center. And so we wanted to know where the opportunities for rooftop solar were. And so when we zoomed in again on the left we have Dorchester, Roxbury, Mattapan. We see that solar penetration is very sparse as compared to communities on the right, which are predominately white communities with lower respiratory hazards. And so Needham, Wellesley, Newton, I mean, these are communities that some of you may already know about just because they're pretty prominent. I want to point out that on the left side of the slide here. Mattapan has a large circle, which would seem to suggest that there's a lot of solar. We did a deep dive to really understand what was going on. And it's just a couple of blocks in this community that have more solar than others. But in general, there's a real gap in terms of solar access. And again, this is an opportunity for energy justice. And so this is where my presentation gets a little bit more provocative. So not only is solar access limited in these communities, but when they do have solar access, they're less likely to have direct solar. They're more likely to have third-party owned solar than the average Bostonian. And so again, we are going to do this energy transition, right? We really have to provide opportunities for ownership of energy assets. And there was a study conducted by the Mass. Department of Energy Resources that said owning your own solar is more economically beneficial than having a third party own it. And so actually, much to its credit, the Mass. Department of Energy Resources helped to design a credit facility- There's my cat! -A credit facility that would target low to moderate income communities and accessing solar loans. But unfortunately, that has not seemed to move the needle. So we really need to drill down on what the barriers to solar access actually are. And what the barriers to solar ownership actually are. Ok, so I want to turn quickly in the last few minutes here to energy burden and energy insecurity, which are topics I know you must be familiar with based on your faculty. But by way of review, energy burden is a percentage of household income that goes toward energy costs. The lower your income, the more of your income you spend on energy. Essentially, our rate design is fundamentally regressive, burdening low-income folks more than wealthier folks. Energy insecurity is lacking reliable access to uninterrupted energy sources at an affordable price. And people are making difficult choices when they face energy insecurity. So the EIA, the Energy Information Administration, does a study every handful of years on energy insecurity and their 2005- I'm sorry, 2015 study, showed something that was extraordinary when I encountered it. One in three Americans, or one in three households, report some type of energy insecurity. This should give you pause, right? People are really out there struggling. And of course, this pandemic has made that even worse. And I know that Sanya and David have done some great studies and surveys really showing the current state of affairs around energy insecurity. It should come as no surprise at this point in my presentation that the folks who are experiencing the worst aspects of energy insecurity are Latinx, Black, and Native in this country. So over half of Black or African American folks have experienced some sort of energy insecurity. And the numbers are just astonishing when you look at American Indian and Alaska Natives as well as Native Hawaiians. So why is this relevant in this moment? Right, again, we're sort of unearthing the structural inequalities that were in existence before COVID-19 and that are becoming more stark as a result of this pandemic. So we've already illustrated the sort of environmental injustices that are a direct outgrowth of choices that we've made around the siting of facilities, et cetera. And now, when we think about rate design and when we think about unfairness within the energy system, we know that there are communities that are on the short end of that. And so at the beginning of this pandemic, we had sort of a widespread moratorium on utilities shut offs. And a lot of us in this sort of activist community, academic community, started to track that. This is an early sort of map put together by the Center for Biological Diversity showing that there was some coverage for a moratoria on utility shut offs, but it was not that widespread and there were states that either issued voluntary moratoria or non-binding moratoria. And they weren't for the duration of the pandemic by any stretch. And in fact, my team at the Initiative for Energy Justice has shown that we are now facing a situation where we really only have about nine active moratoria at this stage. And so that means that people are being shut off of their electricity at a time where we're having people being asked to go home and do everything from home, including school, right? Including work. And so people are now- they had some protection throughout the summer, but they're now being shut off and they're facing extraordinary arrearages. One recent study put utility debt during this pandemic at an additional $30 to $40 billion, with some households facing $2000 in back payments for electricity bills. So this is an extraordinary issue, and I would argue that this goes back to the structure and design of our rate making system. So again, there's an energy justice opportunity in this particular moment of reckoning with inequality. And so COVID has exposed twin burdens, right? Unequal benefits and structural violence that is meted out through the energy system. We know that environmental burdens are disproportionately born by Black, Indigenous, and people of color communities. We know that economic burdens are also disproportionately borne by the same communities. And based on studies done by Jeffery Sumpter and Dan Kammen, we know that the benefits of our energy transition have not been equitably shared. And again, just the sort of analysis of my local, my backyard here in Boston. We know that that is absolutely the case. And so energy justice is a way forward and this is where I end with hope. Energy justice refers to the goal of achieving equity in both the social and economic participation in the energy system, while also remediating those social, economic, and health burdens on those who were historically harmed by the energy system. These are frontline communities. Energy justice, I would argue, and this is sort of where I depart from the literature a little bit, energy justice explicitly centers the concerns of marginalized communities and aims to make energy more accessible, affordable, clean, and democratically managed in these communities. And so, if you're interested in kind of seeing some of this work in a publicly accessible way, I'd encourage you to check out the energy justice workbook that my team and I put together about a year ago, kind of trying to really help policymakers understand energy justice and help frontline communities advocate for energy justice. The middle kind of image there is of an energy justice scorecard that our team put together to help policymakers and frontline communities evaluate energy policy. And so traditionally, energy justice has been seen as having a few different dimensions. A distributive justice piece, procedural justice aspect, as well as recognition justice. And so distributional justice is very much what I talked about earlier, right? The benefits and burdens of the energy system being equitably shared. This is illustrated in all of the slides around the burdens that I showed earlier. Procedural justice is having a seat at the table and making sure that people have a real voice. And recognition justice, that goes back to one of my earlier slides. We had folks from Oaxaca flooding into a meeting in Mexico City simply to be recognized for the burdens that they bore. I love this arrow at the bottom. And this is a heuristic that is put together by two leading energy justice scholars. Raquel Heffron and Derek- Oh my gosh, I just blanked on his name. I know one of you knows. But Heffron and McCauley have sort of consolidated the energy justice scholarship and really frame it out this way. But this arrow at the bottom, restorative justice, I think is really powerful, which is about the healing potential of energy policy, right? We can actually move in a direction of healing across the life cycle. But again, my departure from this heuristic, which I think is useful, is to inject this idea and the notion that frontline communities should be central to our energy policy and energy decision-making. So again, I argue in the forthcoming piece that frontline voices should be central. I have taken the stance that energy policy should be anti-racist, anti-oppressive, and transformative in every way. Vulnerability should be the central aspect of our analysis when it comes to energy policy. I really see energy justice not as something that we should just be talking about as scholars, but as praxis. And so what that means is that we should be living it, we should be breathing it, we should be practicing it on the ground. And so my book, Revolutionary Power, argues that the technical terrain of energy policy should be the next domain to advance civil rights. And I really hope I have convinced you of that today in telling the stories of Oaxaca, of Hawaii, of now in this moment of racial reckoning and reckoning with structural inequality across so many systems. Energy policy should not just be a technical debate, it should be one that infuses issues of social and economic justice. And so again, just to recap, we need to recognize prior harms. We need to embed equity and clean energy goals and those ambitious frameworks like 100% renewable portfolio standards. We also need to include the voices of frontline communities in energy policymaking. I'm excited to do that in my new role at the DOE. We need to adopt solar policies and incentives that are actually centering communities on the front lines and targeting them for ownership, right? This is the way to move the needle. This is the way to really began to advance economic justice. And we also need to reduce energy burden for disadvantaged communities. And in short, we need to craft energy policy that no longer kills us, right? And that no longer creates disproportionate burdens on Black and brown bodies. And so I just want to thank you for your attention today. My book is out. It's making the rounds. I understand it's backordered on Amazon, which is pretty cool. But you can use this discount code BAKER if you go right on to islandpress.org. So BAKER for a 20% discount. And I just want to thank you for your attention today. And I look forward to our discussion. Thanks. Oh, look at those applause. That's great. That was fabulous. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you so much. I'll open the floor now to questions. I know that we have one in the chat function. So I might ask you to unmute yourself if you're willing to ask the question out loud. Sure. This is fun. Okay. Hi Shalanda. Thank you so much. That was really deeply informative and moving. So thank you. So my question is about- I guess I've just started to learn more about energy policy and possibilities. And one thing I'm encountering is the idea of as we shift to renewable energy, there will be less total available energy than we have become used to with fossil fuels, the easy access and all of that. And so- what did I ask? So do you expect that, you know, in, I don't know, 50 or a 100 years, as renewable energy infrastructure is more established, that there will be less total available energy and will middle-class lifestyles need to be altered to be less energy intensive, intensive? And then how can this be actually talked about in a way that centers equity? Oh, there's so much packed into that question. So I'll leave the certain energy shortfall questions to people who are modeling that. But I do want to disrupt a little bit of the assumption. I mean, I think there's still so much low-hanging fruit on energy efficiency that we haven't been able to maximize. So if we can seal our homes, if we can think about efficient appliances, we're lowering the load right? We're sort of decreasing the burden. And although there are some successful energy efficiency programs out there, you know, that utility business model is in essence to sell more electricity, to build more infrastructure. The load curve is not necessarily something that utilities worry about per se. I mean, they obviously worry about peak load. And this was something I saw in Hawaii as well. There was tension in terms of lowering that load and using distributed energy resources, using efficiency to do that. So I think we've got to max out our efficiency. I think in general we consume way too much. That's just one of my soapbox issues. We know that wealthier homes also are big consumers of energy and electricity. So you got to kind of look at that and think about the way that we're distributing costs of the energy system in general. But I think there's a lot more to say about efficiency. I think, you know, clean energy and rooftop solar give us an opportunity to generate the energy that we need so long as that is reasonable. So I think in terms of the equity issues, you know, kind of going back to the energy burden piece that I talked about in my talk. Folks, that are again, the lowest income, living in old housing stock. You know, they're the ones who are really bearing the brunt of the lack of energy efficiency access and lack of energy efficiency programs. So I think if we want to talk about equity in terms of this overall energy access piece, we need to target communities where housing stock is poorer. We need to target communities where there is a higher energy burden. The ACEEE has done great work on that. Really kind of pinpointing what the tardies communities are. We know that folks in the South are extraordinarily burdened in terms of energy burden. And it's not because energy's more expensive, but it's because they live in poor housing stock. So I think there's a lot of low-hanging fruit on the efficiency side. I would hate to sort of say that we're going to run out of energy. I don't think that's true. I'd love to, if you're referring to somebody, I'd love to kind of take a look at it. But I think there's just a lot of opportunity to work on the efficiency side first. Thank you. Sure. I wanted to ask a follow up question from your talk. Thank you so much for a really wonderful discussion and sort of an overview of your book as well. I really like this idea of restorative justice and I wanted to ask you with your new role, what are some first steps that you're super excited about to get to this idea of restorative justice. Yeah, so I'm obligated to say that I'm definitely here in my individual capacity. But, you know, my work to date outside of the DOE has really led me to believe that you have to bring together diverse stakeholders in the discussion. And you've really got to just be honest about the state of affairs. We know that again, the energy system is complicit in the environmental injustices that communities face. So we got to reckon with that. We've got to really look at what's happening on the ground in communities. The President's commitment, both on the campaign trail and then in his most recent order last week on the 27th, makes clear that we're going to move 40% of all benefits of climate investments to frontline communities, to disadvantaged communities. So what that means is we've got to understand who is disadvantaged. And that's how you begin that healing process, right? Once people say "look, here are my burdens," whether that's environmental, whether that's energy burden, whether that's something else, then we can begin that healing process. But it begins with, and this is where scholarship is so important, right? It begins with scholars kind of helping to identify these groups and then bringing them to the table to engage in the discussion about what that healing process, what kind of energy access they want, would look like. I might jump in. Hi Shalanda. My name is Vanna. We met maybe about a year and a half ago at the Energy Justice group. So awesome to hear you speak again. You've been a tremendous influence over work that I've done since I graduated. I've been working with the City of Cincinnati, we developed a suite of energy equity programs. We have your workbook on our website. And I've recently transitioned to a role to now think about these questions at a regional level in the greater Cincinnati area. And I was wondering if you had sort of thoughts or regions you might recommend in terms of who has done sort of maybe like micro analyses or what are some engagement mechanisms that communities can pursue? And how do you, how do you regionalize some of these conversations? Because I think that I'm thinking about, you know, big metro areas. We have our core city of Cincinnati who has resources as the largest jurisdiction in our region. But a lot of folks, because of development practices in our inner core, you know, the most vulnerable are getting pushed out to our inner ring suburbs and our outer ring suburbs now. And so these are communities who have significantly fewer resources. So I was wondering if you had thoughts on what's this conversation look like on a regional perspective? Yeah. So again, another completely dense, densely packed question. And yes, I of course I remember you, Savannah, and I don't believe that was just a year and a half ago. It feels like a million years ago. I mean, really the last year itself has been crazy. So there is an infrastructure of civil rights advocates, you know, folks who just fighting for basic needs around housing, around food justice, that I think should be tapped into for this energy policy discussion. I mean, this is also one of the reasons why I wrote the book, because I wanted to bring in more traditional civil rights advocates into this energy policy discussion. And so there is already an infrastructure of social service providers. But they're not necessarily tracking the energy piece, right? And so, but as you know, I mean energy is so integral to the challenges that their stakeholders are facing. So I think tapping into that network would be one way, but it requires people like you who kind of get the intersectional pieces to do the education and to say, "this is why energy should be on your radar. And then here's how we activate your network." Now there are other very sophisticated, well-developed networks in places like California, in places like New York, where again, the civil rights community kind of had to pivot into energy policy because the stakes were so high. But I would argue that the stakes are high everywhere in that, you know, this should become a part of the lexicon and the discussion in the traditional civil rights community. So that's just an idea. And again, people see energy policy as so daunting, so dense, so irrelevant. And again, that's why I wrote the book to sort of demystify that complexity in some way so people can feel like, "Oh, this is what's at stake for me. This is why I should get engaged." But you know, we're early, early in the days of the transition. And the more we can do education, you know, workshops that are linking energy to these other material needs, I think the better. So that's your work now, Savannah, and also educating policymakers to not see their work as siloed, right? If I'm a Public Health Department, there was a recent study at Duke and I should I should add this to my presentation, showing that if we had just prevented shut offs, I can't remember the exact time period, but I think it was over the summer, we would have prevented 15% of COVID deaths. You can't tell me that electricity is not implicated in this pandemic. So we have to begin to connect those dots. And I think that's our work as people moving in the energy space. Great. Thank you. responsive. Good. no one else wants to. Hi Shalanda, that was an excellent talk. Thanks for giving it. I wanted to ask about the idea of sort of expanding the framing. I like the way that your talk was structured because I think a lot about that, where we focus on the sort of tip of the iceberg issues, right? Like police killings of Black people is a horrible issue. But underlying all that is the daily policing that takes place and that often gets ignored for the stuff that makes the headlines. I think the same thing where I don't think COVID in sort of the mainstream press has been coded as a racial issue when it clearly is, right? And in fact, sometimes you see, like this is the great equalizer because everybody can get it when it's literally the exact opposite. So I wonder how you think about trying to expand the framing on these issues in terms of trying to sort of get to the actual iceberg, to get to all of this underlying stuff that doesn't tend to be captured in the eye popping stuff, but there really tends to be the day-to-day problem that that sort of underlies those things that actually pop out. Yeah, so I love that question and there's such a poetic justice for me right now. Like in the sense that there's a new role at the DOE that is committed to energy justice. Like, for a decade, I had faced so much pushback on bringing issues of social justice and racial equality into the energy policy debate. And, you know, one of the lines is, "well energy policy isn'r social policy, you need to do that elsewhere." When is energy policy not social policy? Tell me that. Where are there not winners and losers in the way that we design energy policy? So I think that is the work, right? You're asking me how to excavate this iceberg. We've got to show through our scholarship and through our sort of advocacy to see how the energy system is always making choices, always selecting winners and losers. And we're doing that as well in the clean energy transition. And so that means we need the papers. I was in an interesting call just a couple of nights ago where someone was saying, "well, we don't know enough about equity issues, so we can't really put this in this top notch public-facing report because the scholarship just isn't there to really illustrate the socio-economic dimensions of the energy system." My head wants to explode. The scholarship isn't there because people have not been focused on this sort of socio-economic dimension of this transition up until the last five or six years. And so we need more data, we need it at a granular level. Kind of going to Savannah's question, we need studies of local communities, we need studies of regions. We need to really unpack the ways that the energy system and energy policy are always making social choices, right? And that's our work. You know, that's our charge. I guess I'll jump in. Thank you for this excellent talk Shalanda. You had mentioned earlier in your talk about rethinking the investor-owned utility model. This may be kind of a nuts and bolts kind of a question because energy policy is not my area. But what would need to change or what would you envision for changing kind of the decision making process either in terms of pressuring utilities or in terms of internally within utilities of who gets to participate. Your comment made me think. So the investor owned utility model is problematic for a couple of reasons. I mean, investor owned utilities are essentially a vestige of the past. They emerged based on the need to electrify essentially rural communities and regulators sort of struck a deal with them, right? It was called the Regulatory Compact. You take the risk of doing these investments in rural communities on electrical infrastructure, electricity infrastructure, transmission lines, et cetera. And we will give you a reasonable return on any investment that you make in that infrastructure. So that's very much a relic in many ways. I mean, first of all, that infrastructure is, is dying and decaying and problematic. And in a climate changed world, we know that that infrastructure is more vulnerable because it's centralized in many ways, right? We have generation facilities that generate electricity, send it across transmission lines far away, and if something happens a 100 miles away it can impact you in the city, right? So we have the innovation to change that. But utilities are not incentivized to innovate in those ways. And if they are, they're incentivized to own every aspect of the infrastructure, right? And to make those investments in service of their shareholders essentially. So we've created a model that is not always in service of the public good. And so I think I come out a little bit in the gray in this chapter, and it's funny, my co-founder, Subin DeVar, she was like "you didn't give us an answer in that chapter about investor-owned utilities." And I think there are a couple of things we can do. I mean, one is we can regulate utilities better. We can sort of incentivize them to engage in public and socially beneficial behavior. But that's a regulatory challenge. Or we can simply begin to move toward public power, which in theory has some benefits. But there are also some folks who say public power isn't a panacea, meaning, you know, municipally owned power and those sorts of things. And they point to LA Department of Water and Power as an example of a utility that may not be managed in the best way or creates some of the same problems that we see in investor owned utilities. But the bottom line is we need to create pathways for distributed energy generation. We need to create pathways for folks to have resilience in their homes. So again, if we think about a place like California, for example, where the law allows investor-owned utilities to preemptively cut power with no fire in sight, but because they think there may be a fire. That's a justice issue, right? Because the folks who are going to have their lights turned out, if they have resources, they can go to hotel, they can go to a friend's house, they can drive. You have a medical disability, if you are low income, if you have one shot at your meds that month and it's in the fridge and it goes bad and you've gotta pay out of pocket for the next shot, you're out of luck. Again, that's the link and this goes to Trevor's point, that's the link between energy policy and health, right? And health outcomes. That's the bottom part of that iceberg that we need to begin to uncover in our work. So I think the investor-owned utility model is at the root of a lot of that. And it's mainly because of the ways that we've incentivized it. Those are outdated. We need a new model. Yeah sure. Yeah. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Thank you very much, Professor Baker for for presenting. I really enjoyed it. I was wondering, you know, some might, some do think that clean energy is a little bit of a misnomer, right? Because the materials that are required to produce solar panels and wind turbines and so forth, they don't come out of thin air, right? So we know that like with the just transition that we're trying to create, what it's going to do is expand pressure on ecosystems and on especially indigenous communities in the Global South. I was really interested in that flowchart in the second part about cosmopolitan justice. So how do we, ensure environmental justice and equity at all stages of the supply chain? How do we ensure that indigenous communities that would be especially impacted by say, lithium abstraction in Chile in South America, how do we ensure that they have free, prior, and informed consent and see the full benefits of that abstraction? Yes. We have not gotten this right. And I'm so glad you brought this up. I mean, the supply chain questions are the stickiest I think in this energy transition and in the activist community, there are folks who are saying, "you will not do this. We're not going to displace our burdens onto folks in the global south with whom we are allied, right, and aligned." And so I think the activist community is ahead on identifying this as an issue, right? That we're going to displace harm here locally by, by putting it in indigenous communities in Canada, for example, or in the Global South. And so there's a lot of work to be done. You know, the first half decade of my academic career was really spent on three-part informed consent and trying to figure out how to make it work, particularly in a transaction model and transaction sort of structure. And I think we need to really amplify it and make it actually work for people on the ground. It's never worked as written. But then even if it worked as it's intended, it may be imperfect because the consent aspect of it, it's not a veto, right? And that's not written into any of the international instruments that speak to free, prior, informed consent of indigenous people. So it needs to go a little bit further. But I think again, you're spot on. I don't have an answer. I'm just going to be very frank with you and I think a lot of scholars are starting to work on that piece. I will say that indigenous communities, disadvantaged communities around the world are not a monolith. So some communities do want this kind of development, but they want it to be done safely. They want it to be done right there, sort of raising their hands and saying, include us in this transition. This is an opportunity for, you know, development. Again, I'm sort of putting that in quotes because it's controversial in some circles. But if we are going to meet the ambitious goals that we've set out for ourselves, we know that there's going to be harms in other places. And so we've got to shine a light on that. I think there are a lot of people in the energy or the environmental community that are like, "oh, that's not something I want to talk about right now." And it's like no, we actually have to talk about it because we're having kids mining cobalt right on the African continent. We're having salt flats that are being destroyed in Latin America. And so we've got to deal with all of it. All of it has to be on the table. So I really appreciate the question Colin. We're very mindful of time. So I will pull us to a close and I think that I can speak on behalf of the entire crew here Shalanda and say, we thank you not only for an excellent talk and for Q&A, but also just generally for inspiring us. And you've inspired our research in many, many ways, but I think you've also inspired many professions that our students have and that we have. So thank you. Yeah, as Savannah noted, you have given great inspiration, so please keep doing it, including in your new role. And thank you so much for a great talk today. Thank you all and I really appreciate it. Thank you. Go out and do great things, do all the things. We need it.

Description of the video:

>> Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Fall Environmental Resilience Speaker Series. Jointly presented by Indiana University's Integrated Program on the Environment and the Environmental Resilience Institute. We're very happy that you can join us today. Before we start, Indiana University wishes to acknowledge and honor the Miami, Delaware, Potawatomi, and Shawnee people.

On whose ancestors homelands and resources Indiana University was built. Both IPE, and ERI are founded on the understanding that interdisciplinary learning and research. Are essential to teach today's scholars and to solve today's problems. IPE is dedicated to bringing together all of the environmental and sustainability scholarship. Across the various schools and departments on the Bloomington campus.

IPE is made up of over 120 faculty and nearly a thousand students studying the environment from all angles. The ERI was founded in 2017 as part of the IU prepared for Environmental Change Grand Challenge. Its mission is to enhance resilience to environmental change in Indiana and beyond. By accurately predicting impacts and effectively partnering with communities.

To implement feasible, equitable and research and forum solutions And we have a wide variety of speakers joining us this semester, and also in the Spring. And in particular, our speakers will focus on topics relevant to the issues of systemic racial inequality. Environmental and justice and the need for a just transition to a future that is healthy and safe for all people.

Not just those who have been privileged by centuries of inequitable systems and societies. So, before the talk starts, please make sure that you've muted your microphone as the talk happens. Please if you have questions, type them into the chat box. And at the end of our talk today, our moderator will present them to our speaker.

So, I'm gonna turn it over to Lingxi Chen Yang. Who's the Environmental Law Fellow at the Environmental Resilience Institute. And she will introduce our speaker today.
>> Thank you Adam. Hi everyone. My name is Lingxi. I'm the new Environmental Law Fellow at UI and I'm really pleased to introduce Dr. Shellye Suttles.

Dr. Suttles is an Agricultural Economist who focuses on local and regional food systems. Municipal food policy, agricultural energy production, and climate changes impact on agricultural land use. Dr Suttles joined the O'Neill school as an Assistant Professor this year. She also serves as an Assistant Research Scientist with the Sample Food System Science Institute at IU.

Previously Dr. Suttles served as Food Policy and Program Coordinator for the City of Indianapolis, Office of Public Health and Safety. And as an economist with the USDA's Economic Research Service. And today she's going to talk to us about the potential environmental impacts of National Transportation Safety Policy. And without further ado, I'll turn it over to you Dr. Suttles.


>> Thank you, thank you, Adam and Lingxi for that great introduction. Let me just share my screen PowerPoint presentation. So, first, thank you all for having me here today. I'm very excited to get to know more about the individuals. Who participate in the Environmental Resilience Speaker Series and Research.

And all of the interesting things that happen in both IPE and ERI. So thank you very much. I'm new to IU. So, I'm learning all of the acronyms so, you have to forgive me there. So, again, I'm Shellye Suttles and I'm with the O'Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs.

And also researcher at the Austrian Workshop Sustainable Food System Science Network. So, I've been working on this project. Looking at transportation safety policy in the context of food and agricultural production. With my fellow economist, Dr. Tara Wade and Dr. Lurleen Walters at the University of Florida. So, I apologize about my sound hopefully.

Let me know if this is any better.
>> I think If you could speak up a little bit or move the microphone a little closer.
>> Okay, how about now? Is this any better?
>> That's good. Thank you.
>> Okay, thank you. I apologize. So, this is a research project that came about because Tara is actually, she has a component of education.

So, she works with community being based at a land grant institution that is University of Florida. So, in that she has an extension component of her faculty appointment. A tomato grower asked her in the middle of last year. He said, hey, there's a new transportation safety policy's is coming about.

And I'm very much aware that it's gonna impact food and agricultural sectors. What should I look out for as a producer? And so she told him, hey, I'm just hearing about it now from you. I don't know too much, but I'll find out. So, she reached out to Laureen and I, and a couple of her colleagues at the University of Florida.

And so, we all said, we really don't know about it, but let's find out together. So, this is the research we've been conducting. Looking at this new transportation safety policy that's known as Electronic Logging Mandate. In the context of food and agricultural industries. So, to start, we really had to think about the general role of transportation in the food system.

So, here we see in this diagram both supply side sectors. And demand side sectors in the food system. And we see a variety of different, all the way from production in green to wholesaling and transportation in orange. Consumer facing businesses such as retail grocery stores. In blue and then we have consumers at the end.

So, it's, a very robust system, the food system and it has kind of interactions throughout. So, stylistically, we were looking at logistics and transportation at the center of this diagram. But we know that transportation actually is affecting sectors in the food system throughout the system. So, if we think about agricultural input suppliers, sending input supplies to farmers.

If we think about farmers sending specialty crops or agricultural products to food processors and food manufacturers. Wholesalers shipping product to retail grocery stores and institutional buyers. We know that transportation is really involved in a much more systemic way. Than just a one orange box we see here. So, when we think about the volume of food and agricultural transportation in the United States.

We can really think about, looking at data in the US Commodity Flow Survey. So, when we look at the 2017 Survey. We see shipments for two food and agricultural commodities shown here. So, there are eight but we're just gonna look at two here. And so, the first is agricultural products shipments.

And so, US Census defines agricultural products as generally specialty crops. So, fresh fruit and vegetable. And it's not including cereal grains and animal feed and those other types of agricultural products. But at the same time we also have prepared food commodities, which are shipped. In the United States, and so prepared foods are what you can think about as processed foods or manufactured foods.

So when we look at shipments of these two commodities by modes of transportation, we see that by weight, about 67% of agricultural products are shipped via on road trucking. And at the same time we see for shipments of prepared food about 93% of these shipments are shipped via on road trucking.

So as a result, we conclude that on road trucking is really a significant component to the food and agricultural industries, particularly food and agricultural transportation. So when we expand our discussion into on road trucking to all commodities shipped in the United States by mode of transportation, we still see that about 81% of all commodities shipped in the United States are shipped via on road trucking.

And so this is equivalent to nearly 9 billion tons of product, that is worth over $10 trillion. So, we know that on road trucking is a very important industry for not only food and agricultural sectors but for the US economy as a whole. And so one thing that's quickly worth mentioning is that although we, are going to focus today's discussion on road trucking, we do have rail, water, and air as modes of transportation.

But it's important to think about these other modes of transportation. Ultimately they are going to require on road trucking to get that product closer to retailers and consumers in the end. So, nothing is purely shipped by water, nothing's purely shipped by rail, nothing's purely shipped by air. At the end of that final destination, it's gonna have to be shipped by on road trucking.

So with all of this on road trucking happening across the United States to move product from here to there, there are gonna be transportation safety consequences. So in 2017, we unfortunately saw 878 fatalities that involve passengers of heavy duty vehicles in these long haul transportation routes. So as a result, the Department of Transportation's Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, has instituted transportation safety regulations to reduce the number of on road highway accidents, as well as highway fatalities associated with on road trucking or transportation industries.

And so, these regulations include general motor carrier regulations, just general things carriers must abide by in their operation of transportation businesses. It also includes hours of service regulation, which are kinda really looking at the human resource and hours of service rules related to transportation safety. And then we also have employee, health and safety regulations instituted by the Department of Transportation.

So in our discussion of transportation safety policy, we're going to focus on hours of service regulation. And it's because these hours of service regulation are intended to reduce fatigue driving, which generally causes these highway accidents and fatalities. So according to the Department of Transportation, the hours of service really refers to the maximum amount of time that drivers are permitted to spend driving.

Or on duty, what they would be spending time loading the vehicle, maintaining the vehicle, fueling the vehicle, and things of that nature. And but also at the same time specifies a number and a length of rest periods and breaks that are required intermittently throughout this hours of service.

So when we look at hours of service regulations, we know that the Department of Transportation only allows drivers to drive 11 hours after 10 hours off duty. And they're only allowed to complete this 11 hours of drive time within a 14 hour window. So they have to do all of that 11 hours in a 14 hour window every day.

And within these 11 hours, they're required to take 30 minute rest breaks for every 8 hours that they spend driving. And so ultimately these hours of service regulations are there to help ensure that drivers stay awake, that they stay alert while they're on the road transporting this high volume of shipments across the country.

And so you might be asking yourself, so who's checking to see if these drivers are complying with these hours of service regulation? If you're driving from California to Georgia, who's checking in to make sure you're complying with these rules? Is it Highway Patrol, is it Erik Estrada, perhaps from CHiPs.

And so ultimately, pretty much, so drivers are required to maintain hours of service documentation, in case they're audited by the Department of Transportation or their companies. But most drivers actually aren't concerned with the audits, they're concerned with being pulled over by highway patrol. And if highway patrol finds that they're not in compliance with hours of service regulations, this has the potential to jeopardize their commercial driver's licenses and ultimately jeopardize their livelihoods.

So we know that prior to a recent transportation safety policy, drivers were actually keeping paper logs. And so these paper logs weren't actually generally effective in terms of requiring or enforcing that drivers comply with hours of service regulation. And so in our review of literature we find that drivers actually drove 4 hours each day, beyond the maximum 11 hours that they're allowed to drive based on hours of service regulation.

And this typically is in order to get product to its final destination in time. So especially when we think about food and agricultural products, Kroger wants those load of lettuce today because they put it on sale in the paper and people are expecting it. So particularly for the food and agricultural industries, on time delivery is key.

And so, in an effort to avoid getting in trouble with highway patrol, drivers often kept two sets of paper logs. They kept one legitimate set of logs for themselves and for their companies. But they also kept one set of false logs for highway patrol so that if they're pulled over, highway patrol would think that they were within their hours of service maximum.

So that there was no issue with them driving additionally. And so very interestingly, the Department of Transportation knew this cheating or this double log activity was happening for a very long time. And they always ask themselves, is there an alternative technology to document hours of service compliance to ensure that drivers aren't driving past the maximum hours of service?

And so actually yes, there is. So the electronic logging device known as the ELD or E-log, is a device that synchronizes with the vehicle's engine to automatically record drive times. Let whoever's looking at the data understand when the engine was stopped, when the engine started. And this really offers very accurate recording of hours of service compliance.

And so this is important because DOT felt the electronic logging device Really offered the opportunity for drivers to have a safer work environment. So oftentimes it wasn't that the drivers wanted to push and drive beyond maximum allowable drive times. It's that their companies wanted it and that the company's clients wanted that very on time delivery.

So the Department of Transportation argued that really this was to the benefit of drivers, and it made it easier and faster to accurately record hours of service. Because in the paper log it was often very difficult for drivers to keep these gigantic log books in the vehicle and record their hours of service.

So it makes it easier not only to record, but also to share your hours on duty status with your company, highway patrol, or Department of Transportation auditors. So fortunately, the Department of Transportation moved ahead with instituting transportation safety policy, more specifically the electronic logging mandate in 2015. And so it had tried actually many times before to figure out a way to institute electronic logging devices in on long haul vehicles, commercial motor vehicles.

But it was always opposed by the trucking industry. And that was until 2015 when the DOT passed electronic logging device mandate which now requires that all drivers and carriers of commercial motor vehicles have these electronic logging devices in their vehicles. And so the mandate came in three phases.

So phase one was just the awareness and transition phase. It was a lot of PR on the part of the Department of Transportation to let drivers and carriers know that this was coming. Phase two was actually a year long between December 2017 and December 2019. And it was a phased in compliance approach.

So it allowed drivers and carriers in the industry to really phase in the electronic logging devices into their vehicles. But during this time, so this two years of phased-in compliance, agricultural industries actually received an exemption. That was until December of last year when phase three went into effect.

And so now, a majority of drivers, so nearly all drivers and commercial motor vehicle carriers in the United States are required to have electronic logging devices in their vehicles. And so there are a few exceptions. So agriculture does receive kind of a minimum amount of exceptions, if you aren't doing long haul driving very much or you're only doing it harvest season.

There's other exemptions for the motion picture industry and other industries that may have varying frequencies in length of transportation and shipments and trips. But one thing it's really important to stress with its transportation safety policy, that is electronic logging device mandate. That the ELD mandate did not actually change the hours of service rules.

So the hours of service rules that we saw previously still stand, nothing has changed about those. So the electronic logging device mandate only makes it harder for drivers and carriers to falsify hours of service records. And so ultimately, that the DOT feels that they're able to better enforce existing hours of service regulations with this ELD mandate.

And so, in our efforts as a group of agricultural economists to answer the Florida tomato growers original question. Excuse me, we noticed something really interesting about transportation safety policy. And that was very much impacted the food and agricultural industries and the economy as a whole. So we felt that it also had the potential to impact the environment, animal welfare, and food waste.

Because if these trips are going to change, perhaps there would be more spoilage in changing routes. Live animals and live fish are often transported through on road trucking in the United States, so that's why I felt there's potential for animal welfare impacts. And we know that these commercial motor vehicles are consuming diesel fuel and there would be environmental impacts to any change in transportation policy that changed transportation times in the United States.

So we really spent the last year exploring this nexus between transportation safety policy, food and agricultural policy, and environmental policy. So two important topics in food and agricultural policy that come to mind when we talk about transportation safety policy, are first food safety. And second, keeping food prices affordable in the United States.

So on the topic of food safety, the FDA is responsible for regulating food safety in the United States. And so in an effort to keep consumers safe from foodborne illnesses through food spoilage, the FDA has various food safety regulations. One of the most recent and most profound was the 2011 Food Safety Modernization Act which was passed.

And so, a major component of food safety, particularly FSMA, is this appropriate and consistent refrigeration of highly perishable goods. And this really impacts the food and agriculture industry, because in the United States a majority of product that is shipped via on road trucking through refrigerated units is either food, flowers, or pharmaceuticals.

So if there's going to be changes in food safety regulation, knowing that they're going to be highly perishable goods shipped in food and agricultural industries. This becomes very important. And this also becomes much more important given the trends in healthy eating. Better encouraging Americans to consume more fresh fruit and vegetables.

So it's all kind of coalescing at once. But at the same time, we know that USDA is tasked with keeping food prices low in the United States. And this is particularly important given that when we think about what the USDA does in the context of the Farm Bill, we know that 76% of the outlays of the Farm Bill don't actually go to farmers.

It actually goes to low income Americans who need food and nutrition assistance. So USDA is really looking to keep food prices low for low income households. So, this 76% of outlays in the 2018 Farm Bill is about $66 billion that goes to low income households who may have food need.

So this is important kind of in the context of low prices. I know some folks argue about price parity for farmers that they're receiving an appropriate price for their goods. But in the United States, there's only about 2 million farmers. At the same time we know about 38 million Americans live below the poverty line and really struggle with food insecurity.

So this is something that's very important to USDA. And so, kind of in this vein would say that food safety, low food prices, are really issues we think will be impacted by the change in labor, change in fuel, change in maintenance, change in travel time. That the electronic logging device mandate is having on the food and agriculture transportation industry.

So at the same time, we can also think about environmental policy. And so we're very mindful that environmental policy is also going to converge with transportation safety policy. So in 2011, the EPA and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration got together. And created greenhouse gas emissions and fuel economy standards for heavy-duty trucks.

And this was particularly important because EPA felt that this cohort of vehicles that would be produced between 2014 and 2018. Could actually contribute to a reduction of about 7, excuse me, 270 million metric tons of CO2 emissions during this time period. So it's something that they were hopeful about, involving commercial motor vehicles and improving environmental conditions in the United States.

And so, these issues are important to the transportation sector, particularly as fleets and as commercial motor carriers are trying to comply with fuel economy standards and emission standards. But they may have to cut costs in other areas to comply with these standards. And cutting cost in those areas may include cutting costs with labour, and that can affect drivers livelihoods.

So really, we're asking ourselves in this case the following research question. So how has the ELD mandate change transportation time? How is the ELD mandate changed fuel consumption as a result of these changing transportation times? And what are the environmental consequences of the change in fuel consumption we might See?

And so to answer this first question we have, we look at the change in transportation times as a result of the electronic logging device mandate. And so as I mentioned before, this business as usual scenario, where drivers were often driving 15 hours a day when they were only legally allowed to drive 11 hours a day, becomes particularly important.

So with the ELD mandate, drivers will naturally spend more time completing a trip. Because they have to observe these hours of service rules which require them to take a longer rest period. And so as a result, we know that transportation times will increase. And so when we look at our calculations to compare business as usual, shipments with electronic logging device and for shipments.

We're really expecting to find increases in travel times for all routes that take more than 11 hours. Because drivers are no longer able to fudge that 12th hour, the 13th hour, the 14th hour and the 15th hour on road in their paper log books. Electronic logging device is actually now seeing when the engine was on, at what times, for how long.

And so highway patrol, Department of Transportation, and the motor carrier is able to track that much better than with paper logs. So, now we know that everyday on the road driving will now be shortened to 11 hours when drivers were actually spending 15 hours driving. So we know that we're going to have changes for every multiple of 11 hours in drive time.

Because when a driver would have first spent the 15 hours driving, they're now spending 11 hours driving, and they're forced to rest. And so this will happen particularly for long distance transportation. Knowing that, if it required many multiples of 11, so 25 hours, 35 hours on the roadg, going from coast to coast, there would be significant impacts in transportation times.

And so here's just a quick table that's calculating transportation times for common agricultural routes that either end in New York or originate in Washington. And so, we really see that this is going to be a big concern for very long haul coast to coast trips for food and agricultural products.

So when we look at this route between Washington and Florida, we see that the electronic logging device mandate will likely increase the travel time of this 3,200 mile trip by up to 38 hours. And that's obviously gonna be particularly important for refrigerated transportation. And so, just to give you guys an opportunity to see kind of the trend and the change in transportation times as a result of the electronic logging device mandate.

Here we see kind of, in orange, we have a line that would be the situation is if the business-as-usual transportation time was the same as the ELD-enforced transportation time. But we know this is not gonna happen as a result of the ELD mandate. So if we focus on the blue line, we see that the ELD transportation times deviate from the business-as-usual transportation times.

And that there were gonna require 4 hour rest period for every 11 hours, which didn't originally happen in the business as usual travel time. And so based on these changes in transportation time, we look to answer our second question. That was, what if any changes in fuel consumption are the result of the electronic logging device mandate?

And so for me, these issues that gonna impact the economy, impact environment, impact animal welfare, that are the result of the transportation policy are really what's hiding in plain sight to me. Because when we think about the electronic logging device mandate, it doesn't actually affect transportation mileage. So if we were to look in data for pre-ELD, and compare it to post-ELD, the mileage of the trips will not change.

The trips are always going to be the same mileage. So the shipment has x number of miles that will have to get the product from Washington to Florida, no matter what. But what is changing is the transportation time. So, we know that of all the publicly data that we have at our disposal, none of the data actually has any mention of transportation times.

And this is what we find is really lacking but critical for the discussion of environmental impacts of transportation safety policy. So, at first glance you might say, who cares if transportation times change, the driver isn't doing anything. Well, he's resting in the vehicle. But there are actually quite a few fuel consumption activities that are happening while the driver is resting.

And so the first activity is what is called hotelling, and so it's not a bad thing. Hotelling is simply the activity where the driver is resting in the cab of the vehicle during rest periods or breaks. And in our conversations with the drivers, they actually said that they prefer to stay with the shipment and not get a hotel is cuz they're very concerned about theft.

And so their goal is to get a really beautiful cab like this one here in the picture. And to be able to rest and relax during their rest period and breaks in the cab to protect the cargo. And so as you can see, hanging out in the cab is pretty nice.

There's the mini fridge, a laptop, TV, all sorts of electronics and appliances at your disposal. But it's important to realize that while the driver is hotelling in this vehicle, it's gonna require energy and power to keep the fridge on, to keep your laptop running, to keep Netflix on.

So it's important for us to recognise that the vehicle engine is idling. And so EPA is estimating that all drivers are hotelling 100% of the time while they're doing these long haul trips. And that the engine is idling 70% of that time and consuming diesel fuel during that 70% of the hotelling time.

And so at the same time, we have a similar situation for refrigeration. So the majority of fresh fruit and vegetable in the United States is shipped via refrigerated containers or what are called reefers. So when we see this kind of shipping container in the back, that's what's called a reefer.

And so the reefer is outfitted with what's called a transportation refrigeration unit. And so this requires diesel fuel to maintain cool, cold, frozen, or sometimes heated temperatures for food and agricultural products. And so while the driver is hotelling during these increased rest periods, the refrigeration unit also has to be continuously running throughout the route, which would include these additional breaks and rest periods.

And so given the constraints that we have on available data for transportation times, we have to do a few back-of-the-envelope calculations to estimate fuel consumption and CO2 emissions as a result of the electronic logging device mandate. And so here you see our fuel consumption calculation. And so we just take our previously calculated change in travel times.

We include EPA's recommendations for conversion factors or fuel consumption for hotelling and refrigeration in a transportation refrigeration unit. To ultimately find that change in fuel consumption as a result of the mandate. And so to get closer to answering our third question, we look at a change of greenhouse gas emissions as a result of the ELD mandate to understand the environmental impacts of the transportation safety policy.

And so these are just additional calculations based on EPA's recommendations. So we take our change in fuel consumption calculation, use EPA CO2 conversion factor. And we're able to find a change in greenhouse gas emissions per shipment as a result of the change in transportation safety policy. And so to ultimately answer this third question we have, we have to look at the change in aggregated greenhouse gas emissions, not just per individual shipment, within the food and agricultural sectors.

To understand the impact of food and agriculture through the transportation safety policy. And so if we're gonna aggregate, Emissions across each food and agricultural commodity, we have to go back to US census and Bureau of Transportation statistics, commodity flow survey. So here we're just looking at values from the 2017 commodity flow survey for the survey's eight food and agricultural commodities.

And so highlighted in blue, I have commodities that will likely require refrigeration. So agricultural products which are specialty crops or fresh fruit and vegetable in the United States, as we mentioned, are very much refrigerated in on-road transportation in the United States. We also have the potential in commodity four, animal feed and eggs, where eggs would likely be refrigerated.

But we aren't sure kind of the total aggregation of value that the commodity flow survey has aggregated. The same can be said for meat and poultry, we assume those commodities are transported via refrigerated trucking. And then we know to some degree for commodity seven, other prepared foodstuffs, that there are a variety of different manufactured foods that require refrigeration that are shipped across the United States.

So ultimately, if we look at the average miles per shipment in the last column of this table, we see that there are on-average short routes and on-average long routes for different food commodities. So short routes include number two, cereal grains. So we see that's a relatively average short route for that commodity.

Animal feed and eggs is also another commodity that has a relatively short route. So when we think about long haul transportation, there are some particularly long routes. So commodity three, agricultural products, on average is being shipped 716 miles across the United States. Similarly, meat and poultry is shipped about 616 miles on average across the United States.

And so the first thing we have to note here about the averages that were given from the commodity flow survey is that we don't know anything about the distribution of mileage given each individual shipment. So we can't say anything about the distribution. And second kind of is related to commodity seven, other prepared foodstuffs, this is really the 221 million ton gorilla in the room.

It is a very considerable amount by weight of agricultural and food commodities that are shipped across the United States. But when we look at the average miles per shipment, they're really not that particularly high. So ultimately, in our calculations, we don't include it even though it is such a significant portion of food and agricultural commodities in the United States.

Just because the mileage isn't what we feel would kind of bump up on average against that 11-hour drive maximum. So if we look at our calculations, so we're able to calculate our change in transportation time given the certain commodities, a change in fuel consumption given certain commodities, and ultimately a change in greenhouse gas for certain individuals shipment of commodities.

Highlighted in blue, we have things that we know that will require refrigeration throughout the transportation. In orange, we have long haul commodities that we don't feel would require refrigeration. And we look at these four commodities in particular because they have relatively long average miles per shipment. And so ultimately, we're concluding that agricultural products being shipped across the United States will have about a 0.25 teragram increase in emissions through the course of a year.

Meat product transportation will have about a 0.29 teragram increase in emissions over the year. Bakery products will be a little bit less at 0.14 teragrams of CO2 emissions over the course of the year. And alcoholic beverages for our long haul trips will be about 0.09 teragrams of CO2 emissions over the course of the year.

So these are particularly conservative totals. As I mentioned, when we look in our average transportation times, we really don't want to force sectors that may have low average transportation times,to say that they'll be drastically impacted by this transportation safety policy. So we have a conservative total of about 0.77 teragrams in total which would be emitted annually based on long haul transportation of food and agricultural commodities.

And so, how did we fare in terms of answering our research questions? Ultimately, we find that there are increased transportation times as a result of the mandate. There is increased fuel consumption as a result of the changing transportation times. And there most likely will be an increase in greenhouse gas emissions as a result of the electronic logging device mandate.

And so just to conclude, we estimate that there is a substantial increase in greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation safety policy, that's the ELD mandate. So we see kind of this a less than one teragram annually for long-haul food and agricultural transportation. But when we put this in context even though that we feel that is substantial amount of CO2 emissions over the course of the year.

It's ultimately fairly small in comparison with a total transportation CO2 emissions that we see annually. So in 2017, there was a little over 1800 to grams of CO2 equivalent emitted from the transportation sector in the United States. So not incredibly high, but perhaps if we think about department of transportation and other kind of policymaking sectors across the economy doing things to tweak the length.

And the time that it takes to transport product across the country, we will likely see these changes in fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. And so for us kind of as a group of researchers, we have a few avenues for our next steps. And so this is what I'd be curious to talk with all of you about in these avenues first, we're going to take these preliminary calculations.

And we plan to work with other general equilibrium modelers and econometricians to answer some of our large questions about the effects of this transportation safety policy on food and agricultural sectors. Because I did mention this is going to impact labor cost, it's going to impact fuel cost, it's going to impact maintenance costs.

And variety of different costs are ultimately going to impact food and agricultural sectors in their ability to be economically efficient. And then our second avenue of research is also hiding in plain sight for us because we've really realized that there is really no publicly available data. That gives us comprehensive disaggregated data about food and agricultural transportation that would allow us to really refine the analysis we talked about today.

We know that what is hiding in plain sight is the electronic logging device itself to give us data. So we know that the ELD mandate had a very long implementation process. So different states were implementing the ELD, some even prior to the 2015 announcement of the ELD mandate.

So there has actually been a relatively long history of drivers and commercial motor vehicle carriers recording their logs through ELD. So we would really be curious to get access to the direct ELD records themselves to see how drivers are better complying with hours of service regulation to improve transportation safety.

But also to change the dynamic of food and agricultural transportation. So with that I'll open it up for questions, but I thank you all for very much for kind of listening in that conversation during what has been a pretty exciting week.
>> Thanks so much Dr. Suttles. Who knew that tracking regulations would have have such a large impact on food and ag?

So our first question comes from the audience and I think there are two questions here. Does the ELD mandate bring up any additional animal welfare concerns, perhaps by increasing the length of shipping time for live animals? And if so, have there been any proposed policy changes to address those animal welfare concerns?


>> Yeah, so that's a great question. So, we have found that for livestock, the kind of this increase in transportation time is gonna be very important for live animals particularly for cattle to large animals who can overheat during transportation. So there are a few publications that are coming out about the effects that the ELD mandate will cause in terms of cattle transportation.

But one thing we're all concerned about, so we're all kind of resource economist on the side of being agriculturists is pollinators. So I'm sure everyone on this call knows kind of pollinators are shipped all across the country, that's how people can have their almond milk. Some poor driver gets stuck transporting hives all across the United States pollinating all the things that need pollinated.

So if ELD mandate is gonna require that the individual driving pollinators across the country spend more time resting. This can be devastating for the hives because much like the cattle if the hives overheat, it will decimate the hive. So the clients who are shipping the hives all across the country are very, very critical about on-time delivery for hives.

And so this will have both livestock concerns for animal welfare in regards to livestock, but also pollinators.
>> That's really interesting that there would be a big effect on pollinators. Our next question is have there been any measurable safety results for truckers based on mandate?
>> Yes, so I was nervous somebody would ask this question.

So this is not my area of expertise. We've only been following kind of researchers who conduct transportation safety research and really right now, the jury is out. There have been publications both ways saying that the transportation safety policy is effective. But there's also been publications I'd say that really what you're seeing is not necessarily the case in terms of improving highway accidents and highway fatalities.

So that's something that we definitely following because ultimately that discussion is what has been the impetus for all of the research we've done in this area.
>> Got it, so it seems like the evidence is mixed. So I have a personal question. I'm really interested in sort of the large scale macroeconomic changes that the regulation might cause for food demand.

So I'm wondering whether the ELD mandate might influence food demand by increasing the supply costs for certain food sectors. And your presentation mentioned that the meat industry might be particularly affected. I'm wondering whether it might hike up prices for meat in supermarkets and stuff? And whether this might kind of shift food demand away from from those sectors influenced?.


>> Yeah, so meats a great example. You can think about the macroeconomic effects. So, we had the discussion about the increase in transportation time for livestock. So if you think about the cattle that will ultimately become beef, those economic costs are increasing. So that labor, that fuel, that maintenance, and what have you, those costs are increasing.

And that's compounded with the increase in transportation times for meat. And so this is gonna be a double whammy. And when we think about low income households who may not be able to bear the brunt of the industry passing on those costs to them, it could ultimately have significant macroeconomic effects.


>> That's really interesting. I'm guessing it will also hike up prices for those agricultural sectors that rely on pollinators which is I imagine a huge segment of agriculture?
>> Yeah, so I guess I missed a tiny component of the first question to say had the department of transportation kind of given any exemptions for Considering animal welfare and the transportation, so there actually have just been kind of one small concession.

And so that's really more motivated around the actual farm operation. So the hours of service regulations don't actually count. So you're given an exemption, 150 air miles around an agricultural operation. So say if you have a nursery on site and you're planting lettuce. So you have a lettuce nursery and a lettuce farm.

And then you go to your nursery and plant your lettuce all within your 150 air miles. You don't have to count that towards your hours of service regulation. But as you saw kind of uncommon routes for food and agricultural products are crisscrossing United States. So they're well beyond that 150 air miles that the Department of Transportation has given agriculture.

So I guess the industry is always kind of trying to find opportunities to get greater concessions from Department of Transportation given that so much is happening within the food and agricultural sector.
>> Right, a question about the truckers. I wonder if truckers are in support of the mandate.

I mean, it seems like it's all ready going to be in fact, but I'm wondering how truckers feel about this particular regulation.
>> Yeah, so we did a handful of interviews with drivers, particularly during COVID. Cuz we were wondering how kind of all of this was coming together all at once during a pandemic where they were forced to really kind of push to the limit.

And we asked them, how is the ELD mandate affected you as a driver or we talked to transportation directors at food and agricultural businesses and ask them how it affected their work. And majority of them said that, particularly those that were in progressive states like California, they had actually long adopted the the ELD as a device in the vehicle prior to the mandate.

So we heard from drivers that Idaho, I think, was really at the forefront of electronic logging devices. Because it ultimately does make it easier for the driver and the carrier to track hours of service. This is just at also at the end of the day, HR issue, I need to know how many hours you worked to pay you.

So it'd be helpful if I had a better mechanism to track your hours of service. So a few states and a few businesses had long since use the ELD as a HR tool. So that's where we see this opportunity to look at ELDs pre and post the mandate to understand at a granular level what may have happened.


>> Right, that's interesting that it's already being implemented in US western states. I mean, it seems like a common sense technology option kind of tool to track those hours.
>> Yeah and drivers, all these, from one, so I talked to Midwest transportation director. And he said that he did see a few retirements prior to the ELD going into effect.

Cuz older drivers said, I don't wanna really learn a new technology, I'm already on the cusp of retirement. I'll just call it quits now so I don't have to learn a new gizmo. But I don't think it was severe pushback into having the ELD, although if you do look at form so, I wonder, I see Stacy's on the call.

I wonder kind of those who do social network analysis and I see how drivers are very chatty group. They had the CB radios in the old days. They very much connect with each other cuz they kind of have the opportunity to chat on the road. But there has been some lively discussions about the ELD mandate.

But we see it both ways. Particularly during COVID, interestingly, there were five days that the White House actually waived all hours of service regulations for commercial motor vehicle drivers. It only lasted five days because the Department of Transportation stepped in and said this is crazy town. You have to have hours of service regulations or people would die.

And so we looked kind of in the trucker chatter online to see what truckers were saying about that. And it was interesting, a lot of them said, hey, you need these hours of service regulations to enforce safety. You've told us this, we have to comply with this during COVID, even you can't, throw the baby out with the bathwater in this case of transportation safety.


>> Yeah, and we see kind of similar reaction from the car industry generally to rollback of environmental regulations from this administration. I'm also wondering whether the supply cost increases from this particular regulation might be a big boost for automated trucking. And I know that's kind of on the horizon.

I wonder if that might become a more attractive option for these like big box stores and big suppliers, given the additional costs of compliance.
>> Yeah, definitely cuz in that case, so even outside of the ELD mandate just with general having a human drive the vehicle, if a human wasn't driving, there would be no need for hours of service regulation.

And you could get from Washington State all the way to Florida and no risk whatsoever, so I think that would be a very big game changer. But kind of in that conversation as folks wait to figure out kind of the status of driverless long haul transportation, the industry is discussing kind of more tandem driving.

And that's where you'd have two drivers in the cab. So while one is getting the rest, taking their mandated rest period, the other driver is driving and so that they're able to complete the shipment in the normal amount of time with that tandem driving. So there are kind of industries discussing different ways to deal with the mandate.

But at least kind of in the conversations we had with drivers, they don't seem concerned, they say, it may take a little longer. I'm not trying to jeopardize my license so I will follow the rules.
>> That's a really interesting workaround. The regulation, the tandem driving solution, it seems totally common sensical to have two drivers to get around that rule.


>> Yeah, the only thing is now you're paying two salaries for the same trip.
>> Right, yeah, that would definitely increase costs. So maybe it's not so advantageous all around.
>> But then yeah, so I guess especially if we think about outside of food and agriculture, it may make sense.

Nobody is necessarily asking that you keep plasma screen TVs at a low cost. So maybe there are certain sectors of the economy shipping commodities who would say, okay, we'll go for this increased labor cost. But food and agriculture, they may have to have another concession to deal with increasing labor costs.


>> Right, right, another question about kind of broader macro economic impacts of this particular regulation. I'm wondering whether the mandate will give local food supply chains a boost as well, if it's more costly to ship things across the country because of this increased shipping time. I'm wondering if it might be a boost to the local food supply chain, so to link farmers markets and local food suppliers rather than big box stores.

Yeah, so I think kind of that's always the question as economists grapple with kind of where do you see efficiencies in agricultural production?. So one thing we're also, interested to know on road trucking, I've just kind of narrowed the scope of the conversation here now to the US, but we also have Mexico and Canada, which are very much involved in North America.

And so there's millions and millions of tons of products that are coming from Mexico and Canada. So you can think about, local in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico. Could be from Mexico. Local in Michigan and Minnesota could be Canadian. And all of that is still on road transportation. But not necessarily kind of in the argument of I'm buying local because local is my people, it's more kind of okay, well geographically local could mean different things to different routes.

And then also just generally have to think about agricultural production and agronomy. So some things grow better in some places and us trying to grow pineapple in Indiana will never be cost effective. So, We'll have to think about other mechanisms to get that product here. But that is I imagine always a topic of discussion kind of adjusting regional and local food systems to deal with other issues that are policies that are external to food and agricultural industries.


>> Right, and along the same lines, I wonder if there are any impacts on foods that are transported via air. So like the the pineapples that you mentioned, given that the trucking industry is being influenced by this regulation. There's kind of an indirect boost foods flown in from South America and faraway places.


>> Yes, as you saw in the graph I showed for agricultural products, less than 1% of agricultural products are shipped by air. So I don't wanna misspeak, but I imagine it's kind of very niche high end products that are coming in by air. Most are what either come by water, or depending where they're coming from perhaps if they're coming from South America, they may come by other mechanisms rail, if there's kind of a decent rail system.

But just generally because of the volume of agricultural products, they aren't often shipped by air.
>> Alright, yeah, it seems like there's so many interesting indirect effects from from this regulation. But yeah, it seems like if air is only 1%, then it might not have such a big impact.


>> Or may make room for air. So now they say well, at first we were on the cost of shipping it via on road trucking because it was cheaper than air but then now we know it's gonna take 38 hours longer to get my shrimp from Washington to Florida.

It may make it more economically feasible to start using more air transportation. So this is what we're kind of curious to get this granular data again to know kind of okay at what point for what style of shipments, what commodities are we seeing these big changes or maybe even small incremental changes away through to other alternatives.


>> Right. Well, Dr. Settles, thank you so much for your talk and answering really interesting questions that come from your research. Yeah, that's the end of our talk, and I'll turn over to Adam.
>> Thank you, everybody. Thank you, Dr. Settles, and Lingxi. Everyone have a wonderful day.


>> You too. Thank you guys. Have a great weekend.

Description of the video:

>> website, Sanya comes to us having taken degrees at Swarthmore in Economics, a Master's at UW Madison in Urban and Regional Planning, and then taking her doctorate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She and I have worked together on numerous kinds of energy things, and nice complementary aspects for socioeconomic stuff and my technical things, and we do things quite nicely.

Sarah if we could go to David, please. David Konisky. David is a political scientist by training, undergraduate degree at Washington University in St. Louis, masters at Yale, and then taking the MIT doctorate in the mid two thousands. So David comes to us from George Town with a nice perspective on the political and social elements.

So together, Sanya and David have gotten together and they have thought about the the socioeconomic implications of energy costs, particularly in the context of our current COVID crisis. So, I'm gonna function as the moderator here, we'll go for 40 or so minutes and let our let our presenters talk about their material.

And I encourage you them to submit questions or thoughts into the chat, I'll have access to that. And at about 12:45 or so will will end and I'll try and organize a little discussion there with your chat inquiry. So, David and Sanya, I turn it over to you guys, and energy insecurity in the time of COVID-19, please.


>> Thank you,John. Thank you also Sarah and others, thank you to all the participants for being here today. So, I'm going to tee us off and then David will take over midway through the presentation, so you get a little bit of a flavor from both of us. And I just would like to acknowledge that this is shared work, but also our two collaborators, hopefully, I think are here with us today, they are amazing.

Michelle Graf and Trevor Mehmet, both PhD students in the O'Neill School. So what I would like to present today is our study or ongoing study on energy insecurity during a time of COVID. And I would like to begin by acknowledging our funders, we've been very lucky to have very generous support from the National Science Foundation from IU through the environmental resilience Institute, and the Office of Vice President of Research as well as the Alfred P Sloan Foundation.

So let me begin by describing what energy insecurity is so that we're all on the same page. Energy insecurity is generally defined as an inability to meet one's household energy demands. So what this could mean for example is that one might not be able to pay their energy bill, or it could also mean that a household doesn't actually have access to electricity, for example if they're unable to pay their energy bills and it has been disconnected from their utility provider.

Now, we know that energy insecurity is a pervasive problem in the United States, though the degree to which we actually don't know which is part of the motivation for this study. And we know that energy insecurity when a household cannot pay for their energy or don't have access to their energy, we know that there are severe consequences such as mental and physical health implications.

It can affect one's mental health in quite obvious ways if you don't have access, let's say, to cooling during a very hot day. But it can also affect people physically and with a more extreme case of through deaths from extreme heat or cold exposure. And this is actually not a small problem in the United States although we weigh under estimated prevalence.

But here I've just included a headline from CNN from a few years ago of a New Jersey a woman who was disconnected a day or two before, she was on oxygen and she died once her power was disconnected. This kind of story is quite common. So we're actually living through a very interesting and terrible time besides just the pandemic, but also with climate change and the fires that are ravaging the West Coast.

There are many outages that are currently in place as a result of PG&E, the utility provider needing to essentially ensure the safety of their electric lines, and so they have these forced outages. So we can learn a little bit from the forced outages as to what happens to the households that face these conditions that no longer overnight have, for example, have access to electricity.

So we can see here on the right hand side for example, some of the the new stories coming out of this. This was just from last year's blackouts, and some of these stories where mothers do not keep their children warm, for example. Parents struggle with their children to put them on electronic devices, which is all the more important right now and the time of homeschooling.

And I think that the average price of the groceries that a family lost in this last round of blackouts in 2019 was about $300. Now some people can absorb the cost of replacing all their food in the refrigerator in their freezer when they lose it, but others can't.

And if you're already struggling from material hardship, then replacing $300 of groceries is truly devastating. Now we know a little bit as I noted about the prevalence of energy insecurity within the United States. The primary way that we do is through the Energy Information Administration which administers a survey every four or five years, that includes some questions on challenges that households might face paying their bills.

So we know from the last year of data available from 2015, that 31% of respondents said that they had difficulty paying their energy bills, or maintaining adequate temperatures in their home. And 20% of this national sample said that as a result of their high energy bills, they had to forego buying other necessities such as food.

So this this really highlights how energy insecurity threatens, or exacerbates other forms of material hardship if a household has to make these very difficult trade offs, for example, if they put money towards food, or put money towards health care. We also know from other studies that the energy burden faced by some households is much higher than others.

So what this graph shows is that the average household spends about 3.5% of their income on energy. But that if we look across certain social demographics, we see that some households spend much, much more than 3.5%. So low income city dwelling households, for example, spend over 7%. Households that identify as African Americans spend about 5.5% of their income on energy.

Now these data sources are great and they they give us a certain sense of the problem, but they do not provide a very comprehensive view of just how prevalent energy insecurity is. And next slide, David, thank you. One can also surmise and as we've confirmed that the pandemic is actually going to exacerbate energy insecurity.

So what this slide shows is that the demand for energy over the pandemic has increased. So this is what's called a load curve. You're looking at the time of day, so hours of the day, and how much electricity or energy a household is demanding. Then you can see that during weekdays as well as weekends, there's been an increase in the amount of energy that a household demands.

Now, this means that these households end up paying a lot more for electricity as a result, whereas formerly it might have been the case that an employer for example, might have paid for that electricity. Now, during the pandemic, there have been many states that have decided that they will put utility disconnection protections in place to help these vulnerable households.

And so what these protections are essentially as they tell all the utilities. Within the states, that over a certain time period they're not allowed to disconnect houses that can't pay for their energy bills. What I would say, roughly half the states adopted some form of protection, particularly in the early months of the pandemic, starting around mostly in April.

But now as we are six, seven months into the pandemic, we're seeing many of these states letting these protections expire. This map is actually a little outdated, these protections are changing on almost a daily basis. But what you can see here is that many states recently had expirations, and many more have expirations as of the end of September.

And when households are not protected from being disconnected, of course, then they will face these certain forms of mental and physical stress. Now we've already seen just many headlines over the the past few months as these utility protections are expiring that we can see that households, 35 million in one state, or 35 million across the country, and pretty big numbers in various states are quite compromised as a result of these lapsing protections.

Okay, so the research questions that we have posed as a result of this project is one, just a very broad question, given the paucity of data that exists right now in terms of the problem, we asked the question of just how prevalent is energy insecurity within the United States.

But then secondly, has this insecurity or have rates of insecurity actually gone up as a result of the pandemic? We asked, what factors then lead households to be more or less energy insecure, both generally as well as during the pandemic? And what are the implications for households when they are energy insecure?

So, for example, what kinds of cooking strategies might they adapt in terms of their behaviour as well as other forms of material hardship, how they spend their money, where they seek assistance, if they have access to assistance, if they have access to legal services, and so forth. So this is our project.

Now I will talk about some of the conceptual work that is underpinning our work. So, the the broad literature, we've bucketed here, one is the literature on energy insecurity, and understanding the problem. The second is thinking about the public health outcomes of being insecure. A third is thinking about the difference between acute and chronic insecurity.

So long term insecurity every single month. For example, a household might not be able to pay its energy bills versus acute, if there are shocks, for example, that send a household into this state of insecurity. And of course, the pandemic is one such form that might send a household into acute insecurity.

And we also pull from the literature on material hardship as well as the evolving literature on energy justice, which I'll say, is the founding framework that Dave, and I, and Michelle, and Trevor have adopted as we've thought about these challenges. So we're always thinking about just generally, what are the justice implications of our evolving energy systems?

And this energy insecurity is a prime one. So, contributions of this work. One is to produce quantitative analysis, and actually have data that we can use to get a sense of the magnitude of the problem. And the data come from a survey, a sample of Americans under 200% of the federal poverty line, as I'll describe in just a slide or two.

We also are able to establish a pre-pandemic baseline. And so get a sense of who is energy insecure, even predating the pandemic. And then also have these measures of post, beginning of pandemic, how are households changing in their insecurity? And then we also have multiple measures of energy insecurity.

Which we range in severity, if you can just press the arrow over David, yeah, here we go. So the least severe would be, you cannot pay your energy bill, which of course is very severe in terms of consequence for a household that's in that condition. But if they cannot pay their energy bill, then they may, or will likely receive a notice of disconnection from their utility provider.

And then the most severe form of insecurity then is being disconnected from the utility provider. So, in our work, we're leveraging this schema. Okay, so, a few points about research design. Our survey, or our design for our broader project is to administer a survey on a panel of individuals.

And we are approaching this panel at four different points in time over the course of an entire year. So here we've created a timeline for you. You can see that the pandemic began in March, well, technically, it began before March, but this is when it really was truly obvious to everyone that the pandemic was here.

And this is when we started to see extreme unemployment increases. We then administered our first survey within two months of the beginning of those experiences in April and May. We also recently administered our second round of survey in August, which was to account for all the warm months.

So think about what might happen when it's particularly hot outside and we have heat waves. And what kinds of behaviors or challenges a household might face if they are unable to pay for their energy but they still need to be cool. Our third wave of survey data administration will be around December or January.

The objective here is to get a particularly cold month, to think through some of the implications for households when they are facing very cold conditions. I'll note that people die more frequently from hot temperatures. However, in very cold temperatures, one or a household might resort to particularly unsafe behaviors, such as using space heaters, for example, or even using an electric oven that's opened to heat a room.

And then our final form our final wave will be in March or April, approximately one year after the wave began. So, we're tracking the same households, approximately 2000 households, over the course of this entire year, through different seasons. Our first survey in Wave 1, we had 2,381 households, and these are adults that the household income is within 200% of the federal poverty line.

So these are low income households. Our survey was administered online, it was approximately 10 to 15 minutes long, and it was administered by YouGov, to a nationally representative sample of this population, the 200% of the federal poverty line. And we asked questions about energy insecurity, including the various degrees of insecurity.

We have questions that identify on certain demographics, behavioral responses, health, both mental and physical health, the degree to which households take or apply for government assistance, as well as a variety of housing conditions. And we also ask questions about how energy insecurity was in the past year, in the past three months, and in the past month.

And what we'll present on today are just points specifically from the past month, in the past year. We also were very fortunate to be able to have Indiana samples specifically, and this is also a representative. Which is pretty incredible for a survey firm to be able to pull such a sample, but it's also within 200% of the federal poverty line.

So today what we're presenting is both include the results from the national sample as well as the Indiana specific sample.
>> Okay, sorry, I had to find my unmute button. Great, so I'm David. Thank you, Sanya for getting us started and thanks to Sarah and John for hosting us.

Sanya did an incredible job considering I was the one getting the PowerPoint slide. So that was very fluid, so Kudos to you. So what I wanna do is sort of take us through some of the results. And as Sanya noted, I will talk both about the national sample but as well as have a few slides on the Indiana survey.

The results we'll focus mostly got on our initial wave. So think about the time period of around April, May, being sort of the period of when that that survey was in the field. But I'll also share some preliminary findings from tthe second wave which was in August, as Sanya mentioned.

So the first research question, if you recall is that we're really curious about is trying to get a better handle on the prevalence of energy insecurity. And to see the rate at which that varies by different sort of population subgroups. So in this graphic, what you're looking at is sort of a select number of household characteristics and some demographics across our three measures of energy insecurity.

So there's a lot to unpack in this figure. But what you're looking at is for proportions of our respondents that indicated that during the past year or during the past month whether they were unable to pay energy bill. And then similarly, where did they receive a disconnection notice from their utility provider, and then the blue is they're actually disconnected.

The full bar represents the proportion that during some point in last year had sort of met one of these or responded in this way to these energy and security measures. And then the hash marks gives you a sense of just those in the last month. So that's sort of the orientation of the figure.

So what's quite striking about these just prevalence results is that you see really big differences across different segments of the population. So one of the really interesting findings is that people who are living in poor housing conditions. So here, think about people and houses who they may be drafty, they may have mold.

They may have broken or not functioning well HVAC systems. And it's in those cases where people are struggling the most with these energy insecurity measures, right? Both in terms of inability to pay bills, as well as receiving notices and actually being disconnected. Simply people who are in households where someone relies on a lot on an electronic medical device, right?

So the very people who need electricity to maintain their well-being are more likely to be energy insecure across each of our measures compared to those that do not. And then in terms of, you also see something very similar with households of children under five. And then also we find very prominent differences across sort of racial and ethnic groups, right?

One of the core things we are learning which furbish confirms what others have spoken to in the literature is that black and Hispanic households are facing much more severe energy insecurity compared to their white counterparts. So this is just one sort of quick sort of analysis. It gives you a sense of how these measures vary across different segments of the population.

Just as a reminder, all of these respondents sort of meet our income threshold. So these are people who are at to represent of the federal poverty line or lower as a household income. So what does that mean? So those are our survey results, but one of the things we can do then is sort of take those estimates to get a sense of just how prominent a problem this is across the entire US population.

That's what we do in this table. And sort of the top part of the table expresses this in terms of the number of households. And the bottom looks at number of individuals. So if you sort of use our estimates then and sort of come up with these aggregate numbers, you see that we're talking about 4 million households.

5 million households at some point during the last year, were unable to pay the energy bill and would receive a notice that their service may be disconnected. And about 2 million people overall actually had their service disconnected. One early indication that things got worse during the early months of the pandemic is that a really large percentage portion of those overall numbers are current just in the last month.

Which for our respondents again means sort of April, May time period of this of this year. Those are certain terms of households like a number of integral individuals we're talking about. 25 million individuals over the past year who were unable to pay energy bill, about half of those would have occurred in the early years, sorry, the early bunch, the pandemic and you can see the similar numbers.

So this more than anything else shows I think, illustrates that this is a pretty big problem. This is not something that is just happening to a few vulnerable households across the country. This is an issue that is quite prevalent, and so I noted it's sort of an underappreciated form of material hardship.

Okay, so the next question is what factors predict chronic energy insecurity and the sort of statistical analysis that we do. And also your results from is logistic regression, which we're gonna look at the correlates of both chronic and acute energy insecurity. We are accounting for state level phenomenon that might be sort of common to our respondents that might affect somebody outcomes.

And just for the remodeling boss who might be more convinced by a more standard linear regression model, all of our results are consistent sort of regardless of what kind of approach you take. So what the regression analysis allows us to do is look to see what the independent effects are of different demographics, as well as different household conditions sort of holding other factors constant, right?

So you can sort of look at these as are the independent effects of, for example, needing an electronic device in your household or having a household that defies as black or Hispanic. So what these odds ratios which we show here, display and we have results both for the last year as well as the last month, is that if there's an odds ratio above one, then you are more likely to have responded in the survey that you were unable to pay the energy bill.

That you received a shutoff notice and then in fact you were disconnected. And what I wanna highlight in these results is that those factors that sort of seem to come out in that sort of descriptive bar graph table or chart that I showed you a few minutes ago, all for the hand, all sort of remain to a moresort of sophisticated regression approach.

And some of the really strong determinants or correlates these measures of energy and security are households with children under five, those relying on an electronic medical device. Households that are black or Hispanic, particularly poor households. So remember again, our samples are people who are Have household incomes of 200% of the federal poverty line or lower.

And what we show, at least over the last year, is that those who are at 100% or below are particularly hard hit. And then, notably, people who are living in housing conditions which are on average not as great are suffering the most as well. So what's interesting about these results, if you sort of look on the left hand side and on the right hand side is that they're pretty consistent over the last year and the last month.

But some of the effects over the last month get bigger, right? So the way to sort of think about this is, who's getting hardest hit, or who was most affected in terms of energy insecurity during that early period of time of the COVID pandemic? And here we see that effects of race really sort of stand out, as well as those of poor housing conditions, and families needing an electronic medical device.

So long story short here, the point is that these demographic characteristics are pretty strong indicators of who's facing energy insecurity across the country. Okay, so let me try to say more about the impact of the COVID pandemic. I think we can learn a little bit just from looking at those two graphics as I just presented.

But we designed the survey to be a little bit more specific, a little bit more fine tuned to try to get at this particular question, which is, in what ways the COVID pandemic exacerbated energy insecurity. And the way we did that is we asked a series of additional questions that you sort of can think about as being COVID specific, right?

So these range from asking people if they, or someone in their household, had symptoms of COVID or if they had a positive test. We looked at people who had lost lost income from job loss. So these could be people who were unemployed or who were furloughed or had reduced hours.

We asked about a whole series of COVID impacts, in particular, whether people were less able to pay their rent or mortgage, or meet other sort of household needs. And we also asked whether or not people received their stimulus checks as part of the CARES act. So what this graph is showing is individuals in terms of how they responded to these questions, alongside these energy insecurity indicators.

And what you can see, if you look at people who have some COVID symptoms themselves or someone in their household had these symptoms, they're more likely to be energy insecure, that's implied from this graph. Certainly people who faced some sort of economic hardship as a result of the pandemic were also, perhaps unsurprisingly, more likely to face energy insecurity.

And I think I wanna sort of highlight the very last part of the graph, which shows that the stimulus checks, the first thing to note is we've been finding pretty high prevalence of people who have not received their check. In our most recent survey, we found that just about 30%, I think it was, of the people had received their CARES check.

So that's kind of a striking statistic on its own. But certainly people who are not receiving this additional assistance which is intended obviously to help them meet their household needs, they are more likely to face energy insecurity, in terms of not being able to pay a bill and receiving shut-off notices and also being disconnected.

These kinds of results, just if you're curious, hold up in a regression framework. So this is just showing you sort of coefficients from a similar kind of model that we did before. These models control for all those other factors I already showed you. So on top of race, on top of housing conditions, on top of households needing medical device, people who are disproportionately affected by the COVID pandemic, this is uniquely contributing to their energy insecurity, right?

So the big inference to make from these results is that the pandemic and the economic dislocation that has resulted has really exacerbated energy insecurity, right? So people who may chronically be suffering from this problem or experiencing this problem, they are more likely to even be exacerbated for those individuals.

And there probably are new people who are being brought into an energy insecurity stage, whereas they may have been more energy secure pre pandemic. So just to sort of summarize some of those findings, the pandemic we think has really deepened energy insecurity. As I already noted, there are these independent effects of the pandemic as we've measured them, which are contributing to our understanding of who's energy insecure.

And the good news about the CARES act is that it seems to have helped. For those people who actually received the support, it did reduce their chances of being energy insecure. The challenge is that not as many people received their support as probably should have. Okay, so those were the national sort of wave one results.

I'm gonna spend just a few minutes quickly going through some of the Indiana results and then give you sort of a sense of what we've been finding in our subsequent wave two. So as Sonja mentioned, we've basically ran the exact same survey instruments among a state representative sample here in Indiana.

This graphic just simply shows you where our respondents come from. And the survey was designed to to be geographically representative. So we're sort of hitting each part of the state but also to be representative of, again, the same income population here in Indiana. And what's remarkable, I mean, I think, remarkable, or at least noteworthy, is that we find basically the same thing, right.

The same factors that exist and come out as being important in our national survey emerge in the Indiana specific survey. Now in particular, race and ethnicity, for Blacks and Hispanics are much more likely to face energy security across all of our measures. It's particularly noteworthy that as the measures or as the energy insecurity gets more and more severe, so our measures are more, they're more severe,hese race factors are particularly prominent.

But we're also finding that poor housing conditions, the amount people are spending on energy, all kind of hang out in the Indiana survey. We're still sort of working through the Indiana results, but I think that the big lesson is that Indiana, we're special in many ways, but the problem is certainly present in an Indiana as well.

Okay, so how have things gotten worse over the course of the summer? As Sonja, we've just gotten results back from the second wave of our survey, which was in the field in the middle, so the early to mid part of August. And our whole purpose for doing this panel design is allowing us to track households over the course of a full year.

And the August timing in particular is important because it's a hot month, right? So it's a period of time where people may have additional demand to use electricity for cooling needs. So just to give you a sense of what we learned from from wave two, and this will be a brief part of the presentation.

One of the new areas we're asking in wave two, is we're trying to get a handle on what kind of utility debt people are beginning to accrue, right. And one of the things we've learned is that nearly two out of the five households that we interviewed, that we surveyed, has some sort of utility debt, right.

So this is on top of other kinds of debt, certainly these households have credit card debt. They have student loan debt, all the other kinds of debts that people tend to have. But these are cases where people have a balance on their utility bill, right? So these are the very people who are at risk of receiving a disconnection notice and being disconnected from their utility provider.

About 20%, I believe have utility debt of about $100 or more and about 1% had over $1,000 or more in debt. So now, one of the implications of the shut-off policy protections that Sonia was talking about earlier was that while they put, they were more toria on actual disconnections.

They are not designed to alleviate the long term reality that phil sought to pay the bills that they use, that associate they use. So just because you're not gonna get shut off does not mean you won't have to go back in time and pay off the debt that you've been accruing.

So one of the things we're tracking our surveys is how bad utility the debt burden is getting for daddy's low income households. So a couple other interesting numbers 38% of respondents across both ways had received their stimulus checked. We should probably emphasize they're only 38%, right? So this is a population that this aid would have been most helpful for and our results show that would make a difference, at least for us relieving some energy insecurity.

But strikingly, just under 40% of our respondents actually received their carers check. We also found out about over 7% of house individuals in our survey were evicted over the summer. And just in terms of some other trade-offs or other interesting factoids, 64% require prescription medication. And 18% of those cannot fill their prescription since COVID began.

So we're trying to sort of track, now our work is really about energy and security. But we're trying to track more generally how energy security sort of fits into the larger sort of portfolio of material hardship that these households are facing. In terms of the energy and security measures themselves in terms of wave too, or now really looking across from both ways of our surveys.

Since May, our best estimates are about 20% of these low income households faced a month where they could not pay a bill, right? About 50% received a shut-off notice and 6 to 7% were actually disconnected. Again, it bears repeating that this is a period of time when we had these protection policies in place which are now largely expiring.

So we have every reason to expect that the rates of disconnection are going to increase In the coming months. And that's particularly problematic, given we're heading into the colder part of the year where people are reliant on these services. The effects based on race and ethnicity are quite prominence.

This is again, sorta aggregating across both of our surveys. You can see that Blacks, for example, are more than twice as likely not to have been able to pay an energy bill compared to Whites, similarly for Hispanics. And even more striking is the difference between Blacks, and Hispanics, and Whites both receiving a notice and being disconnected, right?

So the racial disparities are really, they're front and center in all of the analysis we've been doing, and a topic that we are spending a lot of time thinking about, okay? Let me just finish with some discussion implications, and we're very interested to hear people's questions and have some discussion.

So we've already sort of mentioned seasonal implications, right? So one of the ideas in doing this research is that, the energy and security may vary in intensity because of the time of year, right? So summer presents his own set of problems because of how hot it gets and the need for cooling whether it be air conditioners or fans, whether it's having well insulated homes, etc.

There are different set of challenges that emerged during the winter months when it gets extremely cold. One of the things we'll try to do in our next survey is to expand beyond electricity. A lot of people will use other sources of energy in order to keep their homes warm, while that can be natural gas, it could be heating oil.

And we want to extend our thinking to those kinds of sources as well, as I think made pretty clear. There are these really prevalent racial disparities in energy and security. And obviously, this is not the only place where we see racial disparities and health outcomes and economic outcomes.

And one of the things we're trying to unpack is, really wish there is sort of systematic biases or discrimination or other kind of inequities that are driving these results around these surveys of disparities that we're finding. And there's this compounding effect, right? So we see racial disparities here, but as we all know people of color have been disproportionately hurt economically because of the pandemic.

They're more likely to face health implications of COVID in terms of both getting symptoms, or getting COVID, as well as higher mortality rates. So all these things are sort of interacting in a way that's quite devastating, that's something we wanna be able to think more about. As we've noted, the shock moratoriums are basically coming to an end.

We've been tracking these since the beginning of the pandemics. Underneath these emergency measures are sort of a patchwork of state policies that provides some protections for individuals. The emergency provisions added some additional protections. But as these expire, we wanna understand what this is going to mean for energy insecurity.

And in all likelihood, it's going to exacerbate the problems that we are demonstrating through our research. I mentioned the problem of debt accrual. And then, another dimension which we really haven't talked too much about today, that we're studying through the surveys and in other work is, thinking about where government can step in, right?

So there are a couple of government programs at the federal level that are designed to help people with this problem. The low income, home, I always get this act this one, the Home Energy Assistance Program, I think it is. A likely for short, is designed to help people meet for acute energy needs, right?

So if you can't meet your bill for one month, you can get some assistance. If you have sort of a breakdown in equipment, you can get some assistance. But this is a small program that is underfunded and it is that funds get exhausted early in the year often, so they're not available during hot summer months.

So clearly there's more need for these kinds of assistance programs. There was sort of a short term infusion of dollars through the Cares Act into the likely program. But certainly, not enough to meet a demand, but that program is designed to deal with sort of acute problems, all right?

And what's lacking is programs to help people improve their housing conditions. For example, so there is a federal program, the Weatherization Assistance Program which is intended to provide resources to help folks insulate their homes, make sure that their equipment is working efficiently, etc. But that program, she was pretty small, and we know that there are disparities and who gets access to those resources.

So clearly, given the material hardship people are facing in this realm. Additional government assistance would be one solution to meeting this challenge. And for us as a research team, we're just starting to get started on this, we have a lot of work to do around energy insecurity. The research we present today is really about the prevalence of the problem, and who's more likely to experience it.

Our surveys are also designed to. Try to understand how people are coping, right both behaviorally as well as financially. So we will be continuing to ask questions in those areas and we'll do analysis as we go through subsequent waves of the survey, we sort of mentioned for the patchwork upticks, neck disconnection protection policies.

We wanna understand the impact of those policies. We're curious about what people do when they face energy insecurity, when they receive a shutoff notice for example, are they able to access legal services? What other kind of resources are they able to find to help them through those challenging times.

Raising questions about trust and utility providers and the degree to which people's trust changes their behavior or changes the way they sort of cope with these kinds of problems. So we have a very full plate on our hands. And we expect this to sort of keep us busy for the coming months and longer.

And we're very interested to hear what kind of questions you have. And part of her motivation for presenting research like this is that we are sort of constantly learning from interactions and people's feedback and it helps her guide them the kind of questions that we take on. So thank you very much and look forward to our discussion.


>> Super, super, thank you guys. Thank you very much for the nice presentation. Let me remind our participants, you can send your questions in via chat. I've got a couple of them here in front of me. And so we can start with those. I've taken a few notes here and I've got some questions on my own.

So let me go ahead and begin with some questions that we received from the audience here. And David, I think you touched upon it a fair amount, and David, I don't know if you wanna scroll back or if you wanna put your screen to maybe non present mode so we can refer to the slides in a more effective way.

But I think he maybe covered some of these questions in some of your comments, does your survey the survey tools that you use and the results that you got capture the effects and the impacts of the state run Energy Assistance programmes during the time of COVID?
>> So I can take that.

So we Insomnia may have to refresh my memory. So we ask people so one of the questions we ask people is if they sought financial assistance to help pay energy bills. And we asked about a whole different sort of portfolio potential sources, right? So it could range from, no, I asked a friend or a family member or I sought out assistance from a faith based organization or another or nonprofit organization.

And we certainly we asked about access to federal assistance programs. I believe we also asked about sort of a government agency you in general, I don't recall if we specified a state versus a local signing might remember, but I we haven't looked closely at those data yet. I couldn't give you a sense of what proportion of respondents sort of chose that path or were successful in getting assistance from a state agency.

That's where the first answer to the question. Second thing I would note is we know locally, for example, that people have the ability to get some assistance through sort of government programs that are being administered there at the city level or at the county level. So it's certainly possible that there are other sources of financial assistance, at least in the short term during the pandemic, I don't have great sense that that's available to people sort of writ large during quote unquote, normal times.

So I would add that as well.
>> I'll just add one other thing, the lykki program that David talked about, as well as the wapp to the short term infusion of money to help pay for a bill as well as the money to help weatherize one's home are both functionally state programs.

They're actually national programs but the money funnels then through the states determine how to allocate it and what the eligibility requirements are and so forth. So, it's possible that for question, you were actually thinking about the like, even the walk program. We do we not only ask about it, but we control for it in our studies and I think you might have seen in the Indiana one in particular, that light heap is important and it does help with energy and security.

But again, it's very short term temporary assistance.
>> That inquiry is about federal programs government programs. Another facet to that in the second part of this question is have nonprofits had a significant impact have there been some non government kinds of impacts in terms of helping energy security either historically or in in the frame of your of your survey a time.


>> We, Michelle's on this call and maybe I'm just calling her out without being able to see if
>> Michelle has done yeah, thumbs up. Okay, so Michelle has done quite a bit of perusing of our data in terms of nonprofit organizations and financial assistance. And I think that across the board, what she's finding is that all of these forms of assistance can help.

And that's just generally from our long term work on energy just as we find that nonprofits please play a really important role in Energy Justice Programs and in helping vulnerable communities. So these findings are reaffirmed though we don't in any of the papers we have right now. We don't focus very specifically on the nonprofit assistance.


>> Okay, good. Now I'm delighted to ask this next question here. What effect could energy and security during COVID have on the transition to clean energy? So we're all transitioning, and there's some economic and social implications to that energy justice implication. So what about that, relative to this transition that we're sort of in


>> That's a tough one.
>> Yeah. It's interesting question, and to be candid, when we first started talking about doing research around energy and security. That was our frame. That was what we were thinking about. Right? We began this work start couple years ago, obviously pre-COVID. And there are many ways in which the energy transition could, for example, raise electricity prices for some people in some areas, right.

So as you sort of move away from fossil fuels to renewables and some places, that's has very little cost implications. Other places may drive up electricity costs, as utilities, modernize their grids and seek recovery for those investments that could increase rates. Right? So COVID aside I think the two big points to make is that some people across the country just pay more for electricity, right?

So they're gonna be disproportionately affected by those kinds of changes. We also know that's sort of the energy burden, which is sort of this idea that it's sort of how much of your disposable income do you pay for it for energy needs. There are disparities in that. It turns out that people of colour, for example, pay more of their sort of disposable income on energy than then sort of white folks.

And that's controlling for things like housing conditions or other factors like region in the country that might drive absurd energy costs. So I think it's a long way of saying sort of energy security is not specific to COVID at all. Certainly it's gotten worse. But this is a problem that's, pretty prevalent across the country.

And anything that results in higher energy prices is gonna have these two disproportionally
>> I'll just add on top of that, that one possible intervention or public policy type approach that one could take is to help these households with energy efficiency as well as provide them with access to clean energy technologies such as solar panels.

Right so the energy efficiency would bring down their their energy bills. Solar panels would allow them to offset their energy bills, and possibly even sell some of their electricity to the grid. Solar panels or storage units or something like that would also help these households have more energy autonomy.

And not be so reliant on their electricity provider which, from what we're finding mistrust and decades of poor relations, I think really harm the the interaction between the two. So I think that there, there's possibility for, Government assistance that is moving towards a clean energy transition to specifically help these households.


>> Good, good, good, other questions from our audience, type them in, I'll do it, let me let me carry the ball in the meantime. And David, you alluded to this a little bit, your assessment on energy insecurity is in the context of other hardships, use as terms other hardships, what is the relative percentage or impact?

You had one graph, it was a nice graph, a bar graph at the beginning, I think it averaged out at about 5% of income. We talked about, you implied this business about regressiveness, as your income goes down, the impacts go up. When we compare that with housing or medical expenses or clothing or food, there's assistant programmes, there's also hardship.

Where does energy fit in that gamut of other dimensions and hardships. Either of you, I mean, David, you brought it up.
>> Sonia do you have sort of, a quantitative sense of what that looks like?
>> No, we don't ask actually for full information about all of their bills so that we have a sense of how much they're paying for energy versus other things.

We do ask a question, though about as a result of paying your energy bills, whether you have a difficult time or you must forego expenses on other things. At the end of the first survey so the first three months of the pandemic, it was a 28% of our respondents said yes, I don't remember the wave too, but I think it was much higher.

So, you know, at least a third of our respondents face these trade offs, I'll just add some anecdotal evidence that from talking to. Actually the NAACP has a chapter in Gary and they've rolled out this really innovative I think program where they have both short term as well as long term assistance.

So they've targeted households, low income households that are struggling to pay their energy bills and they're providing immediate financial assistance to help these households pay their bill. But also working with the households and weatherization programs, as well as financial literacy and all kinds of, efforts to help them in the long run, be able to pay their energy bills.

And what I really like about this is the kind of dual approach, and now I'm losing my train of thought as to how that pertains to energy and expenses. One thing that I've heard from speaking with the representative who's leading this charge. Is just how many households within this region that they're working on through this NAAC program have faced these very trade offs this summer in particular because their children are at home.

And their children aren't in school and they either homeschooled or they were just home through the whole summer. And some of these parents are at home, some of them are working like on the front line, right? And so the challenge is to what kinds of things can they do for their children to make sure that they're babysat functionally right, so that they have something to do.

And so, it was noted that these households are spending a lot of money on electronic devices or tablets or even a pool or something to just occupy their children during that time. And that actually is more important than putting money towards food for example, or energy.
>> Just swipe, yeah, I'm sure there's data out there, I'm sure there's rough percentages that you could qualitatively compare.

I mean, is that is that 5%, is that half of what, housing burdens are, I suspect it's less than the housing burden. I assume a housing burden is 10, 12, 14, 15% of an income, I assume food is up high too. So when we think about the the the impacts of this hardship relative to others, and there's always not enough resources to go around and how do we effectively help and stimulate.

And obviously the synergies you talked about Sonia are really important. If we can do something that helps employment and helps jobs and maybe even some other aspects of energy security at the same time of health impacts, that's a wonderful thing. Let's see, do I have any more questions, I don't see any there, that gives the moderator the chance with the three more minutes left to choose one of my own.

Here's a zinger, you started with the stuff there was some EIA data, right? Yeah, this is, I assume that EIA data is aggregated all energy costs, so, inside of that is electricity and natural gas and transportation fuels. So I think maybe, it's almost just a suggestion to look at in the future, very important aspect of hardship, I would say in our very mobile, American society is the ability to move around and we're very, transportational.

We're very personal auto centric, and so if you can't pay for insurance, if you can't pay for the fuel for your car, if you can't pay for payments to your vehicle. This to me is energy insecurity in the same sense, you can't go to your job you can't go to the doctor kind of thing.

Thoughts on that notion relative to this stuff you did on electricity in the home.
>> Yeah, I completely agree with you, I think that it's it's another aspect of the same problem. Though with the pandemic, people are driving less and so one could surmise that there are some savings there that could then be applied to home electricity bills, or natural gas bills.

But I agree with you, that's also, equally problematic.
>> I fear they're driving less because the schools are closed and they're out of work and those two big factors they're unable to move around. Okay, we've got a minute or so left here, any final thoughts or questions from our audience?


>> I should have for the singing children in the background, I don't know if you guys can hear them but I,
>> Do have singing children, I'm missing it.
>> I'm glad you're missing it.
>> A little life there, thank you guys very much for your thought provoking and interesting work.

I wish you the best as you move forward with the very important questions, and I think Sarah, you have a word or two to finalize with.
>> Yeah, thanks, John, let me second your thanks to Sonia and David, very important research and it's just incredibly interesting. Thank you, John for moderating this session, and thanks to our audience for tuning in and for your thoughtful questions.

We look forward to your participation in future resilient speaker sessions. The dates and times are on the screen, so please look to the ERI or IPE website for the calendar registration link. Thanks again and have a wonderful weekend everybody, Bye bye.
>> Thanks, everyone.