A New Way to Finance Renewable Energy | Michael Kennedy | TEDxMiltonAcademy

[Music] ladies and gentlemen I have here tonight some bad news the world is getting warmer and it's mostly your fault now I bet most of you sitting here tonight care about global warming want to see things get better and not worse but the fact is everything that the research tells us about our individual carbon Footprints is that they're really only based on a very few things and few decisions that we make over the course of our entire life it's the car we drive it's where we live where we work and very critically the level of wealth and income of the country that we live in what that means for pretty much every American and I would wager especially those of you sitting here tonight you have made the planet a lot worse than most of the other 8 billion people living in this world now I also have some good news if we do end up living in a hotter world it's not going to be fun it's not going to be a world any of us should want to live in but you will all probably be okay and that's because another thing the research tells us is that the more resources you have the better off the country that you live in the more developed the place that you live in is the more you're able to respond to the changes in climate the more you're able to adapt to all the negative effects that we're going to see if we do end up living in a hotter world now I'm here to talk about this tonight because not only it is it a major issue in thinking about things like income inequality but it's also a major obstacle in our entire ability as a human race to build the things that we need to fight climate change to build the infrastructure that we need to make sure that we don't live in a much hotter world that's two or three or four degrees Centigrade of above where we're living now so I think we have a solution to this problem which I'm going to talk about later but right now I'm just going to highlight what I'm talking about here and this disparity of outcomes and and the effects of global warming this is a map of the world um the rhetoric areas and the redder countries are what the un's human development indexes indicated as lower levels of development The Greener countries are higher levels of development and what you notice here is there's a big concentration of underdeveloped countries in the equatorial zones in the areas in the hotter areas of the world around the equator whereas the global North is a lot richer it's uh the United States and Europe and China and Russia now we know that if the planet does get a lot warmer it's going to be bad everywhere nobody here is going to get out of this um with any kind of benefit but we also know that the things that are very very closely associated with the changing climate la like floods like droughts like heat waves tropical Cyclones mosquito-borne illnesses these are going to be a lot more frequent in these equatorial zones than they are in the global North when the UN counts the number of deaths directly attributable to climate change about 99 of them happen in developing countries most of which are located in the global South now this is of course kind of ironic because the biggest polluters the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases are all us living up here in the North in the United States and China and in Europe so we are the most responsible for this warming world yet we are better able to deal with the consequences of climate change than a lot of the other people who are not doing so much to harm the planet now what do we uh but you know this happens here in the United States as well uh just think about the California wildfires for a second this was you know just some images here reminding us of how truly devastating this was uh and continues to be this is a problem that we know is connected to climate change we know these fires are here to stay for the time being and probably only getting worse overcoming decades it's going to be a chronic thing really everybody who's living in the American West is going to deal with and you know we've seen millions of Acres burned and and millions of towns around thousands of towns burned down to the ground and you know the same thing happens though here we see uh the rich or much able much better able to cope with these kinds of natural disasters than the poor the wealthy can buy things like air purifiers which cost several hundred dollars they only work in one room they're very expensive to run they can do things like buy backup power generators for their homes a lot of times these wildfires will knock out power in the areas that they happen and people be without power but if you can afford it you can still cool and heat your home real estate values in the areas that aren't affected by the fires have gone through the roof if you can afford to buy a new place or rent a new place in the areas while the fires are going on then you pretty much do whereas if you can't do all that stuff you're stuck living and working and going to school in areas with air quality indices that are as bad as any city in the world so again I bring this up because when it comes to making the Investments that we need to fight climate change all the uh renewable energy that we need to put onto the grid the situation here is exactly flipped the benefits of making those Investments flow to the rich and the uh into a much higher degree than they do to the poor and those with less and less resources you know one of the most frustrating things one of the most frustrating things about working on the issue of climate change which is something I do every day is that we know the answer we know how to do this we know how to fix this problem we have all the technology we need right now to solve climate change the problem is we're just not doing it fast enough and we're not switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy resources like wind solar nuclear power as fast as we need to and probably the biggest reason is we haven't figured out a good way to pay for it this stuff is really expensive we need trillions of dollars of investment trillions with a t and to do that kind of investment you really are limited in what kind of entity can do it you can either be a large Sovereign Nation or a large multinational energy company and the benefits of those Investments flow to the shareholders they don't flow to the people whose livelihoods and and health are at greatest risk from a changing climate I'm going to talk about high voltage transmission for a second which you might not know a lot about but if you are in the energy industry you know that if we are going to tackle climate change we need thousands and thousands of more miles of this stuff everywhere in the United States and around the world these big big wires are a great way to take energy from where it's generated to where it's needed and if we're going to make Renewables work on the energy grid we need a lot more of this stuff the problem is it's really really hard to build not just because it's expensive but it's very very hard to get it permitted to get it approved to the the right-of-way to send power from where it's generated to where it's needed and it's not hard to see why if you're trying to build a power line from one part of the United States to another you got to get permission from every single state that's between the starting and the endpoints of that line we see this happening in New England Island for years there have been all these ideas to use high voltage transmission to bring cheap renewable Canadian hydroelectric power down to the lower load centers of of Connecticut lower New England New York and Rhode Island and Massachusetts but these things keep getting delayed they keep getting held up and it's mostly because of Vermont New Hampshire and Maine and now nothing against those States whatsoever I love Vermont New Hampshire in Maine but you can easily see why there's all this Grassroots political resistance against building these lines if I'm sitting there in New Hampshire why would I want to see my pristine backyard torn up for a huge high voltage transmission tower to take power from Canada of all places and give it somebody in Massachusetts to somebody in Massachusetts where I don't live this is what leads to nimbyism not in my backyard something you may have heard of this is a huge problem when it comes to building renewable energy infrastructure there's a lot of nimbyism both here in the United States and the rest of the world and again this I think comes down to the fact that the people who are at greatest risk to the harmful effects of climate change can't participate in these Investments and I'm and I mean financially here they don't get the money that these Investments generate when they generate returns people don't build this stuff for free they build it because they get paid to but the money that they make from these Investments which by the way is a very safe very stable amount of cash all of us buy energy every day whether we're putting gas in our car or we're paying for our utility electric bills and that's something investors love they love safe stable cash flows but the problem is when we need to make investments to Stave off the worst effects of climate change we don't allow those of us with less resources and those of us who are poor to participate in those Investments so what is my solution here uh very very simple we need to make it easier for this to happen we need to give skin in the game to those of us who have the greatest risk to our health and livelihood from climate change we need to make it easier for them to participate in the financial rewards of infrastructure investment and we know we can do this because it's happening already in a few small areas of the country this is a picture of a transmission line that's located in California within the tribal area of the Morongo Native American tribe what this uh Native American tribe did this very unique thing a developer wanted to build this high voltage transmission line through their their tribal areas and you know normally this would be a classic setup for a Grassroots political resistance where the local people who wouldn't see any real economic benefit from the line would resist its construction but what they did here is they created a structure where the tribe itself actually owns capacity in that line now that ownership of that capacity generates a financial return every year for as long as the lines in operation millions and millions of dollars we're talking about and that all flows right into the tribal government now the tribal government can use that money to do whatever it wants it can build schools it can fund anti-poverty programs energy access it's um a really you know powerful amount of money for uh this group of people out there in California and you know think about what this does to flip somebody's attitude around they have changed nimbyism to yimbyism yes in my backyard they have taken people who would otherwise be opposed to the project and made them say hey you know what we want this to get built we are invested in its success we want when it's built we don't want it to fall down we want to take care of it and make sure it operates well and my own company did a similar thing out in California we that that's a picture of the largest low-income Community solar project in the country it's about 40 megawatts and that was constructed with funds used in a similar structure to the morongos that we created an ownership structure where we own a portion of capacity in a high voltage transmission line that runs through the Imperial Valley in California the Imperial Valley is one of the poorest areas of California very very high rates of unemployment very very high rates of poverty and what we did in constructing this solar array is we use the funds that are generated from that transmission line to provide every low-income subscriber in the Imperial Valley with a discount on their on their utility bills it's about 500 a year goes to about 12 000 people every year for the next 20 years uh one of those people is Lupita Castro that's a picture of her right there she's a single mom she lives and works in the Imperial Valley uh ask a person like Lupita Castro how she feels about high voltage transmission development and you're going to get a very different answer than somebody say in New Hampshire or Maine you're going to get somebody who's invested in the success of the renewable energy project the idea here is that I'd like to leave you with tonight is that we in America don't make it easy for people without a lot of money to be good environmentalists we make it very easy for the rich to do that we can do things like put solar panels on our house or buy a Tesla but if you don't have a lot of resources even if you care a lot about the environment we make it very very hard for you to do anything about it and you know we see in this disparity of the effects of climate change it's going to be a lot harder for certain groups of people to adapt than it is for others and what we need to do is Empower these people to put their money where their mouth is and have a stake in the action here because this stuff's not going to get built right right away it's going to take a long time we need to build it as fast as possible we need to build as much of it as we can and I think ideas like this are a great way for us to contribute to that solution thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 9,173

Keywords: Climate Change, Economics, Energy, English, Global Issues, TEDxTalks, [TEDxEID:49029]

Id: Hl_Pkewu2QE

Length: 14min 7sec (847 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 14 2022