It Can Be Done Live: The Future of Our Earth

[Music] my name is nate kasmerick i am vice president and director of the regulatory transparency project for the federal society this is our third virtual panel for the new film they say it can't be done and in my view our panels continue to get better and better with each one this evening rtp and just add firewater are looking forward to a great dialogue on the future of our earth we have a very insightful group gathered and we're honored that epa administrator andrew wheeler is here to kick things off we're also very fortunate to have a fantastic moderator in susan dudley susan is the director of the george washington university regulatory study center she is also a distinguished professor of practice in the trachtenberg school of public policy and public administration she previously served as administrator of the office of information and regulatory affairs at omb susan hold the master's degree from the sloan school of management at mit and a bachelor's of science degree in resource economics from the university of massachusetts amherst we're lucky to have her leadership at rtp and also grateful for her appearance in the film i would note that susan's cv is much larger and and more accomplished than what i've stated uh but you can find her full bio and the complete bio of all of our speakers tonight on our website the website is regproject.org that's regproject.org if you're in the audience and you have questions for the panel please send them along by the chat and we will ask them we will ask those questions towards the end of the program with that uh thank you all very much for being here i'll turn it over to susan i was muted there um thank you nate um and i i agree we have an accomplished panel for this evening's conversation and i look forward to a lively discussion of the film and other topics that may come up now because administrator wheeler has to leave us by 7 30 i'm going to hold off introducing our other speakers until after we've heard from him and i will also try to be brief in my um introductions but i'll get right to that now andrew wheeler is the 15th administrator of the environment environmental protection agency he's had a long career focused on environmental policy starting in the george h.w bush administration then serving on capitol hill as staff director for the senate committee on environment and public works in both the majority and the minority as well as in the subcommittee on clean air climate change wetlands and nuclear safety he's also held leadership positions in the private sector at figure baker daniels law and consulting practices with that administrator wheeler the floor is yours thank you susan thank you and thank you nate for inviting me um this evening to participate in this it's an exciting film um in in the the film in its premise of wanting to encourage innovation by the private sector innovation by new market market entrance um you know it's in sitting as a head of a regulatory agency you know it's we're very mindful here i'm very mindful of the the impediments that regulatory agencies put into the marketplace that actually stop innovation by new market entrance and the fact that we need to make sure that we are encouraging innovation that we are encouraging a level playing field among everyone and trying to come up with the latest great invention and we've done that in a number of ways we're doing we're doing that this year in the covet response on approving disinfectants you know epa improves the disinfectants think of chlorine wipes that you use on surfaces or think of aerosol sprays and there's been a lot of applicants this year that have come to us with new products and it's important that we don't just look at the products that come to us from the large multinational chemical companies but we're also looking at products from startups for mom and pop companies from small businesses and in order to encourage that we have to make sure that the tools that we have at epa are available for everyone so one of the things we've done during this administration is take a look a hard look at how we are structured internally to make sure that the information that we use for our programs is readily available to the public and we've had five pillars of of reform here at epa to try to open up shed some sunlight into the regulatory process so everybody understands what we do as a regulatory agency and those five pillars on the the first is our cost-benefit approach on our rulemakings we are going through a statute by statute basis to put out a cost-benefit regulation that will require for every regulation that epa does going forward that we identify the costs of the regulation and we identify the benefits of the regulation so that everybody knows the basis for our regulations our second pillar is on science transparency and i started epa as susan said i started my career as a career employee here at epa back in 1991 working on tosca and community right to know the community right to no act and i fundamentally believe that everyone has a right to know the basis of our epa regulations and so we have a science transparency regulation we proposed it two years ago we put out a second version asking for more comment and we will be finalizing it sometime this later this fall where we will require that the science that we use as the basis for our regulation to be made available to the public in the event that there is a scientific study that is just very important that information is not available the administrator always has the right to waive that but you know it's it's important for our regulations on both the cost benefit and the science transparency side that people know what the basis is for our regulations and i i found a lot of the people who are opposed to that are people who would prefer to have our regulations written in the proverbial smoke-filled back room what i'm trying to do is shed light on how we make decisions at the agency i'm trying to shed light on the information that we use so that i believe at the end of the day our regulations will be better accepted by industry will be better accepted by environmental organizations and better accepted by the american public along with this we reorganize our regions we have 10 regional offices across the country and every regional office had different names for all of their offices for example in one of our regions they didn't even have a division that had clean air in the title so if you went to our epa website and you wanted information if you were a start-up business in california or startup business in ohio or florida you should be able to go to the epa website and find out what which office you needed to talk to so we reorganized our epa offices all of our regional offices now mirror headquarters for the first time in our 50-year history so it's much easier to navigate across the agency if you're somebody who's not used to working with the epa you can get informati information much easier now because we have our regional offices mirroring our federal headquarters the the fourth and i announced this at the federalist society um i think two weeks ago is our new guidance document and this is really important particularly for small businesses um for years our guidance documents you had to go to epa to our or to our docket rooms or physical rooms here at epa headquarters or in the regional offices and go through the file cabinets to find the applicable guidance documents that laid out rationale or the directions or the guidance for our regulations or our rules and you had to know what you're looking for what we did is we put all of them all of our guidance documents on a searchable database we discovered that we had ten thousand guidance documents all 10 000 are now searchable on the database this is a huge improvement over the over the practices of years gone where you had to hire a dc law firm and i and i actually when i was in private practice i had a a multinational it was a you know top 500 firm that hired us they wanted to know information about a specific program at epa whether or not the agency had ever made any statements on it they were being sued they had they had a product in market and they were being sued by a competitor and the competitor was alleging that epa would not have approved of the product so they came to me as a lawyer i brought them into the epa we went to the enforcement office this was during the obama administration and we met with two great career attorneys and they were very helpful and they told us to their knowledge they met the agency for i think together 15 years and they knew of no document no guidance but they said but if you really want to have the answer you're going to have to hire somebody to go through all of our document all of our dockets to make sure that we didn't say anything about this 40 years ago can you imagine if you're a small business i mean this is a large multinational 500 you know top 500 company if you're a small business wanting to know what the agency has said about his particular subject it's almost impossible it's a real barrier to entry into the marketplace so now all 10 000 of our guidance documents are available for search on our website um the the fifth area of our reform of our five pillars is on lean management and this is where we've taken the um the also called the toyota system and implemented it across the agency and is improving the way that we process everything we no longer have we've reduced our backlog on permits over 55 percent state implementation plans in the clean air act we had one we found one dating back to 1975 that had never been acted on from a state that had just been sitting in the epa um clean air office with no action we had we had um it's implementation plans 20 30 40 years old we're implementing lean management across the board is speeding up the way we process things it's much more fair for everyone eliminating the backlog it's also helping the environment i saw somebody was just scrolling through on the people who are who are tuning into this or someone from lakewood colorado we have our large enforcement lab in lakewood colorado and they do the large multimedia enforcement inspections we would do an inspection in a facility and it was taking on average 270 days to issue the inspection report to the facility to tell them what their issues and problems were that meant 270 days without any changes if our inspectors found a problem nothing was happening at that facility to improve it for the environment we implemented lean management at our lakewood facility in colorado and again they're the ones that do all of the national multimedia enforcement inspections across the country we're now getting 90 percent i believe it's 90 percent done within 30 to 45 days so that is not only providing more certainty if you're a regulated business but it's improving the environment because we're getting to those facilities and telling them what they're doing wrong so that they make the corrections and change so these five pillars that i've discussed are ways that we are opening up the agency to sunlight opening up our regulatory process making things more fair so that if you don't have to be a large company to hire a fleet of attorneys to come into dc and search through our file cabinets you don't have to be a large multinational company to figure out that the costs or the benefits behind the regulation and what the agency means and you you don't have to be on somebody who deals with epa on a day in and day out basis to fi if you have a clean air question and you live in california or you live in new york you should be able to to go onto our website and figure out which office in the regional in the region where you live that you can ask your question to so you know this is all about transparency what we're trying to do here at the agency and i believe it's leveling the playing field between large companies and small companies one quick final point i like to make there are a lot of a lot of opportunities that we are not taking where large companies come in and want a regulation set that would make it more prohibitive for smaller companies to enter into the marketplace and perfect example is our recent methane regulations where we changed the obama methane regulations we had large multinational companies come in and say we need we want you to do a more strict methane emissions regulation but the smaller companies are doing some of the most innovative um emissions reduction techniques in the marketplace and their the regulations that the large companies would have were asking for would have put some of those smaller companies out of business or priced them out of business and we've seen this time and time again over the history the 50-year history of the epa where large companies have taken advantage of the regulatory state in order to drive up the regulatory costs to make it harder for small businesses to compete or small businesses to enter into the marketplace so we're very cognizant of that and there's several other examples i don't want to pick on any particular company so i won't but there's been several other examples since i've been here of large companies coming in and asking for a regulation and then you look into it and you see wait a minute that's going to that's going to cause a monopoly between a couple of large companies and nobody else is going to be able to compete and that's not the american way at the same time we're doing all this just in close we've reduced air pollution seven percent under president trump's administration we've our water is cleaner than it's ever been we've we have invested over 40 billion dollars in clean water infrastructure over the last four years we're cleaning up superfund sites at the fastest rate in 20 years and on the enforcement side because a lot of people have attacked us from the environmental organizations to to politicians on saying we're not enforcing the laws we announced last week enforcement action against steinler we have at this point enforced collected more civil and criminal fines double what the obama biden administration did during their first four years so our enforcement stats are twice as good as the obama buying enforcement stats were at this time during their administration we are enforcing the law if anybody is breaking it that's another form of competition if you have a company that's breaking the law in addition to polluting the environment they're getting a competitive advantage against their competitors so we want to make sure that everyone is complying with the laws of the land the environmental laws and that and if they aren't we will go after them with that susan i'll be happy to answer any questions you have susan i can't hear you how about that can you hear me now sorry about that your video just went out for me maybe that's on my end um thank you that that was great and your discussion about um innovators does the small innovators that really does relate to the film that we um that we're talking about today um and in particular the one um i think there are several things that you said that i'd love to follow on in our discussion with the other panelists today um the one that we're talking about today has to do with um technologies to reduce climate change and i want to ask you there seems to be a mismatch between epa statutory authorities that are focused on conventional pollutants and environmental quality within u.s borders and the challenge of climate change so mass v epa required epa to address greenhouse gases using the clean air act so i wanted to ask you how is that going given your experience both at epa and capitol hill do you think congress should try to develop a different approach um and then i'll just throw in because i'm the economist on this panel would a mechanism like a carbon tax incentivize innovations like the carbon capture and sequestration that we saw in the film sure well first of all to be very careful um i can't endorse legislation without the approval of omb or the white house so i don't um but i will say that you know a carbon tax a cap and trade other programs um would certainly be a different approach than what we are are dealing with the epa because the clean air act was not written or designed to address climate change you know i you know quoting the late john dingle the democratic congressman from michigan who helped write the clean air act and the 1990 amendments um he said using the clean air act to to regulate climate change would be a glorious mess actually i think it's a regulate co2 would be a glorious mess and it is and the obama bite administration found that out when they put their clean power plan proposal out there and the supreme court issued their historic stay you know we're often accused of rolling back the clean power plant but you can't roll back something that actually never took effect um so when we got into office we looked at what mass versus epa stat said we looked at our authorities into the clean air act and we went forward with our ace rule which will reduce co2 emissions from the electric power sector and we've actually taken four concrete regulatory steps to reduce greenhouse gases our safe rule will reduce co2 emissions going forward from automobiles are the methane regulations will reduce um greenhouse gases and then the fourth one is we're reducing greenhouse gases from we proposed this summer the first three were final the fourth is a proposal this summer to reduce greenhouse gases from the from the aviation industry first time that's ever been proposed um is the clean air act the best method or the best best um statute to use for this no it really isn't there are limitations and again the obama administration found that out when when they tried and failed on their clean power plan um but at the same time it's important to note that our greenhouse gas emissions have dropped 12 percent since 2005. at the same time most european countries have gone up since 2005 china has increased their greenhouse gas emissions 50 percent there's a lot of innovation going on in the united states and i think we need to encourage continue to encourage that innovation and the film highlights a lot of innovative um a lot of innovative techniques and we need to do that on the electric power sector we're going to have to solve the battery storage issue if we want to solve energy efficiency long term and that isn't isn't there yet but there are certainly other really promising scientific ingenuity innovations i'm really encouraged from what i see and i think we need to make sure that we don't end up a mistake that some countries have made and it's a mistake that we occasionally make not just environmental regulations but other regulations where we as a government decide what the technology should be and we regulate to that technology instead of setting standards that allow for innovation in the marketplace and i just want to always be mindful of that that we should not stifle innovation in the marketplace on the methane a perfect example we have doubled methane is natural gas we have doubled our natural gas production since 1990 at the same time we've reduced our methane emissions 15 that tells me that there's a lot of innovation going on in the marketplace to reduce those emissions because it makes sense for the companies involved methane is their product that they're selling and we need to make sure whatever regulation we impose upon the american public does not stop innovation from occurring oh i'm not muted now um yes and i think your point too about the the technology being careful not to focus on particular technologies that was something that does come out in the film um that that's a way that that can get in the way of innovation as opposed to finding ways to streamline permitting not so much in the environmental vignettes in the film but in the other ones the issues were we don't know who to go to to get the permits or there's no process for getting permits to do the things that we want could you talk to us a little bit more about what you're doing that was one of your pillars or um actually one of our goals for the second term on the permitting sure and just one more one more point on the on the um actually let me go ahead and discuss the permitting so we have reduced our permitting um backlog as i said i think it's about 55 to 60 percent here at epa but it's important to remember that at this point in time epa is um well 96 to 97 of all water permits were done by the states on the clean air side um 48 of the 50 states have they have the permitting programs delegated to them so the majority of the environmental permits today are done by the states so one of the things that we're going to do in the second term is focus on working with the states to speed up their permitting and to help them get the more resources which is not necessarily money it can be tech it can be a technical assistance etc but we are going to um you know as of now when we delegate programs to the states the only thing we look at the only measured statistic we look at is the on the enforcement side so starting next year in addition to looking at their enforcement statistics we will also start looking at how they process permits and the permitting statistics as well so that will be something that we will be doing i'm going forward i know you're muted again there am i muted now you're on you're on that i can hear you somehow the my the toggling doesn't seem to be working sorry about that um your discussion about the regional work and how the regions work with the states and community-based programs could you talk to us just a little bit more about that certainly and that that is another priority for for um for our second term and this is something that i've been i've been thinking about and watching communities struggle with for at least 25 years back when i worked in the senate back in 1997 we had a mayor a minority mayor from benton harbor michigan testify in front of the senate committee and she came in from the committee and she said the epa brownfields office is encouraging us because we have a lot of abandoned facilities across our inner city they come they they've come to us and they've recommended that we apply for brownfields grants in order to rehabilitate these old industrial facilities turn their productive use and you know encourage new businesses to move in and she said the air office at epa has come in and said you are in non attainment and you cannot increase your air emissions what am i supposed to do i have the brownfields office saying you need to redevelop and i have the area office saying you can't bring any new businesses into your city it's it's a it's a paradox that we've put a lot of cities into across the country we also have a i believe a perverse environmental outcome it's unintentional outcome over the last 50 years of epa where we have encouraged businesses instead of redeveloping in our inner cities we have encouraged them to move out into green space and you know former farmland and put new facilities in those areas um instead we should be encouraging them for the jobs for them to clean up the sites and inner cities um and to reuse those facilities so instead of instead of diverting resources we want to work with the cities to look at their environmental programs holistically we want them to look at their air issues their water issues their waste issues all at one time so we're going to promote a community environmentalism the community level going forward one of the ways we want to do that is to create for example a master grant application for cities where we take maybe a dozen different epa small grants and package them together what i've told my staff we can't take 10 grant applications each one 10 pages long and then give a mayor a 100 page grant application we have to as an agency restructure the way we think and combine those programs and combine them into a smaller grant application so it will help the cities think holistically about their environmental problems and will also help the epa staff think holistically about environmental problems we are very siloed agency we have our air program our water program our waste program and our chemicals program and our offices historically have had a hard time talking across the silos so what i'm trying to do what we're trying to do as a team going into the second term is to take a look at those silos tear them down work more together on a holistic approach to solve the environmental problems in the communities where the people live if i have time for one more question speaking of cities and where commute people live um there there are serious concerns about worse environmental degradation in areas where of people who are low income what can we do about that well you know we we have taken that head on under president trump we elevated environmental justice to the administrator's office in the past it was just in our enforcement program and that puts it at the end of the process you know you can't really take into account environmental environmental outcomes and in the way the environment impacts low-income communities if you only look at it after the pollution's already occurred so we have elevated environmental justice in our administration for the first time to the administrator's office where we now look at it across the entire regulatory process the very beginning when we're developing our policies developing regulations you have to do that in order to take environmental justice seriously i think that president trump's opportunity zone tax credit program in the 2017 trump tax plan was probably the biggest environmental boom to environmental justice communities and all the environmental justice grants over the years because that's focusing um it's focusing private sector money into these low-income neighborhoods by zip code there are inner city opportunity zones there are rural counties that qualify for opportunity on um tax preferential tax treatment that is helping these communities deal with their environmental issues and concerns and then um the the water bill that president trump signed into law two years ago was the first time that environmental justice has the the concept of the environmental justice office that epa has ever been recognized in law so we're doing a lot there but we're also doing it and focusing on the superfund side and when i said earlier we cleaned up 27 superfund sites um last year the most in any one year since 2001. um we will have by the end of this year i believe it's 81 or 82 superfund sites cleaned up during this first four years which is equal to what the obama by administration did in their first eight years or they're only eight years i guess um so we we are really focusing on in particular superfund cleanups and brownfields in low-income neighborhoods and minority communities and that's what we need to do but by putting environmental justice at the beginning of the process instead of only looking at it at the end i think it's going to be a big help i'm going into the future well thank you very much administrator wheeler um thank you and i'm sure that there'll be a lively discussion after you leave us so tune in to the recording later i'm sure i said nothing at all controversial and i'm sure everybody will agree with everything that i've done i'm sure thank you all right thank you so um let me now introduce our other fine panelists um and i'll start with i'll introduce all of all three of our panelists first and then we'll go in that same order um with some opening remarks so david donagher is speaking to us today as senior advisor to the natural resources defense council action fund david is a lawyer and climate expert who joined nrdc in 1978 and is now senior strategic director of its climate and clean energy program he served in the white house and the epa during the clinton administration next we'll hear from charles hernick he's the director of policy and advocacy at the citizens for responsible energy solutions forum in washington dc where he leads policy work and executes strategies to advance clean energy solutions and innovative approaches to reducing carbon emissions charles is an energy and climate change expert who's worked at the crossroads of economic development energy and natural resource management across the u.s and in over a dozen countries in africa latin america and the caribbean and then james coleman is an associate professor at southern methodist university's deadmen school of law where his scholarship focuses on energy law including the regulation of north american energy companies how countries account for and influence regulation of fuel and electricity in their trading partners and how global energy companies respond to competing pressures from investors and regulators in multiple jurisdictions so david would you start us off with some opening remarks thank you very much it's be here and talk at a federalist society uh session um hopefully you i can convey some perspectives that you might not hear so often as i listen to andy wheeler i heard in the first part of his talk a focus on managerial steps some of which are important others quite frankly are from our vantage point um reflect in the agenda of trying to impose barriers to public health and environmental protection but what i didn't hear was uh any focus on the core threats to people's health and well-being that should guide the epa's mission and the number one thing that is missing from this administration's environmental agenda is a serious and honest approach to climate change um climate change is the central uh environment well challenged century and the whole world um it might have been thought speculative and doubted uh you you might you might have been um you know more um free or more credible in doubting this 10 15 20 years ago 40 years ago but the chickens are coming home to roost we we have another season of horrible wildfires in the west another season of uh record hurricane activity in the atlantic and in the gulf of mexico we have so many um signs so many so much evidence that not only is climate change a future threat it's a present threat and it is a threat to our health to our economy to our infrastructure to our most vulnerable communities and to all the other kinds of life that was in it uh it's already it it it will have but it's already having even more impact than something on the scale of the global covid pandemic the slower but far more permanent in its pace and scale the pollution that's driving climate change once it goes in the air it lasts for centuries carbon dioxide lasts well over a century methane is a little bit shorter still several decades we are way over the atmosphere is way overloaded already we're way deep in overtime to address this problem the last administration took significant first steps here at home and brought us into what i would call a virtuous global cycle the previous administrations had said to i won't vote and in the paris agreement and in the diplomacy leading to it we move from that to i will if you will a virtuous cycle and with all due respect to administrator wheeler this administration's climate denial its protection of the fossil fuel industry its wreckage of our international relationships and leadership can never be forgiven if this administration is only a one-term affair we will be able to save epa as an institution and save the clean air act and the other laws that are the tools for action and we'll be able to restore congress's ability to function at least i hope so and if we take smart action climate solutions can be part of a new era of public and private investment in clean energy in new american industries and jobs and in repairing long-festering racial social and economic inequities but the time lost due to this administration's denial and rollbacks we can never get that back it's irremediable and our children and our grandchildren will pay for that in the impacts that could have been averted now i would just like to take a moment to respond to several of the things that administrator wheeler said about carbon about climate regulation his four steps that he mentioned are all rollbacks are all intended to disassemble first steps taken in the last administration or impose barriers to taking steps in the future the um vehicle rule the so-called safe rule is actually an unsafe rule it will lead to more not less death from pollution and and traffic accidents um it rolls back the progress that was to be you know we were going out uh vehicle emissions cut in half from new cars the carbon emissions so the greenhouse gas emissions compared to where they were in 2012 by 2025 they basically nuclear improvement and there'll be nearly a billion tons more carbon pollution uh introduced into the air from the vehicles built under these weaker standards the power plant regulation that they that we we in place of the clean power plan is actually an attempt to lock in a do-nothing rule and maybe even to revive coal plants so that they run more and pollute more rather than less as a result of the rule if it makes any progress at all it's on the order of a one percent change uh by the end of this this decade the airplane regulation is actually a proposal to lock into epa regulations less than what the airlines are already doing uh a less efficient um uh aircraft fleet than the airlines are doing so at the you know you might say uh it would be irrelevant because it's surpassed by what happens in the marketplace now i'm a believer that standards should be based they should be set as performance standards you shouldn't be picking technologies we should be using economic instruments like capped and tradable permits we are open to reforming how regulation occurs but we just cannot solve this problem by appealing to innovation uh alone we need innovation but it needs to be as someone said in the film uh standards and regulations create the conditions to drive innovation by making it unnecessary and and and actually rewarding to solve a problem that nobody recognized was a problem you know the the cost question when you have standards that are smartly designed to to internalize those costs you get tons of innovation and cost reduction and we should be designing the rules to produce that but we need rules because otherwise there's no drivers no rewards for that kind of innovation and until we get serious in recognizing the extremity of the climate change threat and start using the epa's current powers and thinking about new legislation until that we are failing our children and our grandchildren on a scale that they will they will and they will hate us for it so um uh those are my thoughts and when time comes happy to answer questions thank you david um charles let's hear from you now sure thank you susan and thanks to nate and the federal society for putting this event on it was a pleasure for me to watch the movie and and think about this um i agree with the title of this conversation it it can be done i i don't disagree with david at all in terms of the urgency of the climate change problem and the situation that we're in but i don't believe that we've lost any time on the clock and i know that focusing on the two pillars that the movie really focused on innovation and regulation the right kind of regulation we can go far um i think that uh one thing that is clear is and the administrator mentioned this is that uh the the law constrains the executive branch right now in terms of what can be done uh to regulate co2 um and so that's not to say that nothing has happened in the united states though i think in a very federalist and appropriate way states have stepped up we've seen great state leadership and different policy courses overtaken over the last uh four years and more and more states committing to net zero more and more companies committing to net zero focus on what they can do companies uh tech companies like microsoft and amazon but oil companies as well shell bp total just to name a couple of the companies that have dedicated to reduce emissions as quickly as possible and achieve net zero by mid-century which is consistent with what the science tells us that we need to do these are good independent actions it's not only up to the federal government to solve the climate problem we as individuals and as consumers can do a lot and i think that what you're seeing is a response to unprecedented demand from individuals and other companies to reduce emissions i want to provide a little background in context and i'll keep my remarks relatively short so that we can get to the need of the conversation here but my background is informed by over a decade of work working as a consultant to the us environmental protection agency in states and really understanding what that federal state policy nexus is but also working for over six years in countries in africa and latin america and scrolling through the the list of where people are attending from it's not just folks from the united states but from the developing world too one of the major challenges that we have in the united states to tackle the climate change problem is a hundred years of built infrastructure every morning i wake up i go to the bathroom to brush my teeth and i turn on the light and it comes on and that doesn't happen everywhere in the world and that's something that is fantastic but also creates a lot of drag and inertia in terms of our ability to change and upgrade and move to that clean energy future that we know that we want to head to to overcome those burdens of what is our historical infrastructure legacy we need a keen focus on regulation to be able to permit new technologies the way the administrator was talked about talking about in a in a speedy way the administration has put a good focus on modernizing nepa and providing businesses a single point of contact when they're dealing with the us federal government it's not an easy process and when you look at something like hydropower re-licensing that's something that can take almost a decade and if we're really serious about tackling climate change we need to be able to deploy all of the above technology technology resources as quickly as possible and so to do that we do need to look at what are the appropriate regulations what's the appropriate amount of red tape to assure that safeguards for people in public health are being met i agree with david in that standpoint but we also need to be able to actually implement the projects that will deliver those that clean energy and those environmental benefits as quickly as possible on the innovation standpoint we have a lot of technologies at our fingerprint at our fingertips to be able to make this transition but in every corporate plan um how to get there in years 2040 and 2050 it's still to be determined and we know that there's more technology that we're going to need that focus on innovation is absolutely critical not just for tackling climate change but for creating the jobs that we know that we need to have come with it two-thirds of all new jobs come from small businesses and right now when we're looking at an era where a lot of folks have unfortunately been uh either put to working from home or have had their paychecks decreased or lost their jobs entirely we need to look at how we can create robust economic growth and tackle climate change at the same time so assuring that all technologies can compete and that we're focusing on innovation uh and what are the appropriate rules for government what are the appropriate roles for the corporate sector in fostering that innovation and deploying those technologies is something that we need to work on we're developing new new nuclear technologies and small modular reactors here in the united states but we can't deploy them we have to look to other countries to be able to do that just because regulations haven't been modernized there are new types of hydropower that have smaller environmental impacts than ever before in the history of hydropower and that's the oldest way of generating electricity there are 88 000 dams in the united states and only three percent of them generate electricity a lot of those dams need to be taken down to restore environmental benefits and salmon corridors and you know restore environmental benefits that are needed in local areas but if we can add and electrify even a percentage of those 88 000 dams we're talking about a lot of clean electricity and that's something that we do need to be able to focus on but if those types of projects are caught up in seven plus years of regulatory red tape it's not going to happen and it's not going to happen on a fast enough timeline to safeguard my young daughters who i hope can grow up in an environment that is clean and readily available the good news is that for a lot of the world there's still folks that need those first kilowatt hours of electricity for for my friends that tuned in from brazil and other parts of of the world there's a lot of need and there's an open field where new technologies can be deployed and a lot of folks will be able to leapfrog the types of old legacy technologies that we're stuck with here in the united states and that's a good thing so looking at that innovation is beneficial not just here in the united states but it means that if we can innovate here at home those we can export to other countries and there will be an american flag put on the clean energy that is developed across africa latin america and parts of asia so i'll leave it at that and i'll look forward to this conversation thank you charles all right james thank you so much it's just wonderful to be here thank you so much to all of the panelists uh this is an amazing amount of expertise on one one panel so so i'm gonna start by building on something that i think all of our panelists have said which is that this is an incredibly urgent task there is an urgent need for cleaner energy sources because we need to both lower our greenhouse gas emissions here in the united states and also to low to lower them globally to address the climate challenge but i think i would also say uh james you might have a second window open on one of your screens there i think we're getting a little bit of an echo but [Music] um okay apologies multiple screen setup good okay so i'm going to keep going so the uh so in fact i just wanted to deepen that challenge which is it's not just climate right because in fact we also you know if you look at our most urgent challenge environmentally is clean air right if you if you look at some of the rules that were proposed during the obama administration you know if you looked at them on a cost benefit basis often even here in the united states the biggest benefits they produced was as a side matter by cleaning up our air and in most of the world clean air is an even uh bigger concern than it here is here in the united states and then there's a third challenge which is increased energy access because there you know there are billions of people in the world who do not use as much energy as all of us use just for our refrigerator in our house and so we need to massively expand access to energy across the globe but if you look at the people that do have energy you know most of that comes from the biggest source in the world is coal power so you know if they don't always have access to the same clean energy technologies that we have here in the united states and so it's a huge challenge i think the other thing i would say about um so i totally agree with the urgency of the task but also the importance of focusing on technology because for those of you who spend any time you know on energy issues what you'll know is there are so many possible solutions that people look at they look at you know they they look at we heard talks of dams we you know you have existing solar wind batteries as the administrator discussed you could go to you know more advanced forms of solar power i you know a lot of people are excited about forms of nuclear power geothermal there are a lot of different available options and each of those options comes with different challenges when we're looking at the impact on air quality when we're looking at the impact on our need for resources and mining when we're looking at our the impact on climate and so uh i think it is very important as all of us has emphasized that you know we don't we don't yet know the energy system has produced so many surprises over the last over the last decades we're not sure which of these mix of technologies is going to get us where we need to go but you know as david said that doesn't mean we can stand still right we can't just wait until oh we've got the we've got the technology figured out we need to have regulations that don't lock us in to bad choices but do encourage good choices and you know as susan said your one option potentially is a carbon tax if you look on the capture um one solution that you see in the video is carbon capture right and that is something that we are incentivizing through certain policies you know basically through these 45 q tax credits that are designed to encourage at 35 or 50 dollars a ton uh carbon uh capture and sequestration and so there are efforts to do that but we obviously need to have a more systematic uh way of encouraging all of these and so the last thing i would just say is that you know in keeping with our the name of our movie uh it can be done so there are these huge challenges in front of us but if you look at what u.s greenhouse gas emissions were projected to be in 2004 or 2005 we have made drastic progress dramatic progress in cutting those emissions and it's fair to say we should have cut much more but if you look at the change in what was projected then and what we've done now you see the impact of some of the technologies our improved deployment of wind and solar our increased production of natural gas so we have had a lot of things that have caused us to have lower emissions and so we've already made great progress on these we know it's possible to produce economic growth and energy reliable energy access while addressing these problems but it but it is an urgent problem that we need to be pushing through all the different uh technology options okay thank you everyone um i think i heard a lot of agreement um that yes this is something climate change is something that we do need to address um the urgency of the problem um i i'm curious whether people think the clean air act is a tool that can help us do that and that there are going to be a lot of different ways different technologies that we need to be able to use to um to address this problem um i'm going to bring us back to the film if i can i was struck by the difference between the four innovator scenarios for three of them the the entrepreneurs frustration seemed to be getting permission from regulators to test and bring their innovations to market but for the co2 capturing machines the entrepreneur seemed to be asking for new regulation that required carbon capture and sequestration so i'm curious what you all thought about that because when i hear someone calling for regulation that requires other companies to use their technology it raises a red flag um that was something administrator wheeler said that they're alert to that when big businesses come in and say regulate in a certain way that raises a red flag that maybe it's to give them a competitive edge and that's something that we know about regulation that often it does get hijacked to provide well-connected interest competitive advantage undermining the the purported goal but the entrepreneur in that vignette i think he does raise important points for those who haven't seen it he's um creating artificial trees windmill machines um that that that do try to that can capture and then sequester carbon what policies can we find that incentivize solutions like that so i'll just pop in the carbon tax again i hear from i've heard from some of you all of the above um david you did talk about a carbon tax where you pay a tax when the carbon is taken from the ground and then you get a rebate when it gets put back into the ground so i'm i'd love to just open it up to everyone and i see david is already eager to to jump in yeah well i i guess a point i should have made in it's just how just how dire the the emissions overload is we used to think about you know we have an emissions budget left to spend yeah there are there is pathways to get to net zero by 20 50 or earlier if you can but we don't really ought to think about that it's everything we do from now until then is adding to a problem which is already serious and making it worse so that puts a big premium on figuring out not just how to stop putting carbon dioxide into the air but how to remove it from the atmosphere so these technologies that being explored in the film are very interesting and should be encouraged and can be encouraged by regulatory structures a variety of them tax would be one approach although there are a lot of issues with how you could get a tax effective tax implemented frankly uh a cap and trading approach uh is um another approach some sort of responsibility uh corporate responsibility approach namely you you need to need to be responsible for removing what you put in the air sort of cradle to grave approach there are various ways to do that and they can be structured in ways that are technology neutral and innovation friendly but mainly you need a constraint an economic one or a quantity one which is going to motivate people to invest in and and pay for the use of technologies like that and you know nrdc is in favor of exploring those technologies especially if they take if the co2 is permanently sequestered uh we're less comfortable with using it as a um incentive for more um oil production but that's a different matter if i could just um uh say one thing more in response to susan's concern about and andy's concern about big companies small companies my view of the methane situation is quite different from what and andy wheeler portrayed what you have is a bunch of small companies all of which are really they're decent sized companies they may be in trouble uh moment uh at the moment because of the prices but they are these companies are millionaires and billionaires uh and they have just whether it's on um libertarian principle or uh self-interest or cussedness they have re resisted doing really simple things to zip up the leakage of methane from their operations and you have the majors who are willing to do that and in many cases have been doing it many of the smaller companies have been doing it too but there are a number of them which have been uh pushing for this rollback ever since the uh the trump uh uh administration began and it has the fluenciest of justifications uh and it will be struck down in the courts um and i am very confident of that so yes there is a possibility and it happens that uh companies use the regulatory process to try to gain uh specific advantage but if we're smart about how we design these performance standards we should be able to prevent that and still [Music] address these problems create the signals that drive innovation in the marketplace which can only come by limiting or pricing these things that the marketplace is currently ignoring i i want to jump in and uh disagree with with david a little bit because i think that if we're in a hurry to solve the climate problem we can't wait for the political uh miracle to occur where legislation is passed to establish mandates and regulations and cross our fingers that what comes out the other end is going to be useful for solving the climate problem in a meaningful and quick way that actually is beneficial to all americans the best quote that i loved in the movie was that voters aren't very organized lobbyists are very organized and i think that if we rely on a regulatory approach we're going to end up with a solution that favors a lot of the existing actors which are interested in moving as slowly as possible and maintaining the longest economic life of their existing assets and we're not going to solve the problem as quickly as we can the best way i think to do this is a non-regulatory approach that favors improving information for consumers small large investors and allowing supply to match demand and the reason for that is we can talk about a carbon tax talk about cap and trade we can talk about a clean energy standard these are all ways from economic perspective and susan you can you can correct me if i'm wrong to internalize an externality but the problem and what's changed is that climate change isn't an externality anymore everybody knows about climate change um any twitter feed that you follow and and you know republicans and conservatives and democrats and liberals all agree that climate change is real and we need to do something about it where the disagreement occurs is what and how and that's where if we can provide consumers within the right information then they can empower themselves to take the action and choose product a or choose product b and reduce emissions imagine a world where you're driving down the street and now that we're driving more and more again this is actually actually realistic but if you're going to choose the gas station at the left or gas station at the right right now we're shopping on price point but imagine a scenario where these carbon capture utilization storage technologies have been deployed as oil and gas companies want to and gas station on the left is your traditional gas gas station on the right is selling net zero gasoline where carbon was sequestered on the front end and what comes out it's still gasoline it's still going to emit co2 but that carbon has been otherwise sequestered further up in the system this is a way that we could empower consumers and deliver these solutions to the marketplace a lot faster without extra regulations mandating carbon capture but by empowering consumers this is a way that we could help solve the problem in a much quicker way james do you have any thoughts on that let me say something in a comment because i i you know i think i'd probably come down more on the on the regulatory side although i would say that the correct amount of carbon emissions isn't zero either so i'd be more on the tax you know make make companies pay for the externality but i would say that one thing that we think we have in common is the need for building new infrastructure uh whatever whatever you believe in we need more clean energy infrastructure and i think you know if you look at the plans of the current administration or a potential bond administration one big goal is building a lot of new uh energy infrastructure and i think currently we have uh you know our permitting system and it's not just nepa it's a bunch of things but it has slowed those things down and so there needs to be work on permitting reform to make that faster i'm seeing some really interesting questions in the chat box and maybe i'll just bring out one of them that i saw flashing by and that was um what about i mean we energy poverty we do care about environmental justice and at to what extent do the costs of increasing so um now charles you talked about the gas station that uses the the capture and sequestration but that gas is going to be more expensive and people are still going to be making decisions based on their pocketbooks so how is it that we do internalize those rather than just provide the information and second what do we do about the problem that this is going to increase energy costs and increasing energy costs are going to hit the the lowest income people obviously the hardest that's absolutely true for the oil and gasoline example if we were to sequester right now the costs are higher um but you know james mentioned the 45q tax credit that's helping and will help reduce the cost of carbon capture and storage the more it's deployed and this is the story with any innovative technology the more it's deployed the more the costs come down and as we're able to manufacture more of this technology in the united states eventually it would be cost competitive and cheaper and that story is true when you look at solar power and wind power right now it is cheaper in every part of the united states to build new solar and build wind than it is to build any other type of fossil fuel generation with the exception of natural gas in some cases so we have we've reached that point where even without subsidies solar and wind are competitive um and so we can look at the energy poverty equation and i think that that's absolutely true when you look at uh liquid fuels in the automotive sector there might be that trade-off right now but when you're talking about solving the energy poverty question in the united states as it relates to electric power or even around the world we're at this point where solar and wind are really the best bet um and where there are other renewable resources that can be brought online in a cost competitive way hydropower for example but if you have to pay attorneys on an hourly basis for seven years it gets to be a very expensive hydropower project just on attorney fees so if we can look at fast tracking um some of these permit approval processes um still being still creating environmental benefits uh to the waterway but also from a clean energy generation standpoint then we'll be moving quickly i had two points and one some of the worst forms of regulatory capture that are being exhibited right now are by the owners of legacy coal plants and nuclear plants they're trying to get public subsidies to keep them open and the worst example of that is hb6 in ohio which passed and we now discovered um uh it was the passage of that bill was lubricated by 60 million dollars in outright bribery so um uh environmentalists and libertarians can agree that there are uh many places where the regulatory system is uh screwed up in in this way um uh one other thing that i i neglected to mention earlier is that one of the the uh steps that andy wheeler and the trump administration have taken is most destructive in the climate area is refocusing what they call the social cost of carbon uh the um in any effort to balance benefits and costs uh and to figure out really what the where where you would want to put the limits or how you would want to price the pollution you'd have to have some decent idea of what the benefits of the curbing the pollution are now back in the bush administration the second bush administration the national highway traffic safety administration published a fuel economy rule and in that rule they said the benefits of curbing carbon dioxide pollution are uncertain so we will assign them zero a value of zero in the cost-benefit analysis and the ninth circuit court of appeals said that's the one answer that has to be wrong uh you know if you're acknowledging that there's damage but you put zero into the equation that's the one answer that's clearly wrong so the obama administration attempted to develop a principled articulated transparent methodology for determining what benefit number you should associate with the reduction of one ton of carbon dioxide and one of the principles of that is well this stuff spreads all around the world we should take into account not just the damage that occurs in our own borders but the damage that's imposed on other countries and there's a reciprocity principle there you want china to do that you want uh the european union to do that to take into account the damage they're doing to us not just the damage they're doing to themselves this administration has scrapped that and substituted an analysis which confines itself to the damage that our pollution does solely within our borders and i don't think they estimate that very well but even so it ignores the bulk of the damage that's done outside our borders and if everybody did that it would be the equivalent of my neighbor throwing his trash into my garden and me throwing my trash into his garden and we would both wonder why our gardens are full of trash so this is one of the most damaging and least honest analytical changes that this administration has has imposed in the climate area and they've been struck they've lost on this point a couple of times already in court and they're headed for uh more um defeats on the implementation of this uh cramped methodology but david this i'll ask you a question i asked of the administrator um doesn't that argue that the clean air act just isn't the right tool because the clean air act does talk about air quality in the united states how can that be the a tool to look at air quality in other countries well actually the clean air act has provisions in it that directly address when we when our pollution is causing harm in other countries it does not limit itself to the damage for the welfare impacts that are occurring in our country so that's simply not a limitation look i wouldn't you know if we were starting from scratch i wouldn't say that um the clean air act is is uh absolutely ideal exactly as it's written but you know in 1965 president johnson asked congress to pass new clean air legislation that included tackling climate change in 1965 and in 1970 congress did that the authority has been there the courts have recognized that it's there you can do very effective things under the clean air act you can't do everything that's needed and there are good arguments that there might be ways to do things more efficiently but um to paraphrase donald rumsfeld you fight climate change with the laws you have um and not the laws you wish you had and that has been the guiding principle to do what we can under this law which was built to be adapted for new pollution problems not just the things that were right in front of the first epa administrator it'll it'll be a frustrating next 30 years if we're still waiting to figure out how to use the clean air act to regulate co2 and get that done and that's why i'm a bigger fan of doubling down on the existing federal and state roles um what david's been talking about is um you know mechanisms for for increasing costs of co2 emissions using federal powers to do that i'm not interested in figuring out how we can raise costs that's going to exacerbate the energy poverty problem susan that you mentioned the historical and best federal role has been to help signal the market send a strong signal to the market through tax incentives and it's worked it's taken nascent technologies from solar and wind two that are fully deployable even now without the tax incentives maybe we need to revisit those tax incentives to better understand if they should be utilized not now for a new industry but to tackle the climate problem we can send a price signal it doesn't have to be increasing costs it can be focused on reducing costs for sequestration like carbon capture utilization and storage um as james mentioned or for carbon emissions avoidance which is really what you're talking about when you're looking at renewable technologies states on the other hand are the only places where you've seen the types of policies that um that david has been talking about in terms of increasing costs states have capped and traded carbon dioxide emissions states have been able to put in clean energy standards that guide at the state level the types of policies and regulations that need to be enacted to tackle the climate problem and i think that that's a good thing state regulators state elected officials are much easier to hold to account than uh folks at the federal level um and i think that there's there's less likely to be some of the problematic uh regulatory design and really slow regulatory design that you do see at the federal level and i would i would also say that states are you know nothing to sneeze at so i'm very interested in canada's climate policy very interested in alberta's climate policy uh you know and california is bigger than the entirety of canada so i think that you know that and for better or for worse sometimes we see things about how you know some of these policies work out by working with the states i do think there's like there are some uh coordination problems that occur that in some ways ferc has a role in managing and you know i i do think that if we see a lot of climate action i don't believe that the majority of it's going to happen under the clean air act going forward i think you know to the extent you see climate action and maybe um it may be with majorities that are interested in pushing it through different methods but um there still are important regulations obviously under the clean era well nate i think maybe it's time for me to turn things over to you to um to look at the audience questions and maybe share some of those with our panelists there's a lot going on in the chat i have one line yeah and a lot going on there too i i i'm doing my best to track them there's a bunch of questions um that kind of uh are around a similar theme i think they want uh some discussions from the some discussion from the panelists about the technologies that are being advanced that everyone's most excited about i think they want to hear more about innovations um in in this space and also maybe resources so they can learn more about you know where would you direct people if they want to learn more about such technologies david i think you're on now yeah sorry i i'll just say that what we need is a portfolio and it's a portfolio of investment in uh in new tech civil government has a um a key role in that i mean it's going back to you know the uh promotion of the railroad but um the federal government has uh uh been instrumental in reducing the costs of many of the clean energy technologies through the research and development that was done through the energy department and while some people like to pick on a couple of losers overall their portfolio is damn good and has very good returns um the tax credits which are even more neutral in the sense that um uh you know that then they're well they're just more technology neutral or also very important in bringing down clean energy costs but deployment is going to be a problem except where you're really able to get the costs below current incumbent technologies if the incumbent technologies are dirty but they're cheaper they're going to stick around they're going to stick around forever until we have some sort of limits on the pollution but we do need a portfolio of investment in clean technologies and deployment through um getting the market signals right um to talk about some of the technologies that i'm most excited about i think the carbon capture utilization and storage space uh is is really fascinating uh to me and so this is taking carbon dioxide and here in maryland there's a coal-fired power plant where they they take the carbon dioxide and then they utilize it purify it and it comes out and they can use it for fizzy drinks to carbonate beer and soda and whatnot and that seems uh good and fine um sequestering it under underground in large quantities is the next step and scalable uh and something that has been demonstrated in texas and in illinois and it's right around the corner we just need to actually have those uh market signals come across better and in a longer term way and and that's been one step in the right direction through the 45q tax credit so i think that whole space where we can look at how to reduce emissions in heavy industry and in some of the existing uh oil and gas and fossil fuel fleet that we have is vital not because we're ever going to build a new coal fire power plant in the united states we won't but they're still building coal-fired power plants in africa in asia and in latin america and if we can have u.s technologies where we've refined carbon capture storage and we can retrofit and help sell those technologies around the world then we can help solve what is truly a global problem when it comes to here in the united states some of the things that i'm most excited about and maybe that i lose the most sleep about are how to keep and maintain nuclear power uh online david mentioned you know the great scandals that have unfolded protecting some legacy assets and it's a problem i'm i'm not gonna uh you know hide that at all because some of these plants aren't nearly as economical as they used to be but we still need to be able to value their environmental contribution nuclear power provides something like 30 percent of the electric power um to the united states the 30 is a pretty big slice of the pizza but it provides 60 of the zero emissions power that we have available today 60 that's not something that we can walk away from and a lot of these nuclear assets are reaching the end of their useful life or will do so in the next 20 years the small modular reactors that need to fill in and bridge the gap behind them are still very early in their in their infancy and that's something that we need to see piloted and fast with support of the federal government from a very clean uh permit standpoint and citing standpoint so there's more that the government can do it has to do with regulatory modernization rather than making on new regulations and then one of the commenters that i did see you know talked about hydropower and the question is like aren't aren't hydropower projects really terrible for waterways yeah in a lot of cases they have been and that's why i think looking at existing dams and infrastructure and i mentioned 88 000 dams in the united states a lot of those are on the on the cusp of falling apart some of them were built 80 years ago 100 years ago they need to be retrofit or they need to be taken down if it would restore a waterway let's take it down and we can have the army corps of engineers help and and do that uh work if there's a way to establish a public private partnership so that the work can be undertaken to retrofit that dam and generate electricity the money comes from the private sector the benefit is that a public asset that dam gets revitalized and rehabilitated creates local jobs and creates clean energy in a local way that's a big win and i think that that's what i'm really interested in seeing is how we can lower costs and create locally appropriate clean energy solutions all around the united states and then be able to deploy those solutions around the world yeah so i would say um in terms of things that have been very you know impressive if we look at the last decade certainly the expansion in solar wind and natural gas power that we had that allowed us to match you know clean up our power system dramatically that has been you know something that we weren't necessarily looking for i think the other big surprise that's helped us clean up both our air and our climate has been uh rise of electric vehicles i think people thought it was going to be a bigger challenge to make a profitable electric car that people wanted to buy uh and you know it's done and as a result you know i mean you have a company worth an insane amount of money but um but i think there are those challenges and that we don't necessarily expect and then they uh and then we can get them but i also um i would say that in terms of our biggest challenge one of our biggest challenge is permitting around innovation and if you look at you know if you look at green new deal the idea let's get off of fossil fuel and go to all zero carbon you know renewable sources in 10 years well if you look at the current time to permit a power line like if you didn't want if i just wanted a little more wind power on the system it's over 10 years so how are you supposed to entirely change the system if it takes over 10 years to permit a single power line and as i said i think nipah is part of the issue there the national environmental policy act but there are other issues as well you know if you look at you know in 1935 san francisco decided to build treasure island and it was finished in 1937. okay in 2001 they decided they wanted a new bus lane on van ness a couple years ago they said you know maybe we'll get to it by 2022. so there is in all public planning processes and regulatory process there has been an extreme uh there has been extreme lengthening of timelines and you know particularly for somebody who's interested in integrating more renewable power into the grid texas has more wind power than anywhere why is that that's because we figured out a permitting process to get the power from uh you know to ease permitting for the power lines and that's a that's a huge challenge with respect to all of our clean energy sources whether it's renewable or natural gas etc it is um getting permitting done is very difficult whether you're looking to provide a new product or do new infrastructure and so i think there's an opportunity to accomplish big things if we can solve some of that permanent those permanent issues i i did think um getting back to the film again that the project those artificial trees if he if the incentives are right so that he can build them he's going to run into permitting problems so we'll run into the other problem that we have but i'd just like to agree with you james that i think we can't predict today what the solutions are going to be and trying to do that trying to predict what technologies and give them a nudge i think is dangerous because it gets in the way of maybe an innovation that we hadn't thought of nate do we have time for another audience question or should we wrap up well i think we've done a pretty good job actually of answering a bunch of the questions in the chat so i guess i would just give maybe 30 seconds to each of our panelists to maybe conclude uh if you have a final thought to leave with our audience um that would be great and david if you'd like to go first we would love to have your reflection well thank uh i am actually encouraged by the uh fact that everybody on this panel seems to agree that the climate change problem is real and serious and while we may have differences about how to deal with it this is not the kind of dialogue i had at the federalist society at federal society meetings you know a few years ago and so if we can all agree that we have a huge problem on our hands then it should be easier to see our way to some solutions and i look forward to uh to working with anybody to achieve that so thanks for including me sure and maybe i'll just uh build off of what david said um i think there is consensus and we have reached this tipping point that um federal there will be federal action there will be additional state action and i think that we can welcome that it's not just up to the states it's not shouldn't just up be up to the federal government either it should be up to corporations it should be up to individuals to be able to take action and do something of their own accord to be able to drive home this net zero future that we need to get to from a policy standpoint at the federal level i would love it to be as limited as possible and focused on reducing costs and increasing options and if we can do that we will be able to assure that all of the options are on the table for local governments for businesses for individuals to be able to cite what's locally appropriate and if it's at the lowest possible cost we'll be able to deploy it quickly get more bang for the buck more emissions reductions in the near term and in the long term and be able to export those solutions to the least developed countries in the world and really tackle this problem uh on the time horizon that we have uh left ahead of us and and i think that it can be done and i am encouraged by this conversation so thanks for the opportunity to participate thank you so much to all of you i really very encouraged as well and i just say that you know if you are looking for more information on some of these things i do with the economics of the university of texas colorado south carolina we have a energy tradeoffs.com website where we look at uh we do a bunch of podcasts on that or i've got all it on my website at energylawprof.com but i would also encourage please everybody watch this watch this movie it's it's pretty cool the technology is really amazing and uh you know i'm i'm optimistic about humanity's ability to solve this using uh innovation it's one of our best qualities got some got some bad ones that's a good one nate i'll just say thank you for hosting this and and yes if you haven't watched the movie do nate you told me earlier today that it actually won an award i guess you weren't you did say that to the group so it's um an award-winning movie so that's right best documentary at the anthem film festival so we're very excited about that i think it was also time for the audience's pick for uh the best documentary so great stuff um and great stuff again uh with this conversation grateful to all of you for joining us uh certainly to administrator wheeler and susan and david charles and james we really appreciate it uh we welcome your feedback on tonight's program by email at rtp red reg project.org um in the chat box you'll see a link to next thursday's program uh that will be on the future of our food that's october 1st at 7 p.m that panel will feature the secretary of agriculture sonny perdue we will have john mackey the ceo of whole foods join us we'll also have jos tetrick the ceo of eat just who was featured in the film and anastasia bowden who uh who will uh moderate it from the pacific legal foundation with that it's been a wonderful uh wonderful panel thanks everyone have a great night thanks susan thanks nate

Channel: The Federalist Society

Views: 255,726

Keywords: #fedsoc, federalist society, conservative, libertarian, fedsoc, federalism, fed soc, environment, law, innovation, entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, regulation, regulatory

Id: 2LEMh_4umT0

Length: 91min 28sec (5488 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 15 2020