[chimes]
[flute plays]
♪
- [Catherine] Alright, welcome 
everyone.
I am very appreciative that you’re 
here.
We’re going to start our webinar 
now and we’re
wanting to thank you all for being 
participants. You may hear a few more
people signing on. We understand
 that this is 
unprecedented times and we hope 
you and yours are well. 
We just want to welcome you to 
the Solve Climate by 2030
Climate Solutions for Iowa Power 
Dialogue 
Webinar. Please remember to 
keep your 
microphone and your video muted
 unless you are a
presenter. We will try to control 
for that, it will be very 
helpful if you would please 
kind of remember to abide by 
those
protocols, so please mute your
 video and 
your speaker unless you’re
a presenter. Okay, so this webinar 
is hosted by the
University of Northern Iowa. I am
 Dr. Catherine 
Zeman and I am the Director of 
the Recycling Reuse Technology 
Transfer Center and the advisor
 for the 
peer group here at the University
 of Northern Iowa. I am one of the
moderators. We also have with 
us today 
Dr. Craig VanSandt
he is a business administration 
professor and the David W. 
Wilson Chair of Business Ethics. 
During the last hour
our third co-moderator,
 Dr. Jonathan
Chenoweth, a professor of Cello
 and Chamber Music and Intro
and Director for the Center for 
Excellence in Teaching and Learning
will be directing our
dialoguing breakout sessions 
and bringing you back together to report out 
on what you think of all the 
presenters this afternoon 
and then your ideas for getting 
us to 
climate solutions by the year 
2030.
I’d also just like to acknowledge 
real quickly our project sponsors,
that would be the national 
sponsors
and that would be Bard College, 
Cliff Bar, The Institute of 
Environment at University of 
Connecticut UCONN, The American Indian 
Higher Education Consortium, 
Second Nature, and 
Earthday.org celebrating 50 years 
of earth
day this April. So, we’re gonna 
go through a few
more slides and then I will bring 
a small video clip on introducing
 the entire 
concept and how the concept of
climate dialogue and solve 
climate by 2030 was
instituted and that will be Dr.
Eban Goodstein speaking on this 
video clip from Bard College.
I want to make note that this is a
national, international webinar. 
There are 43 states involved 
in this this evening. We are doing 
a webinar for Iowa, but
it is a very large gathering of
 individuals 
from across the United States 
and we do have some representation 
from universities from Europe, 
Central Eastern European
University, and a few others. 
Tonight, just to go over the agenda
 real quickly
from four to five we’re doing the 
welcome and the video, then we will have 
our panelists and I see that they
 have signed on and we’ll be introducing them 
shortly after the video. Professor 
Jerald Schnoor with the University
of Iowa. We will get into his
 background a little bit more in just a
minute. Ms. Kerri Johannsen 
with the Iowa Environmental Council and we will 
review her bio also, and Associate
 Professor Alicia Rosburg with
Economics and Administrative 
Fellow for Sustainability at the
University of Northern Iowa. 
We’re really appreciative to have our panelists with us.
We’ll be hearing from them shortly. 
Once you hear from the panelists
that will speak for about ten 
minutes, giving you the inside wealth of experience
that they have had in this area 
solving climate 
problems. We’ll have a question
 and answer period. I will put up a slide 
at that time reminding you to put 
your questions into the chat 
and we will get to as many of
 those questions as we can. Type them into the
chat and then direct them to one 
of the specific panelists if
you want a specific panelist to
 answer that question. 
Then, Dr. Chenoweth, our other
 moderator, will be on to help you get into your
breakout sessions so you can 
share together in these breakout sessions
and then come back together and
 have someone from your session 
share the insights that you had. 
So, at this point and time
I’m gonna go ahead and open up 
co-hosting with one of the 
moderators, Dr. Craig
VanSandt
Let me find you, Craig, here...
I’m gonna make you a co-host.
- [Craig] Yes, I am here. 
- [Catherine] Craig, if you would like to say a 
few words, you said you would 
appreciate saying a few words about the 
David W. Wilson Chair, one of our
local co-sponsors here and then
 perhaps when you’re done I could
allow Dr. Chenoweth to say a little
 bit about CETL and then we'll proceed
with our video. - [Craig] Okay, 
thank you, Catherine and thank 
all of you for being with us this
 afternoon
The David W. Wilson Chair in
 Business Ethics that I hold
was created with a generous 
donation from
Mr. Wilson, a 1970 UNI graduate.
He was a philosophy major 
while here and
has provided the funds for this
 chair
to try and bridge any potential 
gap between
Business Operations and the 
philosophy side of ethics. 
He is now president and 
owner of one of the largest 
automotive
sales and service dealership 
networks in the country
we thank him very much for
his generous donation and support. 
Catherine?
- [Catherine] Okay Craig, thank 
you very much. I’m gonna go ahead and switch over
to Dr. Chenoweth, here,
just a second and we’ll hear a word
from him about CETL
[chime]
Bear with me just a moment. We 
had him here in the line up
and…
Hi Jonathan, can you hear us now? 
Can you?
- [Jonathan] Yes, I can hear 
everyone. I can hear you. I’d like to
just take a second to welcome 
everyone. I will
be back with you to help facilitate 
some conversation a bit later
but no need to postpone
our chance to hear from our 
speakers. Thank you very much.
- [Catherine] Alright, great, 
thank you. I appreciate
all your welcomes and we’re 
gonna go ahead now and 
I’ll go ahead and I’ll switch into 
our video, so I’m gonna have to 
stop the share for that for just
a minute and go out
and pick up our video.
And just make sure I’ve optimized 
that video so if you hang in there
 with me, everybody.
- [Dr. Goodstein] Welcome to Solve
 Climate by 2030. Today, universities in almost
all 50 US states, Puerto Rico, D.C., 
and several other countries
are hosting state and region wide
 webinars focused on 
ambitious and feasible things 
that we can all do in our cities, 
our towns and states in the coming
 year to really move the needle on climate change.
Here is the most important idea 
to take home today: 
What you do locally will change
 the future.
Fact: The U.S. state of Georgia is 
a top ten solar state,
the neighboring sunshine state of
 Florida has very little solar power due to
outdated laws and regulations. 
When we launched Solve
Climate a year ago, we could never
 have imagined that today entire countries 
and much of the world’s economy
 would be shut down with hundreds of thousands of people
ill, thousands having passed away,
 and our health systems overwhelmed. 
I take that back. We could easily 
have imagined
this. Our health experts and scientists 
warned us this was coming.
After SARS and MERS they told us
 this was coming and yet we didn’t take
preventive action. We didn’t prepare. 
COVID-19 has shown how fragile
 our health and economic systems are to
extreme events. Our scientists have
 told us clearly that
unchecked, climate change will 
turn our lives into an unending
series of extreme events. Floods,
 droughts, rising
sea levels, passing disease, more
 extreme storms and hurricanes
all of this leaving hundreds of
 millions of people homeless
and on the move. We can change
 this. We still have time
to change that future. Last year 
the world’s top 
climate scientists told us that we 
have until 2030, ten years now,
to cut global warming pollutions
 aggressively in order to stabilize the climate at
the low end. That warning was 
the genesis for this national
and international discussion today
 on how to solve climate by 2030.
Solving climate in ten years, that
sounds challenging and yet fixing
 the energy half of climate change 
by 2030 is looking more, not less
 likely, than it was
four years ago. The cost of solar
 and wind power, batteries, electric
vehicles have plummeted. In many
 cases, they are less expensive now than the fossil
fuel power that causes global 
warming and they are getting cheaper every day.
Already, utilities scale wind and 
solar, big solar
and wind farms that feed power into 
the grid, these technologies are
crushing fossil fuels in much of the
 U.S. In Colorado,
Idaho, and California, renewable
 bids are coming in at half the price
that the cheapest fossil fuel plants 
can do and this is where rooftop
solar and battery systems are 
headed in the near future. On the vehicles
front, all the major manufacturers 
see this coming. Mercedes-Benz
announced last fall that they have
 designed their last gasoline powered car. 
Going forward, every new model
 of theirs will be electric. Combining
electric powered vehicles with the
 impact of driver-less technology, we could see
a very rapid transition away of 
gasoline based cars to EV’s
in the next decade. All this progress 
was the result of a major technology
push by national governments, 
starting in America in the 70’s and then ramping
up with the Danes, the British, 
the Japanese and Koreans, the Germans,
and most recently the Chinese 
and Indians. Government policies
have brought these industries to 
scale and now the market is taking over
and renewables, battery storage,
 and electric vehicles are on track to deliver
power and transportation at 
prices, unsubsidized, that will
lead to major disruptions of energy
 markets in the 2020’s.
Can we get there fast enough to
 solve climate?
Well, this is where you come in. 
With plummeting prices for renewables and electric
power transports, the pace of the
 clean energy revolution will 
no longer be determined by 
Washington D.C. and other national governments. 
Instead, the core action is gonna
 be in your city, at your electric
utility, and in your state capitol. 
The key to 
solving climate by 2030 will be 
clearing the path at the local level to rapid deployment of
solar, wind, battery storage, and 
electric vehicles. We need to
get rid of outmoded laws and
 regulations that are holding back the transition.
Florida needs to take the lesson 
from Georgia. It’s imperative
that we have justice in this transition.
 We have to make sure
that the millions of green jobs that
 are created are jobs for all and that 
everyone has access to clean 
affordable power and mobility. 
Today, in Nebraska and New Jersey,
 in Idaho and Alabama, 
in Bangladesh and Brazil, we’re
 gonna find out what are three 
ambitious but feasible things
 that we can do right at home to smooth
the path for clean energy and
 to bring energy justice to our communities.
Following the webinar, I hope 
you will join a group or class discussion 
about what you can do to make
 these solutions real.
What next? Well, this summer, 
young people in particular
have a terrific opportunity to
 both support climate solutions 
and gain valuable job skills in a 
down economy. 
The most powerful thing you can 
do to solve climate by 2030
is to join the political campaign 
of a candidate who best
represents your views on climate
 solutions. In doing that, you’ll 
also learn how to communicate, 
you’ll gain courage, and most importantly
be part of a creative, strong, 
powerful vision
for the future. COVID-19 is giving 
us a stark lesson
about what happens when we 
ignore warnings from science. Today we'll
see how ten years can be enough
 time to drive the climate solutions that we
need and that the future will be
 what we need. 
Thank you for the work you will
 do to solve climate.
- [Catherine] Hey, that was very
 interesting.
We’ll talk in overview, design
 team, get us started
with our speakers and I’ve now
 made you, 
Dr. Schnoor, a co-host here and
 I will be 
unmuting you here and bringing
 your camera online.
Dr. Schnoor, can you hear
me? - [Schnoor] Yes, I can hear 
you fine. - [Catherine] Excellent, okay well I’m gonna
go ahead and read your bio, so 
once I’m done with that you can go ahead
and start your ten minute 
discussion so,
Professor Jerry Schnoor is the 
Alan S. Henry Chair in 
Engineering and Co-Director of 
the Center for Global and Regional Environmental
Research at the University of Iowa. 
He’s a member of the US National Academy of 
Engineering. He was elected to 
that in 1999 for his pioneer
work using mathematical models
 in science policy decisions.
The American Society of Mechanical 
Engineers (ASME) presented
to him in 2016 the Dixy Lee Ray 
Award for his outstanding 
achievements in environmental 
protection via improvements in technology
science and policy. In 2019, the 
American
Chemical Society bestowed the
 National Award for Creative Advances in
Environmental Science. Dr. Schnoor 
has published over 200 research articles
and peer review publications and 
authored, edited, and co-edited
seven books. His research 
interests are in water,
sustainability, climate change, 
and fire remediation.
Welcome, Dr. Schnoor, we’re glad
 to have you with us. Please go ahead.
- [Schnoor] Thanks, Catherine.
 I thought that was a very interesting video that we had to 
kick off the webinar and indeed 
we are
in an emergency right now with 
the COVID-19
and there are some lessons, 
perhaps, for another emergency.
That other emergency, of course,
 is the climate change and 
I appreciate trying to focus it on 
climate solutions
so often I end up giving the talk 
about the
climate science and I’d like to 
get beyond that to where we
actually make solutions and that’s
 what we’re trying to do today.
To do that, we need to win the 
hearts and the minds
of people in Iowa and the nation
and the world in order to solve 
climate change.
We need a plan, as was said at
the outset in our 
video from Dr. Eban at Bard 
College and we
need preparedness and [unintelligible]
[technology issues]
pandemic that we’re facing. 
Our plan
…there are plans available, 
though which we had
reluctant to follow includes
[unintelligible]…the Green 
New Deal, 
focusing on clean energy by 
2030
the day that we’re talking about 
for this webinar.
Of course, it includes the 
actions of 
something like that. House 
files, [unintelligible]
[unintelligible]
…dividend
beginning with 15 dollars a ton
 on carbon. We need
to get the prices right as was 
noted in our video
a lot of things are happening. 
[unintellligible]…solar power,
wind power, electric vehicles, 
but they’re not happening fast enough.
In fact, they’re still 
[unintelligible]
United States coming from all 
renewables, even
including hydropower and so
 forth. 
While good things are happening
 and jobs are being created, 
and there’s prosperity in those
 sectors, 
wind and solar, it’s not happening
 fast enough. We will not
have them happen fast enough 
to solve the 2030 
way to win hearts and minds. 
There’s other plans out there.
There’s plans from the Solutions
 Project from Stamford
initially focusing on understudy
 renewables by
2050. There’s some of you may
 know about Lester Browne's 
Plan B 4.0
and not only focusing on wind, 
solar, 
geothermal, and conservation 
efficiency but also to
decrease payroll taxes. That’s a 
tax on our labor and change it 
over to increasing
carbon taxes. Why do we 
subsidize roads 
and oil, like for example, why not 
change those subsidies
and do bike trails and prairie 
trails and 
light travel and mass transit. My 
other classes, I have about 
seven things that I try to approach
 for 
solutions to the climate change. 
Some of them are local, but
most of them will be because of
 the global problem.
First of all, I think it’s a no brainer.
We need to focus on so called 
negative carbon 
delusions in particular, massive 
reforestation 
and carbon [unintelligible]
We need to focus on bringing 
carbon back into the soil
instead of all the carbon, roughly 
half, that was lost
since the settlement in the 
mid-1800's.
Although, as the massive 
reforestation, I’m talking about 
100 million acres a year and 
remember Iowa is only 
46 million acres, so it looks like 
maybe three Iowas a year
globally that would be reforested.
Many of those are marginal 
answers that we've
once reforested. There’s also 
[unintelligible]
…as you know, they no longer
[unintelligible]
would and into roots and into the 
soils, but really they can
become carbon neutral also. 
They need to be harvested, but what do we
do with them then? Well, obviously, 
carbon
is…we’re gonna plant that area 
and put it into...
[unintelligible] causes us to sequester
 about half of that carbon
[unintelligible] local and more than 
100 years
into soil and soil
[unintelligible] carbonation has
 just been
sure to hold nutrients and has proven to 
[unintelligible] That’s number one. 
Number two is to electrify it
and reflect. Especially as noted by 
our first
we need our complete illustrated
…[unintelligible]
We’ll help that feed into the grid,
 so we are called to
grid, we need to put and sort
energy. We have 240 million cars
 in the United States.
Imagine if everyone had a storage
 pattern grid and
that storage battery could be 
connected into a grid in order to 
store intermittent solar and wind
 power 
by the vehicle and 
to have this exchange of storage
in a smart grid. We need to of 
course build out the grid
that needs also. We’re going to 
electrify everything 
and we’d improve battery technology
 we’ve created 
a lot of doubts and a lot of storage. 
Number three I listed is 
comprehensive energy and time.
For COVID-19, we didn’t have a 
plan. In fact, we even let go of 
our CDC emergency 
pandemic preparedness group 
two years ago. We need a
plan. I can’t believe that a major 
country like the United States
does not have comprehensive 
energy and climate 
legislation, but we still do not. 
I tell my students that 
coal and gas in their lifetime,
those industries are in distress. 
We have to transition
out of coal, oil, and gas, the
 fossil fuels. We have to
keep them in the ground. We 
can’t even burn them. 
The knowledge is improving 
and [unintelligible]
[unintelligible] We have to
 figure out
a way to transition out of that, 
including 
the use of coal as we do,
so we need a plan in climate and
 energy.
Number four on the list, we need
 energy behavioral structure.
[unintelligible]
Thinking forward in the months, 
if COVID-19 ends up worse 
before it gets 
better. We’re gonna have 
[unintelligible]
…wildfires in California
and the drought in Africa and 
floods in [unintelligible]
So, a massive infrastructure invested 
in the ways we can raise up 
electrical utilities on farms
flooding and so on. Number five
on my list for
[unintelligible]
[technological issues]
…to compete with food crops so we
need to have or eat more grains 
and have
tried here at the University of Iowa 
even to get the
meatless Monday on the school 
schedule. We have to 
win hearts and minds in order to
 just begin to have a more
nutritious diet but also to eat 
more grains and
save a lot of greenhouse gas 
emissions. It looks to me
we need to improve our soils as 
I mentioned earlier, but 
more back into the soils we need 
to reuse our water even
here in Iowa, we’re depleting our 
efforts
even in efficient Iowa, we need to 
treat the water highly and put it in 
back down into those aquifers. 
The reason why I enroll that is we 
can’t reuse all that water
especially water treated for high quality,
put it back in the [unintelligible]
We need to actually consider 
these validations.
Like San Diego has just put in a
 one billion dollar
desalination effort for clean 
water and energy. 
Next is 6th on our list is 
we mentioned earlier that we’ve 
already built
and it doesn’t seem to be going 
anywhere at the moment. Some of the plans
[technological issues]
…and increasing ten dollars per 
year and to adjusted as we 
go along. Now with the seriousness
 of coal and oil and natural gas
raising the prices up and 
this will cause solar and wind to
 become even
steeper as a portion 
[unintelligible]…we use very much 
and have very many emissions 
now. You’ll profit from this because
the dividend is to be returned to
 each and every American
on an equal basis. We use a lot 
of energy and emit a lot of
greenhouse gases. 
[technological issues]
[technological issues]
Some of them left on my
 list is changing 
hearts and opening minds. 
That’s 
the most important end goal
and the most difficult. 
But we can do it. I think there is 
a chance there of informing
minds and it begins when we
 begin to 
listen. We have to listen to each
 other
more carefully. We can start 
difficult conversations
by speaking from our heart and
 by sharing 
our wish, especially in this time 
of the COVID-19
pandemic. We’ll be sharing our
universal [unintelligible] everyone
 and everyone’s children
will be safe and healthy through
 this generation 
and the future generations. 
Sustainability 
is nothing less than ensuring 
that we have 
a foreseeable, healthy future for 
everybody
for all generations. That’s my 
speech, thank you 
guys, Catherine, and thanks so 
much for organizing 
and allowing me to speak with 
you
on Zoom. 
- [Catherine] Alright, thank you 
very much Dr. Schnoor. I am going
to hang on there because we are 
going to have our other speakers
and then we will perhaps be 
coming back 
and forth between all of the 
speakers when we take the questions
and I just want to remind everyone 
that when we get to the question
and answer period, you will 
have to use your chat function. You just need
go down to the scroll bar at the
 bottom of your screen and you 
will either see the chat function
 box or you’ll have to go to more and click on that 
so you can get to chat box and 
you can submit a question.
At this point now I’m going to 
bring 
one of my co-moderators back 
on. I’m gonna bring Dr. VanSandt
back on here so that he can 
introduce our other two
speakers. - [Dr. VanSandt] Yes, 
thank you Catherine. 
I’d like to extend a great
thank you to Kerri Johannsen, 
our next speaker.
She is the Energy Program Director
 with the Iowa Environmental
Council. She leads the IEC 
Energy Team of policy, outreach, 
and legal staff 
to pursue a vision of 100% clean 
energy for the state of Iowa.
Ms. Johannsen has over a decade
 of experience
in energy policy including serving
as the Energy Staff with the US Senate
Agricultural Committee during 
the development of the 2008
farm bill administering the Iowa Power
Fund for Innovative Clean Energy 
Projects and working
as an analyst and legislative
 liaison with the Iowa
Utilities Board for six years.
In 2018, she was awarded the 
State Partnership Award by the 
Iowa Community Action
Association for her work on 
energy efficiency 
impacting low income Iowans. 
She was also named
to the Midwest Energy News 
40 under 40
of Emerging Clean Energy Leaders.
Kerri, please join us and we
look forward to what you have to say.
- [Kerri] Thank you so much 
Craig and Catherine and thank you for inviting me 
to participate today and thank 
you Jerry for your presentation.
Some of what I’m going to say
 is going to overlap with what
Jerry has said and what we 
heard in the introduction as well. 
I think that’s a great thing because
 I think that what that indicates 
is that there’s a game plan 
ahead of us. There are
possibilities that are a known 
entity in terms of climate
solutions and there’s a lot of
 overlap and
understanding of what we need
 to do to get where we’re going. 
I titled my part of the talk today 
“Optimizing Energy
for a Carbon Free Future.” So 
just to give a 
little overview, burning fossil 
fuels for energy to power 
our everyday lives is by far the 
biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions 
in the US accounting for 92.7% 
of carbon
emissions in 2018 and weighted
 for intensity 
carbon dioxide made up 81.3% 
of greenhouse
gas emissions in that year. That’s 
the biggest 
chunk, that’s the part that we 
really need to go after, is direct fossil fuel
combustion. Fossil fuel use for 
creating
electricity as well, so yeah fossil 
fuel combustion is everywhere
it’s in our transpiration, building 
heating, cooking, industrial
processes and of course it’s how
 we produce the most
of our electricity still today. A 
common
refrain for those of us working 
in the clean energy space is 
electrify everything and the use
 100%
renewable electricity. Another 
way I like to think about this 
is optimizing energy use
for a carbon free future. What 
does that mean exactly? So,
when we optimize, we allocate 
our scarce resources
most effectively and efficiently. 
This means
first using only the energy we 
really need. 
Next, it means scaling back our
 use of fossil fuels as much
as possible and transitioning 
everything we can to electricity. 
Finally, we have to clean up our 
electricity 
production and move to 100% 
carbon free electricity. 
So, first: efficiency. Using
every single BTU therm kilowatt
 hour of energy
as efficiently as possible is really
 job number one.
Technologies already exist and
 increase efficiency from 
heat pumps to LED lighting, 
smart thermostats, induction cooking,
high tech insulation in windows.
Is it sexy? Maybe not, but 
absolutely these have the double
 benefit of saving
people money on their energy bills 
overtime which is a win win
for customers in mitigating
 emissions and saving
economic and quality of life benefits. 
Next step, after
and as efficient as possible we 
need to electrify as much as we can. 
In the short term, the prospect of
 electrifying everything 
in the next ten years is pretty 
daunting. How do we
transition every home away from
 natural gas or propane to 
electric space and water heating, 
cooking, clothes drying, etc.
How do we transition every 
factory away from natural gas to electricity?
In the near term, we must optimize
this means first being as efficient
 as possible and next transitioning
as many applications as we can
 from fossil fuels to electricity. 
The is how we reduce direct fossil
 fuel use to a tiny
fraction of what it currently is. 
We have to couple this
with investments in the research 
and development necessary to mitigate what is left. 
Finally, greening the grid.
Right off the bat, it is so critical to 
decommission the remaining 
coal plants in the United States as quickly as possible
including Iowa’s coal plants 
which we still 
have a lot of online right now 
today. We also
need to axe any new proposed 
natural gas
fire power plants and direct all
 of our investments
to renewable energy projects and
 energy efficiency. 
When I say renewable energy I’m
 really pointing to wind, solar, and
energy storage. This was covered
 a little bit in the 
intro as well, but I’m going to go 
into a little bit more detail
about just the cost of renewable
 and how transitioning to renewable 
energy isn’t necessarily going to 
be more expensive, but it should actually
be something that’s good for 
consumers and not just from an environmental perspective.
Depending on where you are in 
the US, the cost of building 
new wind and solar is now cheaper 
than the cost of continuing to run old
coal plants. Wind and solar have
 extremely low operating
costs and no fuel costs. Over the 
past ten years, 
the cost of wind has declined 70%. 
The cost of utility-scale
solar has dropped 89%
and the cost of battery storage 
dropped 35% just between
2018 and 2019. As production
continues to scale and technology
 improves, these costs are
expected to continue to fall. 
It is technologically feasible and
 cost effective
to get to 80% renewable energy
 in the midwest
with today’s technology and systems.
 We absolutely need to get there by
2030. There is no excuse not to 
and if we set
aggressive goals beyond that for 
2035 and 2040, 
we will be pushed toward developing
 the technologies needed to get us all
the way to 100% renewable 
electricity in a way that doesn’t break
the bank for consumers. These
barriers and innovations and things
 that we need to work on to get us
all the rest of the way there 
include a huge range
of things that people in all walks 
of life can
be a part of undertaking, so just
 to include some
examples, 
better software to deploy renewables, 
a stronger backbone of transmission
 lines to carry the electricity from where it’s produced
usually in rural areas to where it’s 
consumed more in urban areas,
large scale battery or other storage
 to deal with 
lulls in wind and solar, better
 policies and systems for 
integrating customer owned renewable
 energy and storage onto the grid,
better markets for valuing clean 
energy and energy 
efficiency and even new ways to
 regulate utilities to allow
them to make money while selling 
less and cheaper energy.
Finally just to cover a little bit 
about the transition
of our transportation sector. 
Nationally,
transportation is the largest 
source of greenhouse gas emissions. 
In Iowa, it’s actually agriculture 
is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions.
When we’re thinking about the
 energy system, transportation is a huge
chunk of our energy use. 
Electrifying big
chunks of the transportation 
sector with EVs, it’s important
but we also must expand access 
to mass transit, 
build more walkable and bike-able
 communities and provide 
micro-transportation options like
 bike-sharing, scooters, and stuff like that.
We also need to consider alternatives
 to long range transportation
like increasing high speed passenger
 rail as an alternative to 
flying and electrifying national 
shipping.
Even with some barriers remaining, 
the transition
away from fossil fuels is gaining 
ground and we know what the pieces 
look like. The real challenge is 
to focus on the
policies, incentives, and research
 that will accelerate 
energy optimization by 2030 and 
put us on a path to move our 
energy system away from fossil 
fuels completely.
Thanks.
- [Catherine] Craig would you like
 to…thank you so much, Ms. Johannsen. 
We appreciate your comments and
 if you’ll hang out here on the line we’ll be back perhaps with some questions
for you. I can see some questions 
coming in now. Craig, would you like to go ahead
and introduce the next speaker?
- [Craig] Yes, our final speaker is 
Alicia Rosburg
who is an Associate Professor of 
Economics
and the Provost’s Fellow for 
Sustainability at the University of Northern Iowa.
Alicia’s 
research crosses over between 
agricultural economics,
energy economics, and labor 
economics.
The primary focus of her research
 has been on sustainability 
related issues such as the 
economics of second
 generation biofuels, sustainable 
agriculture, 
and probably the most popular 
sustainable brewing.
Her research has been published
 in a variety of academic
journals as the Provost Fellow for
Sustainability, she helped spearhead
 sustainability initiatives 
on campus including sustainability 
related 
curriculum and the University 
Wide Certificate
in Sustainability. Dr. Rosburg, 
I’ll turn it over
to you. - [Dr. Rosburg] Thank you
 for letting me have
a moment here to speak today. 
I just want to say I’m going to also reiterate a 
number of the things that have 
already been mentioned and I think it’s awesome that there’s 
consistent overlap. It does show 
that there’s potential for action
when you have consistency, so 
having a consistent message should show you that these are
not new and out of the realm of 
ideas. These are ideas that you can
harness and use. One of the things
 I want to talk about
is how to approach things from 
an economic perspective but also
understanding that economics is 
mixed with sociology in some ways
 and behaviors and that sometimes
when even on paper it looks very 
obvious, there may not be
an easy path to get that through, 
so one of the things that I 
like to listen to is a number of 
speakers about how to tackle this in a hard way.
We have the fortunate…we’re 
fortunate to have Katherine Hayhoe
on campus here at UNI earlier this
 year. I love her approach of 
talking to people about climate 
change. For me, I
always think economics is everywhere, 
so to me economics is my common ground.
Whenever I speak with people and 
I feel like no matter what people care about their bottom
line, they care about their income, 
it’s going to be something that I can speak to.
As Jerry noted, speaking from your
 heart and being genuine
about it and understanding, so 
one of the things I want to emphasize is when you
speak to people about this, even 
when you’re talking about policies, understanding the
constraints that people are facing 
and even if it looks like long run this would be
the best choice for staying in 
business. They may have short run constraints that you
need to keep in mind.
From an economic perspective 
though, even if they have this
issue of short run constraints, 
we know action today is going to provide a lot more
economic stability than inaction 
because inaction will lead to havoc
and economic instability in the
 long run. Unfortunately, a lot of the policy that
we see come through in terms of 
energy and climate change is
reactionary. Reactionary policy 
can be very inefficient and it can be very
costly in the long run. We’re 
realizing right now with this
situation with COVID that reactionary
policy is not necessarily turning 
out to have the
best outcomes to a number of 
places, so Dr. Goodstein pointed that out in the
introductory video that this unfortunate
 emergency right now should illustrate some
of the consequences of being 
inactive. So, in economics we have this thing called
the precautionary principle which
 basically says that prevention is 
typically much less expensive 
than mitigation. 
That would save climate change,
 prevention is the preferable policy option on the table
instead of trying to have 
attempts to control the issue when
 it has taken a foothold. In some cases,
we’re seeing some of the results 
of climate change already, so we are mitigating those costs
are expensive. We need to approach
 policy
a little less about starting with the
 conversation of what’s politically feasible. 
We need to start about what’s the 
most efficient and economically sound
and what’s going to meet our 
environmental target. Politically feasible is 
very important and I understand
 it’s critical but that tends to be the thing that’s brought up
first. So, I have…if you’re trying to
 think of ways to approach
this if you’re trying to think of how
 you can act, I think there’s a number of questions that
you can ask yourself and I tried to
 write some of these down just so I could give you some
takeaways. First of all, locally and 
statewide, what 
policies need to be reconsidered? 
Jerry said there’s a number of 
policies that are very bad right 
now and need to be reconsidered. Why do we subsidize oil? 
Get rid of the subsidized for oil, 
get an equal playing field then
in a pretty near term, a lot of solar
 and wind is going to be 
on par with it even without subsidizes. 
Just making the playing field
equal, we just need to get rid of 
some of those. Understand that
heterogeneous problems call for
 heterogeneous action. Without
a national carbon theme dividend 
which I am a very strong proponent of and most
economists are. There isn’t really
 a one size fits all so we’re talking local
there may be some low hanging 
fruit that we can 
grab with certain policies, but we 
have to be creative. We might have to have a bundle of 
policies to attack things. Within
 this with policies, 
we need to reconsider locally. 
Look at the infrastructure that is placed
locally. How is business development? 
Is it sprawling? Is it more
looking at trying to keep thing concise? 
How is transportation 
incentivized? What’s the cost structure
at your local utility? There are a 
number of local utilities that have
what I would call perversed incentive 
built in. They have tiered structures where
as you consume more electricity it 
actually gets cheaper per unit which
has a pretty bad economic incentive. 
There’s reason for it, 
it helps encourage investment by large 
companies in your area, but that 
is not what when we have climate change that
may be a cost that we shouldn’t
 be bearing. Another
question is then how should we 
harness economic incentives to improve 
them? Is it a carrot situation with
 incentives or is it a stick situation
where we need to put a stop to 
things? One of the things that
Iowa’s big agricultural practices, 
so Jerry noted 
regenerative practices, how do we
 incentivize farmers to make that choice?
Farming margins are super tight
 right now if not already in the red
so how can we encourage them to
 make choices right now that
is hard for them when they have 
short term budget constraints and how 
do we put those in place for the 
long run for them. There’s a number of programs but we
can harness that more locally and 
state side other than relying on 
federal ones all the time. In order
 to do this when you’re talking about 
policies, Dr. Goodstein mentioned 
in his video being involved. 
This would be learning about your 
local politicians, 
your state representatives, your
 national representatives and being involved in helping
them to understand the tradeoffs. 
They have people
they have working for them but you 
can be involved and learn yourself in how to push them. 
One of the other questions I want 
you to 
ask yourself when you’re talking to 
people and you’re trying to make a difference what 
constraints are your local community
 members and decision-makers facing and make
sure you frame your conversations 
with that understanding because compassion and understanding 
will go a long way rather than telling 
somebody that this is what you need to do
it makes economic sense, why 
would you not do that? So recognize
their short-term budget constraints 
can help ease
and help people understand where
 you’re coming from with the policy.
Especially small businesses, 
time is one of the
things we don’t have enough of. 
If you can come alongside them
if we can have programs that can
 help 
them, I know at UNI we have a 
number of programs through the Iowa Waste Reduction Center.
Through CEEE, through ROTC that
 have gone out and helped
a number of these businesses
 who don’t have time through energy audits to
sustainability certifications. How
 can we harness then, those types of 
programs to help them achieve
 this when they don’t have the 
resources themselves? Also, with
 that can you identify
a very well respected opinion leader 
who can be a champion of whatever
effort you’re going for. This 
crosses over to sociology. I do a little 
work in community based ag 
practices and it’s very important
to find a well respected opinion 
leader who will help lead
you and come alongside you 
when you’re making these efforts.
At the end of the day there’s a
 lot of economic reasons why
climate change needs action now
 and it needed action ten years ago but why
it’s still needing action now. Until
 we have a national 
carbon tax or carbon dividend, 
we need to make action at the
 local level. It’s the way that we’re going to 
make change before 2030, but 
there’s a lot of ways that we can do it, so
I have that positive aspect of this.
 I like how this is called
“solutions” because I don’t feel 
like we are sitting here waiting for the nation
to move, we can do things in our 
own community. Thank you.
- [Catherine] Okay, thank you very
 much Dr. Rosburg, we appreciate your
presentation and your time today.
 All of the
co-presenters please hold on the 
line here and we have questions that are
coming through, so we can go ahead and 
with the questions I see some of 
them coming in now and some of them
are being directed specifically to individuals, so 
I see a question for Ms. Johannsen.
What are some examples of things we can not
electrify? That’s for Ms. Johannsen
can you respond to that? Did you hear?
- [Kerri Johannsen] I think that 
when you look at what's
available with today’s technology I
 think there are industrial
processes that require really high levels of
process heat that it is not feasible
to electrify with current technology, so
I…you know, there are some 
that use lower process heat, but 
you know some times the metal
processing and I think that there’s still
work to do in understanding what 
we can and can’t allow
in the industrial sector. We have a much
better understanding of commercial 
and palm electrification and those 
type of applications. It’s just when
 you need a lot of process heat that’s where we run 
into questions. - [Jerry] I’d add, 
this is Jerry,
that combined heat and power 
due to Greek era is
really efficient and I know Europe 
in particular has made
a good headway for neighborhood 
steam heating
burning biomass sometimes or 
from digester gas or whatever and 
combined heat and power
is…steam heat at the 
Universities we…
combine heat and power and that’s
 a very efficient system for
heating all the buildings. - [Kerri] Yeah, 
definitely the district
heating and cooling systems are 
great and yes, CHP
absolutely. 
- [Catherine] Thank you both very 
much, I have another question that’s come in for 
any of the speakers, so anyone that 
gets to your unmute button quickly 
and if others have a viewpoint on this.
For any speaker, what role, if any, 
does nuclear energy
have in our future?
- [Kerri] I’m happy to speak 
through that a bit, I think
that it is important
in this period of transition that 
our nuclear plants remain operating, 
that our 
currently operating. I know that
 that’s not happening across the board, 
because of economics but certainly
from a carbon standpoint, I 
would rather see that carbon free
 electricity maintained on the
grid rather than continuing to run 
coal or having increased coal.
The issue with nuclear is that
the expense, basically. Building 
new nuclear is incredibly
expensive. We’ve seen cost overruns 
at the sites where they 
have tried to do this that are just 
massive
massive massive amounts of money. 
When we’re thinking about how to 
do this transition in a cost effective
 way, the fact is that 
renewables are just cheaper. 
They are the cheaper way to do it right now. 
- [Jerry] This is Jerry and I agree 
with that completely Kerri but I 
might add that 
as you’ve said, nuclear is so expensive. 
Who is gonna 
invest in billions of dollars for 
something that is not gonna produce for more
than ten years and besides our 
goal is 2030
in this webinar and so nuclear 
has no 
help for us I don’t believe in the 
next ten years. I do think
there is two units still under 
construction in South Carolina.
I believe, but 
I think that we can’t disregard 
nuclear for the long
run maybe even throwing in power 
or more modular
units because it is a very low 
carbon 
fuel if we can make it cheaper 
and increase the public
acceptability and of course the
 safety record in this country has
been very very good compared 
to almost any other
energy system that you could
 think of, so I don’t want to 
rule out nuclear but it’s not gonna
 help us by 2030
I’m pretty certain of that. I agree 
with Kerri.
- [Dr. Rosburg] I’ll triple down 
on that. I agree
it…I don’t think we should shut 
down [unintelligible] as Kerri said, keep those ready to go.
We have to count those, but 
building new investment in Iowa when wind is so cheap
it just doesn’t make economic 
sense. They’re making areas around the country where
they have career capital investments
 because it may make a little bit more economic sense
there right now, but by 2030 in Iowa
 it shouldn’t be the option
of new addition in Iowa and a lot of 
the added cost to is regulation because
of the safety concerns overtime, 
so if we put a 
level playing field, if we recognize 
some of the regulations that have been put on nuclear,
are because of the [unintelligible]
there’s a lot of force that are very
 heavily oversighted because of the social unacceptability of it.
I don’t see it in Iowa expanding, 
but I do think we need to keep them as an option
when we have a very volatile 
market. It could be an asset.
- [Catherine] Thank you. I think 
we have time for a few more questions
here. I just want to make note for
 the people taking the questions, 
you can open your chat and see
 if it’s been directed towards everyone
you can see the questions. I’m 
reading them because we are recording this session, so
we have a question now in general 
for people with 
regards to renewable energy 
storage are the costs now low enough
and is the technology far enough 
advanced to eliminate the need for 
fossil fuels during periods of 
intermittency?
- [Jerry] I’m sorry could you 
repeat the question one more
time? - [Catherine] Absolutely, 
I'd be glad to. With regard
to renewable energy storage, 
are the costs now
low enough and is the technology
 far enough advanced 
to eliminate the need for fossil 
fuels during periods of 
intermittency, so intermittent 
periods when wind or solar is not
can bring electricity from solar
insulation? - [Jerry] Well, I’d 
defer to Kerri, but
I would say that the…we still
need power and right now it’s 
being given by coal
and natural gas. We need to 
transition out of those, so
we need to think about and that’s 
because to answer the question directly
storage is still expensive even 
though the costs have come down 
as somebody said, storage is 
expensive so it doesn’t get us out 
of the conundrum of needing some 
base level power at least in the 
next ten years as I see it.
- [Kerri] Yeah, I think that storage 
is I think in the…maybe in the
 five year time
frame, they expect it to become
 where it would be very
competitive. There are also a few 
things that I mentioned in my presentation that are really 
tied into this question that’s not
 just as simple as how much storage costs
but how do you value it in the 
markets?
Storage can provide, not to go into 
too much detail but it can provide a lot of 
different services and so if
it’s being compensated for all the 
services it’s providing, then 
the compensation you can get back
 changes the economics of whether it 
makes sense. There’s also, you
 know, the notion
of a changing understanding of 
what base low generation
means or if you deploy transmission
 on a large
scale, then you can balance out 
load and generation more easily and so 
even if you have a lull in one 
location you have the wind blowing in another 
location. You can move the energy
 around to where it’s needed, so 
storage is one piece of a really
 complicated 
kind of puzzle of all these different 
energy assets
that are just…it’s exciting to
explore, but it’s complicated, but 
yeah, I would say like
as an energy resource we still
 have a few years to go.
- [Catherine] Okay, thank you.
One additional question here, I 
think we have time for. This is for
Dr. Rosburg. PACE and that’s an
 acronym
for Property Assessed Clean 
Energy, loans
are being used in other states to 
finance the high upper cost inherent with 
renewable energy, why hasn’t Iowa
 adopted these
PACE programs? - [Dr. Rosburg] I’d 
like to defer to see if Terry has any
expertise. She’s got more
 [unintelligible]
I can’t answer that question of 
why they haven't
been passed forward, I do know 
that there are some potentially unintended consequences
of those types of policies and 
that’s…as an economist I like
to think of a policy might look great
 on the surface, but you have to think about how 
the consequences that might 
happen down the road and one of the things
with those are resale ability, what 
happens, how do those
loans get allocated and the repayment 
probability of those
so I know there’s been some
 implementation problems in states that have
tried, that are doing this and are 
considering them. That said, we are kind of a late
move around this. There are several 
states who’re doing this. In general, 
I think that this would be a positive 
move even with the unintended
consequences to provide a program,
 but it obviously would have to be some thought 
to the scope of such a program and 
so I’m going to defer to Kerri and 
Jerry to see if they have any on your question of why haven’t we.
Apparently not… 
- [Kerri Johannsen] I think it’s just 
been kind of a political 
just for political reasons I think that 
it just takes, you know, building political 
oil and support and you know, 
getting things moved at the legislature 
I think that there are…in the past, 
the bankers had some questions about 
mortgages and how it effects 
loans and things like that
and so really being able to speak
 to all of those technical issues and 
show that there’s a strong demand 
from local governments for this kind of 
program. I think that’s what it 
would take to really move
it forward. 
- [Catherine] Okay, we are just one 
minute away from our transition point
here, so we had a couple of additional 
questions out there, but they would really like
us to make sure we have time for 
breakout sessions and I don’t want to lose too 
many more people, so I’m going
 to go ahead and take this minute to 
turn the program over to 
our other moderator, Dr. Jonathan 
Chenoweth
who is going to do the host section
 and I thank all of our
presenters very much. We hope 
that you can stick around and we really 
appreciated your expertise, your 
insights, and your 
great responses to the questions
 that we could get to. 
It was just, it’s nice to see we had
 a few more questions out there and unfortunately 
maybe they can get those answered
 in the breakout session.
I’m going to go ahead, Jonathan, 
and I’m going to
make you the host of this event.
- [Dr. Chenoweth] Thank you, 
Catherine. I’d like to
strike a balance in this next section 
between channeling your
conversation and letting it be of 
[unintelligible] there are a lot of
experience there among those that are
tuned in, so I will be
putting some questions up to channel 
your thoughts, but
I also encourage you to pursue the 
lines of thought that are on your
mind and not to be limited by that.
 Further, I’d like
to say we are going to go into 
breakout rooms, but if you see
somebody among the participants
 that you would particularly like to have a chance to interact with, 
could you send me something in 
the chat? If you click
on chat and then change the “everyone” bubble
to me. I will try to channel that
request so that you can connect 
with folks that 
you want to, so let me schedule
 where I think 
we might go with this group
conversation and then 
cut you loose.
This is where we turned it into a 
community conversation.
Where we are paying particular 
attention to 
action that individuals can take 
and groups of 
individuals that we initiate from 
this point.
I’d like to recap the challenges
that came from our panelists.
Jerry Schnoor’s challenge, how 
can we win hearts and minds to solve climate change?
Kerri’s challenge, how can we 
optimize the energy
mix for a carbon-free future? 
And Alicia’s
how can we harness an economic 
mindset to combat climate change?
Those topics, 
ought to be the…maybe the topic 
sentences of our
moment forward. I’m going to 
put in the chat a link that will allow 
everyone
to access a shared document 
where your ideas can 
flow freely. I’m going to take a 
moment to do that now.
Please excuse my
brief absence.
Hold on and I’ll be back
I had intended to get this up in the chat and 
I was just spelled down by the conversation, 
so let me take a moment now to get that
available to everybody.
So, you should find some links 
now. They’re actually the
same length I think the short link 
is the way to go.
You can access there a document
 in which you’re able to 
type as individuals and 
make your contributions. You are all
deputized as scribes. We’re not 
going to assign that role
to specific individuals from your 
groups.
Momentarily we’re gonna go 
into breakout groups of about six
 participants and I’d like you to spend ten minutes
discussing questions one and
 two that are coming up
as your conversations are going
 on in your group, 
feel free to make your
own contributions, not just those
 that are part of a consensus
from the group. Questions one
 and and two are building on the themes of 
the presenters: which of the 
approaches that you’ve just heard about
seems most important for 
or most promising in solving 
climate change and why? And do you
see as these…or what do you see
 as your personal role, if any, in helping to 
advance these solutions? Take a
 moment to think 
to type and shortly you will be 
dumped into
breakout groups of about six
 individuals 
each. 
Again, I’ll be looking in the chat 
for your special requests.
- [Catherine] Hello?
- [male voice] Hello, are we at our 
meeting? - [Catherine] Hello, yes!
- [female voice] Hey Trevor! 
- [Trevor] Hey guys!
- [Catherine] Hello.
- [female voice] So, I hear two 
other people. It looks like there’s four here.
- [Catherine] Yes. - [Trevor] Yeah, 
it looks like you’re right.
- [Catherine] I was hoping to try
 to get to 
the document to see if I can 
enter something into it. - [Trevor] 
I’m doing it
mobilely, so I can’t really… 
- [Catherine] Can’t get in there?
- [Trevor] If they’re just questions,
 you can read them off or…
- [Catherine] I’m going to give it a
 try here. I’m trying to log in.
- [Catherine] I’m there, so 
I guess I could
oh…it’s requesting edit access…
- [Catherine] Let me send a request 
to Jonathan and see. I may have to pop back and send him a
chat. I might have to 
- [Trevor] Sure, whatever you need to do.
- [Catherine] Actually since I gave him the 
ability to be the host. I think
I don’t have that ability anymore. 
I turned it over to
him, so yeah…no
I do not. It doesn’t look like I can… 
- [Trevor] Okay, it looks like
it’s closing soon. 
- [female voice] Oh, that was quick.
- [Catherine] Yeah, it’s saying it will 
close in 16 seconds, 15…
- [Trevor] So, I guess we’re going back. 
- [Catherine] I guess we are, maybe he needs to give
us a password or something.
 - [Trevor] Okay, I think you’re right.
- [Catherine] We’ll hang in there.
- [Dr. Chenoweth] …snafu with
 the document not being accessible. I hope
that is now fixed in the chat
if you can let me know if you’re
 able to get in there, but I think given the 
number of participants we have
 here, right now I’d like
it to be broadly open, the 
conversation versus 
broken up into the smaller rooms. 
That may change if we 
get 60 people again.
- [Catherine] Okay…
So, we’re going to discuss things together
in the one group, is that...? 
- [Dr. Chenoweth] I was just looking at the
numbers, which we down to seven 
temporarily. I think maybe that was 
due to folks trying to access the
 document and
failing? But I’d be up for any
 feedback on
best course of action. I just want 
to make sure the folks that are with 
us feel they can contribute. 
- [Catherine] Do you have access
to the document, Jonathan?
 - [Dr. Chenoweth] I do, and
I changed the sharing to anyone 
with
the link should be able to access
 that. Has
folks tried? - [Catherine] Yeah, 
we tried and we couldn’t get in because we needed a 
password or we needed permission
 from you. 
If you opened it, maybe you could
 just send us all to our breakout rooms again
and if we’re able to get into it we 
can go ahead and 
- [Dr. Chenoweth] Right, are you 
able to click on that link
to confirm 
- [male voice] No.
- [female voice] If you refresh it, it
 should work now. It worked for me as well.
In that way. - [Dr. Chenoweth] It 
is working now? - [male voice] Not for me.
- [Dr. Chenoweth] Let me try 
refreshing… - [male voice] I don’t know what’s going on here.
- [male voice] I don’t get this. I 
don’t get what the hell is going on!
- [Dr. Chenoweth] Um, I’m going 
to ask you to try one more time to click that link
that’s in the chat. I believe it should be
available now. - [male voice] I 
don’t know what’s going on…
- [Dr. Chenoweth] Terry, are you 
able to find the link in the chat? - [Terry] No, I’m not.
- [Dr. Chenoweth] If you could go 
down to the bottom... - [Terry] I’ve lost all of you
somehow. - [Dr. Chenoweth] If you 
go down to the bottom menu… - [Terry] I don’t
see it. - [Dr. Chenoweth] Oh, I see. 
Take your mouse down to the
bottom of your Zoom screen 
and does it open up
- [Terry] I’m not on the Zoom anymore.
 I don’t see any of you guys
now. Ugh!
- [Dr. Chenoweth] You are in the meeting. 
- [Terry] I don’t know what’s going on.
- [Dr. Chenoweth] Okay, I’ll try to 
get back to you.
Okay folks, am I hearing that the document
has been accessible to a number 
of people? If so, I’ll put you back in rooms.
- [Catherine] I think you could 
go ahead and try
to put us back into the room. I 
wasn’t having success, but I copied 
the first link, so...
- [male voice] Alright, are you guys there?
- [female voice] I’m here.
- [male voice] Looks like we just lost one person...
- [male voice] Oh, there’s Timothy.
- [female voice] Okay, can you hear me now?
- [male voice] Yep, just waiting on Catherine.
- [Catherine] Hi there, I was trying to get access to the
document. I don’t have access, I was
 wondering if either Trevor
or Timothy can try. - [female voice] I can see it now.
Oh, can I…yeah, I was expecting it to be a
hyperlink, but I had to copy and paste
- [Catherine] Right, me too. I can get to it, but I can’t type 
anything on it. 
You can see it, but you can’t type on it, right?
- [male voice] Yeah, it’s just the… 
- [female voice] The request access is still…
 - [Catherine] Is still coming up?
Well, I’ll tell you what I could do. I could open
a blank word document here and I will
go ahead and type if someone will read off the 
questions and I can type up the things we talk about.
- [female voice] Oh, okay. - [male voice] 
That’ll work. - [Catherine] Okay, what’s the first
one? - [female voice] Which of
the approaches that you just heard 
about seem to be
most important or most promising 
in solving climate
change and why? 
I can start again. - [male voice] Yeah, 
go ahead, Tami. 
- [Tami] Which of the approaches
 that you just heard about
seem to be important or most
 promising in 
solving climate change and why?
 And for reference, he
put the three names above
and their challenges. For review, 
Gerald’s was how can we contribute 
to winning hearts and minds
to solve climate change? Kerrie’s 
was how can we contribute 
to optimizing the energy mix for a 
carbon free future? And Alicia's
was how can we contribute to
 harnessing an economic
mindset to combat climate change?
- [male voice] This first one, 
because I think the mind part of it 
involves the economics and 
finances of it, but also the hearts 
appealing to the emotional side 
of things with, you know, 
with health
- [Catherine] If you get a thing that says
refresh to change your permissions, 
it’s going to lock you out, so don't
hit that if you haven’t already. 
- [female voice] Okay.
Good to know. - [Catherine] I’m 
typing away, so 
far I’m hearing hearts and minds
 is a favorite approach. 
- [male voice] Although I had a 
hard time
hearing his first talk. - [Tami] Yeah, 
I had a hard
time. Yeah. - [Catherine] Yeah, there
 was a very large number
of people, 62 at that point on, and 
people kept signing on and off
 and I think that it was 
dragging it down a little bit.
- [Trevor] Yeah, but I do like the
that approach in the question. 
- [Catherine] Okay, what do you 
like most about hearts and 
minds? I mean, do you think that 
mainly we’ve appealing all this time 
to hearts and minds and what have we missed?
Because there’s still so many people
 who don’t see this
as an urgent issue.
- [Trevor] Yeah, one of the presenters
 talked about how
you just need more than facts,
 the mind side of things.
- [Tami] I also think it depends on just
the person who is in front of you, so there
are some people that the only thing
 that will change their mind about 
this is if you put the economic
 numbers in front of them 
and said this is how much it will cost 
if we don’t do anything, and this is how much 
it will cost if we do do something. 
Or the economics of this is how 
much renewable
is going to cost you compared to 
how much it’s going to cost to stay on 
oil and gas and then the other thing
 is just trying to 
combat misinformation coming back
 from oil and gas industries.
As far as where those numbers…so 
I think that gets 
confusing, but there are people that
 when they see 
that, “oh, this is gonna lower my 
energy bill” that makes a difference.
For other people, just fact after fact
after fact just feels a little bit 
overwhelming and that’s where, kind of where
the hearts and minds part comes in because if you can appeal to the
“well, do you like having…
spring days? Because summer is
 going to be longer and 
spring is going to be shorter and
 is that really the way you want to live or
this is going to be the human toll
 in other places as far as
floods and stuff like that. Is this 
really the world you want to live in?”
I think it just kind of depends 
upon who it is in 
front of you that you’re trying 
to convince. 
- [Catherine] You’re saying just
 make sure that they understand the
personal impact from the technical issues
- [Tami] Yeah.
- [Catherine] Anybody else have 
something they’re thinking about with any of the other
approaches?
With the other speakers...
- [Dr. Chenoweth] Okay, my 
apologies to all for
the snafus with the doc, I
 hope that it’s now available
to all for editing. I hope you had
 good conversation
despite my best efforts.
I wonder if we could now turn to
open forum for the meeting as a whole here
and share out some of the most promising
things that came up in your small groups.
Just, anyone can unmute and comment
at this point. 
- [Catherine] Okay, Jonathan, I 
can go ahead and share back 
some of the things that
we…we managed to talk about the 
first question. This is Catherine.
We were discussing 
the approaches that are important, 
which ones were the most important and why and people
in my group tended to favor the
 hearts and minds
approach. They wanted to make
sure that people had facts and understood
how climate change was going to 
impact them personally
so that it would try to remove 
some of the short-term thinking that 
occurs, make sure that people
knew economic numbers that meant 
something to them, so rather than seeing things in 
aggregate, seeing the numbers so that
 they could understand what it would mean
for their personal life, make sure that we combatted
misinformation and that part of the information
they were receiving was their pocketbook issues
and I think that was the main focus.
Did you make sure that they understood 
what it meant to them personally and by the
time we got that discussed we were 
just ready to start talking about
the importance of the business 
community and the energy mix
and then we had to come back. 
- [Dr. Chenoweth] Well, I wonder
 if it would be useful to 
try to focus on those ideas that
 individuals can 
engage and I don’t mean by that
just in their own households, but 
what kinds of
actions lead to 
immediate change that we 
…I know it’s important to fight for
 legislation and to move through those channels, but 
I’m wanting people to feel that they have 
channels for empowerment that exist
to them as individuals and groups 
that self identify.
- [male voice] Okay, can I talk? 
Can you hear me? 
This is Bill. I’m in Philadelphia. 
- [Dr. Chenoweth] Hey, Bill.
- [Bill] Hi, Jonathan, Hi, Cathy. I’m 
an active member of
Citizens Climate Lobby in Philadelphia.
 I’ve been to
Washington twice lobbying 
offices of congress
and it’s been a wonderful, wonderful
 experience. I can tell you
it is a lot of support bipartisan
 support 
for the carbon…the energy 
innovation and carbon 
dividend act where you put a…Jerry
 talked about it and Alicia
and I think Ms. Johannsen.
[background noise] Hello? Am I on?
- [Dr. Chenoweth] Yes. - [Bill] So, 
I’ve been doing that also
[child shouts] Personally, I started
 a Powerpoint presentation 
[child shouting] geared to grandma’s 
and grandpa’s. 
- [woman’s voice] Mommy’s on a
 phone call! - [Bill] Giving talks to grandma’s and grandpa’s
talking about going to bat for their 
grandchildren to combat 
climate change and what they can 
do about it. So, I’ve been giving
talks on that and 
I just want to share one story with you. 
When I was in Washington
I was with a group of people who were 
petitioning a Republican 
Congressman’s office and about 
getting this dividend act passed, 
and he was 
moaning and groaning about not 
being able to do anything about it
and one of the people on my team 
was a high school kid from Texas.
A Republican, a strong Republican 
from a Republican background
he said to the congressman, look if 
you don’t do
anything fast, you are going to lose a 
whole generation of young Republicans. You don’t have time
to sit back and do nothing and that
 for me was so
encouraging to know what the young 
people are doing and how much 
they care about this issue.
Hello?
Hello?
- [Catherine] Thanks for your
 feedback, Bill. I’m looking
to see if Jonathan
is still on and it looks like he is.
Jonathan are you with us now?
- [Dr. Chenoweth] I am.
I wonder if we could call upon Mark
Welford to offer some thoughts for the group
I’m very pleased that he’s joined us.
I’m not sure that he was
able in his group or through the document to 
share. - [Mark] I had a chat in the 
group. I don’t know
where that really went. I still can’t
 access the 
document, but the concern I have is
in any discussion of climate change
 is not necessarily 
what we tend to emphasize in the
 production of energy
without the discussion of consumption. 
Certainly that was the case
in the three people who chatted and 
also different scales
at which we can 
enact change and that is at the individual
the kind of group and that of the
 legislature and you know, the reports that went earlier 
were conflating or free and were 
given a clear notion of 
what is possible for individuals
 and I think that’s
important. I think it’s important also
 then to talk about groups
that can get together. If you’re going
 to talk about the legislate, which only
means really in this country of people
 you have a conversation with your legislature about 
two to every four years. That’s
 something that
it annoys me that
we tend to push a lot of our 
demands into an environment when we
 have very few opportunities
to discuss with them, so for me,
 talking about 
what individuals can do or local 
groups,
I think is much more empowering 
than talking about the 
legislature. I mean, for the example, 
electrifying 
rail rights which will grab millions and
 millions and millions of dollars with in investment at a time when
we have…we’re running out of money
 because of COVID, it doesn’t seem
like a very good idea to be having
 that discussion. No. We can
look at what COVID’s doing very
 tragically. We’ve got lots of people dying, which is a
terrible…but on the other hand you
 look at the reduction in pollution
though there wasn’t a reduction
 in GHT emissions
it shows you the consumption of 
changing our
personal consumption would have
 a massive change to the amount of 
emissions. So, I think it’s in my mind how we
just read in the textbooks on this, it’s maybe a
better environment to talk about 
what individuals can do at this time because
we can have an impact. I mentioned
 it in my group. There’s a lot of contrails out there right now, 
you can look out there, I haven’t 
seen a single plane flying. That's
a radical change from three months ago or even
two months ago. Maybe a month
 in the case of the United States. 
With seeing improvements in 
pollution levels, in other words, they’re 
dropping, so you know, I think we
 need to talk more about that.
We’re not legislators.
I think we can leave that and 
particularly in this country where we have such
limited opportunities to discuss stuff
 with our legislators
every two to four years, I think in this
environment the individual changes are powerful.
- [Dr. Chenoweth] Thank you. I wonder
if there are individuals who are 
with us now who could speak
to local efforts within Iowa
if you’d like this opportunity to get
 the word out about 
what you’re attempting and to
 maybe gather some 
more interest among those that
 are still in attendance here.
I’d also say that while those folks are 
reaching for their unmute button
 that I have tried once again to 
share a link. This should be to a 
document that you can 
edit, but little
perplexed by why that’s not working
 and my apologies for it.
Would anyone like to speak to their 
specific efforts
here and let us know what you’re
 up to?
- [Dr. Chenoweth] Lacking that, I
 could send you again
to the breakout rooms if 
there are individuals that would like to 
…if you’d like to continue with a
conversation I can show you where we were
with that. Are you seeing my screen?
Questions three and four?
I think not…
If you’d like to take a shot at questions 
three and four which are both 
a chance to address additional 
- [Bill] Initiatives? - [Dr. Chenoweth] And 
also to think about
what the impact is on issues of fairness and 
justice when we are talking about climate
so folks that would like to 
go out to breakout rooms, I will
 enable those now. 
I think we can…
go to it!
- [Catherine] Hello.
Can you hear me Tamothy?
- [Tami] I keep forgetting to unmute, 
so I talk and I’m like “what?”
- [Catherine] I understand. It’s kind
 of a…it’s a challenge
to get used to this and you know, we’re
professors just trying to run these
 programs and we have IT
people who can help us but with
 the COVID outbreak, 
all of them are so buried in just 
teaching some other
people just how to put their classes
 online that
they were like, you know what? 
You’re getting promoted to running your own 
webinar. They were like, oh, 
wonderful, thank you.
We’re doing our best, but it is
 a challenge. I’m gonna 
try and see if I can get into that
web link
have you…were you able to open it
 this time? Have you been able to?
- [Tami] Um...
- [Catherine] The new one he sent 
us, I picked it up, I’m going to see here...
It’s making me sign in. Let me see...
We have done a lot in the peer program
 which is a Panther Initiative for environmental 
equity and resilience to try and talk
 about and address
equity issues and you know, how we can
assure equity
so climate justice, how could we…
Oh! I can type on it now!
Amazing! Hold on so…
we can… - [Tami] Yay!
- [Catherine] In fact, you know what
 I’m going to do, I’m going to just transfer our responses
from the previous one and we will have
our contribution in there. I had 
typed them out.
There we go.
Do you have any thoughts?
Are we the only two people in here 
this time?
- [Tami] I’m here.
- [Catherine] Is there somebody else
 here? - [Alyssa] I’m here. Alyssa. - [Catherine] Oh, hi Alyssa. Okay great.
What does everybody think on this last
two questions? - [Alyssa] I can’t see them, so 
if you could read them, but
 - [Catherine] Okay, sure it’s the two that he
put up there, but I’ll read them off 
here. Let me just
enlarge this a little bit and we’re 
good to go. Okay.
Question three and four right? What 
other approaches do you think are
critical in advancing the debate and
 to making rapid substantial 
progress? So, 
outside of the three things that 
our speakers presented like hearts and 
minds, getting the right energy mix, and then
vocalizing the business community, 
are there other approaches that you
two think are critical to advancing 
this debate? 
And making rapid change? 
- [Tami] I think the last guy who was
talking about energy efficiency 
and just lowering our consumption
was making a good point. 
I in my personal field, I feel like I
hear about it more than other 
people…some other people
have been saying it’s just not being 
talked about at all, but kind of where I have been
it is discussed, but we haven’t really
 tapped into
it at all. The other thing is, you 
know, we keep
talking about wind and solar, but 
we haven't
talked about geothermal exchange
 and about 
every time we have some sort 
of development
like we put up lots of buildings,
 that’s a wasted opportunity where we 
could have done geothermal 
exchange underneath 
all of those buildings or underneath 
all of those parking lots and we’re just not doing it.
I know it’s an expensive upfront cost, 
but it has so much savings over 
the lifetime of the building
that it’s worth the upfront cost and
 that’s probably 
maybe something we should be
 subsidizing more just to get people
willing to do that.
- [Catherine] What is the average 
lifespan of that geothermal? It’s several decades!
Right? I mean, it’s a big long life. 
- [Tami] Yeah, at least
20 years before you have to look 
at replacing the
pipes and that kind of depends on 
how geologically active your 
local area is. 
Iowa is not, so geothermal might 
not work as well
in California and it might not 
work as well
where the injection wells from the 
fracking water have been because that’s starting to cause
so many of those small earthquakes, 
but when you have geologically stable 
area, there is…it’s just a thing we
 should be doing, but it’s 
barely on the radar. 
- [Catherine] I don’t know if maybe 
either one of you have read something or know more about this
relative to what I’ve been reading.
 I’m under the impression 
that our battery storage is getting better
all the time, so that we could have a real 
veritable mix of energy generation options
and with the better battery storage
 that we’re having 
and it’s coming online and I thought
 Tesla had pushed this forward a great deal
that we were going to really be in a 
new sort of game changer mode.
Not withstanding the fact that 
we now have solar and wind that’s 
cheaper that fossil fuels.
- [Tami] Yeah. - [Catherine] So, 
have you all heard the same?
- [Tami] I have, but I think part of
what we’re running into is there has
 sort of been talk so much about
it’s just around the bend, it’s just
 around the corner, 
that I think there is a little bit of
too much hope in it.
There’s also the 
concern about how many 
resources it takes that we’re gonna
 have to shift to our mining operations 
to getting the resources for these
 batteries, so 
it’s 
environmentally better to have the 
battery storage, but we’re still
gonna have to have a lot of mitigation 
and really make sure that 
mining operations for these materials
 are done 
or aren’t exploiting the local 
populations of the people who live
 there and aren’t just people profiteering off
of this and taking the same shortcuts 
we’ve been seeing with oil and gas.
- [Catherine] I agree with you, 
definitely, about the rare earth elements that are 
part of the mix and our electronics 
and the batteries. 
I had worked with a post doc from
 a university 
in Hinland at the Ole U University
in Hinland and we were trying to get 
before this whole COVID thing, we 
were trying to get a European Union Grant to look at
mining landfills, you know. Landfills are
very well constructed now, right and they have to 
be constructed in specific way 
under the laws in the United States
so that they mutate and the gas 
that comes off them is collected, 
but they are guaranteed to fail overtime.
They will have to be dug out to some extent
repaired, remediated, that type of thing 
and it would be so much better if 
we could just manage them as an ongoing recoverable
mineral site and then you would be constantly 
monitoring them and it would also 
be a source of income. It was just something
we had thought about. 
- [Tami] Yeah, I thought about
 eventually if were mining...
for landfills, I thought it might be 
for plastic. If we finally got our recycling plastic
actually got a good recycling that 
we could recycle everything that’s 
out there and just stop producing it 
and get to the point where we could mine landfills
for plastic, but I hadn’t thought 
about it for rare earth.
- [Catherine] That’s one of the things 
we wanted to try to establish was
the “or” content. How many rare earth
elements were present versus a natural content. 
We had a suspicion that it would be
 much higher, so that it would
make more useful, right? Less overall
environmental damage and you 
know, the over burden that is 
removed often has trace amounts
 of core, but it’s not enough
for them to want it, so they just pile
 it at these over burning piles
or mind-tailing piles.
Anybody 
else have something that they 
would want to add? I can put it into our
list here. 
How about to ensure fairness? 
Anybody have any thoughts
on that? How do we be fair to low income
communities, minorities, 
so that
we don’t cause them to bear the 
disproportionate burden 
of any of the environmental costs
 that might come along with
renewables?
- [Tami] Yeah, I think that was…I guess,
 kind of answering…yeah I already
talked about that a little bit before
 about you know, wherever these mining
for the rare earth minerals are, is
 that we make sure the local population is 
protected and not exploited. The other 
thing is the
cost of getting solar panels
onto a house is that much more 
expensive
so it’s trying to figure out how can we get things
like…’cause you’re not going to have wind 
towers in the middle of cities, you 
can have smaller scale windmills and that technology
is coming along, but
when you have solar 
panels for some of these more 
urban minority areas, then we need to think about
well how can we have rooftop 
solar for apartment buildings?
How do we do that? Because a lot
 of these people 
you know, if you’re renting, your
 landlord doesn’t care what your utility bill 
is, so he’s not going to make those 
investments in the building to make it 
energy efficient so how do we 
make the driver to be beneficial to the landlord
to be willing to make those investments
 into building
efficiency so that the people living 
there don’t have to use
as much electricity? 
- [Catherine] Absolutely. Maybe 
grant and loan programs and that
type of thing that would definitely...
it makes you wonder, too, if some
small businesses that are low income or minority 
could be made more profitable by
 forgivable grant or loan programs 
that put in alternative energy or energy
saving approaches, right? 
Could be making cities more 
sustainable and yet would be 
attracted to those groups to feel 
priced out of the market right now? 
- [Tami] That’s a program here in 
Cedar Falls that
our energy and community team with 
the Green Iowa AmeriCorps has 
set up and has been trying to just 
get into buildings just to 
help them switch out their lightbulbs 
and they're
going from business to business, 
do an inventory of the lighting that they have
and then they can say, “okay 
let’s look at how 
much you’re spending and this is 
how much you would save if you just put in LED’s right now 
and didn’t even wait for these 
lightbulbs to expire.
With the 
just to give them that information
 because 
with the outdated lighting that
 they have, 
there’s so much energy being 
used that it’s almost 
more energy efficient just to throw
 them away halfway through their life 
and put in LED’s than it is to let them
 sit there and burn and burn and burn.
That’s one of the…I really feel like 
boots on the ground
and they’re…and then COVID happened.
- [Catherine] I know! I’m sitting here
thinking about what you’re saying 
and I’m thinking, "Okay,
it would be really good to adjust 
the housing
size” and then you think “Oh…” but
 probably
you know when I’m thinking about
 Italy and I’m thinking about the average size of the home in Europe
it is much smaller and people live 
much closer together and I wonder if
that has made things far worse for
 Italy or France.
- [Tami] That is part of
the contributing factors and it’s 
much much worse in India.
- [Catherine] Yeah, so I’m really 
worried about what is going to happen as time goes on here
in India. 
It’s a tough time right now, so…okay.
Anything else? Let’s jump back on since we didn’t
really get to the question about 
more of like our personal
role. I mean, I think we’re kind of
 addressing some of the aspects of our
professional roles, but personally 
do we have 
what can we do to help advance
 these solutions
and what does that mean to us 
personally, especially for people who like work 
in this area all the time?
Personally, we go talk to people 
and we get them to try to personally
 embrace these things, but we’re doing this all the time
24/7 professionally.
Is there anything we have to do to 
take care of ourselves?
- [Tami] It’s kind of one of those
 things social media wise and
talking to my friends and family
 wise, I still have these conversations.
Sometimes there are certain people
 where
I am already burnt out from doing
 it with work 
that I don’t want to, I’m too tired to
 have the conversation with the most stubborn, but there are other 
people, there are now people out 
there that are in my circles
that I can be like, well, this is what’s
 going on over here
and they won’t hear it from anyone
 else.
If I don’t tell them, they don’t have 
any other resources that will
so I do have to see that as my personal 
thing that I do. 
He mentioned Citizen Climate Lobby and 
I’m a member of that group too in 
the Northeast Iowa chapter 
so
that [technological issues]
is something I need to get better on. 
They have been having 
good trainings and that sort of thing 
and I have helped out here and there as far as
tabling events and signing 
legislation and going in meetings and
 that sort of thing.
- [Catherine] That’s excellent. I’ve
 signed up for Citizens Climate 
Lobby a while back a year or two ago.
After I found out about them at the
ASHE conference (American Association
 for Sustainability and Higher Education) and then I got
on to some of the evening conference
 calls
and they were just really full and I just 
didn’t feel 
connected to anything and so 
I guess I kind of…you kind of do this all day 
or you’re teaching about it and then 
you…okay I’m going to go home and hop onto 
this conference call kind of thing 
where I’m just
one person sitting out there and there’s
 just all these people who are talking
and you don’t feel engaged
in it and then also you’re kind of burnt
 out from doing it all day to, right?
Someone, I can actually see what 
other people are writing 
in these areas and so we’ve got
 people talking about joining 
Citizens Climate Lobby, I’ve put in
 the information you’ve talked about 
energy and Green Iowa AmeriCorps
 trying to help low income and minority 
businesses and speaking with our
 friends and families. Someone put
“Yes, build bridges
with people who don’t agree with 
us on all issues.”
“Find common ground in areas 
where we agree.” That is really
a tough thing to do. Does anybody 
have any suggestions 
on how to do that sometimes with
 cantankerous people?
- [Alyssa] I really wish I did, because my dad is one of the 
hardcore Republicans that you say, “Oh, 
something about climate change,” 
and they say “Well, I don’t know about climate change"
and I’m like “Well, what do you
 mean you don’t know?"
- [Tami] Well let me tell you! [laughter]
- [Alyssa] Hey, you’re muted!
- [Dr. Chenoweth] I was apologizing 
for my use of technology and I guess
there’s one more snafu is 
speaking to a muted mic. Thank you all for 
participating. This is one more opportunity for us to 
gather any thoughts for the group as a whole
the 16 that are still joined here
Apologies for making that difficult, but 
the document was populating in these
 last several 
minutes and I hope that you’ll take 
opportunity to drop any last thoughts in there
or to share out to the group right now. 
Feel free to unmute
and share any thoughts 
that were particularly compelling to you.
- [Catherine] I guess I’ll jump in and 
share something again. I don’t want to just sit there for
too long. In my group we did 
speak a lot about 
what we could do to 
personally engage others and also what 
was being done to help low income 
minority communities 
for example, Tamothy with the Green Iowa
AmeriCorps talked a little bit about
 Green Iowa AmeriCorps’s efforts to 
do energy efficiency, change lighting, 
and help educate
people about energy efficiency 
measures to try and help save money for low 
income communities. We talked about
 in the future whether forgivable 
grant and loan programs can be made
 available to like low income 
and minority communities and business 
owners that would help offset the cost of 
energy from their businesses.
Perhaps being involved that way might 
provide some benefit and then we 
were just sort of talking about the challenges 
in trying to communicate with people 
who maybe don’t believe 
still that challenge or issue or maybe 
they think it’s somewhat
of an issue but they still don’t see the 
sense of urgency about it. 
How do they engage in this kind of 
communication and then sometimes 
how hard it can be to do that. How
 tiring it can be sometimes 
just to put yourself out there 
repeatedly and to just feel
that people are scoffing and laughing
 and yet
we still have to keep putting 
ourselves out there. Those were
kind of where we went with some
 of our discussions. I don’t know if anyone else has something?
That they talked about perhaps?
- [Dr. Chenoweth] Was anyone 
discussing lessons learned from 
our international mobilization in 
response to 
this coronavirus? Are there 
things that we can pick up? 
Certainly we’ve learned 
that pollution goes down when 
people stay home, but are there things 
that we can apply to the
need to mobilize a planet
to engage 
a central issue of survival? Things 
that we’re picking up
now that can be part of the plan to 
address climate?
- [male voice] Back to the justice 
question, when we talked about
in Louisiana the percentage of 
deaths
among…oh…I’m 
they were talking on the radio this
 morning that
of the deaths in Louisiana, 70%
were African Americans and this 
was sort of a poverty issue
and I wondered if this will…the same
social economic issue that 
there applies here to climate change. 
They’re getting the short end of 
the stick, probably. 
We’ve got another question here...
- [Catherine] I agree there with Jack 
and what he just said.
In the sense that the climate change
issue is really hitting the world’s
 poor the hardest
and it’s often individuals who are
 living in the most marginal
conditions who will feel the brunt
 of climate change first and in fact are 
feeling it now who are individuals
 of low income, individuals in 
very under developed 
countries, individuals that live in
 marginal housings, 
very much impacted by fits in 
climate or extreme weather
or flooding, drought, so yeah,
the world’s most at risk individuals 
are the 
individuals who feel the brunt first 
and the same thing 
is happening with COVID. African
 Americans who 
die in urban areas at disproportionate
 numbers as are
American Indians in certain areas. 
I know the Navajo reservation is having
a very serious outbreak and it 
appears that perhaps 
the Navajo nation seems particularly 
susceptible to COVID or to more 
serious cases of COVID
and they was a great deal of concern 
as to whether or not 
many many of the elders in Navajo 
nation would end up dying, so I think there are 
parallels in [unintelligible] very 
startling issues
there related to equity and how to we 
personally address that? It’s really
 a difficult thing to do
you know. You try to talk about it, 
try to teach about it, 
try to donate to food banks, those 
are some personal 
actions. I don’t know what others
 think.
- [Dr. Chenoweth] I’m just reading
 from the chat Marks comment
that the case fighting those in 
depletion is maybe
a case study that can give us 
some sense of confidence that 
we can 
address such issues, planetary issues, 
when we follow the science and 
see that it gets into legislation.
- [Catherine] Yeah the Ozone
issue is one that we’re seeing 
success with and also
if you look back in the United 
States at the 
1990 revisions to the clean air act
and just the establishment of the 
clean air act in the 70’s
and then the 1990 revisions also,
 it has really improved 
all of the criteria pollutants like 
peroxides and nitrogen oxides 
and suspended particular matter
 a great deal in many areas around the country.
It is literally startling how clean 
the air is. I think maybe people 
maybe have noticed it.
I think you mentioned it, Jonathan, 
a little earlier in our webinar 
and how clearly if we could switch 
to electric vehicles or 
even to heated vehicles that are
 co-gen
gasoline electric, the majority of 
our transportation 
can shift to a real serious focus
on alternative energy sources, 
whatever they may be. 
When we were in our groups, Tami 
made the point about 
utilizing some more of the geothermal 
energy sources
I mean we would be in a situation
 where 
suspended particular matter in 
many of our cities would be just a minor 
issue and that would improve people’s 
health and their lung function and their
resistance to pathogens. We
 know that people
who are exposed to a lot of 
suspended particular matter on 
more susceptible to bacteria and
 viral infections and 
the respiratory system. It triggers 
heart disease issues,
and we also have seen recent 
studies 
on the National Academies of 
Science reviewed them recently which is why we’ve got 
the message to wear a covering 
over our face in public
too that in areas with a lot of
 suspended
particulate matter, the viral load is
 higher because the virus can literally
attach to very tiny 2.5 micron
 sized
suspended particulate matter. 
The virus itself is only like a 0.017
microns in size, so there’s all these
 viruses that can be attached 
to these suspended clouds of 
particulate matter. If somebody happens to sneeze
or they are carrying it and they’re
 just like running or walking vigorously
they’re expelling that and it’s 
associated with the pollution in the air. 
- [Dr. Chenoweth] We are winding
 up to our 6:00 hour
central time and I 
would like to extend a thank you
 on behalf of 
every…all the panelists and the 
moderators that 
thank you for your participation. 
Please be in touch, we will 
see that the recording and the 
document are available
for you to reflect on and 
share as needed. 
Thank you for your participation 
tonight. Catherine, any last words for our
assembled? - [Catherine] Again, 
just thank you everyone for participating in this 
thank you Jonathan and thank you
 Craig. Thank you to all of our speakers
I know this is a tough time to be 
wrapping your head around another
 issue like this but I think this is also important because
we’re still looking forward to the fact 
that there will be 
a tomorrow after COVID and we’re 
ready to deal with 
that tomorrow and we want it to be
 a better tomorrow. 
- [Dr. Chenoweth] Well, thank you
 everyone
stay safe and I hope 
we’ve got some reasons to be 
heartened tonight by 
the collective list in our group.
 Thank you very much. 
- [various voices] Thank you!
