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>> So thank you for coming today to our seminar for the Global Change Program and very special occasion where I have the honor of introducing Mary and hit a couple things up here and she is amazingly impressive and accomplished so much and I'm a big fan of hers she directs the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal campaign which has been recognized as one of the most successful environmental campaigns in the history of the campaign works replace coal with clean energy by mobilizing grassroots activists and local communities she was listen 2015 has one of the politico 50 politicos a list of the top thinkers doers and visionaries transforming American politics she has made numerous media appearances and outlets ranging from Good Morning America to N.P.R. It was featured nationally job Geographic film from the ashes and then I mean where years of living dangerously because stars OK.

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She's also co-host of the climate storytelling podcast No Place Like Home which I also appeared much more like sisters Mary had previously served as executive director of the Appalachian voices Ecology Center and the Southern Appalachian State Project she received her master's of science from the University of Montana and her bachelor's degree from the University of Tennessee where she later received the 2008 notable U.T. women award she grew up in the mountains of East Tennessee and now lives in West Virginia with her family and we welcome her let's give her a warm welcome thank you so much for coming.

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All right it is a pleasure to be here with all of you and I'm going to spend maybe 2030 minutes here I telling you about the work that we have done well get out of the projector line of sight there the work that we have done and to move us beyond coal to clean energy and it has been a people powered grassroots movement that has transformed how.

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Electricity in America and continues to transform how we make electricity in America and in a time when I think the. Intensity of the climate crisis is really starting to hit people in a new way when we're seeing a lot of new demand for action whether it's in the form of the Green who deal in Washington or the 100 percent clean energy bills that are being introduced and passed all over the country and at a time when we have a climate denier in the White House I think people can feel a lot of sense of urgency and sort of despair about tackling this big crisis and so this story I want to tell you today is how.

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Humble band of grassroots folks joined together and over the course of about 15 years grew and learned a lot and shared their lessons and helped usher in the clean energy era that we are in the middle of today and I hope that what you'll take from it is the power of regular people working in the places where they live to make a difference and so with that out let me just give you a little sense of what brought me to those work.

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So I as you heard grew up in east Tennessee right outside of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park Dolly Parton went to my high school that's our main claim to fame and so it's a beautiful place if you've been there and it's all about the mountains and the culture and the music and that's what our economy is based on that's why it's why millions of people come visit there every year and so when I realize that not that far away and other parts of Appalachia there are entire mountains being blown up like the one you see here for this type of mine in called mountaintop removal I was shocked you know you can't you're not supposed to throw the trash out of your car window you know you're not supposed to.

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You know shoot animals if it's not in hunting season you don't have a license and so why in the world did people get to blow up the oldest mountains in the world to me it was it was shocking that this was was taking place and so I worked for an organization called Appalachian voices where we were trying to stop MT top removal and as we were doing that there were a bunch of new coal fired power plants that were proposed this was during the George W. Bush administration and there are actually $200.00 brand new coal fired power plants on the drawing board in the United States one of them was in southwest Virginia in the mountaintop removal country but they were in just about every state coast to coast and we were trying to stop this one new coal plant in southwest Virginia because we thought well if they build this coal plant it will be impossible to stop now top removal because there will be a coal plant sitting right there that will be demanding more and more coal only to find again that we were not the only people that had a new coal plant proposed in our in our area there were 200 of them all over the country and so just like us there were people who had these coal plants in their backyard who thought well we're going to try to.

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Stop this we're going to figure out who's making these decisions we're going to figure out what influences them we're going to turn people out to hearings we're going to write letters to the editor we're going to use all the tools of democracy we're going to go to court if we have to we're going to protest and we have to try to stop these coal plants so I got connected in with all of these people from all over the country many of whom were involved with the Sierra Club but there were hundreds of dozens and then ultimately hundreds of working as Asians involved and some of these people were fighting because they were these called last because they're worried about the impacts of mining other people were worried about air pollution coal coal plants have historically been our nation's single biggest source of sulfur dioxide pollution which is linked to heart attacks asthma strokes lots of serious health problems.

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A lot of people don't want these new coal plants in their backyard because of water pollution coal plants have historically been our single biggest source of mercury pollution which we get exposed to through the fish that we eat it goes out of the smokestack falls into the water gets into the food chain and we eat the fish and that's how we get exposed it's especially dangerous perp pregnant women because if your babies are exposed to mercury in the womb they have.

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Lifelong and perhaps developmental delays lower I.Q. those delays in walking and talking and coal plants also are the single biggest source of toxic water pollution in the United States bigger than paper mills and chemical plants and all these other big sources of water pollution coal plants are number one they produce the stuff called coal ash that occasionally has spilled in these big catastrophic spills like the T.V.'s Kingston's bill or the Dan Rivers Bill and North Carolina but it also is kind of slow motion tragedies happening all around the country in the places where it's stored in these coal plants so some people are fighting these new coal plants because of mining impacts because of air pollution because of water pollution and then finally because of climate change coal plants for decades.

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AIDS were our single biggest number one source of climate pollution in the United States was called fire power plants so you have all these pollution problems associated with coal and you also have an alternative you have wind if you have solar increasingly you have solar was storage as other ways to make electricity we don't have to invent something new that we doesn't exist we had an alternative at the ready so this grassroots network of people got together and over the course of 10 years stopped the construction of over $200.00 new coal fired power plants in the United States and had those been built we would not be having a climate conversation today because we would have locked this country into another 50 years of our most a carbon intensive form of energy but they weren't built and so instead that grab grassroots network of people after stopping all those new proposed coal plants then looked at the existing what at that time were $530.00 coal plants around the United States and around $2010.00 we launched this new phase of our campaign to try to retire all the coal plants in the United States by 2030 and replace them with renewable energy so that's what we're doing now so sense 2010 we have been working state by state plan by plan where in the decisions are made about how we make our electricity they are not made in Washington they are begun states and cities and so I'm going to show you now a couple of of slides to give you a sense of how we've been doing since we launched the space of our campaign in 2010.

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So this is going to end of May This is 2010 the amount of coal plants see this all work OK these are the coal mines announced her entire 2011. 201232 plants 2013 this is going to keep going up to until the end of 201881 plants as of 2014.

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2015 there were 223 plants coal plants and outs to retire 2016 it was up to 244 at 2017 up to 265 by the end of 218 it was up to 281 and now you're going to start seeing some of the plants that we think are likely to retire between now and 2022 years 2019 Here's 2020 up to 379 plants as this kind of goes through its little cycle again.

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You know this is progress that has been driven by grassroots people living in the places where these coal plants are so all these great plants that are showing up are places where there were people living with the air pollution living with the water pollution Who knew that there was an alternative who knew that there was a better way to make electricity and again these decisions don't get made in Washington they get made by state regulators often called utility commissions sometimes by city councils sometimes by state legislative legislatures sometimes even by other agencies or by governors the policies that the governors pursue and this is the progress that grassroots advocacy has made so here we are here's another way of looking at this.

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What you see here the vertical axis is the capacity of coal plants. That you know where you see the red line up to the top there that represents 2 thirds of the of the coal that was online when we started back in 2010 so 2010 there were just over 300000 megawatts of coal on the grid we're now by 2020 aiming to get.

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2 thirds of that announced to retire that's the red line you can see on the horizontal axis is time and the dark blue are the number of the capacity of the plants and actually retired that are no longer operating in the light blue are the plants that have announced retirement but haven't yet retired and then that remaining gray area is the work that we're in the midst of now by 2020 so again I'm sure you know that there has been a revolution in fact gas in this country in this period of time and I think if you you know if you read the newspaper they might say you know all this all this coal is retiring because of market forces or because of because of that because of all those changes in the electric sector but I will tell you.

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That this is not just about markets and market forces this is about power this is about very big powerful companies that have run our electric grid since its inception and they don't want to give that up without pressure and the pressure has to happen in the places where the decisions are made and that's in states and cities so we do have a lot of changes in the electric sector and we coal is facing competition that never faced before but in my experience this is he all these big changes that we've seen would not be happening without grassroots pressure and grassroots leadership and a lot of tenacity and and courage.

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And so as we're doing this work there's kind of 3 themes as turn to bring us up to the present day that I would underscore of what this work looks like today the 1st is we're obviously doing this work now in a Trump air up when we have someone in the White House rolling back all of the federal safeguards that were put in place during the Obama years for coal so they're worth finally when Obama was president standards put in place for the 1st time ever for mercury pollution from coal plants carbon pollution coal ash disposal stronger air pollution standards stronger water pollution standards and all every single one of those is in the process of.

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Being rolled back by the trouble ministration that doesn't mean they will succeed but this is a picture from they had one rally in Chicago for the proposed rollback of the carbon standards for power plants a bedsit 8 year old Girl Scout who stood up at our rally and gave an amazing speech.

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In support of carbon pollution standards for power plants but this is this is an important part of our work as we enter this sort of this Trump era as we have to stand up for our clean air and water and climate standards and there's a lot of energy around that.

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But even in the Trump arrow we still have big coal plants retiring we are retiring coal plants just as fast under Tromp as we were under Obama and again it's because of the local pollution impacts it's because increasingly renewable energy is cheaper even than coal so these coal plants are used to be the cheapest form of energy on the market now they're the most expensive in a lot of places.

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And because again the decisions are made at the state and local level they're not made in Washington so the plants you see here on your left that's the Sam US plant in Ohio and on the right the Bruce Mansfield plant in Pennsylvania those are the 2 largest coal plants in American history ever to announce retirement that won the Bruce Mansfield plant on the right that that blue lake of it's a lake of coal ash you can see it from space it's highly toxic everyone who lives around it has been dealing with the health impacts of having arsenic lead mercury in their water for a long time.

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And so those 2 plants announced retire last year and then the plan in the middle is the big brown plant in Texas which was these single largest source of sulfur dioxide pollution in the United States and sulfur dioxide pollution is linked to heart attacks strokes asthma attacks and it wasn't just a single coal plant source it was the single biggest source period and it is no longer operating at all the people in Texas who live downwind from that plant are breathing cleaner air so again even in this trauma era these big notorious super political plants can due to be announced her entire.

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And another 3rd theme of this work is economic transition and climate justice and so this is a picture from northern Indiana around the Gary area where there are some big coal plants and also you know a lot of folks who are looking for new economic opportunities in renewable energy and all the bad that promise that it holds and so we did so training's an outreach with some kids in the local area around the economic opportunities that come with clean energy and as as someone who lives in West Virginia.

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I feel very acutely that it's important that we don't leave people behind as we make this transition to clean energy and also that the clean energy economy that we make sure that it benefits low income communities and communities of color that have historically borne the brunt of the worst fossil fuel pollution and so as we make this transition the needs to be just transition it needs to be centered in equity and that's something that as the Sierra Club that both at our policy work and our organizing and advocacy work that we try to center in everything we do so those are kind of these themes of this moment though are in the resisting these rollbacks continuing to pressure these super polluters and working for climate justice with communities and we are making progress so these are the health benefits of.

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The coal plants have announced to retire today that this is in annual So every year over $7000.00 fewer premature deaths every year over $3000000000.00 health care costs saved almost $125000.00 asthma attacks prevented big reductions in sulfur nitrogen and carbon pollution and at some point here we're at 602000000 tons of carbon reductions from the plants announced her entire And some point in the next few years we will get the 1st 1000000000 tons of carbon.

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Reduced eliminated out of the atmosphere which I think will be the 1st time any country in any sector and he's any sector of the economy in any country has made back big again so it's not just improving public health but it's moving the needle on climate change at the scale that we have to move it and as the.

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Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change the National Climate Assessment have been very clear and I'm sure you all have seen the you know we have a decade to start bending the curve down on emissions and this is a big down payment on bending the curve down on emissions and I'll talk a little bit more about where this puts us as a alliance with the I.P.C.C. recommendations in the Paris agreement towards the end of my presentation here.

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So just a couple just to drill down to this something that I think is really kind of a game changer that happened last year or so this the top is a utility called names go in the bottom as a utility called Excel Nisco is based in Indiana Excel is based in Colorado and at the top of these these are what it says is you know Tipping Point new renewables cheaper than existing coal so net SCO is it again in the end it's conservative it's very reliant on coal they have coal mining their coal industry is very powerful but utility their Nisco did a thorough analysis of their future plans for their utility ran on all sorts of models and what they landed on for their customers was the most economic option for them was to retire both of their coal plants which you see at the top shaver in Michigan City replace them entirely with wind solar with storage demand response and energy efficiency and by doing that they will snow new gas and they will save their customers over $4000000000.00 just compared to running the existing coal plants and you can see how much solar wind and other clean energy they're adding the bottom is Excel Energy the coming coal plant where they decided to retire that plant.

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Earlier than they had originally planned to again replace it entirely with renewables and efficiency and no new gas and save customers $200000000.00 And when you have renewable energy new renewable energy cheaper than just running your existing coal plant that's a game changer I believe and when you have not only.

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This switch from coal to clean energy being a good choice for public health but increasingly this is how you get the lowest electric bills and this is the best business decision for utilities I think there's a certain amount of momentum here that is coming frankly just in the nick of time for our climate and these are both things that just happened last year so I would argue this is I feel like it's a tipping point and I think it's good we're going to continue seeing momentum like that in the electric sector and I think utilities are starting to realize that if they're on the wrong side of this equation they might.

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They might get passed by. So. To close out the section on coal here in just a couple of things one of the biggest retirements announced in the past few weeks was the Navajo Generating Station which is a big plant on the Navajo reservation these are folks at one point there was a hedge fund in New York that was looking at buying the Navajo generating station because again they they were running out of customers for their electricity because it was more expensive than the alternatives on the market and I was generating station has been a big source of employment on the Navajo reservation it's also been a big source of pollution and it's been divisive and this effort was led by folks on the Navajo reservation to call on this one individual this hedge fund to let him know that they did not want him to buy this struggling coal plant and extended a lifeline they wanted to have an economic transition to start investing in renewable energy and took their message to the streets of Manhattan to make sure that he heard from them personally and I think I just want to kind of I don't have a little video I'm going to show you another another coal plant that we worked on in Nevada with tribal partners but again I think part of the part of the message here as we think about these big issues of climate change and how are we going to tackle this big problem and ultimately these are also very profoundly important issues of people in local communities who've been calling for change for a long time and standing with them is an important part of this work so I just want to show you switch over to this video just so you can hopefully get a flavor of that this is another.

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Another campaign from Nevada Nevada. Where again there were the local both the the community the pollution from this coal plant was really tragically affecting this a little local tribe but they also through this journey got the chance to be part of the clean energy economy saw show you this now.

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With. The poor. Boy boy. Bad would buy. So hopefully that gives you who I. Have lined up bringing some of the voices into the room of the people who are doing this work I would also acknowledge Ian over here he wants to raise your hand was it we're going to use it with the uncle here in Georgia for how long.

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You. Put people on the ground doing the work are are the of our what this is all about and if we have questions about Georgia then. You can help me you could be Maya. Be my phone a friend but there's anything I can answer but then that is what this work is all about it's about people working and rooted in places that are like as you saw in this video not only retiring a political plant that was blowing clouds of coal ash over their community but then opening up the 1st tribally own solar project in the United States which is now up and running and selling its power to the city of Los Angeles which is a big part buying that power because of pressure from environmental advocates and not climate justice advocates in L.A. We're demanding that L.A. switch to 100 percent clean energy so leadership on the ground and the folks like you just heard in the video are what it's all about and the last couple of parts of this I want to show you are about how it's not just about retiring coal but it's about replacing them with clean energy and not gas and someone to talk about a little bit about both of those and then we'll have some time for questions.

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So just a couple things on clean energy Here's a graph so I will explain this to you this is our own assessment of how much clean energy is coming online in the United States which is based It's a built from the ground up by our teams on the ground so the vertical axis is electricity production horizontal axis is time you can see where we are just shy of 2018 and that little tiny or the smallest little wedge there is 50 terawatt hours of clean energy coming online every year which is basically where we are now.

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And that's everything from state standards to utilities that have made commitments to settlement agreements we have with utilities to add clean energy so it's both required by laws and or things that the utilities have have are moving forward with that's how much is coming on line the next if we keep going at that rate so we keep going at this rate this is where we will be.

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2030 on if we keep growing at this 50 terawatt hour level if we double that $200.00 terawatt hours a year you can see that's the next green wedge and if we quadrupled that to $200.00 terawatt hours per year that's the top green light is that's what you see here the black line is what it would take to replace all the coal the orange line it was is what it would take to replace all the coal and all the gas So basically at the rate we're going now will be will be at the at the orange die and that's our assessment of where if we just keep going at the rate we're going now roughly and if we want to replace all the coal we need to double the rate of clean energy that we're adding If we want to replace all the coal and gas we need to quadruple it so we put this together for ourselves so we have a clear eyed assessment of the task that is ahead of us.

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And while we have a ways to go are making progress and this is just some of the ways in which that momentum is building we have passed 100 percent clean energy legislation in many states California D.C.E. New Jersey is not quite a 100 but it has a bold target Connecticut Maryland just passed 100 percent clean energy bill last night.

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New Mexico passed a 100 percent clean energy bill earlier this year and we also have utilities that are committing to go under percent carbon free X.L. next go and as I mentioned I don't know power just announced in the last couple weeks that it is going to. Percent carbon free energy and then you have cities that are committing 100 percent Boise Idaho is the latest to be actually no Missoula Missoula is just today added to the list Missoula Montana before that Boise Idaho but there are over 100 cities that have a need to cities obviously don't get to make the decisions always about where they get their energy.

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But when they there I like to fish will demand 100 percent clean energy the utilities pay a lot of attention to that. And Excel Energy which has made 100 percent carbon free commitment is a big utility it serves 8 states millions of people and they said all of the cities in their service Terry that had service territory that had passed these 100 percent resolutions were one of the main reasons they had decided to pursue this commitment so there is momentum there and there is the simultaneous challenge of gas so I have a couple slides about this and obviously you know the challenges with gas or both the pollution impacts from fracking and gas development and pipelines and also the climate impacts of not only carbon but also methane which is a much more potent greenhouse gas so the grape circles here show you the existing gas plants in the country it's about $500.00 megawatts of gas and that weren't and read our plan to gas plants so that's about another $100.00 megawatts that is on the drawing board and of the Sierra Club we are trying to figure out right now how to stop the gas rush 1st and foremost to try to stop these new gas plants that are being proposed and I will give you and you can see there's a very concentrated in the Marcellus region of Appalachia where I live and then down in the Permian Basin in Texas but I'll just give you a give you a one more side of this and why we're focused on this and what's at stake so the vertical axis here again this is Terra what hours of energy on the left you see how much electricity we're getting now from wind and solar so about $300.00 terawatt hours now in the gray that's if the those are our coal retirement goals that we're pursuing So that's how much.

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Energy would need to be replaced from the coal plants that are retiring and then the blue shows we expect electricity demand to start to go up in part because we want to electrify cars and we want to electrify buildings and that's going to increase energy demand so if you look at it here's the clean energy that we have.

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Here is what we're going to need to replace right here and we see it as a race between gas and clean energy and who is going to who's going to claim this share of the energy market is it going to be gas or is it going to be renewable energy and if we want to keep our climate.

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Anything similar to the climate that we enjoy now we need to replace it with renewables and not with another fossil fuel and so as we're thinking of the work in front of us that is part of how we're trying to characterize that challenge and we're you know we have this network of people who have learned how to in fact the decisions about how we make electricity in this country over the past 15 years they've been working in their utility commissions they've been working in their legislatures they've been passing 100 percent or strong clean energy bills and it's that network of people again with these same decision makers in these same menus that we feel by really helping to not only finish the job on coal but really focus on gas that can actually tackle this problem so that's the work ahead of us and I just have one more little success story for you and then to last lies about the sort of big climate implications of all this work.

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So this is Los Angeles this is just maybe a month ago and in Los Angeles we had started way back with the mayor be a rose that he was the 1st mayor to come out and say he was going to move his city beyond coal he made that we had Al Gore was there and you know all the climate you know luminaries were there for that announcement was probably 8 years ago or something and that then was the moment when we started thinking about all the gas in L.A. and.

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In particular the gas that was in this city that we knew was going to come kind of hit its expiration date and Allen was going down the path of investing $2000000000.00 in refurbishing and rebuilding 3 big gas plants and a very diverse and and tenacious coalition of folks worked on this for about 6 years to try to push L.A. to not prepare these gas plants and instead invest all that money in clean energy and about a month ago they want and there are said he announced that he would not be investing not $2000000000.00 in these gas plants and is going to step in instead invest all of that 2000000000 dollars in solar community solar rooftop solar is still solar is storage energy efficiency improving transmission and all sorts of other renewable energy solutions to meet Ellie's energy needs and he said when he made this announcement that this is the beginning of the end for gas in L.A. and California and so this is a new chapter in a new cutting edge piece of our work and while we are the Beyond Coal campaign increasingly we're really more of the beyond fossil fuel campaign and I think it's important to tie this together both because of the urgency of the climate crisis and because the work is very interconnected because it's all happening all these decisions are happening in the same places so to a lot size on the climate implications of all this this is Paris so this verdict.

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The axis is greenhouse gas emissions in the United States as measured by the E.P.A. who is that entity that tells us if we're on track to meet our Paris goal or not the blue line are actually missions that have been coming down. The unfortunately went up a little bit last year because of gas which is part of why they were everyone's doubling down.

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The orange line shows what we need to do to get our Paris Agreement and the the horizontal I there says if we don't change anything you know we have that flat point the orange dotted line is where we need to go to beat our pears agreement the work that I have just been describing to you for the past half hour on coal and gas and clean energy if we achieve the goals we're setting out for 2020 will get us almost halfway towards closing that gap towards our pair of schools so again when I say it's improving the need on the scale of matters for climate change this is what I mean and of course even meeting the Paris agreement is not enough to avert a climate crisis and I think we know that but it's an important benchmark and we can get a good part of the way there with grassroots leadership in the states through work that we've feel very confident that we will be able to do all the tard I'm not going to pretend it's easy.

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So that's one way to put this in perspective the last I have for you is around the I.P.C.C. and so this is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in their last report one of their calls to action maybe that's not a word they would use maybe one of.

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The imperatives that they put forward in the report was we have to get the world off of coal we have to get the developed countries of the world off coal by 2030 and we have to get the developing countries of the world off of coal soon thereafter and so the vertical axis here is again how much coal we have had in the United States sense $2010.00 we started measuring it the blue going down that's how much we've reduced it so far.

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The black line of the fastest the biggest year we ever had was 2015 for coal retirements and we kept retiring coal at the same rate as we did in 2015 we would have no more coal in the country by 2030 if we do it at the same rate as we did over the past 3 years we would be at about 80 percent of our coal retired by 2030.

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Then and this is this is beyond the last light I showed you from Paris that's just the goals we are 2020 goals we have that would be if this if our campaign closed up shop at the end of 2020 and went home we would close half the gap to the Paris agreement but if we keep going past that this is what's possible just with coal and I think when people see these big climate reports from places like the I.P.C.C. and Trump is the president and he's a climate denier and the fossil fuel industry is so powerful there's no hope and I want you to take away the message that there is hope and it's it's happening in states and it's happening in cities and it's happening on the scale that matters and yes we need to double doubt and we need to do more but it people in this country are beginning this call to action even if our president is not and we're going to keep going and we're not going to stop and that.

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It's right here in Georgia where actually we have had some big coal retirement announcements just in the past couple of months and there is a big new clean energy coming online and you don't have to go to California to do this work you don't have to live on the West Coast to do this work it's happening right here and it's happening everywhere so that will be my closing photo to you as just some of the great people around the country.

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Illinois Minnesota all over doing this work Pacific Northwest I meant to say this this is happening everywhere it's happening here and we would love for you to be part of it so thank you. Thank you. Thank. You. That's it you. A lot about. What. I would be happy to the Sierra Club's position under clear power is we are opposed to nuclear power we are the only.

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Democratically run national environmental organization meaning our board of directors is elected by our members and so if you're a member of the Sierra Club you can to vote for our board and the board sets our energy policy and it's a board made of grassroots leaders and so we have had a longstanding position of opposition to nuclear power I also know as the director of the Beyond Coal campaign that if we suddenly were tired of our all of our nuclear power plants tomorrow they would probably really be replaced by fossil fuels which would not be a good thing and so I think we're in a tricky time Personally I think where we would not want to expand nuclear power in this country.

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And it as we are replacing it and as it's retiring and becoming more expensive or not becoming where it is it is incredibly expensive that's why it's retiring because it's having trouble competing with other forms of energy that we have to be thoughtful about bad so that we aren't getting ourselves into a position where it's getting replaced with a bunch of frac gases and so that's the that's the challenge that we're in as a country right now is just my view.

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I know I'm an engineering school so probably lots of people are big fans of nuclear power here so we can and I'll just put my cards on the table. I. Mentioned earlier consider if you were people who was really and so I mean. I'm asking this question. Related to what.

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We're. Used. More. Who you know the other there are some people doing I'm not an expert on that there are also you know the other main use of coal in country is for making steel but that also just creates a huge amount of emissions so maybe someone in here this is an engineering school maybe someone is doing the research to answer the question.

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But I think the from my vantage point as a West Virginian I think that we need a couple things we need some federal resources for Economic diversification and you know the way I see it everyone in this country owes a debt to the people of Appalachia who sacrificed their clean air and their clean water and their health and their lives to give us a cheap electricity for a 100 years and reinvesting in those places as morally the right thing to do but I also think that for our sort of political and economic future it's also the the right thing to do and.

[00:42:06]
It and there you know there are a lot of economic opportunities in clean energy that so far aren't coming back to those places that I think could be so I think there's a lot more that we could be doing right now. There is a bill in Congress called the reclaim maps that I think is being introduced maybe tomorrow reintroduce that would free up a $1000000000.00 from the abandoned my lands fund which is just sitting there but Congress has to authorize it to be released and it would go towards those very efforts so there's something on the table now that we could do that would make a big difference but we need Congress to release the funds and so far they haven't done that.

[00:42:47]
And. Yours are. Areas where. You wonder. I think our. Heart. Is. Very well. Well one of the things about coal had gas is that people are affected by the pollution even if they don't believe in climate change I know you can believe in something that is a fact but.

[00:43:27]
That you know so people you know in Tennessee who experienced the T.V. a coal ash spill or just heard about it on the news people who you know saw the trees in the Smoky Mountains dying from acid rain back in the eighty's and still remember that was from the T.V. a coal plants so I think that there are a lot of ways that people understand that that this is not good for our health it's not good for our communities and there's there's no those are using things to talk about and you're right the climate is harder and I think.

[00:44:00]
You know I and I believe that as people start to see the impacts being Gatlinburg where I grew up had to these wildfires ripped through in the middle of the winter a couple of years ago that a lot of people lost their lives and a lot of the tourism businesses were destroyed and I do think it back got people's attention at some level there why in the world do we have a wildfire coming through in the middle who winter and what is essentially a temporary rain forest where this is never happened before.

[00:44:27]
And I mean you know I think there are some people that are being fed so much misinformation that will NEVER they will never see the reality of climate change. And the one thing I think maybe for those folks that may or may not eventually get their attention is their kids you know we have all these like my daughter is 8 and she just participated in the climate strike and then they did in schools where thousands of kids walked out of school and I wasn't even in town that day so I didn't put her up to it she just really she was worried about her future and she was right it was got to happen to the world and I don't you know I don't know if folks kids talk to that will eventually be the thing that maybe changes some minds but I would be what I would put my money on probably.

[00:45:13]
Boy here with a quiet. Word with growth. We are right with you here is your abilities. That we. Are. Yeah and I'm sure folks are familiar with the concept of if you put a price on carbon one way or another then that went to incentivize people to not use so much of it and it is certainly one of those climate solutions out there at the federal level that I think is getting a new new lease on life now that climate is kind of back on the front burner so said Jeff and I know citizens climate lobby is an amazing operation of volunteers and I think just every cunt congressional district in the country said thank you for your thank you for everything you're doing.

[00:46:04]
Well there are all mine we are all or there are generation usually under. My belt or way. I think it depends on the area you know I mean I will say honestly to me as a West Virginia and I and I am frustrated that we haven't had a more honest conversation about the fact the coal isn't coming back I mean if you look at if you think about the slides that I showed you we only you know we were getting half of our electricity from coal in this country 10 years ago now it's below 25 percent we're not building any new coal plants.

[00:46:45]
$287.00 coal plants announced her attire and more are coming every month and I think we need to have an honest conversation and we need resources to support folks and when we don't have either of those things people frankly their fear is being whipped up and I have a very you know I will say I share an office with a little company called Solar hollered that is training people from the coal fields to be solar installers putting together the solar projects for them in West Virginia keeping the money in West Virginia building a business in West Virginia they're amazing company and I think that there are a lot of incredible efforts across Appalachia like that Coal Field Development Corporation is another amazing company is doing great work.

[00:47:35]
But when your political leaders want to acknowledge that you have a problem and you need to change and you don't really have the the policies as a result of that that would help you and you don't have the resources that would help you get going you're trying to do something is already very hard and it's just much much harder because you don't have the political and the sort of financial winds at your back and that's where I feel like we're.

[00:47:58]
You know if we if we could fix both of those I think we could actually make a lot of progress but you're right it's hard it's a hard and I don't want to sugarcoat that at all that in the coal mining parts of the country it is it's a hard transition and it's being made harder by the lack of leadership and support.

[00:48:24]
Where. Are your. You're here. Well when we started working on call economics were not in our favor and so that was something that we intentionally have worked on over them you know it's been an intentional focus of our campaign the only reason I got the call is the cheapest form of electricity on the market when we started was because all of their pollution was being dumped on people for free whether it was carbon coal ash mercury.

[00:49:03]
You know there are many of the major pollutants coming from coal there are no federal regulations for them whatsoever and when it comes to gas I think similarly there are a couple of vulnerabilities one is renewable energy is now cheaper than gas in some places especially out West where renewable energy has really gotten a big head of steam and so we have had including Arizona California a few other states where new gas plants have been pulled back because there's actually renewable or the go in Excel examples I gave you where they're replacing coal with renewables instead of gas because the renewables are actually the cheapest So I think that that's one of the owner ability and I think the other is that again they're part of why they're cheap is because they're dumping their pollution on people for even from the fracking waste and the flaring of the methane and if they actually had to produce it in a responsible way and pay for their political enough their pollution that they might kind of lose some of that advantage so I think that's part of the part of the work in front of us as advocates is to connect all those dots for folks and make the not just make that argument to the public but make it to the regulators and the utilities as well.

[00:50:16]
Yes. Peak to. The political strategy for a lot of the. Island. Even you want to speak to that. Seriously it is. GEORGE So we have an elected body that regulates our utilities are we have a monopoly tell you that I generate all of our power grid power and then they sell it.

[00:50:48]
Become upfront and well and so that by the point in the visuals. They represent you and they're like the big wide you but it was you that knew November and. I had a very interesting benefit that they have politically I know what it is they are with you.

[00:51:06]
They're your public service commissioners the their public but you have actually a lot of access to the commissioners and they all represent You could they represent because there are a few good life that have them and time and space really don't have people calling go or are writing to them so we have more activated commission areas that life could be in many different places and times a lot of people and there are others that what never was our office in downtown.

[00:51:37]
Right now actually stored power and filing when your energy plan. Triggers this public process of going on there and actually hearing that Monday about what's in the plan and I think you put your thought in our partners around a and are we work with going down there and and make public comments and him.

[00:52:05]
And in between probably in the context that may happen but I was a just place generally about how you approach your ethic their current climate and I I mean the layers really in Georgia we do have that Konami on our side we don't have quite the same cultural identity around coal that is out of state and we spend $30000000000.00 spending money out of state import our fossil fuel coal oil natural gas and that we have oil is a go I am sharing that by a number of billions of dollars for the I'll just do that we are and you will never be so when you get on with that is a really powerful argument.

[00:52:54]
And I spend a lot of my time talking to local officials county commissioners chambers of commerce in places where we have coal plant and then also places where solar energy a lot of unusual and again go there really except for people who really does want to do that community benefit and of when you bring in this conversation about the trajectory of where coal is going it's really hard to make the argument that it's going to continue bright enough benefit and you have to acknowledge like your dad being 100 vision back you need me through our in our country.

[00:53:39]
And there I go when you start from the ways you can get to having the conversation about what's next or to acknowledge the pain or awkwardness of what transition go away. There I have meetings are after that and one day. Basically I. Credit is that was realistic or possible and acknowledge where we're coming.

[00:54:08]
Out of that there was a lot of common ground more common ground there with this that most people would mean you all you want to use want water near. Jobs or jobs. And fortunately. Your power. Was eliminating jobs themselves so I there are. You know that I work with a big bag monster.

[00:54:40]
You know coming out and eliminating jobs. What we did was very happy so we really changed because Congress and a lot of ways and all of you important. Work. On some thank you as you see he'd left a team to go back to school and you can see why I'm very sad about that but.

[00:55:09]
Let's not let. Her. Thank you and has given you a couple of concrete I'm pretending is a get involved if you want so thank you for liking the hearing and the process and if you're interested in coming to talk with us. Thanks everybody.