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thanks for inviting me here tonight I'm really excited to be here my name is Leanne baronet and I am part of the industry team at Rocky Mountain Institute I just want to make it clear right now that I am the communications lead for our team so I'm not going to dive deep into numbers and technical details and that sort of thing because that's not what I do I'm more focused on how people process information and make decisions and how we can use that as a factor to drive change so I'm going to be focused on mostly our theory of change and the work that we're doing to change people's behaviors but we do a lot of really interesting stuff and so if you have questions on the technical side you know throw them at me if I can't answer them I'll make sure I follow up with you and get you the answer that you need so I'm gonna start I'll give you guys a brief overview of Rocky Mountain Institute and what we do I'm sure a lot of you probably have heard of it RMI or even those of you who haven't and don't know what we do like have some vague sense of what RMI is but we'll go through it a little bit talk about our current programs talk about something called the seven challenges which is a new framework that we developed last year to think about the energy transition and then I'll get into our my's industry program let's talk about our theory of change and then give you guys as quick of an overview as possible about the work we do which won't be quick because we do a hot so I think a lot of you probably know that RMI is an independent nonpartisan nonprofit we were founded by Emery Lovins in 1982 in a little office in Aspen Colorado we've grown a lot we're growing tremendously something like 20 to 30 percent year-over-year and we now have approximately I'd say about 230 people full-time staff working in offices and Boulder basalt New York DC Oakland and we also have an office in Beijing it's not open right now but we do typically have staff there those guys are unfortunately working from home for the foreseeable future RMI is technically a think-tank but we like to say that we're I think and do tank and that's because we're focused on not just coming up with ideas but taking those ideas and get out into the real world and watching them actually happen so our theory of change is think do scale coming up with ideas doing them coming up with projects to demonstrate how they work getting feedback from that going back iterating and then finally when we have a solution that is really impactful finding ways to scale that and make as a big of an impact as possible we do this by engaging directly with businesses communities institutions and entrepreneurs to speed the transition from fossil fuels to efficiency and renewables anything that's one thing that really sets us apart from other NGOs it's that we have this techno economic focus and that we do partner directly with industry this diagram we call this are my universe diagram and although it looks pretty complex it's actually a simpler way to talk about all of the work that we're doing across our programs and across different areas this is I would say changing a little bit because we're beginning to change how we look at the challenge of the energy transition but you can see that we work on all sorts of sectors from electricity and buildings to mobility to working directly with cities and states and other governments like China and India and then also in industry and hard to abate sectors although we're seeing progress towards reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the work that we've been doing at RMI I think we all know that we're really badly off track to keep global warming between below two degrees let alone 1.5 degrees which is what a lot of us think we need to do so because of that last year RMI identified seven challenges for energy for the energy transition these are things that we think need to be addressed now in order to get us on a pathway to Net Zero by 2050 or 50% emissions reductions by 2030 and these are things that we think need collective action and an effective collaboration to do so so we can't work in silos anymore we have to work together and we have to work cross-sectoral I'll cover each of these really briefly they're very new we'll say that they're still taking shape at RMI it's not like we've we came out with these we released the report and then we restructured the organization to fit under each of these that's still something that's happening so we've got number one making emissions visible so this is about how we can improve the transparency and accountability of emissions data and use that to drive faster greenhouse gas emissions reductions to is tripling energy productivity gains so how can we improve design of new buildings and infrastructure and then get rid of inefficient assets faster three electrifying with renewables this is about generating ideas for expanding renewables increasing electricity as part of our global energy consumption as quickly as we possibly can number four reinventing cities so working with cities and governments to make urban systems infrastructures cleaner and more efficient number five boosting clean technology so speeding the development and adoption of high-impact clean energy technologies number six my favorite redesigning industry this is about shifting the way we produce transport and use energy and materials in the products and infrastructure that surround us every day number seven financing a swift and fair transition this is about adjust transition to new forms of energy so finding something that brings all of us along not just people in the developed world but people in developing economies as well I just want to put a plug in here that the work of our Islands team falls under this under number seven and that works specifically the work we're doing in Puerto Rico is going to be featured on 60 minutes this Sunday so be sure to check that out if you can I think that you know so we're starting to look at these seven challenges and use them as a way to shape how we're thinking and shape how they're driving our work and we're trying to to find opportunities where a really small change can have really big results and so as you can see into our mize industry program which has existed for a few years now is part of it it's number six it's a really important the problem is something that we need to address our our program has the mission to decarbonize the world's goods and services including how they're designed source produced and delivered so that means focusing on emissions across the entire value chain that means starting with the raw materials that are that go into the product so the raw materials the metals the copper all of that sort of thing that went into this laptop that I'm using right now so starting with how those are extracted from the ground how those raw materials are transported to to a facility to be to be processed the energy that goes into processing those materials to transform them and then the fuels that are used to transport the final products and commodities to end consumers if you look across the value chains of these heavy industries and you add up all of those emissions it actually equals 40 percent of annual greenhouse gas emissions each year which is huge so this is a really big problem and it needs to be addressed and our team is focused on doing just that okay so framework for the industry program what is the RM eyes and RM eyes industry program we're focused on decarbonizing the value chains that go into delivering consumer goods and services so that includes materials so things like steel cement and plastic energy like oil and gas hydrogen and biofuels and transportation shipping trucking and aviation you could include rail in that as well we don't actually work on rail right now so don't have it on the list but but someday maybe we will we're focused on this because as I mentioned it's incredibly important more than 40% of total greenhouse gas emissions each year come from these hard to abate sectors they also use 20% of global coal consumption which is really really big but these sectors are called hard to abate they're called hard to abate for a reason that's because they're really really slow to change and I think a lot of these industries would argue with you and like it's impossible to change the steel industry especially the steel industry in the United States says that you know it's really difficult to change it takes too long it's too expensive it's gonna be too expensive for end consumers but we don't think that's true you know these guys do have a stat a track record of evading regulations they very much like the status quo they have invested big time in long life assets so things that are gonna be around for 20 30 40 years so if the industry changes and technology changes really rapidly that really hurts the return on investment for these assets that so they push really hard and lobby really hard for things to stay the same the way their business models are structured also makes it really difficult to have transparency into their operations and one thing I'm going to talk about a little bit later is the difficulty also in in tracking emissions along the value chain especially scope 3 emissions that's something that's really difficult to manage and we are working on a solution to that but like I said we do believe that change is possible we're starting to see that there's pressure from consumers there's investor pressure as well and so those things are driving corporate behavior there's also research that we'll talk about in a little bit that shows that the cost of change is not actually that large that it's really insignificant in the end and you know I think we've all seen that markets can shift really really quickly so what we're doing is we're focused on using market mechanisms and redirecting capital there are a number of different ways that you can create change there's essentially three three levers for change market interventions policy intervention and financial intervention the industry program is forked to focused on market interventions we have another team at our Mir global climate global climate finance team and they are focused on using finance as a lever for change and rmi does not do any policy work directly we're not a policy shop but we do provide guidance on policy so we we are active across all three of them some more than others another thing about these industries we don't really talk about heavy heavy industry on a daily basis it's something we kind of we kind of avoid I I call these industries I affectionately call them dirty smelly and ugly and so you think that you know people avoid them for those reasons they're not warm they're not cuddly and that sort of thing but they are a very important part of our everyday lives they go into literally everything that we touch and use and buildings that we live in on a daily basis and you know if you add up all of the industry sub-sectors that are in the scope for our program they represent 50% of revenue and assets and the Forbes 100 so they're really really a big part of our everyday lives it's a it's a big deal though you know because they touch everything and we've noticed that consumer behavior is changing which i think is great because that's a big mechanism for pressure more and more companies are coming out with climate commitments I think you know one of the biggest that we've seen I think it was just a few weeks ago Microsoft announced that it's going to be carbon negative by 2030 and not only that by 2050 they said they're gonna remove they'll have removed all of the carbon that they as a company have admitted emitted since their founding in 1975 including carbon from electricity consumption which is great I don't I don't know how they're gonna do it but I think it's an amazing ambition and it's great that we have companies like that putting out goals like that Dominion energy also last week of the week before pledged to go Net Zero by 2050 and then BP around that time also had an announcement with something like 10 new climate ambitions including one to be Net Zero by 2050 and you know you can argue that it was a very fuzzy commitment they didn't really give any details on how they're gonna make it happen and they left some things out but I think it still highlights that this is becoming a big issue for corporations and it's something that's in the public eye and I and that's not going to change it's only gonna continue to grow like I said the cost for these types of changes for these decarbonization strategies for heavy heavy industry are actually really marginal for end consumers in the end so one of the things that you'll hear from from big industries like the steel industry I pick on the steel industry a lot because grew up in Pittsburgh so it's a steel town and they actually right out of college my very first job was working for US Steel so I feel like I can pick on them you know they'll say oh it's so expensive and if we do that then prices are gonna increase dramatically you know the cost of your car is gonna double and so it's in the best interest for everyone if you just keep things the way they are but that is actually not true at all about a year ago the energy transition Commission or et Cie our friends at E TCU released a report called Mission Possible and what they found is that the cost to end consumers is actually really really small on the end so for a new car the cost the decarbonisation costs for the steel in the end on that new car is a hundred and eighty dollars for a twenty thousand dollar car I don't know that a twenty thousand dollar car exists anymore but it's still you know gonna be less than $500 or around five hundred dollars for a new car which is really not that big of a deal for clothing for you know more common consumer goods like that the costs you decarbonize shipping ends up being something like thirty cents on a sixty dollar pair of jeans so so that's really just not a valid argument these are things that are really inexpensive to do and won't cost us a lot it'll be very marginal and I think that most people would probably agree that it's something that's worth worthwhile to do I mentioned earlier that we use market mega market mechanisms to drive change and we do that and will we like to call a combination of push-pull making mechanisms to drive change in the industry so on one ends we have things like customer demand for greener products product differentiation and price premiums pulling these industries towards decarbonization on the other side you've got the need for transparency you've got pressure from industry organizations and things like that and then also pressure from investors and regulatory pressure I know that's not happening on a national level necessarily right now but there still is you know industry regulations state regulations local regulations and that sort of thing so all of this combines to exert pressure on all sides and and really help make this change happen from a market perspective okay and we want to start to get into the work that you're actually doing in the industry program talk a little bit about our materials initiative our energy inputs initiative and then our freight and transport initiatives as well our materials initiative it's it actually started as a mining initiative and I think they were formed as some in 2015 they were called sunshine for mines and they worked directly with mining companies with the goal of getting as much renewable capacity as possible installed on mine sites a lot of times that was old mine sites that weren't being used anymore because you have these really vast open spaces a lot of times they're in sort of desert like environments the the the sites can be contaminated for a number of reasons until the the property it's just kind of going to waste it can't really be used for a lot more and it's really primed for solar installation so when the program started in 2015 they had a goal of installing 1.4 gigawatts of renewable capacity on mine sites by 2022 at the end of last year they had actually installed 4.9 gigawatts which I think is a really good example of under promising and over delivering yeah so it's fantastic that that's happening we want to think that that has a lot to do with our program and I'm sure on some level it does I think it also to you know this coincided with a dramatic decrease in price on the storage side of things which is a big part of it as well but these companies mining companies especially are increasingly concerned with social license to operate so the communities that they're in are really demanding that they have ethical business practices and and that they take care of the lands that they're using and mining companies are becoming more and more aware of this and so that is also driving these decisions that they're making so even though what we're doing on sunshine for Mayans is great and that work is still continuing it's not enough we need to do more to address the seven gigatonnes of annual emissions that come from materials so that's from mining from steel and cement cement is actually a really high emitter it's it's a really carbon intensive process one thing I want to say I know most of you probably know what a Giga ton is and know that that's a lot but one of the things that we fight against when trying to talk to people and communicate with them about how bad this problem is is that it's so big that it feels so unmanageable for people and there's this really great article in I think it was The Washington Post about a year ago it was called actually what is a Giga ton and it talked about how one of the problems that we have dealing with climate change is that it's such a big issue and the way we talk about it is so intangible to people that it's hard for people to grasp it and therefore take action on it and so the article was sort of about you shouldn't talk about Giga tons you should talk about what that means in terms of like elephants or or something physical that people can imagine so to put that into perspective for you seven Giga tons is equal to a year's worth of electricity the emissions from a year's worth of electricity from 1.2 billion homes and that's about 10 times the number of homes in the US so that's a that's a lot so to try to tackle more of those emissions you know we realized that we really needed to look not just at a sector sector not go sector by sector but look across the entire value chain and so we have started something called the coalition on materials emissions transparency which we call comment for short we just launched this last a month still February right yes we just launched it in January at wefts annual event and this is a partnership we're working RMI is working with mi t--'s sustainable supply chains initiative the Columbia Center for sustainable investments and the pain Institute for Public Policy at Colorado School of Mines here in golden and the idea is to come together and bring industry stakeholders together and investors and regulators from across the value chain to create a universal greenhouse gas calculation framework for the mineral and industrial supply chains the reasons behind this are pretty simple basically until people know the climate impact of the products they're using it's impossible to demand cleaner goods you know I don't know if this laptop is greener than anybody else's laptop and that's that's something we need to have just like we have nutrition information on the food that we we need to have emissions information on the products that we're using and until we have that it's really going to be impossible to drive the carbonation in these industrial sectors but we've talked about how companies are facing pressure to decarbonize their operations and a lot of them do honestly want to make changes but the problem is without a way to get a clear picture of those emissions it's not gonna happen you know we all know that you can't manage what you can't measure you need a verifiable and and comparable way to look or cut look at your scope 3 emissions across the value chain there are existing methods to do this I don't want to say that we're coming up with something entirely new that doesn't already exist there's actually a lot of stuff out there that tries to do this but the thing is there's no consistency in data or reporting and there's no framework that goes across the supply chain so this is where comment comes in the goal for comment is that it's going to enable producers buyers and investors to achieve climate targets and it's going to do that by having a standard methodology that can be used across commodities and supply chains to build it we're not starting completely from scratch we're gonna leverage existing platforms and tools so we're gonna make use of what's already out there and what people are already and we're gonna collaborate with industry in existing stakeholders to work together to make something that's really valuable and useful okay let's talk about our energy inputs team these guys are reducing the carbon intensity of fuels used to produce and transport transport goods their big focuses on methane and methane is a super potent greenhouse gas I don't know if you guys have heard about it a lot it's starting to be talked about more but it still doesn't get the same amount of attention to co2 and that's a shame because it's actually 80 times more powerful than co2 over a 20 year time frame it doesn't stick around as long but the time that it's here it's really intense and powerful one of the reasons why methane is becoming such an issue and it's such an important thing for us to address is that you know we've had this shift to natural gas for a lot of reasons in the US and people talk about it and try to sell it as a cleaner burning fossil fuel and that's true it is cleaner burning than coal but it's still a fossil fuel and in addition it leaks methane and as we know methane is really really really bad it's estimated that increasing methane concentrations in the atmosphere are actually going to cause one quarter of the global warming that we experience in the next 20 years and the oil and gas industry is responsible for something like 14 to 20 percent of these emissions so RMI is working to get rid of like to get rid of gas everywhere that's ultimately what we want we don't want to encourage the use of gas but we're realistic about the fact that we're not going to get rid of it tomorrow we're not going to get rid of it next year we're probably not going to get rid of it fully in the next 10 years so because of that as long as we have natural gas that's being used it needs to be as clean as possible so because of that our team is partnering with oil and gas companies governments and civil society to eliminate fugitive methane emissions from the natural gas value chain our goal is an 80% reduction in methane emissions by 2015 to do that we're creating a certification standard for low methane emissions gas so this is a market mechanism that we're creating to try to get in place to help motivate oil and gas companies to reduce their methane emissions and we're doing that by you know if you produce gas that's lower emissions we have a way to certify it as a greener product and therefore it's a premium product and you can charge more money for it we're doing this because Believe It or Not buyers are actually demanding it and producers can even earn a financial incentive if they've done a really good job of the abatement and that can actually help offset the cost of the abatement itself so the way that it works is companies will self-report so they'll report on their methane emissions intensity they're going to be subjected to high-frequency monitoring there's also going to be an independent monitoring component that goes on those results will be reported there will be verification and auditing to make sure that everything matches up and if it does the gas will be certified as low methane emissions then it's a premium product and it can be sold as such we're doing this work also I should say here in the US primarily in focus on Texas but we're also doing this work in Europe as well Europe does seem like it's poised to move a little faster on methane regulations than we are as you guys probably know the Trump administration is in the process of rolling back EPA methane regulations from the previous administration but you know Europe they are often a lot more progressive than we are they see that this is an issue and they're starting to make movements on the policy side to put tougher regulations in place in terms of natural gas and methane and whether or not the oil and gas industry here wants to believe it that's going to have an effect because we export so much of the gas we produce here in the US and we export a lot of that to Europe and it's they have tougher regulations and and we are not able to meet them that gonna be a problem to help with that standard we're also developing an analytic tool we're calling it the climate action engine and and it's kind of blend modeled and measured data to get a better more precise picture of fugitive emissions from oil and gas operations the tool is you know that I'm not doing it justice this is usually very complex but essentially it's gonna take in data from a variety of different sources you use really smart algorithms to process and filter that data and then and then output it for a variety of end uses our energy team also works on hydrogen which is a super popular topic right now anytime RMI rates anything about hydrogen it's it's hands-down the most popular piece the work that we're doing here is new and evolving but we've primarily been focused on using hydrogen as a fuel source for a high process heats like steelmaking we've done some exploration on it in the heavy transport side of what as well mostly for long-haul long-haul trucks and things like that and I do want to say really quickly that one of my colleagues the Colorado clean tech industries association is having an event I forget what it's called but sometime in March maybe March 19th about hydrogen and one of my colleagues is going to be speaking at that so if you're interested in hydrogen check it out they'd be a really cool event to go to but so in January we published a new report about hydrogen's decarbonization impact for industry and it was really focused on primarily primarily around steelmaking but other sources other other processes that you could use hydrogen for the bottom line hydrogen is central is essential for 1.5 degree pathway even a 2 degree pathway for a lot of industrial processes there's no other decarbonization option out there right now how you make the hydrogen is important green hydrogen is good that's what we want but our research found that you don't need to have green hydrogen in order for hydrogen to have a decarbonization impact the the truth is that in some countries and geographies the grid is actually green enough today that if you produced hydrogen with electrolysis using that grid power and then use that hydrogen to fuel certain processes like steelmaking it actually would be less co2 intensive than it is with what we're using today so this is a chart I'm sorry I think it's a little fuzzy and I'm sure you can't even see it at all given the given that projector but this isn't our is it in a recent insight brief which you can download from our from our website and it essentially shows the co2 intensity of grid of the grid from different geographies so the EU Sweden I have to tell you that one of the members on our team who wrote this report he's from Sweden so every time he does something he compares it to Sweden but they're doing great they're way over there on the left side with a super clean grid so it shows the co2 intensity of the grid in these various geographies and then shows where that intersects with the co2 intensity of certain processes and things like that in addition to having this in a report that we can you can download we actually have an interactive website where you can go and like customize it and and look at the data in any way you want so I definitely encourage you to check that out because it's some pretty neat stuff in it and it kind of is you know it makes the point that you don't have to wait for green hydrogen we can start decarbonizing with hydrogen today okay last but not least our freight and transport team I love these guys this team is working to break the link between the growing demand for heavy transport and co2 emissions a lot of this work is in zero carbon trucking so working on battery electric technologies in urban and regional markets and then battery electric or hydrogen fuel cell technologies and long-haul markets we do a lot of our work on the trucking side with an organization called the North American Council for Freight efficiency Naqvi this is a fantastic industry organization these guys can't say enough good things about them it's a really small group they're really hard-working they're super smart and they're super committed to what they do we partner with them and and therefore work directly with the industry to increase confidence in these new technologies and best practices with Naqvi we have actually co-authored four reports on electric trucks including a really great report around charging infrastructure for electric trucks because that is one of the biggest issues when it comes to electrification of fleets is the charging infrastructure and how you make that happen and through the course of these four reports which were written over I think a year and a half or something like that we concluded the electrification is definitely coming it's gonna take some time it's not gonna happen all at once it's going to be an evolving thing but it is coming and it's most likely going to start in what we call regional hall so this is trucks that have generally like they don't go farther than like five hundred mile radius and the reason it's likely gonna start there is because they have more predictable routes so you can you can more easily say when a truck will be available for charging a lot of these regional haul operations they have return to base operations so the truck is coming back to a Depot or something like that every night so you can just have your charging station set up there so it's a really good way for this technology to start and we really think that that's how what's gonna happen another really cool thing we do with Naqvi it happens every two years is something called run unless this is a best of the best cross-country road show to showcase advances and freight efficiency and new technologies we take ten drivers from really high-performing fleets we ask them to give this their best driver and over the course of three weeks we monitor everything on their trucks and analyze that data and see how that compares so it's it's a really good way a really good case study to show the industry what is possible in real-world conditions 2017 was the first run unless that was long-haul trucks so trucks that were actually driving all across the country they started in their respective areas and action all converged on this big trucking show that happens in Atlanta every two years the really great thing about run unless 2017 was that they showed that an average fuel economy of ten miles per gallon is possible I know that doesn't sound like a lot but it's huge for long-haul trucks it's usually closer to four or five so that is just really fantastic and amazing this past year in in 2019 we did run unless regional which was focused on regional haul we did not get any electric trucks was a little which was a little bit of a bummer but we still had drivers average eight point three miles a gallon that's lower than the 2017 version but it's a lot of start and stop in these regional haul routes and that's still 30% more efficient than the national average so really good stuff our heavy transport team is also focused on shipping which is a definitely not something I thought I would ever work on yeah but it's really been a lot of fun and definitely a very interesting thing to do because last June we launched something called the Poseidon principles we worked on this together with the global maritime forum and the University College of London and it's essentially a global framework for assessing and disclosing whether or not financial institutions shipping portfolios or climate aligned this is really a groundbreaking t ing because it was the first example of financial institutions coming together to drive greenhouse gas emissions reductions and then do that in line with a climate target really like this helped redefine the role of banks and maritime shipping sector and it has the potential to set the expectation on climate change for the financial sector across the industries so basically these big banks you know we launched we had Citibank and DnB and Societe Generale and a few other big banks on board basically they all came together and said okay something has to change one of the problems is you know they couldn't in these big industries a lot of times you have an issue where first movers are penalized because these industries are so competitive if you act on your own you're just you're just gonna lose out if nobody else changes you're just we couldn't become non-competitive so these Pink's all came together and agreed that they would move forward on this together and that's a really really big step and it was great to be part of that it's a really interesting interesting change model and we're looking at how to apply that to other industries as well and so I think we'll be rolling out other you know Poseidon principles to different industries as time goes on last but not least our aviation team these guys are trying really hard to speed the adoption of sustainable aviation fuel sustainable aviation fuel is really critical to the long-term health of the airline industry but it's really just not being used at all there's there's so many issues and so many barriers in the way of making it happen I think it's funny well every time I fly in United and they show that stupid video or they talk about all the great stuff they're doing and they're recycling they're doing and how they're using sustainable aviation fuels I find that completely ridiculous because it's some like fraction of a percentage of the fuel that they're using is actually saf and so I'm happy to tell anybody around me on the plane that you know like this is complete and greenwashing right now and not true at all but it needs to happen and there are my we're working really hard to make that happen we've got some work we're doing with the World Economic Forum on that right now but our real focus has been on something called the good traveler which is a carbon offset program but it's different than other carbon offset programs in the sense that it is focused on doing in sector offsets so instead of planting trees that's projects that go into decarbonizing the aviation industry and making the industry better itself those are hard to do and we haven't had any in sector offset projects yet we have the first one coming online very soon within the next month which is great but the idea is basically to use that as a funding mechanism for D carbonation within the industry itself another thing that's different about the good traveler is we actually partner with airports and you know so we have direct access to their passengers we have partnered you know we've got partnerships in San Francisco Atlanta the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Seattle all I think we're up to 14 or 15 airports now and it's kind of growing every month we're run by an advisory board of eleven airports that represent over 400 million passengers every year the carbon impact that we've had is equivalent to reducing 300 million passenger decarbonizing 300 million passenger air miles and we've done some really cool things as well like last year we actually offset the Super Bowl so it took place in Atlanta oh yeah I I don't know if we have approached dia um you know it's a aviation team is really small it's actually one person so you know it takes a while to make the rounds I don't know if we've approached them or not I'll definitely ask about that tomorrow I can tell you that Aspen Pitkin County recently came on board so we do have them in Colorado so if you're ever flying through there but it's really great you know I flew out of Newark recently and when I went to log into the Wi-Fi it directed me to the good traveler page and I mean it's just really really great to see okay so that's it the sort of a whirlwind tour of RM eyes industry program and everything that we're trying to do to change the world by 2030 [Applause] yes so our targets emissions lower now because more people are shopping on Amazon and maybe going to the store less I mean as opposed marginally they are because they're potentially getting fewer shipments I don't think it's that severe yet that it would make a dense you know obviously emissions for delivering all those packages are really big impacts it can be so shopping I used to think that shopping on Amazon and getting things delivered to your home was worse in terms of carbon from transportation if you pick the like the longer shipping options it's actually it can actually be better because they'll wait and they'll package everything together in batch it to make it more convenient to day shipping is terrible and and that's a really bad thing so we all want that convenience we want stuff as soon as possible but that's really where the emissions are spiking as a result yeah yeah so I'm just curious as to how you go about this here it's a fairly audacious undertaking and here we are the Rocky Mountain Institute and we just want to come in and help you decarbonize so I guess it's a question of what's your entree how do you make an approach to it and you're do obviously breaking it down by sector and so also which sectors do you find the most amenable to to you're coming in and participating I will say I do I do think the trucking industry out of all the industries sees the season the opportunity the most I think they understand that these technologies are coming that they're going to be really big and revolutionary and I see them starting to prepare for that change in terms of how we how we start to work with industry a lot of it is starting small with personal relationship building and using that just doing one project at a time using that as a case study and then using that as a proof point I think in the past we did a lot of word-of-mouth you know so somebody or Rio Tinto says oh hey ever those guys that are a my so you know you guys should too and going to conferences just networking that sort of thing as we've started to grow and as we're trying to grow our projects we're starting to work more and more with industry organizations to give us access to more companies and that sort of thing but I do think that unfortunately it's got to be there's a lot of just sort of chipping away at it trying to get your foot in the door and make a difference and form a relationship with somebody at Shell and like hope that they have the year of somebody high up and that you can use that to to drive change I have a question too about China so how recent is the addition of the Chinese office and how big is the involvement I got the impression that there's a strong element of interest from the Chinese government to to follow our Mis guidance yeah I think that so I've only been at rmi for about two years now I think we've been doing work in China for a while but only recently established the office maybe about I think it had been newly formed when I started so maybe about two years ago now it's it's fairly large I would say it's maybe about 20 or 30 people and we are making a lot of good progress there it's different though than working here you do have to partner really strongly with the government and you do have to make sure that the work you're doing is aligned with the government and their priorities and things like that so there's a definite like policy sort of working the system component that goes on there but yeah they we are lucky that right now they do seem to be very much aligned with the work that we're doing I will say though that on the net on the natural gas infrastructure side of things that are not aligned so they're you know we are trying to work really hard to eliminate new gas infrastructure here in the US whereas they're just building it like crazy this week was the Colorado solar storage industry's National Convention and they had a panel of all the power supply of suppliers from Mississippi West and the Midwest power supply that powers from North Dakota to Texas has the wind corridor and they showed a graph that from the 90s to today coal they expect will be there I mean coal is on its way out wind will be there top producer by the end of this year that's we all clapped on that yeah that's great Leanne very nice number that appeared the most important to me was that you're combining carbon zero in the year 2050 with natural gas as down just twenty percent remaining great so so the difference it's got to be in the word carbon negativity it's working taking carbon out of the atmosphere no we're not I mean we're really honestly focused on just trying to reach Net Zero by 2050 and 50% emissions targets by 2030 because I mean honestly I don't know that we're gonna get there you know in order in order to get to Net Zero by 2050 we have to kind of missions and a half essentially in the next 10 years and I mean I just don't think we're on track to do that at all so in terms of technologies to remove carbon from the air yeah we're not we're not really focused on that right now yeah that's true yeah I mean I think it'll be interesting to see what seven challenges if we if we start to focus on that at all you know because I think we might start to look into new technologies a little more aggressively especially if we think that it can offer a really big impact for a small effort I know that today our we call it our emerging solutions team this is something that we formed late last year so something that is is exists to focus on those new technologies they did they were talking to people about carbon capture so I think it might be something we're starting to look into but not actively working on it right now oh you know thank you for your work obviously the industry industrial processes are really hard nut to crack I'm just going to mention we presented at the low-carbon development forum in China September and part of that Expo RM I had a big a billion there and they're doing transportation studies I believe in first China is doing a huge emphasis on hydrogen transportation but but my question is I the other day I saw a coca-cola truck all across it was delivering pop and all across the side was this huge thing about this is an electric truck Monica can you are you familiar with that program and expand on it not with coca-cola so Nattie which I mentioned actually Pepsi frito-lay is on their board so we don't talk about coca-cola at all yeah but I do but I do know that you know we are are am I not through Naqvi but RMI on its own is doing some work with fedex and amazon has a purchase also to to help work with them on studies about electrification and that sort of thing and we will say that Pepsi frito-lay is trying really hard and has has a lot of new technologies and electric trucks and that sort of thing UPS who's also on the Naqvi board there they're really interested in compressed natural gas which which we at RMI obviously aren't supporting because we don't want new gas but that in the trucking industry is something that people are looking for as well it is better than traditional gas but still is a fossil fuel and then we don't like those yeah I've got a question about your steel industry roots and the resistance to to upgrade we kind of saw this movie back in the 90s and they were slow to to upgrade and put in new capex and they say we're on a 30-year cycle and meanwhile folks in Asia were on a five-year upgrade cycle and took away their industry and many of those plants down do we have to keep repeating the same lesson to learn it again or are they looking at something that's going to change their month their minds about this I think they're gonna repeat honestly I think they're gonna repeat I think that the steel industry is and this comes a lot from my experience working there as well I mean it's it's so old-school there's so much inertia that's going on there and they're also so used to having the government help them and bail them out that they haven't they haven't been able to change there's actually this book that could talks about this called the innovators dilemma and it talks about the steel industry what you're familiar with this book yeah so I think that they just don't have the mindset to be able to make that change and I think that for the foreseeable future probably as long as you and I will be alive they're just going to continue to limp along with government assistance there's sort of this idea that steel is essential to the United States and we need to have a steel industry because you know back in like World War two it was so critical for us and in case that happens again you know we need to have everything within our borders and I think that I don't see that narrative ending unfortunately anytime soon and I don't know what's gonna make them change I think they will change eventually but I think they're gonna be at the very end of the curve when it's when it's kind of really too late yeah I'm curious about on that same topic you said that hydrogen was the best option for the steel industry is that to burn as a fuel to replace coal and their furnaces yes and what's going to prevent them from falling into the temptation of deriving the hydrogen from natural gas and why wouldn't they just burn natural gas if that's if that's the way they go yeah that's a really good question I think that ultimately we're going to you have to have some kind of transparency and accountability which is definitely really very much lacking right now I think that you're going to have to see something like I mentioned that the Poseidon principles which was essentially financial pressure for the shipping industry you're gonna have to see that for the steel industry as well so people putting pressure on them to have climate targets and be held accountable for it none of that exists at all right now and until that until that happens you're right I think that yeah it's there's no accountability quick follow-up if they do go with hydrogen the smallest molecule how will they keep it contained because if that gets into the atmosphere it can combine and be a greenhouse gas yeah greater that is a question for my colleague who will be speaking at the hydrogen event in March I don't I don't know enough about it to be able to comment on that yeah thank you so much for the wonderful overview of what you guys are working on this is a question and then please take it in the form that was given are there any other sister research institutes like yourself in the United States that are helping you with the long haul yes I mean yes yes and no like RMI is there are other people working in the space spaces that we're working in and we do try to partner with them as much as possible so for example on the oil and gas methane side EDF is actually doing a tremendous amount of work their wife is really active in the aviation space WRI we work with WRI on on a number of things as well there's a lot of organizations and our cities and state states work through America's pledge that we're working with as far as I know though there aren't any other NGOs that have the same kind of industry connection and that techno-economic focus you know people say that our mi-acts like not like an NGO so much as a consultancy and that's true we do have a lot of people were consultants we have a weird number of people who came from McKinsey and so we have that sort of attitude and and vibe and approach to things and and I was to be honest with you I have a for-profit background and I was worried about going to work for a non-profit but what I liked about RMI is that it doesn't feel like a non-profit it still has much more of that drive and that view of making sure things make economic sense I have a question in reference to follow-up of his question of how do you guarantee they're going to use this or have you studied the use of blockchain which contains the tariffs and all the money agreements and then can automatically turn on switches with sensors all in that p cket of information yeah we do have one crazy guide or am i who has studied that and knows all about it I'm not even gonna pretend to be able to have a conversation on it but yes we have looked into it are you doing any work in the recycling plastics particularly new markets perhaps for single-use plastics [Music] opportunities for substitutions for lumber that that kind of thing and then overall in each of the sectors that you're working with to what extent does recycling play a role hmm that's a really great question on the plastics front I don't think that we are doing anything on that side right now we have in the industry team we have plastics on our list as something we would like to work in eventually but we don't have the resources to do it right now even though our EMA is growing we're still really small the industry team is only about 20 people so all of that work I just talked about is done by only about 20 people we're hoping to expand our team over the next few years and be able to focus on both cements and plastics in terms of recycling I don't think we really focus on it as an organization not that we don't think that it's important but for whatever reason we don't we don't do work in that area which is interesting you know I know a Murray's big focus he's really big on efficiency technologies and I do see us gravitating away from that a little bit too we still think it's important but we're not pushing it as much as we used to now what's really about the fuel switchings and and these these really big bang technologies and I don't know why that's happened yeah well one of the most interesting things I learned tonight was when you said that industry is probably gonna repeat the mistakes from back then and I think maybe what we need in addition to an organization like RMI is one industry shaming yeah at a professional level because I mean these these are giant multinational companies that are probably working themselves out of business because they're too slow to react to changes that need to happen and that also changes that will make them not competitive especially in a global market where you have to compete with Europe with higher standards for instance so I always think of Emory Lovins as the the high priest of the low-hanging fruit because for the entirety of his existence and work he's always pointed out the low-hanging fruit in know in what you can do on a fairly large scale to bring down cost and improve your business's bottom line so I'm really appreciative appreciative for what our mi is doing on that on that front I just wish more people would would take notice and I recently talked to a former president of Chris docksiders and he said one of the big things he he wonders about is why isn't our MI much better known because the quality of the work is really outstanding I mean these are you mentioned that your work feels more like being consultants and consultants have a bad rep basically they always say do this but they're not really deep into it but with our Mis report I always had the impression that this is very closely tailored to what a particular industry needs to do if they want to get results thank you all for coming and was that have a good evening [Music] [Applause]