Good afternoon, my name is Xenia Sheyman and my pronouns are she, her today I will be sharing with you my team's experience of developing open educational resource repository for the Canadian public sector with an inclusive lens. I would like to take a moment and reflect on the connection between land acknowledgement and open educational resources. As an immigrant and a settler, I'm grateful for the gift of presenting to you today from density to territories of Squamish, Musqueam, and slave or tooth people. The land now known as the city of Vancouver located in British Columbia Canada. Reflecting on this gift of living and learning on this land. I'm reminded of the words of Dr Robin Wall Kimmerer, the writer Brady sweet grass. She said gifts are not free with a gift comes a responsibility of reciprocity. In the context of land. It is a reminder to give back and to beat stewards. Similarly in the context of open educational resources, we also inherit them as both gifts and responsibility to keep sharing our own gifts for the benefit of others with inclusion and care in mind. And with sharing the gift of knowledge comes a responsibility of equity. That goes what Dr Rebecca Cara recently said about OER is roles in advancing equity, and they said doing OER with an equity lens is doing OER well, and I can't agree more. On this note, let's get into this presentation and see how might we integrate lenses of openness accessibility and inclusion into open educational resources platforms. This presentation will cover sharing context in the government of Canada decisions that went to into design of the open educational resource platform, framing of the collection development approaches, as well as marketing strategies that we used to raise awareness about open educational resources. I will also cover strategies used to engage with enabling to enable stakeholders and content contributors. In this section is covering different aspects of open educational repository, I will begin with a set of questions that we asked, and that helped us frame our decisions and actions from an inclusive and accessible lenses. My hope is that these questions can serve as a pathway for those who wish to apply some of these practices and to improve design of their own OER platforms. Let's begin by talking about the current sharing context in the government of Canada. Next year I have been diligently social listening and collecting stories that capture why and how people across federal government are sharing. I've just started into four main reasons so let's go through them in a bit more detail. Across all government sectors people are looking to develop relevant training to meet urgent and often emergent needs. These are topics that come to mind include agile project management, business intelligence, virtual meeting guides, mental health user research and change management. Meet these needs, time and money are of essence. And while the desire to reduce design costs may seem obvious, especially given that it takes approximately 142 hours or two months to design and develop a course in one language. This is a challenge for the government of Canada when it comes to the cost of translation, since experiences have to be offered in both official languages. While learning should be available to everyone, equitable access is not a guarantee. Canadian government has made up of organizations of all sizes, some are over 40,000 employees and they might have an entire branch dedicated to training and learning, and then other organizations under 20 people. So they simply have no professionals who could develop training from scratch. And of course this brings us to pockets of expertise. And I would say that there is a sense of awakening to the fact that the public service being made up of over 300,000 employees with a variety of expertise is really a place for harnessing knowledge and what better way to leverage this knowledge than to share resources. And surprisingly, sharing is everywhere and it has become spread across many channels it happens on Twitter, Medium, LinkedIn via email and government sharing platforms like GC collab and GC connects, Google Drive, Dex, direct messages, you name it. With over 300,000 public service employees at the federal level alone, there has long been a need for a more centralized way to share knowledge. In response to this demand for sharing GC share platform emerged and it was developed in collaboration with the campus Ontario, and was positioned as the content sharing and discovery platform for open educational resources initiated by the Government of Canada. Part of our vision for the platform was that anyone could share quality content and that sharing was for everyone. We wanted to invite a diversity of voices to contribute resources, not just those in official training and learning roles. We wanted to include practitioners and subject matter experts, whether it was a learning canvas a career tool or a wellness resource. All were welcome. But we also quickly learned that unfortunately sharing was not for everyone. We heard six main types of concerns related to sharing. People were worried that their content wasn't finished or perfect. They feared how others might use it. They wondered if they could take it down later. Some weren't so sure their resources were good enough as they weren't professional instructional designers. Many were unaware that they're learning products post accessibility barriers. For example, tables with split cells images without alternative text missing headings in flexible document formats to name just a few issues. On top of that copyright is an area that was very low awareness and government making it difficult to trace back what was used in any learning product and not surprisingly licensing and open licenses specifically were also not well understood. It is important to acknowledge that barriers to sharing do exist and accessibility and inclusion play a key role in creating a comfortable space where anyone can contribute. And also where people see the differences are valued and supported. Let's talk about design of the platform. Design includes many elements in this presentation I will touch on research artifacts that guide design graphics text metadata and functionality. Any good design process begins with asking questions. And this process was no different. Here are some questions we asked ourselves. Through design, how are we demonstrating what we're asking others to do. Are the images we use on the website open source. Why not. Who is centered in these images. What message doesn't communicate. Have we provided appropriate credit where needed. How can we reflect the values of diversity and website copy is the metadata reinforcing stereotypes are the categories and language use positively. Are the categories language used positively contributing to shaping the world we want to see. Have we made explicit our commitment to accessibility of the platform by an accessibility statement or a statement on inclusive writing. While we did not manage to address all of these questions or to fully implement them for the initial launch, we can use this as a roadmap for future improvements. But for now let's talk about the areas where we did respond to these questions through design. In addition to these questions, it acting as a guiding post we also created for personas. Based on user research to help keep our designs include and diverse and real needs. If you're not familiar with the concept personas are fictional portraits that capture real characteristics traits and pain points of your target users. They help illustrate how we can bring everyone along and remove barriers with identified. Here's an example of one of them. Tony uses pronouns he they and they're relatively new to government. They work remotely from Vancouver. As someone who values learning and helping others it's important to them that the resources share resource sharing platform it's easy to use so they can quickly share content with colleagues. They value sharing, but have not shared their own work is they're not sure if it's good enough. We benefit from resources when we are creation and evaluation personas served as a reminder throughout the design process of who we're designing this platform for. As I mentioned, it was important for us that our designs felt welcoming, and this included how we use graphics. We know that visual representation matters when we talk about inclusion. It is important to be able to relate to the people you see, and to be able to see yourself in these images. So as an organization will have a subscription to paid image bank will also opted to use at least some images for the launch that were shared under open licenses to really practice what we were promoting. The first image on the slide is one of open source illustrations that we've selected from on draw website to represent different resource types in GC share. The second image which is the main image on GC share homepage is from unsplash a website that offers a range of photographs that can be used with or without attribution. Both images on the slide center women of color, and where an intentional choice to ensure a diverse representation copy or text is often treated as an afterthought in design. And as someone with background and content design, I wanted to make sure that inclusion was also integrated into the language that was used. Many different forms including conventions around which sentence case to use for headings using plain language to explain complex concepts like conditions of use, and how to integrate inclusive writing into French copy. For example, based on plain language and readability guidelines we know that sentence case headings are easier to read. So whenever we could we made sure that headings such as resource title and different metadata elements on the resource details page, which are shown in the image on the left were written in sentence case rather than title case, where first letter of each word is capitalized. When explaining what the different creative commons licenses are, it was imperative that this is very basic and clear. So we opted for a longer explanation such as use and adapt for free credit author, rather than using a shorthand of CC by, or even a full name of the license which would have meant nothing to most of our users at this point. So when it came to French copy, we decided to approach it from an inclusive writing perspective. In French, this is called the redaction, which literally means gender inclusive writing to provide some context in French language, all nouns are by default either masculine or feminine. And when representing a group of people, the language defaults to masculine, no matter what the group's composition, making women largely invisible in language. There are many approaches to fixing with the two fixing this one such approach is making both genders visible by fully writing out and doubling the words. Even better, if you start with feminine to prioritize it and reverse masculine first convention. For example, on our share page, we tell people that we're happy they're here. In French, we double the adjectives happy to be both feminine and masculine to represent diversity of our own team. Nous sommes heureuses et heureux que vous vous joignez à nous. While it doesn't solve the challenge of including and making visible other gender identities. It still felt like a step in the right direction. By helping metadata schema for the collection. There are many decisions that can be influenced by an inclusive lens. The two that I will touch on are which metadata data elements to choose and how to express the values within these elements. In the last year, we decided that accessibility element was essential, not only because we wanted to highlight that we care about it and that it's important, but also to use it as a way to nudge people to have a conversation about accessibility. We had a lot of different points of view on what values of this element should be. While using we can criteria was what we ended up going with, we look forward to making it more plain language in the future by finding other ways to communicate how accessible something is. In the meantime, we used an approach that many other or our collections use where we reference the accessibility checklist from BC campus as a way to assess resource accessibility on a basic level. In terms of values included for the conditions of use element will also included traditional knowledge licenses to indicate that we're aware of different considerations necessary for indigenous knowledge, and that we welcomed indigenous contributions on their own sharing terms. An example is the language used in the delivery method of training called mode utilization in French. We once again used inclusive language for the values describing whether content was to be used for virtual or in person instructor led training. The word for instructor was modified to explicitly indicate in brackets that instructor could be either male or female. Once the designs were completed and the platform was live we were able to have the functionality of the platform tested by user navigating with with assistive technology as part of an amazing service provided by fable. We were thrilled that the overall results were pretty good with a score of 90 out of 100 on an accessible usability scale. We also carried our partner you campus Ontario to provide us with an accessibility report by the end of the project implementation to ensure that we eliminated as many barriers as possible. Now let's hope over to collection development. It is all about aligning purpose vision and values, developing one is a really great reflective exercise that forces us to ask some difficult and important questions. In the scope of the collection, it was important to ask the following. What will make this platform inviting and useful. How is it different from commercial training and learning platforms who might be excluded from using or contributing to the platform. What resources will we include exclude. Why, who will be making these decisions. What we heard in doing user research for this initiative. Here's a quote that certainly stood out to us as it relates to collection development. I feel if enough people put enough good quality resources on this platform, people will use it, but if there aren't a lot of useful resources. Most people probably won't. What will drive us are the resources based on what we heard and what we asked ourselves who've identified six important objectives for the collection that respond to the concepts of good and useful in a meaningful way. Let's start by talking about accessibility in government of Canada content is required to be bilingual and it has to meet important accessibility requirements. But what we'll also know is that it's a real struggle for those doing the work to be able to integrate many of these essential requirements into their demanding workloads. So we wanted to show that accessibility is important, and we also wanted to position the repository as a place where things don't need to be perfect. So resources across all levels of accessibility levels were welcome by sharing what folks had so far as a starting point, it would allow someone else to improve the content. Instead of everyone always missing the mark. We would advocate for shareable content that is in plain language targeted and results and concise learning objects that are easy to reuse. We also touches on formats that make reuse and adaptation easier. We wanted to contribute to professionally focused rather than academic areas that can support training of mature learners, and those seeking upskilling a career change. We also broaden the definition of what is accepted as a learning resource to include a variety of content types including templates and case studies, as well as content at different stages of development, such as drafts and iterations with feedback. As I mentioned earlier in the metadata section, we also wanted GC share to be a welcoming space for contributors of indigenous knowledge across Canada. We also wanted to recognize and respect that traditional knowledge does not always align with the Western conventions of intellectual property. And we wanted to learn from the community about the best ways to support them. To support the work of the government of Canada and contribute to the global OER community we also wanted to encourage the development of open educational resources in French. Building something no matter how great an idea it is and expecting people to just come and use it is simply not realistic. You really need to spend some time thinking about how to meaningfully promote what you do. In the approaches we use for GC share we were inspired by social innovation methods, which invite us to ask the following questions. What are the communities that have the most to gain from open educational resources? Who is working on similar initiatives? Whose voices can we amplify by including them in this work? I just want to show you a few examples of how we tried to connect to communities with similar goals in our marketing approach. The image on the left is a tweet that highlights resources that were shared, thanks to our connection with two like-minded organizations. Alpha Plus, which is an Ontario organization focused on helping adult literacy education professionals to incorporate digital technology and civic actions accessibility in an open agile project and a community. The image on the right shows one of our pre-launch campaign messages which highlights that learning that integrates different points of view is valuable today and in the future. And it includes a graphic of a person in a wheelchair to reinforce the point visually as well. Celebrating contributions was another important aspect of marketing that allowed us to once again highlight great content and great sharers. Here are two examples of celebrating contributions. First tweet is highlighting an accessibility handbook released under Creative Commons public domain license by Canadian Digital Service. And the second tweet celebrates thematic resources shared by a number of contributors from across different government and nonprofit organizations. Telling a story and sharing your journey is a valuable way to get people familiar with the new concepts and ideas. We started writing about open learning in government more than a year before the platform launched and we've been able to generate some interest and awareness for the project. We created a publication on Medium and wrote about usability testing, importance of accessibility and sharing. We wanted to align our messaging with the values that the platform stands for those inclusion and openness. We also encouraged all of our team members to contribute and we will soon be publishing an article about what it is like to work on the platform project and partnership with another organization from a perspective of my colleague Shaziane. As I mentioned earlier, there are many barriers to contributing resources in the open so in this section we will talk about how we work towards overcoming this. As we connected with more people and learned about their perspectives on sharing many questions emerged. And we encourage contribution from those who are not sure they have something valuable to add. What are the biggest barriers to contributing? How do we want contributors to feel? How can we help? As part of this discovery and experimentation with identified for main areas of support that was needed. Accessibility review. This included areas like headings, title clarity, tables, all text, content order and flow. Image review. Checking if images used in the current products were copyrighted and sharing alternative free image sources with contributors. Licensing advice. This involved explaining creative commons licensing as well as what crown copyright meant, which is the default copyright licensing applied to government of Canada content. And it also involved explaining copyright in general and how if any third party was used, any third party content was used in a product without explicit permission this content could not be shared under an open license. And finally, but not the least important would be the metadata draft. This often meant filling out the metadata for the resource and asking the contributors to review the draft rather than asking them to fill it in from scratch. In addition to this one on one support, we also did some tailored presentation sessions that address specific concerns of business lines at the school and communities like open government. What we heard from the contributors we worked with has been very reassuring. And here's one of the quotes that showcases a little positive change that we were able to accomplish. I personally doubt that people are interested in what we have created, but it's worthwhile to experiment. This vision excites me in training and learning, how we can share and reuse learning content. We learned that by investing time, tailoring help to the individual contributors needs, offering flexible and manageable options for how they can contribute as well as providing encouragement and asking our contributors how they felt. We open up sharing to more people. We capture these stories as we go along so that we can share them with others in the future. Thank you for your time, and see you out there in the open.


Hello there! So I've been putting my ideas together into some resources now for my new book guide to questioning. Let me just put this full size for you. So the idea here, and it's probably more exclusively for secondary schools, but I suppose it could be translated into Key Stage 2, so the top end of primary school. Now you can choose any question and strategies, but the notion here is that to develop a questioning culture in your classroom or across all classrooms across the organization, everybody introduces at the start of the year mini whiteboards just as an example. It doesn't have to be that strategy, this is just the one that I've selected. And I've actually carefully thought about these techniques, so you could use these as a guide, but this is just an example. So mini whiteboards, get confidence, get all students shown their responses to your questions in class to seek a higher response, to check for understanding. Do that day in, day out, all through September, October, then the importance of think per share. Well think per share, you know, what is the second planet in the solar system from the Sun? I don't know if you're thinking about that question, so the kind of the think, pair with your friend, talk about it, write it down, now show me on your mini whiteboard, brings these two strategies together. Then in November, we introduce wait time. So we're trying to build up some confidence, we're trying to help develop self-regulation. So a little bit of metacognitive thinking where we process what the teacher has been said, we stop ourselves from calling out. And we follow Mary Bud's brilliant research from 1972. We should wait three to five seconds to give students that time to process. So name the four gas giants in the solar system. Because I've given you time to think about that, think per share, off you go, show me that you have thought about it, write it down, show me on your whiteboard. Then we go into December and we've also got the funnel questions strategy, well that's where the questions get a bit more specific and more close, more narrow, more difficult, more high-ended I suppose. December, we've built relationships, we then introduce cold cold techniques. I love, I think cold cold is a fantastic strategy. Hold the students to account, making sure they're all thinking, making sure they're already, they're no opt out strategy too. Well, if you get it wrong, I'm going to come back to you and then I'll use the wait time, the funnel time strategies to think per share, phone a friend, now show me on your mini whiteboard. This January, we might want to introduce some quiz and software. Now, I know this might be too late in the academic year, you're paying a lot of money for all these different tools. So you might want to be just doing this along that bottom line, this regular low stake, retrieval practice, cuisine that your students are doing in class on devices or through whatever technology they may have available at home. February, my favorite question strategy I've written about this for a long, long time, pose, pause, parents, parents, it's very similar to the kind of cold, cold, no opt out strategy. It brings all these things together. The Socratic Questioning Methods, the Explain Evidence, EEAA example, the question matrix, there's lots more here. So this will just wet your appetite. This is just one of many, many new resources that I'm building from my research into questioning.  And then I've produced this book called Guide to Memory where I actually think actually that should have come first. And once I've got all these things in place and we know everything's intertwined and we develop all these pieces of wisdom throughout our teaching career. Once we're on our feet and we can then use a range of questions, strategies as part of our teacher DNA to a point of automaticity, then that's going to reduce our workload and increase our efficiency by holding all our students to account and allowing us to check for understanding on a micro by micro second basis. So there's lots more, but you know, there's loads of resources to unpick each of these little boxes. But I thought that would be a nice resource and get on my websites. It obviously be included as a resource inside my book, when that is published, there's a blank template and there's a blank template with no colors. So easy to do. You'll see me producing these type of things thinking about school strategy and how these things will be embedded for leaders across a large organization, whether you've got seven teachers or 117. So I hope you like it. Hashtag guide to questioning. Bye for now.


Hey guys, this is Matt Beck from freesaloneducation.com and I'm here with a quick business tip. This is related to commission structure. This is a really important subject within salon business because most salons don't have a commission structure. They just pay a commission and that's what it is. Some other salons try to raise prices and base it on that and keep commission the way it is. I personally think you should see growth in all of it. So based on our stylist numbers, we look at their rebuking percentage, their take-home per guest, their average ticket, and also their services per guest. We line up all those numbers, we look at them quarterly, and we base raises on that. So if you hit certain numbers, you might go from having 40% commission to 42% commission and you'll get a pay increase and will raise your prices about $10 each time. That I think is important because it shows your stylist a way of growth, a way of growth if that makes sense. But it's going to take your stylist and give them a career path. I think if you just have one commission percentage, then they're not going to have any reason to try harder to push themselves to keep watching their numbers and keep growing. So definitely make sure that you do that. If you have a computer software, I use Millennium and the way that they can set it up, I have all the commission structures in there built in and then if I give my employee a raise, I just click them to the next level and it adjusts everything for me. So it works really well. If you have any other software, I'm sure you can find something like that in there. If you can't, go to Millennium and get theirs. But just make sure that you have some kind of structure put together for your employees so they understand how to grow and they pay attention to their numbers. So I hope this tip helped you guys. My name is Matt Beck from freesaloneducation.com and I'll see you guys on the next video. Thanks.


Secretary Jewell comes to this position with ideal background and experience for what is the nation's number one lands stewardship responsibility. Secretary Jewell was an engineer, a petroleum engineer for the early part of her career that had banker for a good portion of her career. A chief executive of a publicly held company and lastly a mountain climber and a kayaker. I think the last two attributes that she brings to this job are probably going to be the most important attributes in Washington, climbing mountains and avoiding rocks in a rapids. So I think she is extraordinarily well credentialed for this position. I've had sometimes distressing experience in energy policy formation. I have a lot of, I see Bennett Johnson in the background here. A lot of us have bruises that have lasted for years from that process. Senator, good to see you. Bob Fry, the late Bob Fry was the head of resources for the future, once testified before the committee I was on, that the task of defining an energy future was to chart a safe, secure, environmentally responsible energy path that would sustain human progress for present and future generations. That was probably the most graceful articulation of what is in my mind one of the more difficult balancing acts. Because as we know energy policy is derivative from our security, our environmental and our economic goals and responsibilities. And finding the balance point among those goals, sometimes conflicting goals, and they particularly come to a conflicting challenge in the Department of Interior's responsibilities. Finding that balance point has proved over the last 40 years that I've been involved in this area an extraordinarily difficult challenge to policy making. Energy policy legislation often passed in the House or the Senate by single vote margins. So it is a great challenge that Secretary Jewell has in her hands. And we welcome here to CSIS. It is common to refer to our cabinet secretaries and other officers and the executive as honorable. So I am pleased, honored, in fact, to welcome the honorable Secretary Sally Jewell to the podium. Thank you. Thank you, Charlie. Thank you very much. Bennett, where are you out there? There you are. Bennett and I worked together on the second century commission of the National Parks and it was a wonderful experience. So it's great to see you here. And you're even more green than I am. So thanks, Charlie, for that introduction. And thanks to the Center for Strategic and International Studies for inviting me to be with you here today. I appreciate everything that this organization does to advance a bipartisan dialogue around some of the most pressing issues of our time. And thanks to those in the audience for being here today. It's great to see there's really no better way than to celebrate St. Patty's Day than by talking about energy policy. So welcome. Welcome to the best party this afternoon. So we've had a breakthrough year for the U.S. economy. As President Obama reminded us in his State of the Union address, companies are creating jobs faster than at any time since 1999. Wages are climbing, deficits are shrinking, graduation rates are at record levels. Our economy has emerged from a session with a stronger, more stable foundation. And it's no coincidence that our economic recovery has been accompanied by the biggest energy transformation of our lifetimes. The energy revolution we experienced in these last six years helped spur the recovery. But it's also been accelerated by the policies our country put in place. So since 2008, American oil production has surged from 5 million to 9 million barrels a day. And our dependence on foreign oil has fallen to its lowest level in more than 30 years. The amount of solar energy has increased tenfold and wind energy has tripled since 2008. That's been helped by more than $340 billion of private sector investment and a tax policy that helped move these investments off the sidelines. Families are driving farther than ever on a tank of gas. And with lower gas prices, the average household will have an extra $750 in their pockets in 2015. These shifts in the U.S. energy markets aren't marginal or temporary. They are tectonic shifts. And from a business perspective, these changes are going to present both challenges, risks and opportunities for industry. I can promise you that every CEO of an energy business out there is reassessing the plans they had on the books a year ago. They're asking, especially today, how do falling oil and gas prices affect us? Do we have the right projects in the pipeline, or do we need to diversify? Can we capitalize on consumers' growing demand for smarter homes and cleaner cars? The tectonic shifts are forcing governments at every level to face questions of the same magnitude. Can we adapt in this fast-changing environment, not the fastest places, government, you know, coming from the private sector? It's tough. How do we modernize our energy programs to anticipate the new energy future? Are we doing what's needed for the U.S. to lead the world in energy? This is a speech about energy, but you can't talk about energy without talking about climate change, and that's good. It's one of the reasons I left the private sector for this job, was not just to talk about climate change and to do what you could do within the bounds of a country, but to do something about it on a much bigger scale. And I am proud to work for a president who is taking historic, meaningful steps to cut dangerous carbon pollution. So as a person interested with America's biggest land management portfolio, I've also got to ask myself questions like, what are we doing to achieve a low-carbon future? Are we striking the right balance between conservation and development? What measures do we need in place for our land, our water, and our climate today to protect the families of tomorrow? So as CEO of REI, and it's not a public company, REI members out there, it's probably a few. All right. So you own the company. There you go. It's a member-owned cooperative. But I needed to pay attention to the current year's earnings, but I also needed to make long-term decisions to make sure that our business would be relevant and profitable 10, 20, 30 years down the line. And I was just chatting with Frank and Charlie about how my colleagues at REI, and I did a study on what's impacting us over the long term, and then I saw a CSI study just a couple of years later, and they were almost completely aligned. You do, as a business, have to think long-term. That's the same balance that I have to have as Secretary of the Interior. Managing our resources to help drive our nation's economy without taking our eye off the America we want to hand to our children. The fact is, I know, we all share a desire for a cleaner and more secure energy future. But getting there is a complex task, and many thoughtful people will disagree over the right path forward, right, Charlie? That's why today I want to talk about the path we're forging at the Department of the Interior, because put simply, our task by the end of this administration is to put in place common-sense reforms that promote good government and help define the rules of the road for America's energy future on our public lands. These reforms should help businesses produce energy more safely and with more certainty. They should encourage technological innovation. They should ensure American taxpayers are getting maximum benefit from their resources, and they should apply our values and our science to better protect and sustain our planet for future generations. After all, as my colleague, Secretary Kerry, said just last week, there is no planet B. I thought it was clever, too, it's good. Over the past six years, the Obama administration has launched the most ambitious reform agenda in the Department of the Interior's history. We saw and inherited how a drill everywhere plan doesn't work very well if nearly half the lease sales are challenged or later overturned in court. So we put in place onshore leasing reforms to front-load engagement with the public about where it does or doesn't make sense to develop. Through smarter planning, we're seeing reduced conflict and litigation and more certainty for industry. In 2009, the renewable energy industry was knocking on our door to permit wind and solar projects, but there was no clear path forward. So my predecessor, Ken Salazar, stood up a strike team to get the most promising projects across the finish line and to establish an enduring renewable energy program at the Department, and he did a great job. That legacy is the gift that keeps on giving. So in the span of six years, we have now approved 52 commercial-scale projects on public lands across the West. Together, that's 14,000 megawatts of renewable energy that when built would produce enough electricity to power over four million American homes. So let me put that in perspective. How many of you have ever visited Hoover Dam or Grand Cooley Dam, Glen Canyon Dam? Quite a number of you. Okay. So 14,000 megawatts is roughly equivalent to the clean hydro power the Bureau of Reclamation produces through 53 facilities built over the course of 100 years, including Grand Cooley, Hoover Dam, Glen Canyon Dam, and the other 50 dams that we have in the Bureau of Reclamation portfolio. So this is not minor. This is huge. Offshore. We've also made sweeping reforms for safe and responsible development in the wake of the devastating Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Interior strengthened drilling and emergency response standards for oil and gas companies. We've raised the bar through new standards for well-designed production systems, blowout prevention, and well-control equipment. And we've overhauled federal oversight by restructuring ourselves to provide independent regulatory agencies that have clear missions and are better resourced to carry out their work while keeping pace with the rapidly evolving industry. But our work's not done. There's still areas where we need to change how we do business. So the United States can better compete and lead the world when it comes to energy and climate change. Our reform agenda over the next two years has three goals, safe and responsible energy development, good government, and encouraging innovation. I'll start with safe and responsible energy development. It's pretty simple. If we don't have the right measures in place to protect the communities we live in, the air we breathe, and the water we drink, we all lose. I quote, the critical path to sustained and expanded resource development in North America includes effective regulation and a commitment of industry and regulators, industry and regulators, to continuous improvement in practices to eliminate or minimize environmental risk. Sounds like the Interior Department, right? But it wasn't. It was the National Petroleum Council, largely made up of industry. It's because many in industry get that effective regulations and independent oversight of energy development not only help minimize risk, but are absolutely critical to building the public confidence necessary to sustain our energy revolution. But many of the regulations on the books haven't kept pace with the advances in technology. They're the same ones that were in place when I was working on drilling and fracking operations in Oklahoma more than 30 years ago, 30-year-old regulations. It's why in the coming days, if we will release a final rule related to hydraulic fracturing or fracking on public lands, the rule will include measures to protect our nation's groundwater, requiring operators to construct sound wells, to disclose the chemicals they use, and to safely recover and handle fluids used in the process. Some have already labeled these baseline proven standards as overly burdensome to industry, but I think most Americans would call them common sense. Standards only apply to activity on public and tribal lands. Where as a matter of geology, listening to my friends at the US Geological Survey, about 25% of America's unconventional oil and gas sits. So you can all do the math. It means that three quarters of the resources are found on state and private lands. So the responsibility for developing this energy safely must now be taken up in state capitals, in engineering labs, and in boardrooms all across the country. We owe it to our kids to get this right. If we do, we can continue to grow our economy just as we work to protect our water, our air, and our communities. Interior will continue to do its part. In the coming months, we'll also propose standards to cut methane emissions and wasted gas. The results are venting and flaring during oil and gas operations, or leaky pipes like they had in this building. Apparently it smelled like natural gas in here just a few hours ago. Methane is the third largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. It traps more than 20 times as much heat as carbon dioxide over the course of a century. But this powerful greenhouse gas is routinely released during energy development. In fact, above Northern New Mexico, where there's more than 40,000 gas wells, satellite images show a methane plume the size of Delaware. So we'll be updating our decades-old standards to encourage the kind of infrastructure and technology that companies I've met with in the Bakken and the Permian Basins have demonstrated can reduce harmful emissions and capture the natural gas as a source of energy and revenue for the American people. And when I was last up at the Bakken, Statoil was showing me a device that they were about to use to recover some of that natural gas right after a well had been completed. They just skid mounted it. It hadn't worked yet. I gather now it's not only working, but they've ordered a couple more. So that's a great illustration of industry doing its part to really innovate. Further addressing the impacts of energy development, we're also moving forward with a proposal to modernize the way coal mining operations protect community water sources and make sure that companies restore streams and forests to a healthy condition. In the Gulf of Mexico, exploration and development activity is booming driven by new discoveries in deep waters and the expansion of existing fields. In the next two years, 13 fields are expected to start up and offshore production is projected to steadily increase, reaching 1.6 million barrels per day in 2016. So as we continue to make vast areas available for offshore oil and gas, in fact, tomorrow I'm heading to a lease sale in New Orleans where we're offering 41 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico. Safety remains our top priority. We can't forget the lessons of the Deepwater Horizon tragedy. Building on the sweeping reforms that I mentioned earlier will propose a rule in the coming weeks that raises the bar on blowout preventers and well control measures based on technological process, excuse me, progress advanced by the industry. Operators will be required to use best practices to protect against and effectively respond to any loss of well control. And in the Arctic, we just released a proposal to make sure that any oil and gas exploration offshore Alaska is subject to strong standards and specifically tailored to the region's challenging and unforgiving conditions. We know the Arctic is a sensitive environment that has sustained Alaska natives and their culture for thousands of years and we can't afford to get it wrong. When it comes to these reforms, I recognize there'll be pushback from various corners, no surprise. I also appreciate the importance of the oil and gas sector and I'm committed to its ongoing success but I strongly believe that they're not only achievable with modern technology and science but absolutely critical to upholding public trust to responsibly develop our natural resources. We've got to update these regs. Second, when it comes to reforms, we need to improve the way we do business as a federal government, plain and simple. Part of that means ensuring the American taxpayer is getting a fair return for the use of natural resources on their public lands. I think most Americans would be surprised to know that coal companies can make a winning bid for about $1 a ton to mine taxpayer-owned coal. Coal is gonna continue to be an important part of our nation's energy mix in the future but the Government Accountability Office, our own Inspector General and members of Congress from both sides of the aisle, agree that the federal coal program needs reform. So we need to ask ourselves, are taxpayers in local communities getting a fair return from these resources? How can we make the program more transparent and more competitive? How do we manage the program in a way that's consistent with our climate change objectives? These are hard questions but it's time for an honest and open conversation about modernizing the federal coal program and we welcome that. In the coming weeks, thanks. In the coming weeks, we'll also take public comment on a proposal to give the Bureau of Land Management the flexibility to adjust royalty rates on the oil and gas resources that belong to all of us. This is important especially given the dramatic growth of oil production on public and tribal lands. Production has increased in each of the past six years and overall combined production from public and tribal land was up 81% in 2014 compared to 2008. It's not just about royalty rates. We need smarter management too. In 2015, incredibly, we're still processing a majority of our oil and gas permits by paper. And we got about 150 inspectors out in the BLM who are responsible for inspecting 100,000 oil and gas wells spread across millions of acres of public and tribal lands as a lot of territory and it means we're not able to do our job effectively. To carry out our mission and to be a better partner to industry, we need resources. Repeated budget cuts have tested BLM's ability to keep up with industry demand for new permits and to effectively enforce safety and environmental standards. It's why the president's budget calls on Congress to support a strong onshore inspection program partly funded through fees. This proposal takes a page from the offshore energy industry where industry pays fees for permits and inspections, which means we can keep pace with the workload and we don't have to divert funds from other programs to support permitting, leasing, or inspection activities. Coupled with the transition to a new automated permitting system, which is underway that eliminates paper applications, these budget resources will significantly strengthen the BLM's capacity to do its job well. That's a perfect example in the budget where Congress needs to move beyond mindless austerity brought about by sequestration. And I can tell you, my first year in this job was 2013. I thought I left the private sector for this, crazy budget, but this enables us to move beyond that sequestration and make a smart investment in the future in infrastructure and in innovation. That means investing in safe and responsible energy production but also in our ability to protect our critical landscapes, our wildlife, and their habitats. So when it comes to good government, we're also working to provide predictability to industry by identifying on a landscape level, where does it make sense for them to develop and where does it make sense for them not to develop? So to that end, we're taking a targeted leasing approach in offshore frontier areas. We're also completing comprehensive oil and gas leasing plans onshore places like Moab, Utah in order to open up access to resources in the right places but recognize there's some places that we don't wanna develop. We've already done that in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska where we've made nearly 12 million acres available for oil and gas development while protecting sensitive habitat that's critical for species like the caribou. They're valuable oil and gas resources in the NPRA that companies can explore and bring to market and we're facilitating that. But to be clear, predictability also means identifying places that are too special to drill. Talking about places with rich cultural resources or key wildlife habitat or awesome outdoor recreation opportunities like you talked about, Charlie. That all matters to our economy and to our future. I'm also talking about places at the doorstep of Utah's national parks, North Dakota's Theodore Roosevelt National Park or the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge not only should we, thank you. Not only should we actively avoid damaging special or sensitive places like the ones I mentioned but we should permanently protect some areas for their conservation values. Future generations of Americans deserve to enjoy those incredible places just like we do. So we're using this comprehensive landscape level approach for renewable energy too. Because all energy development has its consequences. We have to be thoughtful about it. So onshore we've mapped out nearly 20 zones across the West where solar potential is high and other conflicts are low. Because of this early planning work, companies will see faster permitting times. For example, three solar projects in the pipeline in a solar zone in Nevada were reviewed by the BLM in about a third of the time, nine months. Whereas previous project by project approvals often took two years to complete. Offshore, we're identifying energy areas that will allow our nation to capture the huge potential of wind along the Atlantic. It is windy along the Atlantic, I've been there. Didn't used to, it was on the Pacific. We can do that without compromising fishing, recreation, national security, the environment or view sheds when we're smart about planning upfront. We've already held four successful auctions where industry has competitively bid to develop offshore wind farms. We now have over 800,000 acres offshore under commercial lease and we're looking forward to seeing steel in the water in the coming years. The third and last reform I'll talk about today is making sure that our country is positioned to encourage innovation and be competitive in a global economy. America is both blessed with diverse natural resources and more importantly the human capital to develop new and better ways to harness them. Just as the United States is a leader in unconventional oil extraction and is now the world's top producer of natural gas, there's no reason why we shouldn't also be the top producer of solar power and wind power. Why not? Let's do it. The government has a role to play here. For example, the Department of Energy has for decades been a key player in research and development, things like directional drilling and tools to assess oil and gas potential, technologies that help spur our nation's recent energy boom. Today, the DOE is investing in innovative technologies that make our energy production cleaner, more efficient, and finding ways to make solar more cost effective. The government's also supported the development of a strong and profitable oil and gas industry through many tax credits and incentives that lowered the cost of doing business. I worked with those incentives when I was a banker, banking oil and gas companies, and I was surprised to find out that they're still in place 35 years later. So these credits may have made sense at the time, but I'm not sure they make sense for as mature as this industry has become, and I think we need to look at that. Instead today, we should be investing in incentives for industries that are still getting a foothold in our nation's sector, like wind and solar energy. We need Congress to make tax credits for renewable energy long-term and predictable instead of allowing sunsets and stutter steps that create so much uncertainty for businesses and manufacturers. Many enlightened states have spurred the growth of clean energy through renewable energy standards and incentives. So when you talk about creating jobs and growing the economy, this is the kind of action that Congress can take that will move billions of dollars of capital investments into the clean energy economy. Our nation's policies should accelerate American innovation and entrepreneurialism, not blunt them. Renewable energy tax credits, energy efficiency targets, carbon reduction targets, and thoughtful regulations thoughtful regulations that incentivize clean technology are a few ways that we can get there. So I've talked about our reform agenda from my perspective as Secretary of the Interior responsible for representing the interests of all of us taxpayers on their public lands. But I'm also a grandmother. My responsibility to my grandchildren's generation is at the top of my mind with every decision we make. It's why I'm determined to help make energy development safer and more environmentally sound in the next two years. It's why I believe that new energy development should be matched with new protections for lands and waters. And that's why we must. We must do more to cut greenhouse gas pollution that is warming our planet. I see the cost of a changing climate everywhere I go. Recently I was in Kivalina, Alaska. Coastal erosion there threatens to wipe out an entire native village. And it's one of several that's in danger. In the Marshall Islands, where I was in 2013, they have to sandbag the airport runway to keep the rising ocean from washing it away. And I got an email last night from Esther Kia Aina who is Assistant Secretary for Insular Affairs who said that just king tides in some areas in the Marshall Islands are making parts of inhabited areas now uninhabitable. That and one storm and it could wipe out 15,000 people who share 80 acres right now with the average elevation that's just a few feet. Right here at home, across this country, communities are facing more extreme wildfires. We saw some of them in the news last night. Bigger storms, devastating droughts like California's experiencing, disappearing wildlife and rising economic damages, these are not free. So for us at Interior, we're already adjusting our land management strategies for the impacts of climate change. But we also need to do more and we can to address the causes of climate change. Helping our nation cut carbon pollution should inform our decisions about where we develop, how we develop and what we develop. President Obama has rightly described climate change as the single most pressing energy and environmental challenge of our time. But he's also right that we're in a moment of remarkable opportunity and promise. In the State of the Union, he said we have risen from the recession freer to write our own future than any other nation on earth. It's now up to us to choose who we want to be over the next 15 years and for decades to come. I share the President's belief that the US should lead the world on energy, climate and conservation. And to accomplish this, we need to encourage innovation. We need to provide clear rules of the road and make balanced decisions. Every day, I think about this phrase, we don't inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children. We don't inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children. My job is to take the long view. It's what the American public expects of us and that's what we all owe the next generation. Thank you. Thank you, Secretary Jewell, excellent presentation. Let me allay some of your fears. I'm Frank Verrastra, I'm a senior vice president here at the center and I have this messenger chair. The gas leak was on 17th at M, so no panic. But for our safety moment in the event that we have to evacuate, the unlikely event, since we're on the second floor, down the stairway out the front, across the street to the park for those of you in front, out the back where the exit signs are, takes you to an alleyway, dumps you on M Street, okay? You should have said that in advance.  And I'm secretary, so I got my start in the federal government at the age of four in the interior department, so I have an affinity for the oil and gas office there. You and Charlie both talked about the trade-offs, especially at interior where you're charged with resource development in a prudent way and environmental stewardship. But then when you expand that throughout the government to national security, foreign policy interests, labor and economic interests, how do you reconcile what are the trade-offs and the balances? Because I'm not sure the public has a full appreciation for the deliberations that go on to get to a policy decision. I'd say that the American public has an amazing capacity for the truth and when you explain the trade-offs, when you engage communities in the process, you actually end up with some pretty smart thinking about where we need to go. So as I was talking about, we've done a fair amount of engaging with communities on landscape level planning. What are the areas they think make sense to develop? What are the areas too special to develop for the industry? What are the areas that has the greatest potential and how can we help steer development to the right places and avoid the wrong places? Now the worst thing I think we can do for industry as well as for the country is to make hasty decisions that aren't well thought through that just end up in court. Slows everything down and there was a fair amount of that that we inherited. In fact, my husband's not happy that all the lawsuits in the Department of Interior bear my last name, or just most of them, our last name. Because a lot of those are formed when you don't have the right kind of upfront discussion about what is the right balance and what's at stake. So I think that we've made some really important progress in that area of engaging the public so that we're really, they trust the decisions that are being made more than before and they recognize that there is balance in trade-offs and I think that has enabled us to avoid some conflict. Well also building understanding for the very real conflicts that do exist out there. And you talked too about, so in addition to the outreach as the technology moves is an extraordinary time that we've seen over the last five years. But as with budget that I'm sure you're keenly aware of the restrictions on budget availability, the notion that is there a better way to collaborate with industry and the private sector on research and technology and regulatory proposals so that the regulations are lined up with the best thinking of the day and best practices as they are put in place. Yeah I think that that's, we are doing that and I think it's very important. I mentioned a lot of the regulations we're looking at upgrading right now were created in the 80s. And that's when I was in the early 80s is when I was in the oil and gas industry directly and they haven't changed but the technology has gone miles. It's not easy to change regulation and maybe it shouldn't be easy but you want regulations that can adapt with new technologies and that's what we're doing in a lot of the regulatory work that we're doing right now to update these things. So I used a quick example of stat oil and the skid mounted unit to capture natural gas and natural gas liquids right at the well head in the box and when the pressures are really high right after they complete a well. And we're listening to technologies like that as we formulate the methane capture strategies. For capturing methane what you really need is a gathering system and gas processing plants. It takes time to put those in place and you've got pressure issues that are very complicated for industry to deal with early on in that well's production life. This is innovation by industry. We want to learn from that. We want to figure out what's practical, when it might apply, how practical is it to apply across the network. Likewise in offshore, tremendous amount of work has been done post deep water horizon. I mean that that accident really hurt the oil and gas industry. It hurt every producer out there. It certainly hurt the Gulf Coast States and I think it horrified the nation but it inspired a lot of soul searching on what went wrong. A lot of human error involved. A lot of not paying attention to the technologies that were there and that had to do to a certain extent with a safety culture. So we can work with industry on enhancing that. We were not structured to provide the kind of support and focus on safety as distinct from leasing as distinct from revenue. We have now split that into three parts. That's not technology, that's human capital and focus and clarity of mission. So all of those things are factoring into how we are updating our regulations and when you look at the well control work we've done around blowout preventers and so on that's embracing technology industry has but also innovations that industries done in the Gulf of Mexico to say we need better well containment than we've had so they've got two different organizations both consortiums of oil and gas companies that have pooled their resources to build new technologies to address well control and those are the kinds of ways that we're working closely with industry so that our regulations match what they're able to do and so they're able to progress over time. Well and since we're coming up on the fifth year anniversary of Macondo this whole notion that you can expand best practices internationally and be a leader whether it's the Gulf of Mexico or offshore Cuba and the opportunity that that presents for the United States in terms of leadership position also in the Arctic. That's exactly right. And my colleague Mike Conner deputy secretary is in Mexico right now. He's working on water but he's also working on energy. We've got for the first time ever a trans boundary hydrocarbon agreement which will take into account the oil and gas resources that know no international boundaries but both countries want an opportunity to develop and so we're working closely with them sharing our practices, listening to their practices and making sure that the Gulf writ large is protected in the future. So learned a lot of painful lessons since the Gulf oil spill. We've learned a lot in the Arctic as well with a lot more to learn because Russia's developing, Canada will be developing, China's poking around. We need to know what we're doing. Well and so the Arctic now that you have in that there's an NPC study that's coming out shortly about the Arctic but this whole notion that if other Arctic nations develop the resources as well and if we are a bit of a laggard on that what does that happen? Does that put us at a disadvantage? Is sometimes more is more in terms of capability, shoreline backup systems and staging areas, Coast Guard defense capability as well so it's a bigger geopolitical issue as well as just a resource issue. Yeah I think that's exactly right. The US will be chairing the Arctic Council coming up I think later on this year the transition occurs. My colleague Brian Salerno, wave Brian, runs the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement. Brian came from the Coast Guard. We need to make sure that our Arctic response capabilities, search and rescue capabilities, safety environment, all of those things are solid and in place and I think as has been well documented through Shell's challenges that they had in the 2012 drilling season, we are talking about harsh conditions. We're not talking about the Gulf of Mexico. This is very different and we want to know how to do it right. I will also say that many of the companies that may be interested in developing the US Arctic are also the same companies that are developing in other parts of the Arctic, ExxonMobil I believe is doing work with Russia. So we need to know what we're doing to the extent that there is development there and we believe there is strong potential. We want to make sure we do it right. We want to make sure that the resources are there to drill a relief well, to contain a spill if there is a spill and it's not a problem as much in the Gulf even though it was with Deepwater Horizon but you've got a lot of assets there. That's not true in the Arctic. It's a long way, it's a lot of time and you've got a much shorter season because of ice. So lots to learn and I think that it's important that as companies show interest as they have with the lease sales that have occurred that we do it right. Talked a lot about climate change and the focus within the administration as well as in the Interior Department. So when you look out on conventional or unconventional energy production or renewables, how do you weight averages to decide where there's areas that should lease or you talked about primary spots where you think that that would be good for wind energy offshore? What's the process within Interior? Well first it starts with science. Where are the areas that are consistently windy and then where it's consistently windy, what other attributes might that area have? Is it part of a critical bird flyway or bat flyway? Is it close to transmission? Is it right in somebody's view? We have to think about all of those things. Offshore wind, 800,000 acres now under lease and we de-conflicted that before we put those acres up for lease. So we said, where's the Navy in the Coast Guard activities, where's the Merchant Marine in the fishing activities? What are the critical recreation areas? Can you see these future wind turbines? And is that going to bother anybody? Yes, usually. That's a short answer. So we need to de-conflict and say, these are the areas that have the lowest conflict and the highest potential. These may be areas with high potential but really high conflict. You know, there are places, there are national parks with oil and gas resources. That's not the places we should be developing them. I don't believe we should develop oil and gas in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The President agrees. He made that point and that is a recommendation we'll be making to Congress. So this is through applying science, understanding, other uses of the land, the impact of the energy development and trying to chart a course forward that says, let's go to the areas where there is limited or no conflict. So we're doing that in Moab, Utah with our master leasing plans and we're engaging local communities and they're part of that effort. We've done it in the National Petroleum Reserve. We're doing it in the California desert. There's all kinds of areas off the coast of the Atlantic and it's really working and the community's engaged. And those are good solutions. When I was in the private sector, we were developing Pornark Way off the coast of California and there was one proposal to encase the offshore rigs with mirrors so that they wouldn't be a visual pollutants. We thought that was a bad idea. Let me just suggest one of the reasons that we invite you all is to participate and the secretaries agree to take some questions from the floor. We have a couple of simple rules. One is to wait for the microphone. Number two is to, to the extent that you can, pose your question in the form of a question. So that's a little voice inflection at the end and then identify yourself and your affiliation if that's okay, please. So, any questions? Wow, you're good. Okay, all the way in the back there on the left. My name's Andrew. I'm with the Biomass Thermal Energy Council. I'm an intern there and I have a question about the department's initiatives in forest restoration and kind of energy opportunities. So lesser known energy opportunities and innovation at the forest edge. Thank you. Thank you very much for your question. So there is actually a lot of work going on in USDA and the US Forest Service, which isn't part of the Department of Interior, but it is a very important potential. So for example, because of climate change, just a few degrees difference have caused a proliferation of the mountain pine beetle.   There is fuel potential in that timber and this is something that Tom Vilsack, Secretary of Agriculture, has been working on with his team. It's a matter of economics. How do you make it economic to harvest that for energy development or for manufactured wood products or otherwise? But it's certainly a very important part of the equation. I will also say that I visited the National Renewable Energy Lab, which is a DOE facility and there's incredible research going on in biomass energy development. More of that is with grow materials like switchgrass, but it also includes wood products. So there is potential to doing that and I think the research absolutely is critical to continue. It's not yet being done on an economic scale but it's only a matter of time and it's a good illustration of where a little bit of incentive, the right kinds of tax incentives as the oil and gas industry continues to enjoy and has for over 30 years. Actually it's just the 30 plus years I've been since I've been in the industry but I think they were in place long before that. Maybe we could take a few of those incentives and move them to areas that are just getting their start so that technology can bring the price down and we can learn a lot from the science and that's a big part of where I think we have an opportunity to go. So if I can just pull back on that a second. So on the economic side, put yourself your REI hat back on as well as your government hat. So in times of low prices as fees or structures or economics change for companies that are struggling but where you still wanna get development can you be flexible in how you encourage or disincentivize people from doing certain things in certain places? Yeah I got a great REI example for you. I hope it answers your question directly. So REI was very concerned about being a company that supported human powered active outdoor recreation and yet having a carbon footprint ourselves and we wanted to go about understanding that carbon footprint and figuring out sort of where's the low hanging fruit to reduce it and one of the areas was energy consumption. So we went about figuring out what were our dirtiest markets in other words which stores were located in places that used high carbon producing sources of energy and so we took that and then we married that with the potential that local utilities had for green power and we locked in green power supply contracts to give those utilities certainty that they had a market for that green power. We signed up for long term contracts. Those contracts were more expensive than buying conventional energy but it was something that we were committed to doing but that was in 2007 when oil prices ran up and at the end of the day those contracts ended up being much better for us economically because we locked in several years at a time when oil and gas prices were high and associated electricity rates went up if you were tied into fossil fuels. So that's an illustration where we as a business could help support renewable energy. Now the states typically that had those renewable facilities were states where there was some kind of a renewable energy standard. So it wasn't a tax credit necessarily, it was an expectation that utilities have a certain percentage and so it basically was a requirement that they developed it. So if you marry that incentive if you will or expectation from a state with a willing buyer and there are lots of willing buyers out there that want to reduce their carbon footprint. You've got a situation that actually drives the cost down for those technologies because more people get into it and I've got other examples actually with the company on where we put solar panels, distributed solar on our roofs and which ones we used and which states they went to and had everything to do with both national and state incentives to support energy development and we accelerated, I think we did 11 stores one year because the tax credits were gonna be expiring at the end of that year. Which is kind of a crazy way to do things. Very difficult to plan that way but that's how these stutter steps I talked about have worked with tax incentives around renewables. Yeah, uncertainty doesn't help with planning. Does not. And I won't put you on the spot to say when a carbon tax gets put in place. We have a question here in the front row. Hi, my name is Todd Tussi. I'm with Advocates for the West in Boise and Washington, D.C. and I'm intrigued by your presentation, Madam Secretary, regarding deconflicting energy development and conservation and I'm just wondering if you've had a chance to review a recent letter from 11 sage grouse scientists to you noting that it appears the agency is abandoning science-based conservation measures for sage grouse and developing more elastic subjective measures. How many in the audience have any idea what a sage grouse is? Quite a few. Okay, I know the front row does because you guys, we got two of our three grouse critters we call them in the front row over here. So let me just, for those that didn't raise their hands, let me just bring you up to speed a little bit. There is a species that is under consideration for listing under the Endangered Species Act called the Greater Sage Grouse. That's the minor part that I want to talk about. The major part is we have ecosystems across the American West that are at risk of a number of different factors. We think about Redwood Forest in California as old growth forests. We think about my home state of Washington, the Olympic Peninsula and the old growth trees there as really incredible habitats worthy of protection. But we have old growth sagebrush ecosystems throughout the Great Basin that are equally important to 350 species. Greater sage grouse is one of them, but mule deer and pronghorn antelope and hundreds of other species call these places home. And so when we have a wildfire that burns through range land we can wipe out in the space of a day or two hundreds of thousands of acres, hundreds of square miles just like that. And we don't think about it as being old growth and the way we do when you've got crowning fires running up through Yosemite. But it is very, very important from a habitat standpoint. So we have 11 states working together to say how do we strike the right balance between conservation and development? In a state like Wyoming development, oil and gas resources typically, some coal resource development can be the biggest potential disruptor to sage grouse habitat.  So we're trying to come up with comprehensive strategies across the landscape to understand the critical areas for these species and to protect those areas with the highest level of protection. We are using sound science. We're using the best available science we have. I haven't read specifically the letter that you referenced but I will say that it is very complicated. And there are, states have done a lot of science. There's independent work. The work that we do scientifically is available and open to the public. Some of the private science that is done by others or by states is not open to the public. We will take at the Fish and Wildlife Service all of the science into account. And we must do that because if we don't do that and we come out with a decision on whether a listing or not is warranted, we know it's gonna be challenged in court. The question is, will it be defensible? And we have to have our ducks in a row. But I will say this that it is unprecedented to have 11 states, 11 governors, really the core is probably seven governors that are where they have most of the habitat working so hard alongside the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Land Management and private land owners to put in place conservation measures that protect these lands that have helped define the American West and the species that call it home. So I am very, very proud of the collaborative work that's happened with states, the BLM, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Geological Survey and others. And I'm confident we'll reach the right conclusion when all the science is in. Excellent. And Tommy's working on the answer right now, is it? Oh, Charlie. Charles Ebinger from Brookings Institution. Madam Secretary, I was wondering if you believe that with the TAPS pipeline in Alaska and such serious jeopardy as to its flow levels, whether any criteria when you have lease sales in Alaska ought to take into consideration those that might be nearest TAPS if something was found and hence keep the pipeline alive. Well, thank you for that question. You know, I actually worked on the Alaska pipeline when I was a college student, solving little engineering problems like what do you do when you put hot oil in a cold pipe and the pipe moves and how do you keep the insulation on it and little things like that. It's a very tricky place to do business. And what's interesting is that, I mean, when Alaska achieved statehood, Alaska chose lands, federal government chose lands, tribes up there, native corporations chose land, Alaska chose wisely. They chose Prudhoe Bay Oil Field in Kaparek and developed that very thoughtfully and it peaked in production in the 80s. So it's no surprise that production's been going down and I will say that state of Alaska is really hurting right now because of oil prices and I'm sympathetic to the situation that Governor Walker finds himself in and the whole state. We certainly support development in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska. Conoco Phillips has developed the Colville Delta or CD5 and the area around Alpine. I've actually been out there personally myself. Janet Schneider who's Assistant Secretary for Land and Minerals has been out there, Tommy's been out there, a number of others. And that is already hooked up to the pipeline network. The National Petroleum Reserve, Alaska, the Greater Musa's Tooth Unit, which is the record of decision that we just reached on development with Conoco Phillips of that will tie in to the Alpine facility and we'll be able to go straight into TAPS. So it's our expectation that as the National Petroleum Reserve is developed that that will help keep oil flowing through TAPS. The other thing I would say as we did all of the work to look at the National Petroleum Reserve and what are the areas that are really critical habitat to not develop, like to Sheckpook Lake for example, which is really critical habitat for caribou birds and other species. We thought about if there is exploration and ultimately production in the Chukchi Sea, is there a way to move that across overland through the National Petroleum Reserve to the Trans Alaska Pipeline? And if you look at the areas that we set aside for conservation and the areas we set aside for development, you will see that it facilitates the ability to ultimately have a pipeline corridor that runs through there. So TAPS is a national resource. It's very important to the state of Alaska. It's certainly important to us. And so we have every expectation that we will facilitate making public lands available for oil and gas development. Obviously it'll be up to industry to develop those resources and that's gonna depend on a whole bunch of factors, including economics, but we will be supportive but doing it in the right ways and in the right places. One of the reasons we get folks like Secretary Jewell to join us is that we try to adhere to their time constraints since they have an active day outside of CSIS and hard as that is to believe. Madam Secretary, you've been candid. You've been informative. It's great to have you here. I hope you do come back. We'll look for the proposals. And I think given your background, you're the right person at the right time. So if you'll join me in thanking Secretary Jewell. Thank you.