Hi everyone and thank you for joining us today for this week's lecture and planning series presentation. Our speaker this week is Joan Fitzgerald, professor of urban and public policy at Northeastern University. My name is Jana Davis and I'm a PhD student here in the planning program and I'll be moderating the session today. So I just want to start with a few kind of technical and logistic announcements and then I'll turn to introducing our speaker and her talk. So during the talk I'd just like to remind everyone to please mute their microphones. We'll be recording today's lecture so anyone in the audience who wishes to not be recorded should please plan on turning off your video input. And then we'll use the chat box only for discussion regarding the session. If you have any technical questions that apply only to you please feel free to message me privately. And then finally we encourage all of you to type questions into the chat box during the presentation. We'll have some time for Q&A at the end of the presentation probably starting around 2.15. And I'll be coordinating today's Q&A with attention to diversity and inclusion. So if you've already had a chance to ask a question just please allow others to do so before asking another. So with those kind of technical comments aside I'd like to now turn to introducing today's speaker Dr. Joan Fitzgerald. Dr. Fitzgerald is a professor of urban and public policy at Northeastern University. Her research focuses on urban climate action and strategies for linking it to equity, economic development and innovation. In her fourth book Green Innovation Urban Leadership on Climate Change she argues that the climate strategies of too many cities represent random acts of greenness rather than integrated and aggressive action. She points to leading cities in North America and Europe and offers strategies for lagging cities to accelerate their action. Her ongoing climate just cities project examined strategies for post COVID urban climate action to please equity at the forefront. She also blogs on inequality and urban climate action on Plattinacin. Today Dr. Fitzgerald's lecture called How to Transition from Climate Action to Climate Justice Planning will draw on some lessons learned from her book to explore how cities can transform climate action into climate justice. So Dr. Fitzgerald if you're ready I'll pass things over to you now. Okay, thanks for the introduction Jenna. Happy to be giving this lecture. I wish I could be doing it on site, but won't be for a while. Anyway, a minute. There we go. Moving forward. So yeah, I'll be starting about Green Innovation, Urban Leadership on Climate Change. Green Innovation came out March 27th and on March 28th Oxford University Press closed down its distribution center. So in many ways it was ill timed for for its landing. But it's been great to be able to reschedule all the talks I had last spring for now. So it's a made up word Green Innovation. I got it from Boston, which calls its outreach on climate Greenovate. And so I decided to use that with permission to characterize what I see is really needed in climate action planning for cities.  So one is setting aggressive climate goals with a strategy and for achieving them and accountability for achieving them. And it's easy to set aggressive climate goals. But what you'll see in many cities is they don't have interim goals to say that they are on target for getting there or anything that happens if they don't get there. And so that's one of the big problems is city set goals, but seldom reach them. The second thing is experimenting. We haven't been doing climate action planning in cities for very long. The first climate action plan was Portland in 1992. Most cities really started to pick up in say 2008. And so we don't know exactly what we're doing. And I got this idea at first in Malmo, Sweden where the mayor told his sustainability team experiment. If you're not making mistakes, you're not experimenting. If you're not experimenting, you're not learning. And so that is what I find is the leading cities are experimenting at so many levels. Being a learning organization, how do you how do you learn particularly learn across departments? And again, drawing from my experience in Malmo, where they set themselves up for something that Argers and Schoen call called double loop learning, that it goes into the departments, but then is disseminated among the individuals and also at a higher organizational level, learning about what works both technically and as well organizationally works. The fourth one is linking climate action to economic development and social equity goals, the three legged stool of sustainability that we'll talk about in a minute. And then catching contradictions. Even though we often have an office of sustainability in many cities, climate action involves almost every department in a city. And it's often the case that what is happening in one department is running counter to the goals of another department and trying to figure those out so that you're not slowing your progress is really important. So in green innovation, I focus on buildings, energy and transportation. And the reason I do that is if you look at any given city, chances are the two largest sources of its greenhouse gas emissions are buildings and transportation. And of course, the energy used in buildings, different cities count in different ways. So I focus on these three areas. But there are several chapters that relate to energy, several chapters that relate to transportation. And then in each chapter, what I do is look at what are those economic development links? What are those links to equity? So that's kind of a summary of the book. But since green innovation came out, of course, we've had the COVID-19 pandemic. We've had repeated injustices, even murders of black Americans by by police, the rise of Black Lives Matter. And equity has just become a much bigger component of what needs to happen in climate action. And so what I'd like to do is while I'm telling you about the book and what I talk about in the book is to demonstrate how recently equity has even become more to the forefront and even more than just equity as a term, racial equity has become essential to climate action planning. So I'm starting I'll start out with buildings. That's the first chapter. Amory Loven's long ago coined the term negawatts, and that's a unit of energy you don't use. And so we've always known that energy efficiency in buildings is the first step of a city's climate action. What I argue in green innovation as a city, if you aren't doing passive house as your standard, or net zero emissions, then you're behind the curve. And so the question is, how do you get there? And what I do is offer different strategies for cities at different places for moving to this standard. But it's very difficult. Some cities are in states that don't allow a city to have a higher building code or stricter energy code than the state does. And if the states is low, cities have to resort to more voluntary means. But anyway, the idea of passive house is that passive solar orientation, of course, very secure building envelope, high levels of insulation, windows, and so forth. And typically, the idea is that a passive house requires no external sources for heating and cooling. What we're finding is that most of the buildings built to that standard use about 70 to 80% less energy than others, they do require external energy. Zero emissions is often the same in the code. But in addition, it mandates that the building meet its energy needs with onsite renewable energy and or off site renewable energy. And that's the difference between zero net energy and zero net emissions. So with this, who are the leaders on this? Well, you're living there. The York is one of the leaders. And one of the things when passive house first came to be was that it was thought you couldn't do it in high rise buildings. And we are now this is one of the I think it might still be one of the world's tallest passive house building. This is at Cornell on Roosevelt Island. And demonstrating that in fact, you can do I think it's 26 floors, pretty high buildings with the passive house standard. So here's a few more that are in New York. There's a map of all of the passive house buildings that are in New York. And the city is promoting it with a lot of help from the state, which is also working on passive house. So keeping with our equity focus here. The question is, can you build ultra low income housing with passive standard? And the answer to that question is yes. And in the book, I tell the story of Tim McDonald, a Philadelphia architect, who was just curious about passive house, and was building this this low income development and decided to go for it. So you see he has solar on top in the design of this. But he did it. And what was amazing about it, it only cost him about 2% more than how he otherwise would have built the building. So Tim kind of got religion around passive house, went to the state and said, look it, if you put something in the development requirements for low income housing that the developer would get a certain amount of points for considering or for attempting passive house, we would really promote this standard in Pennsylvania did it. And it is still one of the leaders in passive house construction, and particularly low income. Tim has since gone around to, I think he's got 17 states now that have included passive house points in low income housing development. And it's really spurring that movement to build it. This obviously has a racial equity component in that the air inside the building is cleaner. And it also reduces energy burden because so much of the energy in this case comes from from solar that's produced right on the building. So here you can you can find a link to his global passive house happy hour. So where I did Massachusetts is also quite a leader. And our clean energy center, which is is funded through utility surcharge is also looking into multifamily passive house. And has just conducted a feasibility study with about eight units where they were paying $5,000 a unit. And the reason they did this is because developers are convinced architects are convinced that they can't do this reasonably. And so by providing this, they are then demonstrating to them that they can do it. And it's been a very successful project. And Massachusetts expects to become one of the top five states that are promoting passive house in low income, as well as generally. So New York is doing very similar things on low income passive house. Here we have one one development. And they have a certification system. They've produced guidebooks like the one you see here for developers to produce more multifamily passive house. And the strategy in New York at the state level is convince the construction companies and developers, they can do it for low income housing, you can come in and subsidize that, then they're going to want to do it for everything else they build because it commands higher rents, higher sales prices. So it's an interesting strategy to bleed with low income in New York. But what about retrofits? So new construction, that's great. Can you retrofit to passive house standard? That's something New York state NYSERDA is looking at as well. And in fact, where they got the idea was German or the Netherlands with this program called energy sprung. And as you can see what energy sprung does is it's works in social housing in the Netherlands. And they had design contest of how you could do it. And this is what they came up with. The idea is you create this external ectoskeleton.  And then you can come back in less than a week and fit it to the building. And this has been very successful. And with each round of the design challenge, they have found it that costs are reduced, increasingly as well. So here's some photos of the buildings with their new shells. The solar panels are right on the roof, they just pop them, the whole roof with the panels already right on it. And again, New York is looking to replicate that kind of model. And again, the equity component of this is that this says 10 US cities, but I'm sure it's more than that. A quarter of low income households spend about 15% more of their income on energy, which is more than twice as much as the average household spends on energy. So by making these efficient buildings much more efficient, it's saving people money and it's improving the indoor air quality. Here's just some other, obviously not low income, but passive house retrofits in New York. So building is our first line of action. And we demonstrated that we can do a passive house, we can do it in high rise, we can do it in retrofits, and we can do it in low income housing and low income retrofits. So let's move on to energy and look at cities. I mean, cities can't in many ways control energy supply. What are the mechanisms that cities can use? One is community choice aggregation. And so how that works is rather than the utility sourcing, the city sets up a CCA that buys and builds electricity. It's still delivered through the utility. And then you are billed typically by the utility. I think about 17 maybe 18 states allow community choice aggregation. As a way many cities do it just to lower the cost for their residents of energy. But in fact, many other cities are doing it primarily as a way of increasing renewable purchasing. And some CCAs have been set up just to purchase renewable energy. California like so many things, climate leads the way. Not only here in renewables in the number of community choice aggregations, but also really being able to connect that to jobs. So one of the cities that I looked at in Greenovation is Lancaster in the Los Angeles area, they created Lancaster Choice Energy as a CCA. We often think of these things in our politically divided era as Republican or Democratic initiatives. This is a Republican mayor who just saw CCA as a way to provide lower cost energy, but also as an economic development magnet for the city. And in implementation, what they're what they're doing in Lancaster is they've created one choice entity for the city, one for the surrounding communities in the county, but they're also putting it in low income housing and connecting that to micro grids. So they're covering all the basis in terms of equity, sustainability and economic development that they've been able to attract. And part of that is connecting the electricity to electrification of vehicles. And I'll talk about that a little bit more. Another way to do that cities can promote a solar is community solar. So one of the things we know is that about half of the people, either because they're renters or because they can't afford it, can't take advantage of all the subsidies states and some cities offer for putting solar panels up. So typically how it goes, you get the panels, have them installed, there's some kind of discount there. And then through net metering, you get to sell back to the grid, oftentimes making money. If you're able to make that an initial investment. So the utilities have argued against net metering saying it's it's unfair, because so many people can't afford it. And I think they have other reasons, but that certainly is the case. So community solar allows for community group purchasing. Sometimes it could be panels that are right on the houses. Sometimes it's off site. But the idea is you become a subscriber to say a solar farm like you see here, and then you get a credit on your bill for the energy that's produced by that. Sometimes you actually get the energy, but it's more often the case that you get the credit. How do you make that more of an equity thing?  So there's a great story in Austin, Texas, where Austin is utility is a municipal utility. And the City Council has asked the utility or required their utility to buy increasing percentages of its power from renewable sources. And running out of space in the city. So Austin Energy decided to invest in a number of community solar projects. And one they were they went out to investigate was an area of the city called the Loma. And as they were there, Pete Rivera, a longtime community organizer in this community said, wait a minute, if you're going to put those solar panels here, shouldn't we in the neighborhood have some access to that? And wait a minute, while you're putting these up, we have this, what used to be a park that's now essentially a dump, maybe you could invest in that. And he became he really negotiated this. And was successful, as you can see, there he is at the opening of the solar farm. And how it works is subscribers agree to pay a set price. But then using the utilities fund for low income, they are subsidizing so that half of the energy produced from the solar farm goes to the Loma community. And in conjunction with that, they're doing a lot of energy retrofitting of those of those houses as well. And it will dramatically decrease the energy burden of people living in the Loma. And they got the park out of the deep deal too. And so we're seeing this pop up all over the country, these community solar packages often in low income communities, often driven by developers that are nonprofit developers. So another aspect of this is, if all these cities and states are going to meet these goals that they've set around net carbon emissions, 100% renewable energy, one of the things that has to happen is we have to electrify everything. So one of the cities I've been watching since green innovation is Oakland, California, and a project going on in West Oakland that involved fuel switching and renewables. So West Oakland is an area that has just about every environmental harm you could want, a couple of highways, a waste treatment plant, a peaker plant that runs on jet fuel, port facility. So a lot of pollution in this community, as you can imagine high rates of asthma and other kinds of diseases caused by air pollution. So they decided the city with using state funds as well as city funds to go into West Oakland, and do major energy retrofits. But what they recently added on to it was fuel switching, that is getting fossil fuels out of the house or buildings. And it's interesting, at the time they were doing this Rocky Mountain Institute just published a paper that showed the harm that fossil fuels inside buildings, things like pointing out that if you have a gas fired hot water tank, that has to be vented. What about the stove? In the best cases, it's vented, but not always. And so the natural gas is creating pollution inside the building. So the idea by fuel switching, you would be able to get rid of indoor sources of pollution. But what about the outdoor? So one of the things they wanted to do was get rid of that peaker plant. And what they did was start installing renewables plus storage to the extent that they could actually get rid of the peaker plant. So it's a great story because it's cleaning up indoor and external outdoor air pollution by electrifying everything. So those are a couple of examples of how cities can have an impact on energy in that transition to renewable sources. Let's look a little bit at transportation. One of my favorite cities on this front is Los Angeles. Los Angeles has been trying to build out a subway has had a very integrated transportation policy for some time, definitely focused on equity, this idea that low income neighborhoods have not had the access to public transit to transportation in general, and bear the brunt of much of the pollution of the area, particularly from the port of LA. And the transportation policy would be focused on doing that. The port of LA is a great story. It's in the book. I'm not going to talk about it today. But one of the things that they're doing, speaking of experimenting, is they think of the first city in the country to commit to transition transitioning their entire bus fleet to electric. And that's an experiment because Los Angeles is a is a spread out city. The bus routes are off and long. They really have to be able to go on a charge for say 300 350 miles. So Los Angeles as part of this strategy attracted companies, but in particular one called BYD build your dreams the Chinese company to come in and produce them here. It's in Lancaster. But working with an organization called Lane, a community organization in Los Angeles that eventually split off this group called jobs to move America, negotiated a deal where BYD would come in, they would preferentially hire from low income communities and build the buses. Well, it all sounds like a great story. But then they started trying the buses. They didn't produce to the to the mileage that they were promised. And there were problems with them, all kinds of mechanical and other problems. And of course, one of the things that electric buses, what makes them attractive to cities is because there's lower maintenance. And so here you've got maintenance problems. So here's one of the dangers of experimenting. But they went back to the company. And one of the things build your dreams did not do was agree to unionization. There was a big campaign. They tried to squash it. Jobs to move America came in. They negotiated a union contract. They negotiated a lot of training. And things seem to be going right very well right now. And the buses have improved pro Terra and other electric bus company that was started in Silicon Valley. And then moved its production to South Carolina is now bringing production to California. And so we get a great economic development with equity story out of the way Los Angeles is expanding its its electric buses and jobs to move America is a nonprofit that's working in Chicago, New York, other places, not just on buses, but if you're expanding subways to get more of the construction to happen locally and to to have union unions and obviously well paying jobs and preferential hiring for people in low income communities. So Los Angeles is also investing as is the state of California in a considerable amount of electric electric car infrastructure charging infrastructure. And one of the things that that leading cities are doing is also building out car share programs that are all electric cars. And this is the one for Los Angeles. And in keeping with their with their equitable transportation strategy started it out in a low income community, highly subsidized so that everyone would have access to the to this car service. So not everything is equity focused. Some of it is just focused on how do you make that transition to electric vehicles? The quickest and I think Oslo is the world's leader. And I talk about Oslo in the book, I don't talk about Oslo when I give talks so much because it's such a unique environment. So Oslo had or Norway has a lot of money from oil, they're taking their money from their oil and investing it in electrification in the charging infrastructure. So you have a unique environment in the amount of money they're able to throw at it. I think London is is a better example of how you build layers of policy, which is my argument for how you get to green innovation, building layers of policy. So many of you probably already know that London was one of the first cities in the world, one of the few cities still in the world that has a congestion charging area. And so you see that marked by the red dotted line there.  The idea is to reduce the amount of traffic and then to take the funds generated and use those to invest in the public transit system. And highly effective in terms of reducing the crashes that occurred, reducing air pollution, reducing the number of cars, making it quicker to to to get around. So then London has been investing considerably in charging infrastructure. And what they did here was then overlay you less an ultra low emission zone, the blue area, you can see it corresponds to the congestion charging boundary. And what they're doing is over time, it over time, cars and our electric are not going to be allowed to go into this area. What it is now is you have to have a certain level of emissions, low emissions, and that will just get stricter and stricter and stricter over time, until only electric vehicles will be allowed in that zone. What they're doing as part of that is requiring the London taxis to all go electric as well. And so here you can see one of the electric taxis. And they are also a Chinese company, Geely bought United Taxi from London, and then refurbished a plant outside of London. And that's where they are producing or retrofitting taxis to make them hybrid or producing the actual electric taxis. So what's the contradictory policy? That just seems like layers and layers of good policy. Well, what happened was at the same time they were reducing traffic through the congestion pricing, Uber came along. And there were no restrictions on Uber. So everything they gained from the congestion zone, they lost and then some with the amount of Uber cars that were traveling in London. And they finally did ban or limit dramatically Uber in London. But I just point that out as just one of the examples of contradictory policies and not only limited success but almost did in the success of London's policies. One other kind of contradictory policy that just popped up on the screen one they're very proud of in Boston is apps people can use to find empty parking spaces. Because a good part of the traffic circulating is in a city is people looking for parking spaces. And so the idea is you find you find the space, you're circling less. But if your idea is to have fewer people driving into the city that you don't really need to drive into, because it's compact and has public transit and has plenty of bicycles for rent, do you want to promote apps that actually make it easier to drive in the city because it's easier to park? So in transportation in particular, we see a lot of contradictory policies that limit the ability of cities to reach their emissions goals. So where I'd like to go with this now is to move from an article I just submitted to the Journal of the American Planning Association is how do we move from climate action to climate justice? And this is an investigation of five cities that are doing that. Austin, Baltimore, Cleveland, Portland and Providence. And Providence has gone so far as to rename it the climate justice plan. Austin's plan is about to be released as a climate equity plan.  And I'll talk about that a little more in a minute. So moving from climate action to climate justice, I would argue is the next wave of climate action planning. So backing up a little bit, one of the things I've talked about in my articles as well as both of my books on this topic is eco districts. And they're in many ways big experiments. A city takes a whole district of a city and applies everything it knows on mitigation as well as adaptation. So here's one of the first ones, Wobahn in Freiberg, Germany, an area that as you can see, all of its energy is produced from renewable sources. Part of that is a combined heat system that runs on woodchips. Part of it is renewable. Green stormwater management, 15 minute community, public transit, everything linked to really experiment and determine what works and what kind of value to you get from integrating all aspects of sustainability. Another one that I follow is in Stockholm, Sweden, Hammurby, Shostad. This was an old industrial area of the city about 340 hectares. You can see there the city cleaned it up and turned it into a green community following this Hammurby model that as you can see is essentially a closed loop system. And in that closed loop system, what you see is just about everything going out of the district comes back in. So waste is either recycled, burned in the and then returned back into the combined heat and power system. Or organic waste is composted and then comes back and is used as compost throughout the city. Then the biogas produced from compost runs the hybrid buses. So this closed loop model really became one that many places tried to replicate. And with any kind of experiment like this, you know, there were a lot of reasons buildings didn't perform to the standards. They were supposed to transit had to be rerouted, all kinds of things to learn from doing this kind of experimentation. Stockholm has taken what it learned from Hammurby Shostad and is still in the process of developing its Royal Seaport. And here was another brownfield development. And the idea was that it would be all all powered by renewable energy as well. Green stormwater management integration of all aspects. And you really see the experimentation and learning going on in Stockholm. But one of the critiques of eco districts is do they just produce eco gentrification, create these areas where upper middle class people can live and feel they're doing the green thing. And Melmo started out that way with the redevelopment of the Western Harbor, which was a shipbuilding area in decline and produced. This was developed in three different stages. And again, experimentation and learning in each stage. But what Melmo got right was that, well, it's pretty easy to take a brownfield site, clean it up, combine every aspect of sustainability and build homes for relatively rich people. Can you go into an existing neighborhood and an existing poor neighborhood and apply the same principles and make it work? And that's what they did in Augustenburg. And it's been a highly successful project that they came in as a city and said, we want to retrofit for stormwater management and we want to retrofit for building efficiency. And the people in the community said, wait, wait a minute, and told their priorities. And they ended up doing a very nice job of redeveloping this area. So to me, this is the move from climate action to climate justice. So if we look now, I think what we're seeing is a transition from what we had been calling eco districts to green justice zones. And this idea is, again, that the first line of climate action has to be to undo, to remedy the harms, environmental harms that have been done to low income communities, often black and Latino communities that we've seen through COVID 19 are bearing the brunt of the illness due to due to the high levels of pollution in those neighborhoods. And so Providence is using green justice zones. You can see it's actually this one is California. It's actually become the new approach to integrating all aspects of sustainability and climate action planning and really focusing it first on frontline communities. So this is a trend I'm sure if you haven't heard of it before now you'll see green zones coming up all the time. And then the other aspect in conclusion that I'll say here is that talking about cities in a green new deal, as you know, last August or I guess a year ago, August, New York released its green new deal Seattle, a number of other cities. Boston, we have a mayoral candidate to Michelle Wu who just released a green new deal for Boston, where cities take that economic development focus integrated into their climate action plan along with the equity focus. So I would say where greenovation is going now is with green justice zones, green zones and green new deals at the level of the city. And I find it really exciting, exciting action and the way we should be going. So I will stop there and take any questions. Well John, thank you so much for your talk. So I guess we'll transition into the Q&A portion of the talk. And just as a reminder, anyone can feel free to please just type your questions into the chat box and we'll go through them accordingly. So I think the first question that we have is from Stefan who asked, do you find or think that passive house is most persuasive on economic grounds like a cost-benefit analysis or utility expenditures, moral persuasion or both? Does your example from Lancaster California represent a more conservative city adopting CCA on strictly economic grounds? I think it's both, it's always both. But I think the remarkable thing that Tim MacDonald was able to do was to get the points built into the funding stream for affordable housing. And so that motivated the market to move in that direction. And then people found out, oh, we can do it competitively cost-wise. And that's why I think New York's approach is so important, demonstrating that you can make it work cost financially in low income housing, then you get a premium for doing it in regular housing stock. So yeah, I think it has to be both things. And so Massachusetts is adopting the same points in its system but also the state Colleen Energy Center decided, okay, if we really want people to see it, we're going to have to pay them to do it. And then once we've done that and they see they can do it cost-effectively, they're hoping it will take off by using the points. So I think the cost, there really were differentials, but as we saw with the energy sprung and retrofitting, as builders get more used to doing it, architects get more used to doing it, those costs go down over time. Community choice is almost always a lower price and that's what motivates it. But as I said during the talk, there are many places that are using community choice aggregation and totally focusing it on renewable energy. Thank you. We have another question from Sophia who asked, I totally agree with the gentrification problem that comes with eco districts. I know that Malnö, if I said that correctly, used to have a refugee camp where, which was the biggest slum in Sweden and when I visited last year, there were still huge problems with housing supply. Do you have any thoughts on how you can make sure that housing demand is met equitably in an eco district and avoid gentrification as much as possible? I won't claim to have the tried and true answer that will work everywhere on that. Yeah, they did have a refugee camp and I'll add one of the other cities I follow is Hamburg, Germany, that has built out, they don't call it an eco district, but a whole new area of the city built along these principles and you can look and see a refugee camp, you know, right from this. So it is a problem. Rosengard is probably the fiercest neighborhood in Malmö. A lot of refugees, Sweden has taken in a lot of refugees and they have been applying the eco district principles there and one of the basic things that they do first thing is accessibility so that people can come in and out.  So for example in Augustenburg what they did was they built a lot of green roofs. They also created an international green roof institute. It's the largest green roof research center in Europe and it's right in the heart of Augustenburg. And so when I toured that I was with a group of Japanese landscape architects, people from all over the world come to this place. Similarly in Rosengard they're trying to build facilities there that will bring people there to try to integrate it better. So that's one thing that can be done.  And so that's where I think this idea of the green zone comes in that looks more comprehensively at how you approach it. And there's one, an eco innovation district in Boston where a new commuter rail put a stop in this neighborhood. And so what the CDCs and that group started doing is building green affordable housing near the stops to try to prevent that pathway to gentrification. A lot of the eco districts are doing park development and green stormwater management and doing it in a way that to use a phrase is just green enough so it was not to trip off that gentrification. But you're right that's the problem and it's really, really hard to stop. Let's see, I'm not seeing any more questions in the chat box so I think maybe I'll ask one of my questions. So one question that I had for you Joan was that it seemed like some of the projects that you mentioned potentially have the potential to potentially remake neighborhoods like the eco districts in ways that could be potentially contentious. So I was wondering are there specific ways of framing green innovation projects that you think have allowed some cities to get buy-in from multiple stakeholders? Yeah, I'd point to San Francisco and Portland that have consistently were some of the innovators in eco districts as an approach and in fact the organization eco districts that comes in and helps cities across the country develop these areas emerged out of that. Washington DC has a number of these areas as well and so you know it's a tough balance Seattle is doing them around new transportation links and it does take a great amount of intervention not to to actually map out how much affordable and market rate housing is going to be in an area and mandate that from the beginning to prevent or slow down that gentrification process. So remind me of the the second part of that question or did I? Oh I was muted sorry. Yeah I was just curious from your own research if there was anything that that you think has allowed cities to kind of get buy-in from different kinds of stakeholders. Okay buy-in from different stakeholders. Yeah I mean I think I think the stakeholders though have to be it has to be you know from the developers as well that they have to be able to make a profit building you know the low-income housing and I think we've seen that that happening but I think private investors in areas such as park development and so forth have been happening in some areas but it's going to be a difficult process and rather than giving you a good example I'll let you know how hard it's become. When when Providence did its green plan it really did put the community first in the planning process to the point they were one of equals with the city in in developing the plan and they didn't invite the business community they didn't invite the traditional environmental organizations that are predominantly white that usually are a big part of this and so there was a lot of resentment and so rather than giving you a good example you know the business community was up in arms and it remains to be seen whether they're going to buy into the idea that these are our priority areas the the environmental organizations are very concerned that you're not going to be able to meet your environmental goals if you're focusing on improving frontline communities first and then there was a liquid natural gas facility that was going in the mayor opposed it a number of people because it would be one more polluting thing for for these neighborhoods in in Providence and the governor came in and said we need this for economic development this is going to happen so I'm just reinforcing your point and just saying I I'm not going to offer silver bullets on here's how you prevent gentrification it's it's very hard to do and you know I think it's it's more process of probably slowing it down got it thank you I think Wei Ping might have have a question that she'd like to ask next hey Joan thank you for sharing your work one full book my question has relates to a little bit more at the city scale right so the examples if you look at our cities pretty much all in very good or decent fiscal health right because you know we already know infrastructure updating requires a lot of upfront investment so in your case studies are you seeing cities using even different kinds of financing mechanisms to start on these both you know justice and echo kind of fronts or are you also seeing private sector buy-ins in terms of building these you know either large-scale solar capacity you know also because you know part of the reason we all went to the big grid was to cut costs right there's a scale effect and now if you have a municipal utility companies like Massachusetts does it might actually increase costs for per resident so so come back to the central question has to do is our cities also innovate on how they finance these you know new forward thinking kinds of infrastructure and if they do you know who are the players and especially in terms of from private sector to some extent so for example Oakland in in the West Oakland work that they're doing with the renewables they they are using bond funds they are floating bonds in order in order to finance it but they're also subsidized by the state and of course California is using its you know its cap and trade program to finance it and I think there's the advantage we have here in the northeast as well is being able to use those funds to finance some of the renewable projects and so forth it's it's interesting you're right in terms of you know when you look at the usual suspects they tend to be pretty well off communities in this this last article I did it'll be interesting to see how the Providence Clevelands and Baltimore's of the world are able to finance that and right now these are plans that are relatively new and so I think part of what they're trying to do is establish green banks at the state level so Connecticut for example has a thriving green bank program and hopefully if all these green national if the national one of these national green new deals ever gets passed after after the next election you know we'll have federal money to go into projects as well but I think one of the most hopeful things that really is getting private sector investment are are the green banks and I think about six or seven states have established those right now as as a way to finance projects but in terms of the community solar those are just doing well just on market principles there are lots of developers very eager to move on this because the price of solar has gone down so much and investing in it similarly if we look at the the wind projects that are in you know in play in the northeast corridor there are some financing and and tax credits going on but those are moving on market principles as well so luckily the renewable costs have gone down and the efficiency of offshore energy has has risen dramatically Maine for example has one of the best programs in the country for fuel switching moving people to electric heat pumps and part of the reason is it also has the highest concentration of oil heat in in the country and there again they're getting private financing into that because it's creating all kinds of jobs it's a real engine of economic development in Maine but you're right there has to be you know this is not something cities can do on their own there has to be you know market penetration but there have to be these banks green banks that are going to to help finance some of the projects thank you I'm seeing another question from Brenna who asked Joan to the issue that you mentioned with buy-in from business entities do you find that the push for climate action is more effective when it comes from the community side the government side or the private side well the easy answer is you need it all and one of the things that I think we're seeing is a big switch from the private sector side I mean obviously not the fossil fuel industry but there have been several recent reports that have come out from series E2 these are leading business organizations that that are motivated to invest in green technologies another leading report insurance industry so there are a number of industries from the private sector investment banks that are really getting it on climate change there's a number that are getting it in terms of buildings that we talked about realizing that you can command higher rents higher prices for green buildings because that's what that's what people want to live in so I think the more you have it be part of the private sector investment the better one strategy that I talk about in the book are a number of 2030 districts and Ed Masry of architecture 2030 started this program with Seattle and it now probably has about 18 cities involved where a whole area of a city the business community commits to reductions in greenhouse gas emissions reduction in its transportation footprint and in reductions in water use and again it's just because this is where the market is moving these are the kind of buildings people want this is what's in demand so it's kind of public demand something and the business community sees it's in its interest and it responds and so I think we're at a really good moment there of course the fossil fuel industry isn't going to give up easily and we see if the regulatory environment say on fuel efficiency standards isn't good it's going to set us back the way it has already on electric vehicles and energy or auto efficiency but it's moving in a good direction in terms of from the community we'll see I mean we're at a moment where I think the American public at least for a while was really supportive of Black Lives Matter of supportive of equity and justice what that will turn into post-pandemic remains to be seen about do we prioritize remedies for these communities do we put our investment in that in the realization that you know we need a more egalitarian society that's good for the economy thank you we have another question from Tiago who asked how can we adapt green solutions in cities with great social inequality and poverty would the Malmo experience with refugees be a good example to be replicated in poorer cities and countries and then they added I usually see that solutions are thought from cities that have a stronger economic capacity which makes it difficult to approach green theme in some cities yeah no it's absolutely right I think the Malmo experience it's definitely something that cities could try to replicate in terms of its orientation of how it works with the community it's driven from the city but you have to look at differences so for example in Swedish cities and many northern European cities the cities are the major landowners so they have a lot of leverage with developers on what they want and how to how to build it that you know that doesn't exist in a lot of other places so you can take the ideas the participatory planning the building the community in a way that integrates it with the rest of the city but the leverage and the financing you know is different in every place um again this green zone movement I think we're at the very beginning of this to see how far both private investment and city commitment is going to go to prioritize cleaning up frontline communities first and of course the poorer the city the harder the harder it is and so that's why there has to be some level of national financing you know going into this in terms of urban redevelopment and hopefully we don't bungle it as badly as we did in previous rounds another student had had a question about the the green zones you were just mentioning they said one concert about both eco districts and green justice zones might be the bound in nature of these concepts for instance what about the areas just outside of these bounded zones are they excluded from participation and publicity and some of those associated benefits what alternative approaches might exist and perhaps the hamburger approach does do that um the hamburger approach is really creating a very you know there's social housing in there but it's it's a very you know well to do it's more along the hammer v show start lines of that um yeah how do you draw the line at in some communities like the west oakland surrounded by highway so that kind of creates the barrier but that's always the case when you when you focus on space place someone's getting excluded right and someone very much in need so I think there has to be a prioritization process and there has to be a participatory process on how to prioritize who's getting investment but the other side of that question is it's a people versus place investment so um in in of course I teach 21st century city we read Richard Rothstein's the color of law that looks at deliberate government policy to create segregation in housing and um of course what that meant is that blacks who were who were not allowed in neighborhoods didn't have the housing appreciation so they didn't have the wealth accumulation so what's the remedy to that? Rothstein would argue the remedy is to maybe government buy back some of that housing and sell it at much reduced rates to blacks who were excluded or you know who knows what the criteria are for that so that's very much an individual solution trying to deal with individuals and the idea to kind of integrate people into neighborhoods as opposed to a place-based solution where you're focusing those efforts and so I think the way to to prevent those kind of resentments is is to have you know a sequencing of what are the priority zones and um so that people can see that all areas will eventually be part of it but going with the greatest need first and that's what that's what Providence has done it's it's identified three green justice zones and it's in its climate action plan and it may create resentments we're we're about to see this play out thank you so I'm not seeing any more questions in the chat box so I think we'll unless anyone would like to have the the last word here I think we'll wrap things up but I wanted to thank you Dr. Fitzgeralds for taking the time to present today we really appreciate it and uh definitely wish you the best of luck with uh your recently published book great thank you it's a pleasure to be here okay thank you uh-huh bye-bye


The implementation of biorefineries based on lignocellulosic materials as an alternative to fossil-based refineries requires efficient methods for fractionation and recovery of the products. Traditional pretreatment methods such as steam explosion, organosolve, and hydrothermal treatment have been used to improve the efficiency of enzymatic hydrolysis and downstream processes. However, the large variety of lignocellulosic materials makes it difficult to find a general process design for a biorefinery. Therefore, the selection of a suitable pretreatment method should be based on a thorough techno-economic evaluation. This article was authored by Matt Galby and Ola Wolberg.


A few months ago, when all of this controversy was first starting, Sia tweeted, excuse my French ear, fuckity fuck, why don't you watch my film before you judge it? Sia, I've watched it and I've judged it and these decisions are so poor and damaging. Hello there, my beautiful, lovely, delightful and intelligent internet friends. Welcome back to my channel. Thank you so much for joining me here today. I wanna jump right into the topic that we have at hand today as it is one that I believe deserves our full attention. So last week I released this video in which I talked about a lot of the controversy surrounding the upcoming release of a film called Music by Sia. Now in that video I go into a lot of the depth about the controversy. I would encourage you to watch that video first if you haven't seen it before now but the long and short of it is is that Sia did a absolutely horrendous job of portraying an autistic character by not casting someone who was autistic, by not listening to the autistic community by continuing to make very poor choices and also be cruel and harsh and ignorant in her responses when criticism was raised. This has been going on for months. Again, check out the video for the full details but one of the most concerning issues about this film is that there were restraint scenes depicted. It came out that there was more than one scene that showed restraint being used to help this autistic character music during a meltdown and it was pointed out by a lot of people that the way that they were restrained and using restraint at all in that context is not only dangerous but deadly. It has killed a lot of people and a lot of autistic people and there was a lot of concern that this was being shown in the movie. Understandably so. So last week, right after this film was nominated for two Golden Globe Awards, Sia announced that she'd be putting a warning, this warning, at the beginning of the film and also that the restraint scenes would be removed. That is what I talked about in the last video and the movie came out a couple days ago and I watched it for one reason in particular. This is not a movie I wanted to view but as a person who has the honor of having a voice to a number of people here on the internet, I did want to be accurate in what I was saying. I wanted to verify what she said was gonna happen. I wanted to see for myself and what I saw was honestly horrifying. There was no warning. Right here, I'm going to play the opening, you know, minute or so of the video. There is absolutely no warning. I watched this through renting it on YouTube yesterday. There is nothing there. The film just starts. I want to go ahead and give a warning that I am going to be showing brief clips of the restraint scenes in the next couple minutes of my video. I'm gonna put a timestamp right here when those end if you do not want to view those. But I thought it was important to include as documentation that they are still very much in the film and are extraordinarily harmful. Now, the restraint scenes themselves, where those were moved, maybe there was a third and a fourth restraint scene but I can tell you that there are two that are definitely, definitely still in there and are pretty graphic. And from my understanding, to those who have been restrained like that, especially autistic people, this is very traumatizing to watch, restraint scenes are still in the film and more than that, they are promoted as a positive thing. This is so confusing and heartbreaking to me because Sia claimed that she had autistic people consulting on the set. You know, two people were with her at all times consulting on all of her actions and if she had done any actual research or listened to anything anyone had said, this never would have been a part of the script. But one of the most upsetting things is that this is in courage. Like there's a scene where music who is the character is in a park and then she gets really, really overwhelmed, overstimulated because there are kids and loud noises and all of this and she starts having a meltdown and the character that Leslie Odom Jr. plays tells the character that Kate Hudson plays that it's her turn to like step in and take care of her sister and what that means is getting on top of her. This is like actively promoted as the right way to handle this situation. So simply put, Sia lied. This movie was released with no warning and with restraint scenes still in place. The opening musical scene uses movements that are commonly used by autistic people in stimming as like part of the beginning of a dance number but it's done so poorly. It honestly, like there's no way that this can come across as anything but mocking. Simply put, this movie does a horrendous job of representing autism. It's not accessible. It's very poorly done in so many ways. And if an autistic person has had experiences being restrained, it might also be very traumatizing to watch. So with that being said, I was really curious what could be done to make this situation better. So I reached out to a few of my autistic acquaintances and friends online creators and asked them a few questions. The first question I wanted to know is what would they like people to know about autism? Because this movie clearly does a poor, that's an understatement, a very poor job of showing their experiences. So what do they wish the world knew about autism? Something I wish people knew about autism is that it is what people call a spectrum but it's not a linear spectrum. It's a spectrum in the way that people are a spectrum. We have different abilities and disabilities. We have different strengths and weaknesses, just like you.  Autism, yes, it does cause communication changes. Yes, it can cause a disability in somebody. It can inhibit how we communicate. It can change how we communicate. It can change how we see the world. But that doesn't make us any less than you. And it doesn't mean that we don't want the same things that you want. We want connection. We wanna be able to communicate. We wanna be able to express. And I think that's really important to understand about autism and autistic people. First and very, very important is that autistic people are very diverse. The thing that connects us is our brain connections are more diffuse and they have some good things. Like they make us often more intelligent or they make us have synesthesia. For example, I connect numbers with personalities and have then emotions about that. There are so many positive things and we can be creative in such a different way. Feeling the world different and feeling it's so much more intense but everybody else isn't feeling it like that. It feels like I originally belonged to a different planet and I was thrown in here and now I'm trying to figure everyone out and trying to live here. And I enjoy it and I met so many amazing people like you. But sometimes I feel like I kind of wanna visit my original planet. The biggest thing that I want people to know about autism is who we are is exactly who we're supposed to be. The idea of autism that so many people see when you look at Rayman, when you look at Sheldon Cooper, when you look at Sean Murphy, that's not us. There are so many different types of autistic people. There are as many different types of autistic people as there are neurotypical people and just because of who we are it doesn't mean that we are the stereotype, this stigma that you think of us. The next thing that I was curious about is what can be done to make this situation better? I'm a big believer in calling something out when it's wrong and also providing solutions and how we can move forward. So this is about Stephanie, Sophie and Chloe had to say about that. I think this would have actually been helped if Sia had followed through with what she said. Being able to take those scenes out saying we don't condone this, go to an autistic occupational therapist or an occupational therapist in general, someone who's informed about autistic people and what actually helps autistic people when we're in a meltdown or we're in a time or place of crisis would have been really helpful. I think that would have really redeemed a lot of the situation for me personally. To me, the real harm of the movie would have been mitigated by her doing what she said she was going to do. And for me in the US to see on a streaming service which I assume is probably the easiest thing to change out of all of them, I imagine it's probably harder to communicate with theaters and stuff. I don't know, I'm not well educated in that area. But to see that she did not follow through on that really frustrated me. That really would have been what helped. A resource that I think will be helpful for those who have watched the movie, watched the trailer, kind of know what the situation is. Maybe have heard that there's an issue but don't really know kind of what the big issue is. There is a resource done by a group called NeuroClastic. It's a group of autistic people and they made a guide to go along with the movie. It helps explain what the issue around Sia is and the movie music as well as explain maybe some of the things that were portrayed with music. Maybe about meltdowns, maybe why there's an issue that we have with restraints. Instead of relying on a movie that is very fantastical that tries to display things on a deeper level and really missing the mark. Because I think what Sia could have done with this movie is really apparent in what she set up. There were moments if she wanted to talk about restraint and meltdowns and situations like that, had she had the correct input, those scenes could have been very powerful to say this is what people do but this is not helpful. This is actually really dangerous. Don't do that. This could have been a really great opportunity to reach maybe a more general audience who is interested in Sia's music so they wanted to see the movie music. It was a great opportunity to maybe take those scenes and really see them from the autistic perspective but unfortunately she missed that mark and that can really cause serious harm. So really just spreading information would be the best. Sia coming together with the autistic community would be amazing and apologizing for the mistakes she made and taking out like the scene, definitely taking out the scene. Sia is so big, she could just give autistics a different way of being able to reach her community. I think she could collab in a different way with autistic people like there are autistic singers out there. A lot and they are amazing and I think working together with them and working together with others and like a series or creating an album, there are a ton of ways in my opinion that you try to make up for what you've done and try to prevent most of the damage. To prevent this sort of thing from happening again we need to promote and lift up autistic creatives, autistic directors, autistic actors, autistic journalists. We need to uplist autistic creatives so that when movies like this get cast, when movies like this start to happen, we have a team of disabled people behind it rather than neurotypical people which will never understand our journey. We have the ability to create movies for disabled people by disabled people without neurotypical and able-bodied stigmas and stereotypes surrounding it. We have that ability and as soon as the rest of the world sees that we have the ability to create the most amazing content. By the way, all of their channels are linked down below and I would highly recommend that you check them out. Seeing this whole situation unfold is so disheartening to me and to those who are directly affected by this, I am so sorry for the incredibly poor handling, the poor choices, the awful communication and the fact that this movie has still been nominated for awards which is really just like a slap in the face to everybody who has been saying this is not okay. It's yet another film that trivializes and tokenizes and infantilizes and does a miserable job of representing any kind of disability or difference and then gets applauded by everyone not dealing with that because look at them doing a good thing and telling this story. It's really not a good thing and I would highly recommend not watching the film, not supporting this in any way. I think it's so important to look at and consider some of those solutions. Nothing can be done that's gonna fix this situation that's gonna wipe out like what has already happened but there are a few things that can be done to prevent this from happening again in the future. I've also linked some additional articles and resources when it comes to the situation in the description down below. A huge thank you to Stephanie, Sophie and Chloe. Again, they are all creators. They're all on YouTube. They're all Instagram. I've linked all of their socials down below and highly recommend you check them out. I so appreciate each of you being willing to be a part of this project with me. Thank you. And to you watching this video right now, thank you so much for taking a few minutes to learn a little bit more about what's happening and to educate yourself a little further or hear the story. I appreciate it. And enormous thank you also to all my patrons over on Patreon for making this video possible. And to you watching this video right now, thank you so much for spending a few minutes out of your day. Here with me today, you could be anywhere else in the world doing anything else and you chose to hang out with me for a few minutes. And I really appreciate that. I love you guys. I'm thinking about you and I'll see you on the next video. Bye guys.


I am here with Jean-Yves Donca to talk about a really innovative new product coming from ST which has a huge number of very diverse applications. So Jean-Yves, tell me more. Yes, indeed we are extremely excited about the XT60 because this product is allowing us to discuss with value cement of customers in very different fields. Typically we have already engaged design with customers doing large lead panels, doing waving machine, doing electrical cabinet, doing medical equipment, and even doing mobile phone. And indeed it can be used by any customer using Ethernet protocol which is the most widely used protocol for high speed communication. So what are we talking about technically? Okay, so let's go into the detail. The ST60 is a transceiver allowing us to transmit up to 6 gigabits of data per second over a few centimeters and using the 60 GHz RF band. And the use of the 60 GHz RF band is bringing out a lot of advantage. First of all, this is a free band allowing high bandwidth transmission. Then, 60 GHz is absorbed by oxygen. This means very suitable for short distance communication. And then it is crossing plastic and mostly all non-metallic material. Based on that, we develop an Ethernet connector with our partner EPS. And you can wrap all of that up in showing me the demo because I can see plastic and connections go and explain it to me. Yes, so basically we have two PC connected through an Ethernet cable. In the middle of this Ethernet cable, we have a pair of modules using the ST60. And then I will copy a large amount of files from this PC to the other one. Okay, so let's engage a copy. We can see that the copy is operating at basically 1 gigabit per second. If I separate the two modules, then the transfer is interrupted. I put them back again and the transfer is worth setting. Okay, at full speed immediately. And what about using ST60 and designing the product then? There is two ways of using the ST60 for customers depending on their RF knowledge and the volumes that they are needing to do. First solution is to use an already made module, typically the one made by your partner EPS. Okay, where you can have two versions, the one with propagation in the plan of PCB and the one with propagation perpendicular of the PCB. And the other option is to use directly ST reference design. Okay, where we can have multiple kinds of antenna, typically antenna with propagation in the plan of the PCB, antenna propagation perpendicular to the PCB or even rotating antenna allowing 360 degree rotation. We have as well an antenna inside a package in order to fulfill the application where the footprint area is very critical. Where can I find that more? On ST.com slash ST60. Jean-Yves, thank you.


Hello, welcome to Microsoft Build 2017, and welcome to the session on OSS-based DevOps. In part one, I will talk about CI CD with Jenkins and Netflix Technologies. In part two, my colleague Eugene will talk about provisioning using Terraform. So let's get started. When developers try to do DevOps with Azure, they typically come to a fork in the road. Visual Studio Team Services provides a fully managed service with excellent integrations into Azure. However, Cloud-native and Enterprise Java developers also want third-party tools they know and love to work with Azure. In this talk, I'll go through some of the OSS tools you see here on the right, and show you how to integrate them with Azure. Let's start with Jenkins. Jenkins is a very popular DevOps tool for continuous integration or CI. So what is CI? It is the DevOps practice of merging all developer working copies to a shared mainline or trunk ideally several times a day. This is achieved by building and testing developers changes on-commit via automation. One of the problems with CI is that as the codebase and the automation increases, the CI gets slower and it becomes a bottleneck. To address this, we released the Azure VM agents plugin with Jenkins. This plugin lets Jenkins rapidly spin up large numbers of Azure VMs in parallel, thus making CI faster and also cheaper, as these VMs are quickly torn down when not needed. Unlike on-premise machines, so you only pay for what you use. So let me show you how this works. To start with, all you need to do is get to this ak.ms-urai and click Deploy to Azure. This will bring you to the screen, which will help you to spin up a Jenkins instance on Azure using an SSH key. So all you need here is a name for your resource group, a username, and a SSH public key for which you have a secret key, and then the Jenkins DNS prefix, and you're good to go. Once you've done this and you've configured your Jenkins instance, you will now get to a screen for configuring your system that looks like this. At this point, you don't need to install any additional plugins because we have installed all the plugins you need for you. The most important one that I'm talking about right now is the one that you need to do your CI. This is the Microsoft Azure VM agents plugin. This relies on the Azure credentials plugin, so that where you can basically plonk in your service principle and service principle secret, that will let Jenkins master know how to access Azure resources so that it can go and provision VMs as it needs. The other thing you need to do is to define what is the template of your VM agent look like, so that every time Jenkins wants to instantiate a VM, you need to tell it what are the different criteria for it to instantiate it. So for example, it'll have things such as size, but also you can define either an image reference to something from the marketplace or create your own custom user image from a baked VHD, say using something like Packer. That's it. So once you save this, any developer using your Jenkins master within any job, all he needs to do is to say, restrict where this project can be run, check this box, and use the label expression for the template that he needs, and every time he runs this job, Jenkins will decide to spin up or tear down Azure VMs depending on the load that it needs. So this automatically scales up and down, and think of it as a domain-specific, CI-specific autoscaler. So this is so trivial and easy to configure that we use it a lot ourselves. For example, we use this heavily for all of the builds and CI that you see for.NET Core. As you can see here, in the recent past, we have been spinning up something like 240 plus virtual machines, and with this level of parallelization and scale, we are able to bring, we have brought down our CI times from something like two hours initially to less than 15 minutes now. So this is compelling that this is also used by Jenkins itself. So the Jenkins OSS project is built on Azure so every time you check in something into Jenkins, it spins up a CI on Azure which use the exact same plugin. So if you do not want to use our QuickStart template with the master installed on Azure, you also have the choice of using the Azure VM agents plugin from your own on-premise master. So if you have a Jenkins server, all you need to do is look for this Azure VM agents and follow the instructions in this page and you're good to go. What if you wanted to use the Jenkins instance on Azure but you want to tune it yourself? So there are two options here. One is you can secure the Jenkins instance on Azure using the guidance in this blog post that you can get to from this link, or you can just fork our QuickStart template because it's fully open source and tune it to your specific needs. So let me get back to the slides. So now that you have seen how to do continuous integration, let's move on to the next important practice in the typical DevOps lifecycle, which is a notion of continuous deployment or CD. So what is CD? CD is nothing but the continuation of CI. So it is not for everyone or every project, but if implemented right, it can drastically improve business agility. CD relies heavily on automation of all steps and tasks in a release pipeline. The initial effort of setting up this automation can seem overwhelming, but it'll save a lot of headaches and effort going forward. Some of this automation, the initial effort can be mitigated by the notion of immutable pipelines. This is the concept where production infrastructure is treated as cattle which can all be treated equally rather than pets that need to be individually cared for via patching and upgrading. The company that pioneered the concept of immutable infrastructure even before Docker popularized it with containers is Netflix. They use an immutable pipeline tool called Spinnaker to enforce this best practice. In order to achieve immutable pipelines, we have built out a tool chain based on OSS tools combined with auto-scaling Azure services. So everything I will show you is completely free software except for the basic cost of Azure compute to run them. If you have an application that you haven't containerized, you can deploy to auto-scaling sets of virtual machines using Azure virtual machine scale sets. We worked with HashiCorp to extend Packer, which is an OSS tool to bake both Windows and Linux Azure VHDs efficiently. However, if you do have a containerized app, we can bake the image using a Docker plugin in Jenkins, and deploy it to the Azure Container Service Kubernetes. So in this demo, I'll show you this tool chain, the latter tool chain, which will help you to continuously deploy to Kubernetes. So switching back to demo. Before I go into the details, the one thing you need to notice here is that we have a blue screen with a Hello Kubernetes. I'm going to go ahead and kick start a change to this screen. Say, instead of blue, I'm going to say I want green, and I want to say hello build on 17. Let me go ahead and commit this. As that's going on, let's talk about how to spin up an environment that will help you do the tool chain that I showed you. Again, it's pretty straightforward. All you need to do is go to this link, which gives you a quick start template, where you would click deploy to Azure, and then you would go ahead and notice the there are the same kind of parameters you saw earlier, except you can also specify the service principle and the secret right here, and you can also specify the git repository from which you're triggering the continuous deployment, and the name of the image in the Docker repository. Step two is basically to have a Docker build. As you can see that that build already kicked off, which uses a GitHub plugin to listen to that the commit, builds the Docker image and pushes that Docker image to the Azure Container Registry.  Next, we go on to the Spinnaker instance, which I'll spun up for you, which is listening to the changes to that registry. Basically, the pipeline here is listening to changes to the Docker registry of the specific image that we talked about. We have now integrated the CI system and the big system with the CD system. Next, once the pipeline is aware that something has been triggered, it starts running. Here you see the pipeline that is triggered from the Docker registry that we just talked about, and it's initially going to be deploying to a Dev cluster, and then it'll halt at the manual judgment just because this is a demo. One of the things that you can see here is once it's successful, we can basically do a find image from the same Dev cluster and then deploy it to Prod. So the advantage of that is that you don't have to go back to the registry in order to read the changes. That's one of the big benefits of the immutable concept, is that you can have any number of applications go through the exact same flow. As you can see, there's nothing specific to any application here. This is more like a pipeline that you can configure and reuse as a template. So as you can see, this has currently stopped at the manual judgment, but it's asking me to verify whether the Dev server group looks good. I'm already running a proxy system here for my cube control and I will navigate to this URL to test that things have changed. So everything worked well. I should see the Dev cluster has been deployed with the new container and I should see this turn green. Yes, so that worked. So all that this is showing you is the ability for you to control a simple continuous deployment to Kubernetes. However, Spinnaker is not just about that.  It also lets you resize dynamically and scale up and scale down as you want, and also we have attached auto scalers to it based on CPU and memory, as well as things like disable and destroy. These are really important because Spinnaker is also the platform on which something like Chaos Monkey is built. So Chaos Monkey 2.0 basically relies on this cluster view in order for you to do things like fault injection. So let me go back to the deck. So in this demo, I've shown you how trivial it is to create a tool chain that lets you, with a single click and a few parameters, instantly deploy a tool chain using GitHub, Jenkins, Docker, and Spinnaker, along with Azure Container Registry and Azure Container Service. You can choose to run the Jenkins jobs in VM agents, or also use containerized agents with the Kubernetes plugin targeting the same ACS Kubernetes cluster that we created. So all the links that I showed in the demos are provided in this slide along with links to deep dive videos around each step. So I encourage you to go and try these. Please do let us know if you have any questions as you use these tools. We take customer feedback very seriously, and we'll try to help you out as best we can. Please don't forget to view part two of this talk. That's all about Infra as code and provisioning Azure resources using Terraform. Goodbye, and thanks.


It's time to work again, and it's my great pleasure to introduce Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdul Hamad bin Yassim Altani. Sorry for my Arabic pronunciation, but I hope that you recognize your name anyway. Who is the Foreign Minister of Qatar? Many of you attended Qatar meeting the ninth edition of the World Policy Conference last year. And thank you again, Excellency, for your hospitality last year. And of course, when we met a year ago, nobody would have expected that such a deep crisis would explode again, even if we knew that the relations between Qatar and Saudi Arabia and the Emirates were not always simple. So we are now in an extremely complex situation, and we are going to listen to the Foreign Minister of Qatar, who will give us his perception of the current situation and how we could hope to get out of this mess, which has, of course, huge implications for Qatar, but for the Middle East in general. So, Minister, it's a great pleasure again to have you, and I have the pleasure to give you the floor now. The Minister will speak about 10 minutes, and after that we will take a few questions to have at least a little beginning of a real dialogue. First of all, good afternoon everybody, and thank you very much, Terry, for hosting me here today, and to such a distinguished audience from policymakers, to intellectuals, from business community. I hope that this session will be useful and informative for you, so I will make myself very brief in my remarks and give more time for the Q&A in order to address any of the questions or anything to be clarified from my side. And I would like also to thank the government of Morocco for making this gathering happen and hosting all this number of people, which we had the honour to host last year in Doha. World Policy Conference has become one of the most important events in the world of policy and international affairs. I just wanted to start today with one very simple question here, why the Middle East is an important region. For ages, the Middle East was the source of civilisations, was the root of languages, and the origin of different faiths. It was the international trade hub where it was connecting east to west, and the west to east, where the people can connect and can engage. And the keyword for this was the coexistence and the engagement of people from different backgrounds, from different ethnicities. Now the situation is turned and reverted. Unfortunately, we don't want this to revert to the dark ages. Where we have, where we before used to be the source of enlightenment, we don't want to become the source of turbulence for the world. I believe most of the international challenges now are happening in that region, in the Middle East, where you have a different ongoing conflicts from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Yemen, a humanitarian catastrophe there, Libya, a turbulent situation where it's spilling over everywhere in Europe and in Africa and the sub-Saharan area, the issue which is still ongoing in Iraq, and unfortunately the most horrifying situation in the recent history is what's happening now in Syria, where it's a continuous seven years of conflicts. And this conflict which was just started with a decent demand from the normal people asking for justice, asking for their rights, asking for some reforms, and unfortunately they were confronted with military action and bombardment, and now the situation has changed from the people's situation and the crisis of people to a crisis of terrorism, a crisis of extremism. In all, if we are going to look at all those conflicts, we will find there are different narratives. And normally they are using their religion as a scapegoat for those narratives, but if we are going to look at all of them, we will find one common theme here. And the common theme is that those who want power, who seek power, always create crisis. When we are looking at one example of Syria, as I've just mentioned here, we see that the government want to preserve power. That's why they are creating the crisis of people where more than 500,000 people being killed, more than 12 million being displaced. And all this is just for the sake of power, for the sake of power. The extremism are just nurturing there because of to achieve an influence there. They are not having the religion as the vision to achieve a religious state. Their vision is a political vision. They are using their religion here as a scapegoat for them to achieve this political vision. So it is all about game of power, game of influence here. Now, the same theme which is applied everywhere. We see that the most stable and the most promising region in the Middle East was the Gulf countries, where it has been the center of stability. It was the role model and the example for the cooperation in the collective security to achieve one common objective to maintain the security of the region and to have more prosperous future and more economic, better economic integration for the future of the people. This is, I'm sure everybody will recognize that I'm talking about the Gulf region, which was just like this before few months ago. When a crisis started out of nothing without any basis, we have seen suddenly that the Gulf countries, the GCC as an organization and specifically Qatar has becoming to the front page of every and each media outlet talking about the Middle East. A crisis which is happening in one of the most stable regions, which is happening in a region which is considered the source of energy in the world when it comes to oil, to LNG, to economic prosperity. A region which is really situated in very complicated neighborhood, it's just turning to another crisis within the same region. What are the motives of those crises? I'm going to ask anyone here, everybody's going to talk about different motives. Even me, who's the foreign minister of Qatar, whom I should know very well what is the reason of this crisis. I cannot give you a clear answer because I cannot judge and I cannot assess on behalf of others. I cannot stay guessing on behalf of countries which they are not willing to talk to me yet. This crisis, it's all started with a cyber attack. No one can imagine the effect and the spillover of the cyber crimes which is now becoming a phenomenon everywhere in Europe, in the United States, in Asia and now in the GCC. There is something wrong, ongoing, with all those conflicts. Why the international system couldn't solve and couldn't prevent any of those crises from happening? Aren't we in the age of preventive diplomacy? Aren't we in the age of engagement and dialogue? Or we are just reverting back to the age of confrontation, to the age of different war? Qatar has been always calling for dialogue for different conflicts. Qatar has been always acted as a platform for peace, as a peace broker. Qatar has brokered more than 10 peace deals in this region because we believe in dialogue. We believe that engagement is the best way forward to provide a solution for any crisis. Although the crisis has been created for those who seek power, but we believe that dialogue is the best way forward. There is another failure in the international system we found that cannot address the needs of the civilians and the protection of the civilians from becoming part of any political conflict. When we see that the civilians cannot be protected in different conflict zones, in Syria, in Yemen, in Libya, and now in Qatar. Although it's not the same difficulties our people facing, the same difficulties which are faced by the Syrians or the Yemeni or the Libyans or the Iraqi, but they are facing some difficulties when their families are being teared up because of a political conflict. When we have more than 26,000 human rights violations, it is a serious thing to provide a protection. It is our role and our obligation as a government to provide a protection for our own people. So why there is nothing and there is no mechanism in the international order in the 21st century to prevent this from happening? Why there is no any enforcement mechanism to protect our people, the Qatari people, the Syrian people, the people of the world, to protect the humanity from such escalation? So I believe this is a very important global challenge which I hope that such a gathering here for different politicians and different intellectuals come up with some recommendations for the international community to come together and really to face and confront the law of force to the force of law. To empower the law enforcement mechanisms, to empower the system itself in order to prevent and to protect our people. I don't want to take much time explaining about our situation, but we believe that our situation is just similar to the other situations. Yes, it's not on the same level and we hope to never reach this level of tension and we hope that it will be recovered and solved very soon. Not because we see that there are a lot of challenges within, but the challenges is really facing the entire region. And we believe that this region cannot afford more crisis. So if we are talking about a region which is not affording an additional crisis, we are talking about a needless crisis without any foundation. And we hope that the wisdom one day will prevail and the countries whom are trying to avoid the engagement, avoid talking, avoid addressing any of the security concerns which is our security concern if it's the same claim they are claiming. And come to the table and solve the issue. We have to learn from history. We cannot learn by experience. The entire world witnessed the same conflicts, the same crisis everywhere and took years and years. And at the end, none of them has been solved in a battlefield, none of them has been solved in a confrontation, all of them being solved around the table. And we hope that all the crises in the Middle East will be solved around the table. Thank you. Well, thank you very much, Excellency. I think you raised a number of questions which are very important and I think much in the spirit of this World Policy Conference namely to promote dialogue, negotiations, diplomacy, et cetera, et cetera. So these are very important points and now I invite those who would like to intervene to do so and I will start with our friend Jim Hoglund from the Washington Post. And then Renaud Girard, whom I say from Le Figaro. Mr. Minister, you've very eloquently outlined the impasse that's developed, the stalemate between you and Saudi Arabia on one side. The United States has very strong military relationship with Qatar but has taken a position of neutrality in this conflict. At what point will that begin to affect, that American position, begin to affect the military relationship between Qatar and the United States? Well, Qatar and the United States has enjoyed and still enjoying very good and strong relationship when it comes especially to the military relationship but also in other areas in economy and investment education. The strong military relationship between Qatar and the United States has been affected not in term of the strength of this relationship but really the global efforts to fight terrorism has been affected by this crisis. When we are hosting around 11,000 US troops in Qatar and we have the center of command for the global coalition and this country is under a blockade, of course it's affected when we have our soldiers fighting from the bases of some of the blockading countries There is a direct impact on the global efforts encountering terrorism, encountering Daesh, namely here. There is an impact even on our joint training when everybody has noticed that the defense department has suspended any joint training between the Gulf countries until this crisis resolved. There is a series of things which represented a great impact on the security relationship not on Qatar-US only but it's on US-GCC relationship and on US policy toward the Middle East and toward countering terrorism. Regarding the neutrality of the US position, US has been very consistent from the beginning and very clear in their position. They want this crisis to be resolved. Yes, we were the country, we are the country which is subject to this aggression from those four countries and we expected more of allies and more of friends to stand with us and to show that they are rejecting the violations of the international law that they are rejecting the humanitarian impact from this crisis. US has been one of the frontier in this and they have rejected the blockade. They have rejected that this crisis continue and they are trying to call for dialogue. But when you have any conflict or any crisis, there are always two parties of the crisis. If one of the parties are still unwilling to engage and to talk, you cannot put an end for this. Even if he will come by force to the dialogue table, he will never come with a good faith or with the intention to solve the problem. Qatar will remain in its position, have the best way forward for us is the dialogue and whenever they decide that they want to solve this crisis, Qatar will be there on the table, waiting for them with our friends and our allies with us in the United States or in the other friendly countries. Renaud Girard. The Turkish government has sent military troops to secure your country. What is the strength of this military alliance with Turkey? How do you see the future of the relationship between Turkey and Qatar? And second question, there is a much closer country to you, which is Iran, I mean closer geographically of course, and they helped you also with food and humanitarian aid. How do you assess your future relations with Iran and how do you assess the stability of the Gulf in the future with Iran on one side and Sunni monarchies on the other side of the Gulf? Thank you, sir. First, just regarding your question about the Turkish forces, first of all, Qatar and Turkey have very strong and strategic relationship. In the same way, in defense and in the economy, we have very strong investment ties and bilateral trade ties as well. And Turkey is an important regional country. It's an important country in the region. It is an NATO member, which we have a relation with other member states as well. We have the largest presence of troops, the US presence, and we have also a different defense cooperation agreement with other countries like France, the United Kingdom, and Turkey is one among them. Having them and having some of their troops in Doha, yes, it helps in the security of the country, but it's also in the context of a wider range of cooperation between our both countries, where we have also a representation from our military there in Angel League Base. We have our cooperation is governed by this agreement also within the global coalition countering Daesh coalition. So Turkey will remain an important regional player, yes, will remain a strong partner and strong ally for Qatar, but doesn't contradict with any of our partnerships or any of the other alliances we have. And once you surrender your sovereignty to give up on a military relation with Turkey, it will be just a starting point and then we might be asked in one day that we also kick the US troops outside Qatar or we end our defense cooperation with the France, or we do the same with UK or to do this and not to do that. This is something which is unacceptable for any sovereign nation to impose and to dictate something. As we say that if this was reflected on their demands because of some of the security concerns, first of all, they need to understand that the demands cannot be imposed on a sovereign state. If there is any conflict or any difference, there should be a dialogue and engagement and understanding and not a demand from a country toward another. So if they have any security concerns, we are willing to sit and to engage in a dialogue to address those concerns because their security concern will be our security concern. We are from the same region and there is a common threat we will be exposed to if they are going to be exposed to any threat. Regarding the future of our relationship with Iran, our relationship with Iran has been consistent since years. We didn't change our policy, although we have now different situations and different circumstances. When Qatar is blocked from three sides and I have just one way toward the north to fly or to send my shipments, which needs from me to intensify my communication with them. But at the end, the differences in policies between Qatar and Iran will remain there because the policy is normally based on principles, based on assessments. So those differences, how should we overcome? Is it by confrontation? It will not work and it will never work. And this is what we have been calling for since 2015. The irony here that in 2015, when the JCPOA be inside, President Obama has called all the member states in the GCC to Camp David to discuss and to address their security concern with Iran and he was encouraging the Gulf State to engage in dialogue with Iran. And when President Rouhani has expressed his willingness for dialogue to the Emir of Kuwait, all of the Gulf leaders agreed to engage in dialogue which is based on principles. And this agreement remained until the end of 2016. Now, when the same countries being invited by the President of the United States to engage in a dialogue about Qatar, no one has responded to this positively or no one has expressed his willingness to engage in such a dialogue. Just in summary, our relation with Iran will remain the same. The differences will be there until we overcome these differences by addressing those security concerns we have together. But we cannot afford a further escalation between, not between Qatar and Iran only, but between any country in the region and Iran. We believe in dialogue, we believe in engagement. Iran is a neighboring country for us. We share borders, we share a gas field together. We have more things between us. We need to address by dialogue and we cannot address by just escalating against each other or avoiding talking to each other. Because if we are going to remain avoiding talking to each other, the problem will remain there and it will never reach an end. And sometimes it might reach to a level which will create another crisis which the region cannot afford. I can take one last question. No, no, yes. No, no, no, one, sorry. Patriarch? No. Who? So you have the choice. Okay, so between Germany and Israel, I choose Israel. Okay, Ambassador Abinovich. Mr. Minister, Qatar has been a supporter of Hamas in the Gaza Strip. More recently, Hamas has grown close to Egypt and the reconciliation between Hamas and the Palestinian authorities is considered by many to have been inspired to a great extent by Egypt. Does that mean a distancing between yourselves and Hamas? Well, first, just let me make it very clear here. Qatar never supports Hamas. Qatar always supports the people of Gaza and supports the reconstruction effort of Gaza Strip. Hamas is a party which has positioned there in Gaza, yes, but the support has been always very transparent and visible for everyone including your government. They know very well where the money goes and they know the contribution of this support to the peace and stability of the Strip of Gaza, which prevents the Strip of Gaza from any potential war. And here we have used the principle in our policy in supporting the people and supporting the reconstruction and the resilience of the community as a mean of peace, as a mean of stability. And we have witnessed this stability now since the 2014. Hamas' relation with Qatar is a political representation where they have their office there, which has been very useful for everyone. When they were in Qatar, Qatar was a facilitator for different engagements whether to end the two wars in Gaza in 2008, 2009 and 2014, has been a facilitator for the reconciliation, the national reconciliation, which is the first step for any peace deal between the Palestinian and the Israeli. Now, with Hamas' relation with Egypt and Egypt's contribution in the reconciliation, Qatar was the first country welcomed this reconciliation between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority because we believe in the unity of the Palestinian as a precondition for any peace deal. Whoever is brokering this deal, Qatar will be helpful and will be welcoming. Qatar has taken now the funding of the reconstruction of the government facility there in Gaza because we believe in the unity of the Palestinian because not because Hamas today is in Egypt. I think the question needs to be asked for the countries who are using this narrative in the United States or with the Western audience that it is the reason for them to blockade my country. Their reason and their claims now that Qatar is supporting Hamas why they never disconnected themselves with Hamas or they never considered Hamas as a terrorist organization. Just now they start to talk about it and suddenly we find Hamas in Egypt being praised by the Egyptian government and by the other government. So Qatar's position has been very clear and has been very transparent and very visible to everyone. We will continue supporting the people there in Gaza because they are people who are in need and we believe that our support and our contribution in Gaza has contributed to the peace and the stability of the region and we will be the first to celebrate any national unity between the Palestinians themselves. Well, thank you very much Minister. I think it was a very interesting and useful conversation. So thank you very much again. And as we can guess now, they wish to eat a little bit. So do we allow them? No, no, no. But I think we should allow them to. And ourselves too. Thank you very much.