Thank you for having us. I'm Peter Dugas. I am the co-chair of the Portland chapter of Citizens Climate Lobby. Citizens Climate Lobby is a national international organization of almost 200,000 volunteers. We have over 195,000 volunteers and we are laser focused on creating the political will for a bipartisan climate solutions on a national scale. We are very active in Maine and there's, as I'll get into in a second, we're gonna have a lot of reasons to be both hopeful and to be working very hard to increase the political will for this solution. So I'm gonna start sharing my screen. There's two components of what I may be talking about, but what I really want to share this screen, if that's okay. We have a there's everyone has a personal story about climate change and as Mainers there's we have a lot to lose. My personal story talks about when my was first married, I kind of married into a family that had a generations-long tradition of shelling Maine shrimp on my mother-in-law's birthday, which was January 1, when it's middle of Maine shrimp season, or at least it was, and taking that shrimp and buying it at half the cost when you buy it wholesale with the shells and you shell it and put them in baggies in the freezer. My daughter was part of that tradition and we had three generations of Maine women doing this. It was like a Norman Rockwell Christmas card. But over time, of course, that was shut down because of the warming of Maine's ocean waters. And you think it causes you to think how many millennia those shrimp were in there in the Gulf of Maine, and we know Gulf of Maine is warming faster than almost any other body of water in the world. And, you know, the good news is you can still get Maine shrimp, but bad news is you have to go to Newfoundland, like really far north to get them and we can think about, it doesn't take too much imagination to understand what's going to happen to lobster and winter recreation and our temperate summers and blueberry harvests and all, you know, there's nothing quintessentially mean that's not vulnerable to climate change. I did climate change research as an undergraduate data entry stuff 25 years ago, and it's been on my mind ever since and only increased. So I'll quickly go through. We know that over the past 800,000 years of we've never had so much carbon dioxide in our atmosphere and there's more than a dozen robust lines of of evidence showing that our carbon emissions are creating a problem. And disrupting the balance between radiation coming from the sun and our ability to maintain a temperate climate, it's increasing the temperatures on the global scale. And a lot of that is coming from the emissions of CO2, which come from the industrial revolution. You can see here on a graph of coal, oil, land use, natural gas, that kind of stuff. So there's a lot of terrible things that'll happen. I'm going through this very quickly because I don't want to emphasize, you know, these are maps of projections of what's already happening to the Gulf Coast and what could happen in the near future as we lose more coastal cities and the infrastructure and the tremendous costs to to our, you know, the world's financial systems never mind humanitarian crises, like drought, wildfires, floods, and that sort of thing. So I'm actually going to switch over now to talk about an online tool that's developed by MIT called Enroads, which with all the talk about the climate crisis and so many competing ideas about how, what means would be best to address the problem and to effectively and equitably transfer the world's economy to a way that's not poisoning the atmosphere anymore. There's, we need a third-party tool, and that's what MIT developed. They're previous products, which are still available called CROADS, which was actually a version that was used for successful negotiations of the 2015 Paris Protocol negotiations, where scientists needed, from different world communities, basically could talk about where they needed to pledge to keep their greenhouse gas emissions in order to avoid disaster. And without that tool, apparently, according to people on the ground, those negotiations would not have been as successful as they were in creating at least an infrastructure framework for participation on a global scale. This new model, Enroads, is free to use. You just go to this website, n-roads, and you can check out, you know, there's a lot of background and material. You can take the same eight-week course I did, which is free, just as it is to use the program, to be qualified to hold, to do demonstrations of it. And basically, it's policy-driven. It's economics-driven. Very quickly, what's happening here is on the right, I'm looking at global temperature increases on the global scale, from where we were 20 years ago until now, so past 20 years from 0.67 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels, pre-industrial meaning, you know, 1800 before the internal combustion engine, to now, where we're at 1.1 degrees. And, you know, scientists are saying we have to stay below 1.5 to kind of keep certain ecosystems in balance, which means ocean reefs and keeping sea level rise to a certain degree. And then, as it looks like we're going to blow past that, they say two degrees is really, you know, we would still sacrifice a lot past 1.5, but two degrees is really a kind of existential crisis for humanity, where we're talking about feedback loops that we can no longer control. And then it's kind of a runaway system that our time to do something about it has passed. So this is the projections of where we're going in the next 80 years to the end of the century. And this is where our energy sources are coming from. So the energy sources each creating varying degrees of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, but we can see black as coal, the dirtiest of fuels, and most plentiful. Oil is red, natural gas is blue, renewables is green, bioenergy is pink, nuclear is light blue, and then net zero, which is kind of stays at zero, but it's basically a catch all category for in case we discover some kind of new energy in the next 80 years that changes everything, whether that be nuclear fusion, which is eluded scientists, or we discover vibranium or, you know, the flux capacitor or something like that from some kind of science fiction. And then all of these levers you can see here are a way of manipulating policy. So when I'm actually adjusting the renewables, I'm not talking about actually pushing, you know, creating new renewables and actually just incentivizing it. So for each of these categories, all of the different forms of energy, we also have how to rework our transportation systems on a global scale, not just cars, but also trains, planes, automobiles, all this stuff, energy efficiency and electrification of those, energy efficiency and electrification of our buildings, and then growth in population and economic growth as much as we can adjust for that, lands management through the rate at which we're cutting down the world's forests or land management that creates methane and other kinds of secondary greenhouse gases, sides carbon dioxide, and then carbon removal, either through natural means planting trees and forests or technological, which is like contraptions that might suck carbon out of the atmosphere. So here in Maine, we know that most of our most of our greenhouse gas emissions are coming from our tailpipes. So I could move here, each one of these, by the way, I can check out this three-dot system and see, do a more detailed approach and look into information. But I'm just going to go quickly through this and give you a cursory explanation of each of these and see what it's like. So we want to get below two degrees and if we on a global scale kind of incentivize people moving away from internal combustion it is in their car to electric vehicles, so Nissan Leafs, Priuses, whatever it might be, Teslas, we can grab this and just move this all the way over and we can see that good things do happen. We get renewables going up. We also see that the temperature got whittled down by a tenth of a degree, which is not anything we need. Well, it actually, sorry, it's plenty, but it's great, but it's not nearly enough, I should have said. But the explanation for that is if you look at the black line, you can move this all the way over and you can see that, yes, gas goes down, renewable goes up, but coal kind of goes up a little bit as well. And that's probably the reason, you know, it's counterintuitive around the United States because we are thinking about coal as diminishing and it supplies our power, but that's not the case worldwide. In fact, when Australia was on its record-breaking wildfires last year, their number one export was still coal, which is the dirtiest of fossil fuels. So when we only address the electrification of our vehicles, we're actually, and could be on a global scale, incentivizing the more coal pollution. We could also go to other ideas like renewables, highly incentivizing renewables, and if I just grab this and slide it over, you can see that renewables, yes, we're subsidized, we're getting people tax breaks or other kinds of economic mechanisms, and it's great that those are going up, does shave off a little bit of our projected temperature increases, but we're still far away from two and 1.5. And again, that's because an economic argument, this is a very sophisticated model that uses over 1600 different complementary equations, and if we're driving policy to create renewable incentives, you can use the thought experiment economically about, well, we are now going to make renewables that much cheaper. What's going to happen to coal? Well, people are going to move away from coal, which is going to make that product have a lot less demand, which is going to make the prices go down. So it has a rebound effect, and you can see it goes down for a bit and then kind of starts leveling off and then coming back up later on in the century. So even with incentivizing renewables, green energy, we still get a rebound effect because we're not doing enough to mitigate the amount of other carbon dioxide emissions. Republicans have been getting to talk about, they've been slow to talk about climate change, but the good news is that they're talking more and more about it. The audience may have heard some things about their offering ideas about planting a trillion trees, which is a great idea. You can model that. Again, I can show you a deep dive, but I'll just do the quick version and slide this all the way over, and as you might imagine, sources of energy doesn't change because we're not addressing that at all.  So there's two big takeaways from this model as far as I see it. One is there are no silver bullets. There's only silver buckshot. We need a combination of things. We're past the time where we could just address this with one or two different things. However, the folks at Citizens Climate Lobby are very encouraged by the findings that this shows, which is they have been for over a dozen years now, been asking whittling away at the political will of using normal democratic lobbying from volunteer lobbyists to ask the United States and other countries to bring about carbon pricing. The idea is a gradually increasing price on carbon. There's a number of different bills that are out there, that price carbon, and here's a little graph that shows you, you don't hear very much about these, but these seven different bills, some of them are democrat only, some of them are three of the four of them are bipartisan, and we're going to concentrate on this one here, which is the Representative Deutsch and Rooney bipartisan team talked about, which is putting a $15 price on carbon to start with, and that is applied at the point source of the refinery, the oil refinery, the fracking site, the coal mine, and that money equates, when it goes through the system, is about 12 cents on a gallon of gas. So we're already used to that kind of fluctuations or those kinds of price fluctuations. And we're going to say that let's be bullish and say that it gets implemented next year, and it goes up every year starting in the first year by 10 bucks a year. So over the course of the next 80 years, it's going to go up to 80 years times 10 bucks a year is 800 plus the initial 15, which is 815 bucks, and that's conservative. That's actually the lowest it could be. There's language in the bill that make it, we don't hit certain earmarks, it'll go up to $15 a year, a little bit steeper. But this is conservatively speaking, it goes up at this rate, a nice linear graph where it gets more and more expensive per ton of carbon emitted. And you can see that although it doesn't bring us down to two degrees, it does more than any other single policy. In fact, it does more than twice any other single policy. And at this point, we can look at the model and we can say, well, let's take a look at where at the greenhouse gases. Okay, so I'll go back and just show you what this is like. With business as usual, charcoal gray is the carbon dioxide, which we're most concerned about because it's the most plentiful greenhouse gas, biggest source of our problems. And this is it with a carbon price. You can see by the end of the century, carbon dioxide is no longer the greatest contributor with this carbon price, it's now methane. So I can then address methane by taking better care of the leaks in my pipelines and land use and that kind of thing. And then I can say, okay, now we're actually almost at that magic number of two degrees now. If I at that point talk about, well, let's slow down the rate at which we're cutting our forest down, maybe planting some trees as the Republican group has been talking about technological, we bioengineer some algae or something that will suck up carbon, or perhaps those contraptions and working on in Switzerland will work. So we can see that it is possible. And this is before we're actually getting to business and energy use. And we can we can actually get to that 1.5. So the two takeaways are there's no silver bullet. But the biggest factor is gradually increasing price on carbon. Now, there's a problem with that if we just put that price of carbon into the system, that's tremendously regressive, meaning economically speaking, it hurts the poor. So each one of these bills uses a different mechanism, but they each one of these bills requires that that money that's brought in is returned to each individual taxpayer. And there's a means for doing this, there's a lot of economic argument for which I'll get into, but these are all those bills and the rate at which we've been concentrating on this first column, because it has the most co sponsors, it has 85 co sponsors currently in the house. There briefly was a Senate companion bill, and we're hoping in the new Senate, there will be one as well. This bill is this one here, the second steepest increase in the price of carbon. Oh, second only to the Senate Coons, Senator Coons bill, which is a democratic only bill, we want something that's bipartisan so that it can be robust enough to withstand the changing political, you know, whoever's in power at the time. And you can see the reductions in greenhouse gas emissions are right down here, which it's second again, second most effective in reducing greenhouse gas emissions only to the Senator Coons bill. So again, how it works effective, good for the people good for the economy and revenue neutral, meaning that it doesn't increase the size of government, which is important in order to get Republican support. And we need Republican support in order for it to survive more than two years when, you know, if Democrats, you have a sweep and take the Senate, then, you know, how long that lasts, if we have something that's only going to last for a couple of years till the midterm elections and people don't vote, then what good is that? We need something that's going to withstand the change in political climate. So how it works, again, you put the first tenet of the three is you put a fee on the fossil fuel source and the IRS or sorry, the federal government already keeps track of what the equivalent carbon emissions are for each one of these sources for coal, carbon, coal, oil and natural gas. All of that money, the net 100% net revenue is returned in an equal dividend check to each man, woman and child. If you are under 18, you get half credit. So the parents of those people get a half credit for that. There's all kinds of independent analysis, which you could check out online to show what this does, but tremendously helpful in saving lives over the first decade it's predicted to save about 400,000 lives and reduce and that's mostly from affiliated respiratory diseases like, you know, asthma and other things that are affiliated with the emissions from burning coal and other fossil fuels. 40% emissions reductions in the first 12 years and every year after that getting better, the better way of saying that I feel like is it exceeds our Paris protocol goals within the first eight years and then after eight years it does that much better and it continues until we are at 10% of 1990 CO2 levels at which point we'll be happy to have solved the existential threat of climate change. What that money returned back to folks as an equal dividend check means that the typical family of four will see a net gain of about $4,400 and that in turn will spread the economy creating about 2.1 million jobs in the last projections over the past 10 years after implementation and that's not just in green industry jobs like building windmills and solar farms, it's also just the fact that that dividend check returned to every taxpayer will give them some more money in their pockets so that they can spur the local economy where they live. Very briefly this shows where that money returned to folks projects across the income level. So this is the poorest 10% on this bar graph and they do the best most likely because they have the least carbon, the smallest carbon footprint because they have the least means to do so and they tremendously benefit from that dividend and everybody does marginally well or wins on this until someplace in between the 60 and 70th percentile and the top 30% income on average they will be paying a bit in. For most of them it's less than 2% of their income level and remember that these are the folks who should be incentivized to decarbonize their lifestyle so and then you know the top 10% and then you break down that top 10% to this level. These folks another way of seeing that same bar graph is here where we're talking about direct energy costs in blue, indirect energy costs which is like embedded stuff so like the carbon that's in your you know in the food you but the carbon cost quote-unquote of the footprint to the food you eat the drinks you buy the products you purchase services all that stuff has some sort of embedded carbon to the manufacturing or supply of it so these are where those fees will come from at the bottom quintile bottom 20% and their dividend check exceeds that all the way up to you know at the top level even though this looks like a big difference between what their dividend check would be this because dividend check is taxable it's got a different level but it actually amounts to over a course of a year less than 2% for almost everybody in that top level and there's going to be anomalies rich people who have switched to they have the best means of switching to being carbon winners it creates a positive economic feedback loop for that so I'm going to skip this bar graph because I think it says the same thing but basically it's most of most of our carbon costs are embedded we think of it against carbon fees is affecting our gas for our cars or for heating oil if we're on or you know whatever you're using to heat your house or buy your electricity but for every income level most of it is in the embedded costs the embedded carbon footprint which means that even if I take that dividend check and foolishly spend it on more gas consumption or carbon fuels it will just you know that it was I still will be reducing my carbon footprint because most of you know the companies surrounding me are allowing me to you know they're much more sensitive to flight price fluctuations so they're going to be highly incentivized to decarbonize their production lines and their service lines before it gets to me so it's really about changing industry more than individual although individual consumers will obviously change their consumption habits where has this worked the easy answer is everywhere it's been tried our favorite example is one of the older examples about 12 years ago British Columbia up as part of a Canadian effort for all the provinces of Canada to experiment and see how they could best reduce their carbon emissions implemented just this almost to the letter this this policy where they had a gradually increasing price on carbon and they returned all of them that money back to as a as a as an equal dividend check back to Canadian British Canadians it's popular because most people are winners on that dividend check and they have reduced their carbon emissions be almost twice as much as the Canadian average for the first few years and at the same time their economy has outpaced the Canadian average so decoupling the old methods we need carbon emissions for the economy to grow British Columbia which is actually a fossil fuel state I mean it's not Alberta in its tar sands but if they do have some extraction they do have some reliance on carbon carbon fossil fuel productions they actually have outpaced the Canadian average this is a map of the world with all the countries that participate in carbon pricing either regionally domestically or on the brink of doing this so you know China and India the people that people point to well they why are why should the United States do anything about this if they're not they are to some level pricing their carbon as already and in fact the the EU just announced in late 2020 that they will be charging a border adjustment fee on products imported into the EU which is I believe are after China and Canada our third biggest trading partner I'm not sure but they will be charging those those tariffs on incoming products that do not have an equivalent carbon price so basically United States is 80% of our trading partners already participate in some sort of carbon pricing and we just have to get our act together in order to be avoided like in some kind you know a tariff war with with the EU well there's nothing we could do in retaliation because the rest most of the trade in the world is done with partners that have that have a carbon market so you know we share this distinction of not pricing our carbon with Russia Somalia Yemen Libya it's you know and those countries are going to be incentivized to join the club when it explains to Democrats they carbon fee and dividend this idea has 80% support very high support and the reason when we were been meeting with our national representatives here in Maine we're talking about Senators King Collins representatives Golden and Pingry we have found that Republicans are talking to us more and more Republicans actually under the age of 40 75% of them support carbon fee and dividend because it does rely on a lot of conservative values to address the problem I mean as you think about it it's not using the heavy hand of government to pick winners and losers it's basically turning it over to the market and letting individual consumers and industry leaders incentivize innovate to try to try to move away from their emissions it's basically bringing the economic externality of carbon emissions into the system so it we're very excited the fact that Republicans are beginning to support this and that's why we have this bipartisan bill and we're particularly focused on of course Senator Collins and Angus King Senator King because they are business friendly track record and Senator Collins actually supported something very similar to this 12 years ago and we're hoping that she can be convinced to support this as well this is a document that was published in the Wall Street Journal along with many other sources but it's basically a resolution showing that this means pricing carbon giving that money back to each consumer and you know a gradually increasing price on carbon that the money has returned to each consumer in the dividend check is supported by over 3500 economists I think it's 3589 right now all living threat chair of federal reserve chairman 27 Nobel laureate economists we have 23 I believe in state of Maine not Nobel laureates but economists from main universities all of who have signed this document and this is it's very hard to get economists to agree on much but they all agree that the effective and the effectiveness and the equitability of this policy is is the way the most important first step we need to to address our carbon emissions this is us thanking my this is my daughter thanking Shelly Pingry for when she became a co-sponsor in summer 2019 this is us meeting with Angus King back when we could do in-person meetings we hope to again sometime soon and this is us meeting with Susan Collins we also meet with Jared Golden and there are chapters throughout the country where we I think we've met with all but four of the House and Senate seats um I talked to one of the economists who mentioned that they signed on to this and they said not only is the science of climate change kind of decided about 30 years ago and we're just kind of figuring out the detail since then the economics of how best to address this has been settled pretty much the past 15 years ago from 15 years ago um and so we're just everything other because this system of pricing carbon works economy wide uh we don't have to worry about surprising emissions coming from other sources um that we're not anticipating you know any other policy it's we've been playing whack-a-mole where we're trying to solve a problem in one area and not addressing it another and this is the only thing that works economy wide and takes care of the poor um I'm almost done with the slideshow I promise but this is the a map of the world showing the past 100 years of carbon emissions so the United States is the big culprit uh followed by Europe and Russia and China um from the developing world not as much and then climate change deaths per year this is kind of just speaking to the moral imperative of doing something about this this is from Catherine Hayho's um very important work on the morality of climate change um and she use uh you know you can see here that we're now averaging about 150,000 deaths per year from extreme weather events drought floods um extreme heat uh and of course it's affecting the part of the world that has the least to do with creating the problem right sub-saharan Africa so um just talking about the moral mandate um this is a slide showing some of the organizations not all but who have endorsed um this just like the group of economists who have endorsed this idea this is you know we have far left groups we have far right groups we have very moderate groups outdoors groups faith organizations business friendly groups like chambers of commerce's rotarians all that kind of stuff uh business and community leaders and then this is a picture of us of some of our young people leading a meeting with Shelly Pingery after which she became one of the co-sponsors and I'll leave this part of the demonstration with this picture of us last time I think maybe spring of 2019 when we were in doing our Capitol Hill visits with our volunteers um and I'll leave you with this quote with James Hansen the climate scientist who in 1989 had the first session uh joint session of congress where he was talking about the perils of climate change and um he has this to say about citizens climate lobby and the important work we do it's as most impressive as the work of citizens climate lobby if you want to join the fight to save the planet to save creation for your grandchildren there is no more effective step you can take than becoming an active member of this group um so if it's good enough for him it's good enough for me that's why I spend so many volunteer hours working on this James Hansen you know when he was talking about this a couple years later under George H. W. Bush in 1991 they we came inches from putting uh cap and trade uh a carbon market in place different specifics but it's a form of carbon pricing in a way um and at the last minute we were he there's a bunch of different political reasons but basically he stepped away from doing that in 1991 and just to bring home the severity of the problem if you were to calculate all of the carbon emissions before that time to the point of that decision to not go go ahead with carbon pricing and it would actually be less than the amount of carbon emissions from that decision till now we've more than doubled the problem so it puts it into perspective and just shows how important it is now the with our senators senators king and Collins the two of them we're the only state even with only a hundred oh sorry 1.2 million citizens in main 1.3 maybe I can't remember now um we're a small state but both of our senators were the only state with both senators on these bipartisan senate climate solutions caucus we know that that group i uh has been using enrhoads model to judge where the best mechanisms are for addressing climate change and we also know that they are interested in things that can get bipartisan support so they can be politically robust so if you want to uh to learn more about this I encourage you to check out citizens climate lobby we have like dozen chapters in main um or if you want to learn more about enrhoads you feel free to click on this site you can do the training by clicking right here and most importantly if you want to support the bipartisan um most important the most important first step of the bill as it reads right now is the energy innovation carbon dividend act you can read about all the support it's it shares um and if you're a community leader or if you know of any organizations I'd be happy to make a demonstration to them but most importantly you can endorse the bill it takes about 20 seconds as an organization or as an individual or feel free to send us any questions so you may ask as a meaner what can we do um well as a as I said um it earlier that the uh the fact that we are mainers actually helps our political clout because we are the only state with both senators on the senate by pardon the senate the bipartisan senate climate solutions caucus so we should be watching carefully what both senator king and senator collins do they have uh well they both have pretty admirable uh track records for the environment um and uh you know it's debatable certain policy decisions but senator collins's clear act from 2009 was in a way ahead of its time in that in similar to the carbon the carbon pricing that we're talking about that was a cap in dividend as opposed to a fee in dividend so in some ways it's actually more senator collins came up with something that's more progressive it was an artificial cap we're stopping our emissions here and we're going to lower it over the years and that the money that comes from that is a dividend which is very similar to what we're doing except we're talking about just putting a fee that's gradually increasing instead of a cap so um there's all kinds of a political history to that but basically keeping an eye on what they do is super important now what can you do on a local level what can you do as a you know just a common maner who's worried about this who's sad about the fact that we can't get main shrimp and is going to be sad you know in the projected decades when we lose lobster blueberries skiing and all the other things that we associate with main um talk about one thing is to share the importance of carbon pricing and you know basically citizens crime lobby didn't start with carbon pricing it basically started with an idea that we have to have it be effective whatever policy we're talking about has to be effective in reducing the risk of this crisis climate crisis and it has to be equitable it has to take care of the poorest and they settled on this because it does an added bonus it's both effective and takes care of the poorest by giving that that money projected go down to the poorest and middle income folks it also does a tremendous amount to have it be bipartisan the fact that it does get bipartisan support makes it more politically robust so that it'd be great to get something that passes um and uh and exists for a couple of years but if it's not getting some buy-in from both sides of the political isle then it is unlikely to last very long just think about the fights that have happened over the Affordable Care Act which was a republican idea that was fed you know that was championed on one side and not to get too political but um so that's one thing on a local level we are motivated to meet with as many political uh community leaders as possible that means businesses who could speak to our representation um community leaders like Rotarians, Lions clubs, the works, um faith organizations, chambers of commerce whatever it might be school groups municipalities so now we're to talk about politics there are many Portland we're very blessed to have one climate future to have uh you know Portland and South Portland both have the same sustainability director um Julie Rosenbach in South Portland Troy Moon in Maine both of them are doing great work both city councils are really on the forefront of this um and a lot of uh towns in Maine are declaring climate emergencies we also have the city of Portland city of South Portland and eight or maybe 10 others towns have endorsed carbon pricing on a national level if you think about all the work that's been doing in a city's wide level regional level and even state level let's talk about the state Governor Mills should be applauded for making this kind of the centerpiece of her administration and Hannah Pingree should be applauded for fronting the um the uh governor's uh climate council however Maine has 0.32 percent of the U.S. carbon emissions so even if we were tremendously you know like perfectly successful and we flip the switch and Maine could turn off of all of its carbon emissions tomorrow we are still goners because it's that's you know that's 0.32 percent that doesn't apply to the other 99.7 percent right so what are we going to do about that we need something we're not going to get there with just a piece meal thing state by state we're doing what we can in the more states that do this the more pressure there is on the federal government but we need robust national policy and the fact that the national policy is actually got an international component because of that border adjustment fee I was talking about it makes it so that that policy because America is still a big power broker on the on the economic scale we are exporting that policy to the rest of the world the few parts of the world that don't already have that policy like not Canada U.S. uh sorry EU China so we need to talk to people in the local level we need to talk to your state representatives we're hoping to pass a state would be great to pass a state resolution in Augusta supporting basically a document saying we want our national representatives to work towards this equitable carbon pricing model so those are all the things that need to happen Columbia science guru and economics of he's like kind of a authority on the economics of climate change and climate change solutions Noah um Kaufman had said uh and I'm paraphrasing because I can't remember the exact clue but it's basically saying with a gradually increasing price on carbon there is a possibility we will avert disaster um without it we are doomed to failure so we need to have this as part of the portfolio at least and it's the important complementary part to all the important the great work that's going on in battery storage and all the other things uh and the work of the main climate council is doing and the other work that King and Collins are finding possible in the divided government to do municipalities so Portland and South Portland and a few others are coming online we know um smaller towns bigger towns uh Bangor they've all basically passed a city resolution supporting a national carbon fee and dividend the policy is called carbon fee and dividend be on carbon it's not a tax technically because that money it never actually goes into the IRS's accounts it goes into a separate escrow account that is mandated to be paid out in full every month so there's no pot of money that is attractive for politicians to raid for some other purpose whether that be um energy investments or plugging a hole in social security or you know um or incentivizing green technology it's just there's this money has got to be the reason why all the money is returned back to the policy and you can be disappointed by that not being applied to the best efforts but if we don't turn all that money back that reduces from that 60 70 percent level of people who benefit it's going to go down down down but the more we kind of skim the cream off the top of that policy so carbon fee and dividend is what the policy is called and all those seven different bills are technically that uh the the bill itself as it appeared in the house and bipartisan and briefly in the senate when we had a bipartisan bill in the senate um it's the first bipartisan bicameral bill in over 12 years um that was called the energy innovation carbon dividend act which is um which you know i can shoot that website that i was showing you right here that i'm asking for an endorsement who knows what it's going to be called in the next legislative session but it's probably something similar hr 763 um the easier way to think about it and then probably an easier expression is carbon cashback a lot of the municipalities in main are passing and we're having a big push coming 2021 to push more towns to adopt a carbon cashback resolution and we're doing the same thing in the state house and the state senate um and carbon cashback makes a lot of sense people don't know what dividend checks are unless you're in you know playing with stock market and you have those kinds of means but cashback that makes sense i'm going to have carbon price going up i'm going to be incentivizing to move away from that or to to be thriftier with my carbon fees but it's the cashback part that mostly benefits and translates and also like makes a lot of sense for folks who are on the bottom or middle income so that's really what it boils down to is the more we can talk about this with our friends and family and people of import that we might know in main the more business leaders the more folks that we can get to talk about this to their state representatives and senators and most importantly our national state representatives and senators