Hi, everyone. I'm glad to be introducing Senator Skinner and stepping in a little bit. I am a graduate of Stanford long time ago in Humboldt, so I'm always happy to help out. And I've had several affiliations with Stanford. I used to be an actual senior researcher with the Precourt Institute. I continue as a member of George Holtz's Energy and Climate Task Force and a scholar with the Bill Lane Center. And I was a state policymaker in California with the California Public Utilities Commission. I'm going to go ahead and introduce, just talk about, I don't have a slide for this, your speaker today, because I want to make sure as soon as she's ready to come on, we've got her ready to go. So I've had the honor of knowing Senator Skinner probably 40 years that I actually live in Berkeley. And she was very active and a host of things in Berkeley. And she became a member of the assembly. And I was one of her constituents. And then she became a member of the state Senate. And I continue to be a very proud constituent. She is absolutely a leader in California and frankly internationally on climate and clean energy. It's not on the blurb that was sent around, but one of her early achievements was she set up an NGO called ICLEI, which was basically to get local governments involved in climate action. And this again was 25 years ago. And it was the first time somebody focused on let's get local governments involved. And from there, she's had just a host of bills that she has sponsored. She has chaired many of the most influential committees in the California legislature on both the budget and on the environment. So I'm going to leave it to Senator Skinner to tell us what's going on in California these days. But think of her as a voice of knowing not just California, but nationally and internationally on sort of what are the leading edge policies and programs to adopt for clean energy and climate. So I'm taking up my little time that I now have because Senator Skinner is going to have to join us a little bit late. And as soon as she's ready to come in, we'll stop. But I decided instead of trying to talk about some of the pending things in California because Senator Skinner will talk about. I'm going to talk about a very precise area that I've been involved with in studying recently. And it's called extreme heat. And this is probably something most of you have never thought of. And what's interesting is there is not a definition of extreme heat because it depends upon the location it's happening, the duration of it is a single day and multi days and sort of a host of weather patterns. Generally, it's something at least 100 degrees or more. And the point being with climate change, you may think mostly about drought, or you think about flooding or you think about wildfires. But extreme heat is one of the worst impacts that we are now experiencing from climate change. Deaths happen because of extreme heat because vulnerable people get affected. There's a lot of health issues, visits to the emergency room, productivity is impacted. We have a lot of outdoor workers, construction, agriculture, and it's darn hard to be working when it's 104 degrees. And natural resource impacts and Professor Wein and I were just talking and I was thrilled to learn that he has a project going on in this area, actually about the impacts of extreme heat on agricultural production and productivity. So point everyone to Professor Wein if you want to get involved in that area. One of the other really concerning things is this happens in terms of populated areas, almost always in low income areas. Because study after study shows they don't have trees shading the neighborhood and they don't have air conditioned houses and they may not have well insulated houses as well. So it's something that is sort of this triple whammy of it's really focused on the low income disadvantaged communities. There was an assessment by California recently that said by 2050 extreme heat is going to be costing the state at least $100 billion a year. And so I didn't get a number for right now, but this is not a small issue. So that's what I really want to say. You may not have heard of it, but you're going to be hearing about next slide. So California not surprisingly is a leader in this area that there was a budget deal that was worked out last year that basically is giving us about $800 million over three years to implement what's called the California extreme heat action plan. And that's by far the biggest amount of funding that we're seeing anywhere, at least in the United States. And there's a lot of different agencies involved. I won't try to go through them, but those agencies have to plan what to do develop programs. Good news is there is money for research. So I wanted to target especially those students here and faculty that this is an area that actually has some money to be doing research because it is so new in the thinking there are grants for education for adaptation. And in terms of adaptation, we have a lot of the technology, fans, heat pumps, air conditioners, and what we call cool services, white roofs or lightly colored roofs. Pavements are a big area now because our cities are so paved over, but there's new materials being developed and even on walls thinking about the paint that's used. But again, this is an area where we need a lot more technology and a lot more understanding of how effective is the technology. But there's still a really some major gaps in programs and agency coordination because bottom line is there is no single agency in California or frankly at the federal level or anywhere that's in charge of thinking about and dealing with extreme heat. And then sort of the flip side is it's really actions at the local level and by individuals that have to deal with this that in a city it is the local building department that will be looking at what is the pavement that can be put in. You also have what are the permits that are required in terms of roofs. So that's a lot of action locally and then individually. Can I think about if I'm going to finally get an air conditioner that I get the most efficient air conditioning? How am I going to make that decision? Who's going to help me in making it? So huge amounts of effort that are needed but it's really starting to get attention. Next slide please. So then there are two important bills in the legislature that I wanted to mention and I don't think Senator Skinner is going to be talking about them because they're in the Assembly and she's a Senator but AB which stands for Assembly Bill 2076 and 2238. It would establish among these they would establish a new program right in the governor's office in the Office of Planning and Research or OPR and then within that there's another group called the Strategic Growth Council SGC that's really done some great work in my mind with local communities. So we would have finally sort of a place where this lives and we call the new extreme heat and community resilience program. But there would also be a lot of work with two other agencies. One would be with the natural resources agency because there's a lot of need to green up our cities and especially areas that are poor that don't have trees or canopies and so they would be hosting a lot of the effort in that area. And then the third major agency at least in my mind is one you unless you're involved in this you're not going to know it's called Communities Services CST. Community Services and Development it handles a lot of the low income energy programs and rate relief programs and so they're going to have a major role since the communities of our low income areas are so impacted by this. But this is a major thing getting a whole new program set up. They will be given then the authority to be giving out grants and technical assistance. And I just want to say again this is an area that I think is ripe for researchers and academic experts to be helping out that I work with Lawrence Berkeley National Lab has a heat island group where their work in this area is situated and they really are sort of an expert on call when some new like the city of Phoenix is getting very involved in this San Francisco is when you're trying to think of what to do how do you know what the performance is how do you evaluate it. This is an area where you want unbiased experts and I'm really hoping we'll get a group going in at Stanford as well. The bills call for development of a statewide extreme heat ranking system and that's because we don't know sort of just off the top of the head what do we mean and so the the talk is to develop something like what we have for hurricanes and our other adverse weather events so that there will be a way of saying you know we're in code red on extreme heat or we're going to be looking at code yellow and these are the areas that are going to be affected. Nothing like this exists that we know of so it's going to take a lot of effort of thinking about it but we've got to have a way that we then can communicate to the public be prepared this heat is coming here's how long we think it may last and here are the steps that you can be taking. The other part and this is I think important to say this is not just engineering or public policy there's a huge amount on public health and again Stanford with this wonderful hospital and whole health care system I think could be a major player because it would call for developing a hospitalization and death reporting system so we really start to understand what are these horrible impacts but it's not clear sort of how that system is going to be developed how those reports are going to be made if you also have a heart attack sort of like with COVID what do you say are the causes and very very important to think then how we target our efforts but it's going to take a lot of work and then interesting the Department of Insurance in California is likely to get involved they're going to be called upon to put in an extreme heat cost report because there are lots of costs for this but we're not sure at all now who's paying for them and eventually it is believed there will be insurance coverage for these events but we have to start with understanding what are the costs what are the causes and who's paying and possibly we may be looking at more funding there have been very specific requests made to increase it but we don't know yet if that's going to be happening so I think that is the end of what I prepared if Senator Skinner is not around I am more than happy to talk if that's what folks want me to do or answer questions any questions on what Diane just presented or her illustrious career at the BUC and that's the effort yeah you can ask me anything when she was at the BUC Diane was for many years I hope I got this right the kind of leading voice on energy efficiency I want to talk about that and how you orchestrated that whole effort here yeah right no I actually just talked with Jeff St. John of Canary Media today about energy efficiency so I wore that hat for a couple hours today California was where energy efficiency was developed and frankly Senator Skinner was very important in that area we developed the first building codes appliance standards we did the first utility programs when I had the good fortune to become a commissioner at the PUC we were overseeing over a billion dollars in spending that was raised from rates that utility customers pay that the utilities then administered and there was 200 separate programs and what I became concerned with is that we didn't have a good plan for where we were going and I said billion dollars a year 10 years that's 10 billion dollars if we were a corporation somebody would have a strategic plan so we developed a strategic plan which I'm happy to say is you know continue to be implemented in various ways some of the most interesting new developments in efficiency I think are that we have a lot of effort going into building decarbonization and specifically heat pumps and getting them out there and getting contractors involved in that the other thing is the data analytics and I had a great pleasure while I've been at Sanford even now working with Professor Rishi Jane so if anyone's interested in buildings efficiency and data analytics he's your go-to person doing some really wonderful wonderful work in this area but we are starting to see now in the private marketplace private companies that have as an example I gave this morning was just one company NRV that it has what's called an online marketplace that if you go on to it's a state sponsored website CAFTA which I won't try to talk tell you what it's about but you actually can then put in if you are thinking oh I need a new air conditioner or my water heater died and I got to get one today um it it very much develops algorithms that look at your location you're interested have you go to the least to the most efficient appliances and you can then also do it by cost etc and they partnered with contractors and companies so Best Buy helps out and the important thing I think is that it then offers very low cost financing so what it's doing is micro loans that we have not seen in the state before that somebody can get up to a five-year loan for a new furnace or a new air conditioner there's automatic transfer of payment monthly from a checking account the default rates appear to be very very little and you can qualify with extremely low credit scores so we're starting to penetrate we hope the renters market and low low income so that's just an example of how we wouldn't have known how to do this five years ago without the great data analytics that have developed and then thinking through sort of what's the marketing and having then instant feedback about what's working and what isn't so that's an example of what excites me in in this area is this is a good example to advance cooling that can decarbonize us yes that's what we're talking about is um heat pumps but getting more and more heat pumps put in that will cool um split systems so they both heat and and cool and it says another question should we I'm going to just keep talking John till you tell me not to shall we reconsider earth sheltering housing and other building buildings as we did experimentally in Alaska 10 years ago um I am certainly not an expert in this area but I think how we're going to be looking at the housing we build um may change dramatically over the next decade as we understand there's no standard for example um for how cool buildings have to be whereas on the heat side there are state laws all over the map that if you have a house or an apartment its furnace or other equipment needs to be sufficient that it can heat you to I don't know what you know the standard is but some level of standard so that people aren't getting too cold or getting sick and so what's being talked about is we probably need to develop some standards for buildings for the cooling aspect and that again will open up a whole another level I think of thinking about how we are building the buildings and what our technologies are going to be would engineering student projects to design new types of easily installed efficient low power cooling heating pumps be useful in California absolutely um with our new school coming out um it's going to have as I understand a lot of focus on doing student led or student involved projects that can then be implemented and tested out and this is an area where all hands on board um and I'm sure there's people connected but if not somebody can figure out how to get in touch with you do I have any thoughts on the current heat wave in California I am not familiar with what's going on though I've done work in India and that's you know in some ways the problems in California are so small compared to places like India and other places that have these terrible terrible um heat issues but we work closely with India and other places and so some of our solutions hopefully can be adopted um with prices increasing how will people stay stay cool that's that's a big problem and that's why there's talk about oh there's Senator Skinner hello I'm going to immediately stop can you hi Diane great well I took the time they asked me to talk so you know what I just did was a primer on California extreme heat efforts in California because I figured it won't you know I didn't at all get into anything else going on in California so please stop we're glad to have you thank you and I don't need to remind all of you who are part of this that the climate crisis is real and it's already upon us so you know fortunately California has been more of a leader than most every other government in the US in terms of taking it seriously and advancing policies and programs to reduce emissions what we've done a little less on but we're starting to amp this up is in the area of adaptation and uh investments that to help California be more resilient and now we're realizing that we have to because look at these wildfires that we're experiencing look at our ongoing droughts um California's always had droughts it's not new but it's much more challenging the the high heat extremes the uh you know you can get a record snowfall like we did this year but then it melts immediately then we do not have the water storage capacity we don't get the slow um runoff melting of the snow that normally would provide us the water ongoing so you know we're and of course sea level rise so we're right in the middle of in real time experiencing these impacts which are only going to be aggravated um but let's get back to this the realness of the crisis what now personally i've been involved in this issue since about 1990 and i started a program called cities for climate protection where back in the 90s we were recruiting cities all over the world to make commitments to make decisions that they were going to set goals for ghg reduction that they would do inventories of emissions in their communities and they would do inventories as to what how their policies impacted those emissions so in other words were they adopting policies that increased emissions or were they adopting policies that would help reverse them and so i was counting carbon back in the 90s and for all through the 90s and even up through you know 2010 2015 that we had high resistance to adapt to pushing adaptation because we really wanted to stop the climate crisis we wanted to reverse those emissions and avoid that that the most catastrophic impacts well i still hope that we can avoid the most catastrophic but we're in it now and did i believe that when i started in this work that in my lifetime i would so so immediately experience these climatic changes no no and i can tell you just from someone who hikes a lot the just the the changes in places where i used to go and have wildflowers at a certain time of year or certain species that don't exist or places that i snorkel where the coral is all dead and various things that did i sure i knew that those were potential impacts but did i think that i would personally experience them no so we have got to double down on emissions reductions no questions double down but it's not going to be enough we also have to do everything we can to capture carbon and when i say that i mean not just within those things that are emission producing and i'll explain a bill that i'm carrying right now on cement for example which has process emissions that even if you switch cement over to the if you even you were powering your cement production with 100 renewable energy you would still be producing process emissions because of the nature of the content of cement so we got to capture that but we also have to maximize nature's ability to capture when i say that we mean that's clearly what we talk about when we say protect forest protect the amazon but there's also great capacity within soils soils are alive at least the optimal soil and if we can bring back that regenerative regenerative practice whether it's in ag agriculture practices or even grasslands forests you name it to keep soil alive the microorganisms in soil have great capacity to capture carbon there's also a lot of research now showing that that fungus mycorrhizal mycorrhizae from fungus has great capacity for this as do of course microorganisms in our oceans and waterways and plants so we need to understand that better and maximize that capture or sequestration of carbon as well as direct air capture which is only being really experimented with there are you know some places you know projects in iceland a project in germany a project here and there but it's not yet commercially viable but we've got to send the right type of market signals to get the research and the development because we've got to pull carbon out of the air at the same time we're doubling down on emissions reductions to really avoid the most catastrophic and now is california doing all of that yet no but the governor knew some in the budget that he proposed in january and he will be revising that proposal in may but in january you saw and you can see if you go up in the governor's website that he's proposing some very very significant investments to to completely transform our transportation sector so that vehicles are zeb zero mission primarily electric and putting a lot of money towards electric vehicle infrastructure charging infrastructure and also support for people to be able to purchase electric vehicles and convert to electric vehicles but the the other things that the governor had in his january budget along these lines are 100 million for green hydrogen electrolyzers so we can use renewable energy that we at times were more over producing it to then produce hydrogen money for offshore wind and there's some spots around the california coast that are really good for offshore wind 380 million for long duration storage which we're hoping will be beyond just battery but certainly battery has a huge role and we have utility grade batteries now for long for they're a little shorter duration we want we obviously need longer duration hydrogen's a great capacity for long duration storage as some other things and he's put in a billion for building decarbonization and what i'm expecting is that when the governor puts out his budget for may that he will be building on those he won't be reducing any of those but we may see some additional investments because revenues are up right now now in the meantime the air resources board california air resources board which is the agency responsible to basically put together the plans and implement most of california's very ambitious climate protection goals including ab 32 sb third sb what was the number 32 are 32 i mean ab 32 sb 32 sb 32 which doubled up so ab 32 had a was very ambitious when it was adopted back in 2007 but the uh but sb 32 doubles up those and gets us an even bigger uh ghg reduction target and then of course there's targets around carbon neutrality and uh zero emission vehicles and various things like that most of which are in the responsibility of the air resources board to develop the programs and plans for implementation so how the air resources board does that primarily is through something they call the scoping plan and carb just updated the scoping plan for california it's on their website now they just released their newest version and their plan is to get california to be carbon neutral by 2045 and in that scenario that scoping plan scenario they include reliance on both emissions reductions and natural and what i'll call for now technological carbon sequestration or carbon capture so exactly what i was talking about before um now i'm the budget chair for the state senate and the state senate we have the r pro tem tony akins senator tony akins just decided that she wanted the senate to be very ambitious and aggressive around climate the climate crisis this year so she set up a working group in the state senate which is headed up by senator john laird and there's a number a lot of different senators who are participating in it and they are rolling out bills right now and at the same time that they're rolling out some policy bills we're also looking at a budget plan that would add to the investments that the governor is um arguing for and some of the investments we're going to be um asking for are investments that would have california the state put its money where its mouth is and move its own vehicles the states the vehicles we purchase to zev at a quicker timeline than we had previously because we figure if we're expecting the private sector to do it then we need to use our market power to affect that which also can help bring down prices and clearly we'll invest in infrastructure for charging because we'll need to charge those state vehicles so we want to move that up we also want to we're going to put a lot of infrastructure capital money in the whole adaptation and resiliency around drought around improving drinking water wildfire mitigation including fuel reduction and also sea level rise because if you look at a lot of california's economic engines whether it's our ports our airports various others they're all the major ones are all on the coast and very very vulnerable to sea level rise so we have we are probably going to propose sometime this week a multi and i'm talking multi multi billion dollar investment in those areas the senate working group on climates that i just referenced just release their first bill and their first bill is sp 1020 and you can go on the what's called the legislative data site and see all the language for that bill but i'll give you the highlights of what it's going to do it accelerates our clean energy goals so in other words our renewable electricity portfolio goals for electricity purchased by the state or generated in the state to 100 by 2030 rather than 2045 so it jumps it up and it sets a goal of 95 renewable for all retail sales by 2040 and the existing law is 100 by 2045 and we're trying to increase the coordination between our various agencies responsible for transmission because we're going to need transmission upgrades as we expand our reliance on renewable generation for electricity and as we expand our reliance on using electricity to power vehicles and to switch buildings over now we don't expect all buildings to be switched over quickly to be coming all electric but we need to plan for that and we need to get off of natural gas and you need the infrastructure to do that so that's the bill sp 1020 everything i mentioned only the first things are clear components of it the other things i mentioned are going to be more in some other bills that come forward and in the budget proposals that we make to add to the governor's proposals the other thing that our working group is recommending is establishing a california affordable decarbonization authority that would administer a climate and equity trust fund to help you know certain of these things are going to have higher costs and we do not want to put undue burden on our lowest income residents and while california's revenues are really healthy we're a very strong economy we have a lot of residents who are still struggling and who are with our high costs of living and such that if we as we pursue our very important climate goals add more cost burden to them it can be it's it's really unfair and so we want to try to to establish mechanisms to help them be able to participate in this decarbonized economy and society in a way that doesn't hurt their quality of life in the short term now i'll jump over to the bills that i've introduced this year on this question meaning on uh on addressing our climate crisis and here's the bills that i'm carrying this year i have sb and just putting it in a context i have not carried um i've been in the legislature since 2008 so i came in after our first really big signature bill which was ab 32 but i was a core part of the negotiations around our all of our renewable portfolio standards and our renewable portfolio standards is that rps is the term for our goals for switching our electricity sector to renewable so we started out first with 25 percent and we went up to 50 percent now we're at the 100 percent and now we're moving dates to get to that even faster but the some of the other bills that i've carried in the past i'm the person that carried the bill that established california's utilities buying energy storage so the first time that california put uh utility grade batteries onto the you know within the um utility sector within the transmission sector was due to a bill that i carried and at the point that i carried it which was in 2009 people were like you know this will never happen batteries are too expensive you can't expect this but within very few years california had the largest market share of this utility grade storage and we completely changed the landscape around that technology and its use not only in the california and the us but worldwide um so now i'm trying to do similar things around hydrogen and around carbon sequestration when it comes to certain industrial processes so i'll mention i'll describe those bills now so i'm carrying sb 1075 on hydrogen and the reason i'm interested in green hydrogen is because we you know we're trying to decarbonize everything but you take long haul trucking port operations ships planes they're harder to electrify we don't yet we haven't made the breakthroughs and battery yet uh i'm hoping that we will someday but hydrogen has that capacity but it's no good if we produce that hydrogen from fossil fuels and given that we've really brought down the cost of the generation of electricity from renewable sources and also those sources are at oftentimes they're generating more electricity than we need at the point that they're at their maximum generation so wind or solar for example we can in effect capture that excess generation and utilize it rather than directly onto the grid utilize it to produce hydrogen whether it's electrolysis or other means and then that hydrogen is very flexible that hydrogen then can be used to store energy that hydrogen can be used to fuel transportation a variety of different applications and it's one of the few renewable sources that has that different kind of flexible capacity so 1075 jump starts california's use of green hydrogen and it also pushes california towards trying to invest some state matching money so that we could compete with the federal government or rather we could compete for the federal dollars that were in the the infrastructure bill that got passed that is is providing some funding including for hydrogen and i want california to maximize that and potentially have be selected as one of the hydrogen hubs so that's a purpose of sp 1075 and then i have sp 1010 which i a little bit referenced which is my clean fleets bill and that is to get california we own 40 000 vehicles and most of which are still fueled by fossil fuels um so i want to accelerate the purchase of our state agency it's called dgs department of governmental services they're the ones who buy those vehicles and i want to make sure that we are accelerating and amping up the date for when we will buy all zeps because when we use our market power that way we helped bring down prices and we helped make it easier for others to do the same thing so that's my bill sp 1010 then i've got sp 905 which would i referenced in the opening of this talk about the process emissions from cement manufacturer so what this bill does would allow for a few of the cement manufacturing facilities in california to pilot capturing carbon and then geologically sequestering it and we're not doing that right now in california so i want to do that because there's a lot of fear around geologic sequestration when you think about the eliso canyon some of you may be familiar a few years ago eliso canyon was a place where natural gas was being stored and the the thought was that okay this is completely uh this these caverns are completely safe they're uh you know nothing's going to escape and they started it started escaping and it created many many problems and i think it was so cal gas that was it was their facility i can't remember it was southern california edison or so cal gas and it just added to people's fear that if you sequester carbon it will just escape and then people have fears that carbon itself would be dangerous in the immediate way meaning have an immediate pollution on that neighborhood now we know that that's not the case though certainly it does for the atmosphere but we don't we need to pilot some projects to show that it can work and then to learn what it is we have to do to make sure that it works so my bill sp905 would allow a few california cement manufacturing facilities to pilot capturing that carbon released from their process emissions and store it geologically then lastly i have sp1206 now when i said we have to double down on emissions reductions one of the things that i think california should do is focus on the short-lived climate pollutants and when i say that the short-lived climate pollutants are things like methane diesel so the dirty the black carbon refrigerants like hcfcs those short-lived climate pollutants will only have a bad effect in the atmosphere for maybe 20 years but there are thousands of times more powerful than co2 and if we can do everything we can to keep those out of the atmosphere in this next 10 20 year period we buy time for that transition to get fully off of fossil fuels so my bill sp1206 would move california more aggressively off the the short-lived climate polluting refrigerants so right now we've moved the refrigerants from 20 years ago were called cfcs and they were very damaging to the ozone layer and they were short-lived climate pollutants however in replacing them we got rid of a thing that damaged the ozone layer but we replaced them with something that was still a short-lived climate pollutant meaning an hfc and what i want to do now is try to get even away from those and uh and if we can't in those applications where we can't completely eliminate its use then require that it be captured when you repair it or when you dispose of it that it's never released so um that's my bill sp1206 and let me see if there was anything else i wanted to to point out um um back to the governor's uh budget i said that very significant investments in the electric vehicles and zero emission vehicles but let me state what they are it was his january proposal had six billion in investments over five years a billion for light duty vehicles four billion for medium and heavy so we're getting into the goods movement type area and one billion for school buses and infrastructure and i was really glad to see that for school buses um just an important message to kids and uh good one so that's what i wanted to highlight for you and then i am happy to take questions there is much more that california is doing there's also much more california could be doing and uh maybe in our dialogue we can get into some of that if you could wave a magic wand so we're not in the immediate political fight of the budget and the legislature right what are the barriers with our current um government structure do you think you've had long history of working with a lot of different agencies um i think one of the values is we have deep expertise within the agencies and you can't just reach a hold there's very different cultures but are there you know two or three things that you think that maybe california should be working on to achieve these um tremendously ambitious goals i didn't plant this question so okay um you know that's a good question um or do you think we're doing it's not worth you know basically things are moving along and life's not perfect i mean that's another well you know life is definitely not perfect and any human endeavor whether it's business government families schools i mean it's human endeavor so it's gonna have its foibles right and i actually think that our air resources board is doing a great job and i i feel like they there's lots you know anybody could complain about whatever process of a government but they they when i think about what you need to do to address the climate crisis number one you better understand it what's driving it what are the emissions that are causing it what are the sources so that's one of the core things that a rb does in the scoping plan is they update they do an analysis all right here's california's emissions profile these are where it's coming from so if we're if we are trying to achieve a 50 reduction or a 60 we better be targeting this now when you look at where are the emissions coming from they're coming from transportation that's the highest amount our while i am 100 supportive of our electricity goals in moving to um to fully to non-carbon to fully renewable electricity our electricity is the least worry to be perfectly blunt of in our of our carbon profile so in other words if i for example if you're a homeowner right now i would tell you get rid of your gas appliances before you put solar in your roof why if you hadn't got solar already the reason is because our electricity that's coming into your house already is pretty much solar not 100 but close enough it's got a very low carbon coefficient but your water heater your stove and your uh your home heater are all gas and there's where your carbon is that's your carbon in the household in california by and large so but you think about how do you change that and every individual either homeowner or building owner making those changes that's those are it's easier in a way to uh to fix the big generation of electricity even if we really have to get at this you know this other thing um so it's partly just the number of actors that you have in order to affect the change and then you take the same thing about transportation you've got all these vehicles out there huge number of vehicles and how is it that i mean most of us don't i mean we might love a new vehicle but most of us will keep our vehicle for a good number of years before we switch it out so you know how fast are people going to switch over to an ev and will they switch to the ev if they don't feel like it's easy just right there to charge it at home or if they feel like you know there's a lot of misperception about most of us don't drive that far we really an ev with a hundred mile range is more than enough for us but of course now today on the market there's evs with way longer range so all these range anxieties are really um not needed but that's hard still to get a consumer to really embrace so a lot of this is just um trying to get at how how how do we make the big changes and yet still support all the individual actors meaning you know the people in their homes or the vehicle owner or whatever to also make the changes in order to affect it and that's not easy right but we're i think ARB is doing a good is doing a good job with always like any of us always room for improvement i would say the thing that and these are um you know this this horse got out of the wagon a long time ago uh but california is the reason our transportation emissions are so high yes because our vehicles are dependent on fossil fuels but because our land use policies encouraged long drives meaning encouraged growth of VMT rather than non-growth and when i say that i mean you look at the the typical land use policy up and down california housing is segregated from jobs and segregated from services so you have to take kids to school you have to go to work you have to get you know buy groceries or whatever you know other than now the switch to online you had to drive all different places and you had to drive far and by not building housing and for 40 years we pretty much did not build enough housing we we pushed housing further and further away from job centers which of course made you dependent on your car that much more and so you know the fossil fuel vehicles never that great but the fossil fuel vehicle where you only have to drive six miles compared to the fossil fuel vehicle where you have to drive round trip 125 each day that's a big difference in terms of emissions so land use policies and housing policies are two very very core reasons why california has high emissions in the transportation sector and those we're working on changing those they aren't necessarily arbs per view but there's enough of us in the legislature who are understanding it we're pushing it but local governments are not always amenable thank you so much for being here senator skinner it's an honor i have a question about something you mentioned about median and heavy vehicles you mentioned the problems you have to be carbonizing them and you also mentioned your interest in hydrogen live as the 1075 but i'm also interested in what do you think the rule of renewable natural gas is in this landscape of medium and heavy beauty vehicles given that you know by utilizing this renewable natural gas it would also be reducing short-lived forest service like methane that you will also mentioned um and given that california is also very interested in installing any rocket digest there's some theories um so just your perspective on hydrogen and renewable natural right well i clearly as i described i clearly think we you know we need to use every tool in the toolbox i think that we should be utilizing um renewable natural gas and hydrogen the concern about um the renewable natural gas is there's fears by um on the one hand we have a great infrastructure already pipes and and everything to move that kind of stuff around to get it where we need it however the fear is that you know how much can we actually produce of renewable and and are we just prolonging the use of natural gas if we in effect integrate those sources and i think that's one of those questions where i feel like as long as we have clear enough goals to move off of the fossil fuel natural gas we should not be limiting the thing that can be utilized right away to replace it it just you have to have those belts and suspenders on everything but it's been an area that's been a little bit stuck i think for some people i see a question in the chat of who might have the responsibility for developing cool building standards that's the energy commission and uh those are needed and i'm glad that diane mentioned them because they not only would help us all of us be more comfortable in those horrible heat waves they would contribute less that um my real mentor brilliant brilliant man art rosenfeldt who um was really the founder of all of california's efficiency policies he and steven chou who was uh head of doe and obama they did a brilliant research that showed that just applying cool roof and other cool community strategies not only help you know the quality of life but it would hugely reduce emissions because it would reduce our demand of air conditioning and other things so it had it was a and diane probably can cite the data on it better than i but i've been disappointed that california has not been more aggressive in that area but it's the california energy commission who has that response one more quick question it is needed to be more aggressive if you ever want thoughts hi there senator skinner first thanks so much for taking time to talk to us today um so my question is on uh california's outlook on carbon offsets specifically um in terms of both the offsets on the compliance market um so you know those that are contained within the in the capricade system and then also um you know over the past couple years we've seen the voluntary carbon offset markets grow quite significantly um it seems like especially with california's commitments to increase carbon removal and in other forms of sequestration these offset markets are going to be very important um but could you talk to your sort of outlook on how you think these markets will best develop in what california's role um in in uh in helping them develop will be of the next sort of decade so i'm not sure if i caught everything um it was around offsets but yeah i was having a little hard time hearing maybe you could just say so in in essence you want to know what specific thing about um the offsets um just how you see the role of offsets developing in california's capricade um system you know right now they're right they can be four percent of of uh utilities uh emissions scoring right and then also if you could touch on uh how california views regulating the voluntary carbon offset markets um right um i did a bill last year to so there's a trend right now a lot of companies in trying to be responsive to the climate crisis are indicating that they're going to be you know 100 carbon neutral by certain you know date and or the intention to go carbon neutral and to do that for many of them they're going to need offsets and so there's the potential and there already is a private sector market around offsets but i wanted to make sure that there were standards and quality offsets that when a company made an investment that they you know you could have some integrity for the quality of those offsets so i did a bill last year in that area asking arb to set those to set up such standards um now california's there's been criticism around our both use of offsets that they haven't been the type of quality that people were hoping um i have not really looked into that in detail recently so i can't quite answer that though i feel that there's also been a a strong feeling that california should only invest in offsets that benefit californians are so more immediate to california and part of that is around the issues of environmental justice that we have so many communities that have had to bear the burden of the environmental damage and environmental pollutants more than other communities and that one the i am not opposed to that but when i was a when i used to work internationally as the head of this program called cities for climate protection i was struck so this i'll end with this little analogy so i had a couple of small cities from sweden in my project and one of the cities i'm going to forget its name it's very small community maybe 12 000 people and they decided they were going to go 100 fossil free and they so they used biomass they used i mean they were they were very very creative and very brilliant and they pulled it off and but they spent a lot of money their their cost per capita was very high and they were presenting what they had done to one of our workshops where we had city representatives from south africa from india from various countries and the south africans stood up and they were aghast they said it's lovely that you've done this now you are now you've reduced this amount of carbon at this cost if you had given us that same amount of money we could have 10 times reduced the carbon in our community than what you did and so in effect they were arguing for you you know offsets and such where and it was a very interesting discussion because i had not thought of it in that context and given that this is a global crisis we should be thinking about where we make our investments to get the biggest reductions because the atmosphere is global but i also think equity is an important factor to it's equity to do that but it's also equity to reinvest in communities that have suffered the the most significant brunt of your environmental problems great with that said thank you so much senators skinner for that rapid grand tour of climate and energy policy here in california and i think i'd speak for everybody here online thank you for your role in making it all happen as both citizens and analysts thank you very much for joining us you're welcome and diane's been a great contributor to all of this also she deserves uh equal thanks


Tom here from Learn Systems and we're going to dive into how storage works in XCPNG. Now this is being recorded here in October of 2022. And I'll be talking about, well, in the future when there will be some changes coming to the way the storage system works. So this is the current implementation, but I will also leave some articles linked down below to talking about the future and the future things they're going to be doing with XCPNG. And maybe you're watching it in the future when some of these things I talk about, well, have changed a little bit. So kind of keep up with their blog and check it. For now, this is how storage works. It'll work very similar in the future. It'll just be better and faster. We're going to keep today's video narrowed in scope to having your resource pool with shared storage and local storage and what that means and how you migrate between them. I won't be diving into some of the really esoteric details of things like how you set up SEP and Gluster. Those are available, but those are a little out of scope of the topic, but we'll be talking about the different storage types supported overall. And of course, referencing all their documentation and that's already linked down below before we get into details of this video. Let's first, are you an individual or company looking for support on a network engineering storage or virtualization project? Is your company or internal IT team looking for someone to proactively monitor your system security or offer strategic guidance to keep your IT systems operating smoothly? Not only would we love to help consulting your project, we also offer fully managed or co-managed IT service plans for businesses in need of IT administration or IT teams in need of additional support. With our expert install team, we can also assist you with all of your structure cabling and Wi-Fi planning projects. If any of this piques your interest, fill out our Hire Us form at laurancesystems.com so we can start crafting a solution that works for you. If you're not interested in hiring us, but you're looking for other ways you want to support this channel, there's affiliate links down below to get you deals and discounts on products and services we talk about on this channel. And now back to our content. Now, this is the article I was mentioning. I really recommend taking the time to read this. It'll give you a good understanding of where they are with the current storage implementation and where they're going in the future. This was written in June of 2022, but it's a great read to kind of understand some of the history of, you know, the 2008 version of storage versus the 2022 and beyond storage of how things are changing and how things are going forward. It's a good write up. A lot of details in here. Their blogs are actually very insightful just to understand some of the complexities of virtualization and specifically this one about how drives are handled. Now to jump right over to the storage types, this is really important to think about when you're designing storages, where's it going to live? How many hosts are in a resource pool? A resource pool is a grouping together of different Zen hosts, and that allows you to migrate the different virtual machines between the different hosts. And this is common in your enterprise world where you have two or more, sometimes as many as 64 hosts in a resource pool. And we can simply migrate the virtual machines between them. But how they migrate will change based on whether it is a local storage or a shared storage medium. Now just to keep it simple, we're only going to talk about NFS and iSCSI now. Those are the ones that are natively built in when you set this up. You have to load extra drivers, which of course this is all in the documentation if you want to do something more such as setting up the ZFS for local storage, XFS, GlusterFS, ZFS, ZFS. That's a little bit hard to say. That's all in here on different ways you enable those if you want to use those. So out of scope of this video, but it is in the manual, but the menus are essentially going to be the same for setting this up. Now let's talk about how things look in the pool. So we have two hosts in my pool, Ryzen one, Ryzen two, really simple naming. Both of these have local storage. Now XC PNG is set up to boot off of these devices, which are just a simple mirror of MVMEs for the hardware and specs and everything else. That video is linked down below for the servers. But because of that video, I figured, hey, I'd explain how the storage works. So things that are running on local storage besides XC PNG itself, the extra leftover from the partition goes to a local storage that you can set up either as EXT or LVM. I'm partial to setting them up as EXT volumes. It keeps them as easy files to manage. If you're more familiar with LVM or don't have a problem with LVM, you can do it that way and manage it. But with EXT, they're thin provisioned and it works really well. That being said, when you have a VM only on the local storage, it can only start on that particular host. Now you can migrate, you can live migrate and we can demo that between these. You can migrate storage between these, but if you started the server on Ryzen one, you have to do a full migration to this Ryzen two host in order to get it set up. And that's going to require the VM and it can be done live, as I said, but to copy the entirety of the storage over, which may take several minutes or longer, depending on the speed and the interconnect you have between these hosts. Now, when you have a NAS or SAN storage, when the virtual machine lives on the NAS or SAN, it is really easy to move it between the host, because the only thing that has to be migrated is the memory between there. This is one of the advantages of the shared storage and also a prerequisite for HA in order for the HA to figure out which host it needs to start up on because when you have three or more, you can put these in a HA mode. You have it talking to the storage. If one of those host dies that happens to be running VMs that you have enabled the HA mode on, then you would say start that VM on one of the remaining hosts. It would not be able to do that if the host dies and the local storage dies with it. So it does have to live on the NAS or SAN storage. Now you can connect multiple NAS and SAN storage devices. It's as easy and walk through this as when we connect these, you're able to connect them and then keep connecting more of them as needed. There's not really, well, there's a limit of how many you can connect overall, but you can connect quite a few before you're going to hit any of those really large upper limits for just how many different storage devices you can have. And they can be added and removed dynamically. So we'll talk about how to add these shared storage devices. Now for the way my NAS and SAN system is set up, I currently only have one. So we'll be adding a second one as part of the demo, but they have both. And this is because I'm running a TrueNAS system. The TrueNAS system presents as iSCSI and has presented as NFS. And you can mix and match between them and you can migrate between them on the shared server. So it's a single connection to a single device in terms of the hardware, but you can migrate between the two different storages that are presented between there. So let's talk about how that works and talk about the functional parts of that. Now we'll start here with storage to show what storage is currently attached to the system. We have this called Trinity. Trinity is just the name I gave my TrueNAS. So we have the pool of ISOs that we have on there. We have the production NFS share. And we have the Trinity SCSI that I set up. And I guess it is production. Technically, I just didn't add the word production. You can rename these dynamically. Like that. ION, well, let's spell check. There we go. Production and naming them doesn't make any difference because everything on the back end is handled by these UUIDs. This allows you to dynamically change tag. We want to add another tag to there for filtering any of the storage devices and XCPNG without affecting anything that's currently running on it. For example, I have gray log running on this one right here. So no changes happen when you change name. That's just all for your presentation on the back end. Nothing has to start or stop to make that change happen. This currently lives and we'll look at the disc on that Trinity production NFS and everything's kind of clickable here through the storage. So we can pivot back over here to the storage. We can look at these stats. We can look at all the discs that are on there for all the other things running. But we're going to focus on our Ubuntu 2020 2004 storage demo. And let's go ahead and start that up. Now, if I just hit start, it's going to pick the host with the least amount of resources because this is on the shared storage, the NFS storage, it will look at the two hosts that are available. Or if you have more than two and go, all right, this one looks like the one best to start that on also under advanced. You can actually tell it to start under a particular host if you want. But as I said, it's shared storage so it can go on to either one. So we'll go ahead and let this start up. All right, this VM is up and running. And because it's on the shared storage, we'll talk about how it can be migrated. So I just ran bash top down here at the bottom so you can see it's alive and I'm not restarting it. And we're to say, let's move this to the other Zen server. So we'll choose it rise in one. Currently, you see up at the top here, it's on rise in two. And we hit OK. And it's going to take only a few seconds to move over because we don't have to deal with the storage migration. And now it's already moved over. As I said, literally a few seconds, it's now on the other system. You get the refresh to console when it switches. Nothing you have to do to the VM, it's still running. It's now on the other system. Now, the next thing we can do is move to another shared storage. So this is the NFS. And from here, we can migrate it this way or we can just say migrate this particular VDI. So we'll choose this and we're going to go over here to the Trinity scuzzy. So destination SR hit OK. And now it's going to take probably just a couple of minutes and it'll migrate this completely live. I don't have this restart or shut down the VM. I can now migrate these to a new storage. Now, this is really advantageous when you have production systems and you want to add another sand or another nasty to the pool without having to shut anything down. This is really handy for setting up when I have a migration of a customer has a really old servers, they have some old storage devices. And well, we would like to get them off of those, but we don't really want to shut anything down. Well, you can add these in addition to the systems and then migrate them live over also a new shared storage. But let's talk about even live in production here, adding another storage server. And what does that look like? So we're going to go over here to new storage and then select the host. Now, this is where sometimes people get a little bit confused. It looks like I'm selecting either this one or that one because I am, but it doesn't matter which one I attach it to in the name of a shared storage. So if we type in Synology, because this is going to be a Synology Storage Test. Give it a description. What kind of connection is it going to be? I scuzzy, I scuzzy shared. Now, if I were to choose something like these, they would be local and it would matter which one I choose. It would only search locally on that device. But because I'm choosing a shared storage, such as the ice because he it'll actually attach to both of these. So if we put in the IP address, query it, go ahead and have it select. It's going to think it's going to query it real quick here. It doesn't take too long. It's going to depend on your setup. It recognizes there's a hundred gigs analogy option here. All right, we're going to hit create. Let it create that new connection. So we've just added a new storage device, shared one to our resource pull with our servers in it. And I think this one's probably a way to those finishes creating. All right, now that's created, shows it available. There's no disk on it. Let's go back over here. This VM, which is still running. But as we look, the disk are now migrated over to the Trinity scuzzy production. Let's migrate it again. We can move it over to that new Synology right here. So there's our Synology Storage Test, hit OK. And now it's migrating over there. This is the advantage that they have for the way the storage is very dynamic within here of I can just migrate it to any location. Well, unless there's a problem actually in sufficient space. That's a that's a pretty fair error. And this is where you may run into some problems because this particular VM doesn't have enough space because there's a snapshot probably attached to it so that I deleted earlier. So let me provision that with a little bit more space real quick and continue the demo. And while I'm here, all you have to do is increase this total capacity is now 300 gig hit save, switch back over, and we instantly have the availability now of 299 gig. So now I have enough to continue that test. I'm going to leave this in the video because I said, Hey, why not? This is a interesting learning lesson when you don't have enough space. What happens? Does it all come crashing down? No, you just get an error message, you go and increase the storage and we can kick off the migration process again. And by the way, we didn't damage our running VM. So we didn't mess up anything that was in operation while it's doing this. So this is going to take a couple of minutes to move this over. We'll fast forward through this. So you don't have to wait. Now, one of the things I want to point out while it's migrating is it looks duplicated because in some ways it is. One downside of using ice because he is that it is not then provision. So it has to have the entirety of each time there's a copy of the VM in there. This can lead to a lot of storage. And when it's doing the copy, it has to have a base copy. It has to then have anything related to figure out the live running data and then keep copying that live running data as it migrates the base data. This can be, well, a little bit better explained by diving deeper into some of their write ups they have. But overall, this is the process by which the migration takes and why, even though it's a 60 gig VM, it requires more than the 60 gigs to do the migration. So it needed 120 while it's doing the migration, but then it'll actually reduce down once this migration is complete in about 58 seconds. Okay. The migration is complete. It's already coalesced one of them. There's one left to coalesce. So if you look at general, we're still using it says two X disk, but once these coalesce down, there won't be any other ones used. So we'll just give this a few minutes. But in the meantime, let's jump back over here and look at the server, which of course we've now moved between three different storage locations and it's still working perfectly fine. This is, like I said, the flexibility you get with the Zen storage. It treats all the different storage repositories, all the shared ones, even of different types and allows you to uniformly move these between any of the different storage, even from thin provision to thick provision and back again, without having to shut down the VM. This makes, as I said, migrations and moving things around a lot easier. Now, one more thing we can do, and let's see if this completed, let's go back over to the disk. Did it finally coalesce? Not yet. It'll coalesce over time. Coalescence is an entirely different topic that I highly recommend understanding and taking the time to read. They have a good article that I'll leave linked on how coalescence works when you're dealing with multiples of storage. And especially when you start having a lot of snapshots, which could lead to a coalescing error. It's some nice technical details go on the back end. But one last thing I want to show how storage works is what happens when you move things to a local storage. So we're going to go over here to the desk. We'll click migrate VDI and it's running on Ryzen one, which means we can migrate it to Ryzen one local storage. And let's see what happens. So now it's going to migrate. And we're pulling it off of there and moving into local. So got about two minutes left. It's going to go to the local storage on that particular system. Now, once we do this, I am going to lose the ability to migrate quickly between the two hosts. And the reason for that is once the storage becomes somewhere local, it can't start because you can't start the local storage from one host, but start the VM on another host. Someone may point out there's a tool out there that allows for some of this where you build shares across hosts. This is completely not an officially supported methodology. But yes, I'm aware of its existence. It's called HA lizard. If you want to look it up where you can build hosts that actually have replicated storage between each other on there. It's an interesting thing. It's not what I would recommend. And it's not something I would use in the enterprise, but for those of you in the home lab would like to use it. Hey, have at it. It's certainly fun playing with all these things and learning how they work. But you can see it moves quite fast to the MVMEs because, well, plenty of right speed on those. So it just read and moved in the time it took me to talk to over to the local storage on here. So it's finishing a couple of little details and some cleanup. And now we got to see it jump in real time to tell me it's now on the other storage. And of course, all this was done without the VM even being shut down. Pretty simple. How all of that works. You're able just to migrate these dynamically between the different locations. This is also good and can be built into automation where you can move and migrate multiple machines at once and do the migration. This can be coordinated for doing things like rolling updates with their enterprise versions. So if you're updating a series of the hosts when there's package updates and they're going to have to restarted, you can actually migrate all of these and build automation around that. So there's some real advanced functions, but it all starts with this base functionality of being able to dynamically move the storage to different locations. Now, of course, we're going to go ahead and if we stop this VM, we're going to stop it right here. And when we start it, there's no way to start on. It should give me a funny error if I do this because the storage currently is, and we'll look at the disk, so it's on the rise in one storage. We're going to go ahead and start on rise in two and see what kind of error message we get. And this is a little bit vague here, but VM requires SR and it's saying it's requiring that storage repository that's not available to it. That's essentially, this is an XCPNG year. Yes. It is Zen server XCPNG year. So we're going to go ahead and go back. And if we just hit start or start on, if you want to choose it, the rise in one. So even though that's there to start on the other one, it won't actually let you do it. So you, when we hit start, it's going to automatically start on the place where it's local storage is accessed. It's pretty simple to figure out where it lives because well, just hit start. It'll start where it's supposed to by default. Just don't try to get fancy with it, even though those options aren't grayed out on there. Now, as far as adding these storages or removing them, and we can actually go back over here, look at storage and because I didn't tag it with anything, it's not filtered. Now this has nothing on it. If you want to get rid of a storage like this, Synology storage test, we've migrated all the disc off of it. First, we want to disconnect from all hosts. Doing this will clear any connections those hosts have to this and break those connections. Once those connections are broken, then we can do the forget hosts and they can be forgotten, or we can go back and connect to all hosts. And this is an important feature being able to go back and forth and do these. And this is where sometimes people just go to the forget and sometimes it will hang because there's things going on there. So you do want to make sure you do the disconnect from all hosts. Or if you need to connect to all hosts, when there's a problem with it, especially when a storage was offline, when one of the hosts was started, it may be connected to only one of the hosts to pull, but not all of the hosts to pull. So these buttons, you can do them while there's VMs living on there. The last thing I want to talk about is maintenance mode. This is a really neat feature. And for that mode, we just click enable maintenance mode. Maintenance mode allows you to take these offline and put them online. And it actually, you know, puts this little tag right here maintenance mode. What it's doing, though, is looking for any VMs that are on here and it'll warn you and can shut them all down. That way none of them are running. So if you have to do an update to my Synology or an update to a Shurnass, I can just click on maintenance mode. It powers down all of those virtual machines. Then I can process all of my updates and when I'm done. You take it back out of maintenance mode. Let's actually go over here to my storage and show you what it looks like on a lab one, because I don't want to click this on production. If I click something accidentally, here's my lab. And there's a lot of disks in our lab, but not all of them are running. Some are in running states, some are in stop states. But if we go here to maintenance mode and we hit enable maintenance mode, it lets me know that these two virtual machines are going to be shut down and in maintenance mode. And when you take it out of maintenance mode, it will start those ones back up. Also, while in maintenance mode, it won't allow any other changes to be made to the storage repository until it's taken out of maintenance mode. Pretty handy little feature when you have to do updates. It makes storage a lot easier for managing an enterprise. So last piece we're going to do, go back over to this Synology, because this is how I clean things up when I'm done. We're going to go to that disconnect all hosts, like I said, let it disconnect. And then we're just going to tell it to forget this storage repository. And then I don't have to think about it again until I do my next demo, because well, this is just a demo system. We keep set up for testing purposes. Are you sure you want to get rid of it? Yep. And it's gone and that's it. So hopefully this gives you a better understanding of how storage works in XP and G. Leave your thoughts and comments down below or head over to my forums for more in-depth discussion or spend some time in their forums. I really recommend going through and spend some time reading. You can learn a lot about how storage works just in general, but they have a lot of really cool write-ups in their blog. And of course, just all the different back and forth in their forums is very enlightening to get deeper understandings of how all this works, not just with Zen server, but it gives you some ideas just how complicated and how interesting storage is when you have everything virtualized. All right. And thanks. And thank you for making it all the way to the end of this video. If you've enjoyed the content, please give us a thumbs up. If you would like to see more content from this channel, hit the subscribe button and the bell icon. If you'd like to hire a short project, head over to LauntSystems.com. And click the hires button right at the top. To help this channel out in other ways, there's a join button here for YouTube and a Patreon page where your support is greatly appreciated. For deals, discounts, and offers, check out our affiliate links in the description of all of our videos, including a link to our shirt store where we have a wide variety of shirts that we sell and designs come out well randomly. So check back frequently. And finally, our forums. Forums.LauntSystems.com is where you can have a more in-depth discussion about this video and other tech topics covered on this channel. Thanks again for watching and look forward to hearing from you.


Alright, so I'm going to have a little bit of time at the end for some questions. Seattle RB folks, we got some guys up here. Any other Seattle RB folks?  That's good. So at the question time, I'd actually also like to invite any of the Seattle RB folks if they have their opinions also to share them as well. So before I begin, I would actually like to say thank you to Ben and Karen and Jonan for the tremendous effort that they've done to put this together. Thank you guys so much for taking the financial risk to put it together. I also want to thank the Seattle Ruby Brigade who made my club viable when possible. Thank you guys for the over a dozen years that you guys have been doing the work that you do. Really appreciate it. So in particular I want to thank also Ryan and Eric and Aja. These three in particular are supportive and gave me the tools and everything to succeed in my club. They've always been so welcoming. Also there was this one other guy who attends there. I've tried to talk to him over the years, but whenever I see him he just runs away. So I don't know, I think it's because he's kind of shy. Yeah, he's definitely shy. By the way, Erin, when I was putting these slides together I found you with this huge skillet. What on earth are you cooking that thing? Anyway so my name is Miles Forrest and this presentation started as a lightning talk back in RailsConf in Portland. Did anybody see that lightning talk? Okay, a couple people.  So when I gave the talk I'm going like ridiculously fast so that was the reason why. So this talk that I'm giving is actually the talk that I wanted to give. Unfortunately for those of you who've seen that other talk I'm not really funny so I'm going to reuse some of the jokes that I had so I'm sorry about that. So earlier this year Ryan Davis gave a talk at Mountain S RubyConf which I think is the definitive talk frankly on building a successful Ruby Brigade. It's entitled NerdParty version 3.1 and if you go to bit.ly slash nerdparty 3.1 it'll take you to the conference talk on that. Frankly I think if you have any work to do to get done during the conference just go ahead and do that right now and then later go back and watch this talk. Ryan's insights are excellent and very insightful and that's where I direct people when they want to learn how to run a Ruby Brigade or any technical club for that matter. So a quick show of hands, how many of you attend any sort of Ruby Brigade? Okay and out of those folks how many of you help out in any small way can you stand up please? Can you stand up? Those of you who in any small way run or help out. Can we give these guys applause? If you see these people during the conference I'm serious go and thank them because doing this sort of thing can be a bit difficult and it can be a bit thankless but really it's the Ruby Brigades that have a lot to do with our culture. How many of you live in rural areas?  So yeah there's a few. How many of you don't like your local Ruby Brigade and don't go out to it? Eric back there. Anyway I want to start with a story before I jump into my talk. So in World War 2 the Allies relied heavily on bombing the enemy to try and turn the tide of the war. However they were losing a lot of planes from ground fire and from air combat. When many of the planes returned they were often shot up so badly that it was a wonder they could fly at all. We need to reinforce these planes with armor, said the leaders in charge. But the engineers had a problem. If we put too much armor on them then the planes will either be too heavy to fly or they'll burn too much fuel to be able to make the trip. So there was this massive mathematician named Abraham Wald who was asked to catalogue where all the bullet holes had torn through the planes. He produced a diagram that reflects something similar to this. The plane on the left represented the undamaged plane and the plane on the right showed where the planes were taking most of the damage. So the superior said ah we need to reinforce the wings and the nose and the tail because that's where the damage is occurring. As everyone nodded in agreement at the obviously sage display of wisdom from their superiors a lone voice spoke up. Sir said Wald. I'd reinforce the areas where there are no bullets. What? They said incredulously. But that's where all the damage is. But sir said Wald. These are the planes that came back. So as the obviousness of Wald's observation sunk in the engineers began the task of reinforcing the planes. So there is a lesson to be learned here. Sometimes it's not about reinforcing the problem areas. Sometimes it's about reinforcing the things that we need to protect the most. So I want to come back to that point later but first let's talk about Ruby and Ruby on Rails. We are extremely blessed to have a rich and vibrant choice of conferences that you can attend. You've got big multi-track events like RailsConf and RubyConf to smaller regional conferences like this one and they all work to support the community and that is awesome. But the real strength of our community lies at the local level or what we like to call our gates. Other names include Ruby user groups or rugs or nerd club or geekouts or whatever. It doesn't matter really what you call it. This is where people get together in person to help each other. You want to learn to code? Need help hacking on a project? Do you dream of earning a living, running your own business, living the life of a digital Bedouin where you can work where you want or when you want and for who you want? So I just want to stop my talk here for a second and let you on an awesome Ruby Brigade club hack. Be nice to sponsors. Mention them in your talks and do things like retweet their tweets during conferences. In fact if everyone could go to bit.ly Cascadia sponsors and download there's a little text file, a little gist file. It's a list of the conference sponsors here at Cascadia. I'm personally keeping a running tally of how many times I've retweeted the sponsors tweet so by the end of the conference I will have retweeted every company at least once. Now why do this? See companies are cool. They have these things called marketing budgets. Which means folks like you and me can get stuff for free. So the gist is just a text file and anyway so let's go back to the talk here. Ruby Brigades exists to help you and more importantly for you to help others. But there's a big problem with Ruby Brigades right now.  But me I don't live near a big city. The nearest city for me is in Vancouver British Columbia which is 90 minutes away. I live in Chilliwack British Columbia which is a little town way out in the sticks and yes it's as po-dunk as it sounds. But hey Chilliwack we have all kinds of resources for aspiring web developers like cows and corn. So undeterred I decided to be positive and take the advice of Seth Godin that the way to get unstuck is to start down the wrong path right now. So when I was going to start my very own Ruby Brigade I went in and boy did I ever go down some wrong paths. I tried to build a group three times but no matter how much work and planning I did it just kept failing and failing and failing and that made me sad because you know you put all this effort in and nobody shows up. So there was no hope of me being in a Ruby Brigade anywhere near me. So in desperation I decided that after work I would leave immediately at 4 p.m. and drive well over 200 kilometers from Chilliwack British Columbia across the border into the United States and into Washington State. Drive all the way to Seattle to the Seattle Ruby Brigade and who meets every Tuesday night at 7 p.m. in Capitol Hill District in the best coffee shop, Vivachi. I'd stay there for a couple hours. I'd pretend that I was a local. I would barely talk to anyone. And then it was all over and I would drive all the way back. Now I know this seems crazy and I suppose it is but at the time the Ruby community in Vancouver was languishing. Yes, the internet was there and that's, you know, that works if you know what questions to ask but can anybody relate to the fact that sometimes you don't know the questions to ask? Can anybody relate to that? Yeah, yeah exactly. There's a lot of you I know because I've talked to many and in fact I've talked to hundreds of people over the last six or seven years that this is the case. So not only do you need to know what the right questions are to ask, you really need to know how to ask them the right way on the internet. And heaven helped the poor soul that doesn't do that right. But I was struggling so much I didn't even know what to do so the cool thing is those crazy trips turned everything around for me and made all the difference. The Seattle Ruby Brigade was the first Ruby group in the world. For over a decade these folks have created and maintained over 350 projects from just 19 people. Every single one of us in this room rely on the work that they do. We literally own our livelihoods to these men and women. Who here is from the Seattle Ruby Brigade? Stand up guys, come on, let everybody see you. It's Aaron, even you. I love how only two people stood. So the first few months that I attended Seattle RB, I hardly talked to anyone but then I finally mustered up the courage and I talked to Ryan Davis. Yes, that's right, Zen Spider, a man who loves to hurt code because people are terrified of this guy. But it turns out that Ryan actually is a heck of a nice guy. He offered on more than one occasion for me to let me crash at his place. And if I was too tired to drive home, you said, yeah, I just crashed in my place. I told Ryan about my three failed attempts to start a group. So he shared with me the secret of Seattle RB. And it worked. I started what was called the Fraser Valley Ruby Brigade on January 10th, 2009. And we specified instead of the city, we specified the region, which is east of Vancouver because the towns out in the valley are just too small to maintain a group. So we are in our sixth year as a Ruby Club. We're not that big. But for a rural club, we have over 80 members. We average three to five people out every single week hacking on projects. So now that we know it's possible to clone the Seattle Ruby Brigade, even in rural areas, I want to share with you what Ryan taught me. So now remember what I was saying earlier that the things that need protecting most? Oddly enough, the things that we think need reinforcing, like presentations or food or membership, those things actually really don't matter as much. What really, really matters to reinforce a club are three things. Number one, hack nights. Most clubs do focus on presentations, but those are a lot of work to prepare. If you're trying to build a Ruby Brigade, you seem to be endlessly chasing people to do a talk. With hack nights, only one person has to show up. There's no work, there's no pizzas, there's no incentives, you just hack on code. Also presentations can actually work against you. When you watch a presentation, generally people have sort of an arms cross consumption mentality, which leads to point number two, bring a project. If members are encouraged to bring a project they work on, the arms are now unfolded, and now we're talking about hands on the keyboard. People show up wanting to create something rather than consume what others have worked hard to prepare. This attention shift from being a consumer to a creator has an interesting side effect of repelling recruiters. People who are there to look for someone to build their next awesome idea. When people show up and they want to build the next Facebook or Google will help you with your project, but we're not going to do it for you. Number three, meet every week. If you want to be successful at a project and you aren't working at it at least once a week, your enthusiasm and your momentum on that project fades. If you want to start a Ruby Brigade especially in a rural area, or you want to start a different Ruby Brigade that maybe isn't meeting your particular needs just set aside two hours a week, once a week and that's it. No really, that's it. You can meet just about anywhere, a local coffee shop, someone's house, a high school, anywhere with free Wi-Fi. If you end up being the only one there after a week so what? You're there to hack on a project. So you're still there, you're still working pushing your idea forward and you never have to chase people down to put on a presentation or you don't have to chase people asking them to attend every week. The fact is people are busy. They have lives outside of Ruby and people will actually find comfort in the fact that they know of at least one person meeting in one location every week to geek out and hack on stuff. So when it's convenient for people to come they just show up and I'm amazed how many people come and they say oh I'm so sorry I haven't been here for weeks and we literally say dude it's totally fine we're here every week. So now we have folks, some will come like once every three months or sometimes they'll come for a spurt, they'll come for like three months straight and then they just stop coming and it's really fine. There's no guilt, there's no shame about it and the likelihood if you're showing up in one location hacking on a project the likelihood that you'll grow from one person into a full fledged club is actually very high. So also there's tons of perks running your own club. Remember earlier I talked about the free stuff from sponsors? Well for starters you don't have to buy books anymore all the major technical book publishers have user group programs so here's the library for the Fraser Valley Ruby Brigade, we have over 90 books, they're all paper, they're not e-books, this is actually the paper books, members in our club they come to me and they just simply ask can I get a copy of such and such book and I order it for them and it's free I live in Canada shipping anything in Canada is ridiculously expensive but I get all these free, the companies cover all that. There's no shipping costs at all. So how do you do this? How do you get free books? Just do a Google search for the book publishers name and user group program. And that's it generally all they ask you for is can somebody, either you or somebody in the club, can you write a review on Amazon? That's all they want. So you can start building a library, hey if it's just you a one man club and you can show on meetup.com or however you promote your group that you actually have people coming out, these companies are more than happy to give you free books. The biggest two publishers by the way that we use are O'Reilly and Pearson. So just O'Reilly user book program, Pearson user book program or user group program and that's all you need to do. Other free stuff that you can get includes things like swag and t-shirts and conference tickets and promotional cost. For example, our club happens to use meetup.com which seems to work well for us. We try different things but meetup.com works well. I asked a local company, well actually it's not even a local company, we're in Chellowac they're down in San Francisco. I asked them if they would be willing to pick up our meetup.com dues which are like 72 bucks twice a year. And all I do is have a little promotion of them. I talk about them in the club if they have something that's new. And they've been supporting us like four bucks for like half a decade now. So if there are any expenses that you incur for running a user group don't just reach for your wallet or your purse, just ask a company if they'll cover the cost for you in exchange for some sort of promotion or whatever it is that they ask, just ask them. So that's how you can clone the Seattle Ruby Brigade or the Fraser Valley Ruby Brigade or actually there's several other Ruby Brigades that are doing this model. If you need any help with anything that I've talked to you about today just hit me up on Twitter. If you're a company looking for someone to promote Ruby user groups and would be willing to pay me to do it full time for remote locations like some companies are doing, just hit me up as well. The beautiful part about the kind of job that I do is that not only are you building goodwill in the community but you get to meet everybody. You build relationships with people in the Ruby world. So when that company is looking to hire you can find potential hires without being this scummy recruiter. It's just a natural conversation.  So let's all continue to work to make the Ruby programming language community the best tech community on the planet and because I like to recycle my jokes here's my dog Bailey and one time he got a purse stuck around his neck. Is there any questions? Has anybody tried to start a group and it's either I know some of you are, I was talking to you at lunch, come on put a hand up. Yes, give me a question. No, no. No questions at all. Yes, it's actually not. Yes, I'm sorry. The question was when you are, let me see if I said this right, if you are there every week how hard is it to keep the momentum going? If you're the only one. Well, I would assume that most people who are getting into programming or something like that a lot of people have like this idea of burning in their gut. Something that they want to build something that's interesting. So if you're going to build that anyway just make that commitment.  If you're going to do that anyway as DHH a lot of times says stop watching TV and take that time that you would normally watch TV and work on a project. You can build stuff. He built base camp in 10 hours a week. So does that answer your question? No, it doesn't. No, let's dialogue here. What's sort of bugging you there? Oh, well don't do a communal space.  No, no. That's the point. You don't have to prepare anything. I used to have like a little paper thing. I had a little logo, Fraser Valley Rubricade. I would sit there I put it just on the coffee shop. People we use meetup.com. So some people with RSVP others didn't and because I'm going there anyway to work on a project when somebody shows up hey how you doing? Oh good. What are you working on? Oh I'm working on this. What are you working on? Oh really cool. Week after week it's very common where we don't even do any coding. We will talk about tech related things but because the focus is on projects as opposed to going out for beer or some other social thing it always ends up coming back to working on a project and because you're working on a project you don't have other people coming in hey can you build this for me? Hey can you build this for me? You just simply say well hey I'll help you build that. Why don't you get started? And people that aren't willing to do the work, they leave. Well that's what we want. Does that make sense? I don't think you're totally on the next question. Anybody else got a question or concern? No? Yes. By the way how close are you to Myrtle Creek? No I5 if you go down I5 you said Central Oregon. So halfway in there is a little place called Myrtle Creek. Are you anywhere near there at all? No? Okay. Oh you're on the other side of the mountains. Okay. If anybody happens to be near there I'm going to visit a friend who appeared about a year ago. You would all know the name. I'm not going to say his name but I'm going to visit him tomorrow and see how he's doing. And he lives near Myrtle Creek. Any other questions? Yes. Of course you do. Let's go back to the question that I awkwardly didn't answer properly. Go ahead. Brian. So to summarize he was answering the very first question and he said don't worry about it. Actually now Brian is amazing Brian you graduated from where? No. No no no no. You were valedictorian at where? The guy was like an art major. He graduated valedictorian and decided I don't want to do this. And he drove from like I mentioned not wanting to go to Vancouver. He lives in downtown Vancouver. So he would drive all the way to our club because the Vancouver scene was dead and he would come visit us. We got him interested in Ruby. I hooked him up with one of the members of our club which is Dan Cubb. He's the maintainer or data mapper and they got talking and now you're working at where? Unbounce. Unbounce. You guys looking to hire anybody? Always go talk to the guys if you want to go work in downtown Vancouver at Unbounce. So I got just a couple minutes here on the end. I wanted to kind of run an idea by you guys. You know the whole idea of RB or Ruby Brigade came from the fact that you've got .rb. Who made that up? Was it Ryan or you Eric? No? Probably Ryan. So I have this sort of thing when you talk about a Ruby Brigade.  So I've been checking around all these things like Ruby Bratz or Boneheads or I don't know. I could never think about something. So we all know what a hashtag is.  Like if you're at this conference today you're working on something RB hash. I'm over at whatever and that kind of opens the door to anybody who wants to come and sit down with you. Are you all familiar with the Dreyfus model? Has anybody not seen this? Alright great so most people have seen this. The Dreyfus model could even actually kind of map to this where you could say you know I'm working on such and such project RB hash which means you see yourself as an expert or a master as opposed to RB1 or something. And the other reason I kind of like this is because then you can talk like a pirate. What? I didn't hear you sorry. You can have lots of fun. Help me RB1. But the other thing is RB hash in on code. So I don't know what do you think? For those of you who are it's just kind of an idea I don't know. The idea is to try and get individuals who need help because I remember coming to these conferences and not knowing anybody but wanting to get help and so you put the Cascadia hash tag and I'm sitting in such and such working on stuff. If I threw something like RB hash or RB hash 1 then it kind of gets an indication to people. So what do you think about it? If you think it's a cruddy idea too bad but that's the end of it.