[Cello Music] What is energy?

Yeah.

Good question.

It's the thing that powers our lives.

So everything that we do uses energy.

You know, from our smartphones to our computers to the lights to when we heat and cool our house.

All the transportation we use our cars or the trains, planes, and ships that deliver our goods.

Even this TV program, it's all powered by energy.

The problem with energy, energy is taught as something that exists in the physics lab.

To me, energy is about everything.

When I'm washing dishes, I'm thinking about energy.

I'm thinking about energy 24/7.

Hot water cleans better than cold water.

Why?

It's got more energy.

Scrubbing off the food particles, well, that's physical energy.

The soap as an emulsifier is chemical energy, and it certainly exists to run our economy.

Our economy is totally dependent upon energy in ways that people barely recognize.

It's so essential and it's a huge part of our daily lives.

It's the biggest industry in the world.

When you think of oil, natural gas, electricity, all of those combined, it is the biggest industry in the world, so it kinda touches everything that we do.

During my lifetime, we've increased the energy use in the world by 8 times.

From 1300 to 1750, half of all economic activity was to get the energy to run the other half of the economy.

And some people, kings and dukes, were rich, but most people were dirt poor.

I mean, you invest one and get back two.

Coal came along and you got moved up to 5 to 1, and then oil came along and you moved up to 20 to 1 and we became rich.

Most people didn't have to do drudge labor to get the energy to run the rest of society.

I mean, a guy sits in an air conditioned tractor listening to his favorite music and being computer guided and makes enough food for 10,000 people.

What a difference oil has made.

We are so rich and so powerful and so bloody arrogant because our muscles are so much bigger with oil.

We live on a planet which has greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

We are grateful to those greenhouse gases because they keep the temperature of the planet at a level which supports life as we know it.

Extracting, processing, and combusting fossil fuels is increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

And what this does is simply increase the capacity of our atmosphere to retain heat.

Yes.

So when we look at sustainability in terms of energy, we can see finite resources such as coal, such as oil that we're using up, and these resources are depleting.

But it's not just about the fact that they're not gonna be there forever It's also that these resources tend to have health and well-being impacts, causing climate change as well as local pollution.

So when I say climate change, what's the first thing that comes to mind?

Existential panic.

Well, it's the biggest news that humanity has to face right now.

Water scarcity, extreme weather events, foreboding for the future.

A looming reality that we should definitely pay attention to.

It's like hell on earth here in the Rogue Valley.

I mean, when that thick smoke comes in, it's like you literally can't go outside to be safe.

It evokes a lot of big emotions in me.

It's scary.

I think that's just like my initial knee jerk reaction is to say that I find it to be very scary.

It feels like, you know, I'm I'm compromising all the time.

We should be cooperating to confront the issue and give up on a blunder that we didn't know was a blunder running all these engines.

It's gonna have to be a transition to renewable energy, solar power, wind power.

We have tremendous potential in the state and are producing solar.

We're producing wind.

About half of our electricity is actually hydro.

We're looking at renewable hydrogen, our geothermal options, and we're looking at offshore wind.

It's far more sustainable and a better choice for all, but we need to change the systems, so we're working to those systems.

At the moment, we have the infrastructure very much for non-renewable energy.

It's about balancing the social, economic, and environmental impacts, whether they're positive or negative, and understanding all those contributions around society, economy, and the environment.

Why are we making these decisions?

Can we learn from decisions we've made in the past where we've caused pollution, where we've had a negative impact on society?

The planet will go on without us, so it's up to us to decide what role we want to have on this planet.

Energy Horizons is made possible in part by the Elizabeth Maughan Charitable Foundation, The Four Way Community Foundation, And by the Members of Southern Oregon PBS.

Thank you.

Oregon contains incredible geographic diversity.

In the west, near the craggy shores of the Pacific Ocean, prominent mountains peak out from pine forests crisscrossed by rivers and streams.

In the east, stark open areas boast grasslands and impressive canyonlands.

Humans have called this place home for tens of thousands of years.

A more recent addition to the Oregonian landscape are the cities and towns of our modern world.

Each of them, in turn, consume energy.

We could get stuck on a road like this.

Our team has spent the last year traveling through Oregon seeking experts to answer questions about the past, present, and future of Oregon's energy supply.

We hope to learn what lies ahead for Oregon as the energy landscape changes and how this connects to issues of global significance.

In Eugene, we met Alan Zelenka, the assistant director of planning and innovation for the Oregon Department of Energy.

We actually look at all forms of energy, electricity, natural gas, and fuels.

We talk about and think about policy, advancing solutions to, get out of an equitable transition and a clean, affordable, safe energy future.

The energy system we have today is a whole bunch of different factors.

A lot of it has to do with our natural resources.

Like, the Columbia River, for instance, was a huge natural resource for us, and damming up those and creating the electricity, and with FDR in the New Deal and electrifying the rural areas.

Having those dams then be able to bring electricity for the first time to people's lives was a huge deal.

Soon the power of the Columbia was producing more than half the nation's supply of aluminum.

Pacific Harbor is a regional utility that serves about two million customers in six western states.

We started out more than a century ago primarily as a hydroelectric company.

Hydro was was what people looked to for power.

In pioneer times, it was used to grind wheat and and other grains.

The force of moving water was a natural source of power when people began looking to electric power.

And that was pretty early.

You know, in the 1890s, people were were using hydroelectric power to generate electricity.

Other sources of power became more important.

You know, coal was a resource of choice, and it provided a dependable and low cost dispatchable resource, you know, well into the 1950s.

Then it was an expansion of renewable energies, typically wind and solar, particularly in, the last twenty years.

Can you tell me what the current energy mix here in Oregon is?

Where do we actually get our power from right now?

Well, over 40% of it comes from hydro, and that goes up and down depending on how much water and how much rain and snowpack we have.

Then the next biggest chunk is, natural gas and and coal.

Pacific Power owns a lot of coal plants and imports the coal.

We don't have any coal plants left in Oregon.

Last one was Boardman, out in Boardman on the Columbia River, and it it shut down, I think, 2020.

And then the next biggest resource is wind followed by nuclear and then solar.

We have one nuclear power plant left in the northwest, and that's in Richland.

We own a vertically integrated generation transmission distribution network.

That means we own much of the power that we use to generate electricity for our customers.

We own the transmission system, and we own the distribution system.

And so that gives quite a number of advantages in terms of our ability to control costs and also to produce highly reliable service.

And we are one of the lowest cost energy providers in the nation.

Where they've had what we call legacy hydro, really old hydro that's very, very cheap, less than a cent per kilowatt hour to generate it.

And some of those utilities have some of the lowest rates in the world.

Investments help America cut carbon emissions.

They help America prevent the worst climate disasters.

They help fire up the economic engine for whole communities where the shovels are going into the ground.

What are Oregon's, like, biggest assets when it comes to renewable energy?

Well, certainly, you know, eastern and central Oregon, big advantages in terms of wind and solar.

We got lots of, you know, hydro.

We are a renewable state.

You know, we really are not a fossil state.

I mean, we've got a real leg up on everybody.

We had leadership for years and years starting with, you know, Tom McCall, and Tom McCall was always, you know, talking about Oregon being a special place where the purity of our land, air, and water was sacrosanct, and he talked about land use reforms, and, you know, political leadership, you know, counts.

So I'm very privileged to be able to represent a special part of Oregon, Timber Capital of the World.

Everybody brings certain assets to the legislature, be it senate or the house of representatives, but natural resources has been my life.

The rivers that we have on the southwest corner of Oregon are the most pristine in North America.

I raised my family on Rogue River and in the wilderness area, roadless area.

Everything had to be transported in by jet boat, so the environment was very important to us.

I am deeply honored today to present House Bill 2021 which will set the state of Oregon on a course toward one hundred percent clean electricity and in a distinctly Oregon way.

When I ran for the the state house of representatives, I really talked about climate change as being my number one priority.

It was interesting because at that time I ran into people who said, oh, that's interesting.

We've never had a candidate who said climate change was the first on their list.

I think in the almost eight years since then, times have changed a lot and we've really, grown in our understanding of what climate change is about.

But the reason that was important to me is that I lived in a rural area.

I'd lived out in the Green Springs, but our whole community is largely rural or semi-rural.

And I think if you live in a rural community, and you're paying attention, and if your eyes are open, you see climate change all around you.

And we did even back in 2016.

We saw it in changing habitat.

We saw it in drought.

We saw it in reducing snowpack.

And we saw it in smoke events.

A couple of years later, we had the devastating Almeda fire hit our community, and then we really saw what climate change could do.

So this has been a driving force for me during my whole career in the legislature.

Oregon is is known as a green state, is known as progressive policies and getting the right thing done for the people's interests, for the public interests.

So can Southern Oregon Climate Action Now, to make folks aware and make them understand, get folks to understand the science of global warming and its climate change consequences, and motivate individuals to take individual and collective action to address it.

I will confess that, for several years, I was using the terms climate change and global warming interchangeably, and then I discovered that I was making a mistake.

They are different phases of the process.

Incoming radiation from the sun comes through the atmosphere, and it reaches the surface of the earth.

It gets transformed into longer wavelength heat energy radiation, and that radiates back outwards.

By increasing the concentration of those greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

What we're doing is simply warming our atmosphere, and that's the global warming.

And that global warming then results in climate change, which is driving a whole array of consequences.

So climate change is the consequence of human actions that is causing changes in the climate, and it's difficult to understand because it's not always obvious.

There's changes in weather patterns, and then you hear, oh, climate change isn't happening.

But this is a very long term trend in terms of records that we've been taking, and we are seeing changes in the climate.

We are seeing more extreme events.

We are seeing differences, and this is caused by an increased amount of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere caused by humans.

If the climate projections occurred as they were being proposed, what this would do is shift the climate out of the range which supports these natural ecosystems across the planet.

And what that would do would compromise the existence of those natural ecosystems where they currently occur.

Unfortunately, we're imposing climate change at a rate which is faster than natural ecosystems can easily keep up.

What that is likely to do is lead to the extirpation of the species of that natural ecosystem in that location.

Morels don't come up at the same time that they used to or in the plentiful way that they used to.

The irrigation ditches don't fill many times in many years.

Snowpack has been reduced.

We had one season where Mount Ashland was never able to even open.

And so we were already seeing, if you looked in nature, the impacts of climate change.

Our geographic region is gonna shift the temperature out of the range that our current woodland, grassland kind of natural ecosystems can tolerate.

Yeah.

So this is the stump of a Douglas fir?

Right.

So this was a beautiful towering Douglas fir that was with our house for a long time.

So basically, it died partly, you know, after the big heat dome event.

There's lots of Douglas firs that have died.

If you go in the woods above here, you'll see many trees with the same, you know, fungus stuff on it, the same different coloration pattern and so on.

And all those have been killed.

What we're seeing is a considerable die off of Douglas fir, probably a consequence of the climate change, how that climate change has mediated population size of of bark beetles.

Once a tree is stressed, the bark beetles zero in on it, and the problem becomes a positive feedback loop.

Why do we care about climate change?

Climate change won't stop the planet from spinning, and won't wipe life off the planet.

When you really get down to climate change and why it's important, it's important to humans.

We have a very narrow range of optimum temperatures and resources that we need.

There's a lot of naysayers that say, we've had these cycles before, and they're correct.

We have had some very warm periods.

Cretaceous was one of them, but we've never had the rate of change that we are seeing now.

The fossil record, it shows rate of change and it is millennial level.

The rate of change we are seeing since the industrial revolution is decayed a level.

So we are speeding things up by a factor of ten again.

At some level, everyone is being affected by climate change at this point.

It leads to food insecurity.

It leads to challenges with growing crops and gets back to this idea that if we want to live on this planet at the density that we do, we have to acknowledge that climate change is one of the forces working against that.

Among the most present and consequential climate change effects occurring now in the Pacific Northwest is an increase in the frequency and severity of wildfire.

Our community experienced six weeks of choking smoke.

If you were here, then you remember it was an existential crisis.

People really started to wonder if they would be able to live here or if they could make a living here.

And it was really an understanding that climate change was present and it was targeting us.

And then two years later, we had that really awful Labor Day fire where fires, erupted across the state.

Woah.

Woah.

Woah.

Oh, my God.

In our own community, the Alameda fire swept nine miles in about twelve hours, devoured twenty-five hundred homes, many businesses, set probably six to seven thousand people homeless.

I have known numerous families out here that were burned out by the fire, numerous individuals who lived along the Greenway.

And just because someone doesn't own an address and a home doesn't mean they didn't lose their home when the entire greenway went up.

We understood that not only is climate change here, not only is it targeting us, but it is really the most vulnerable residents that suffer the most when climate change is evident on the ground.

Unfortunately, we've had a lot of very clear evidence in front of us about what the impacts of a changing climate are and you've seen that in other places in the state.

Obviously, kept a very close eye on the fires, so I learned from very early on in my business career, and as an employer to learn all I could about those fires.

So that's what I brought to the whole natural resource issue.

I had three fires going at the same time in Curry County just this past August.

Of course, I think you're very interested, we all are, in the carbon emissions that come from those fires.

It's just astronomical.

A healthy forest holds that carbon.

Milled lumber that goes into homes holds that carbon.

We live in a climate which is very much winter wet and summer dry.

Every summer, the soils dry out inevitably.

The vegetation, because of that, is fire adapted, and in turn, is fire dependent.

Our forests are dependent on fire for their ongoing health.

I grew up that fires were often good, part of nature.

You know, that's when the old growth sometimes sprout out and drop their seeds, especially in the pine species.

But, Keegan, these wind driven monsters, what I sometimes refer to as nuclear fires, they burn to 2,000 degrees, and they kill everything including the old growth.

I mean, everything fire touches in that environment becomes fire.

Everything.

Folks don't want fires.

And so we have been very successful for the last, more than the last century, at suppressing fire.

So anytime a fire starts, we have the capacity to put it out.

What we have done is allow the invasion into our fire tolerant forests, fire intolerant species.

But now we get even more dry vegetation as the summer wears on.

Climate change piles on top and makes that risk of fire even worse.

Climate change doesn't just impact our lives in ways we can see directly.

It also threatens the environmental conditions which underpin some of Oregon's existing energy resources.

We have a fantastic hydropower resource.

And in the northwest, hydropower is king.

We've had snowpack in the mountains that melts slowly over time and it provides us a steady stream of hydropower resource.

Now we have less snow.

I hate to say it as a skier, we have less snow and we have more rain.

So that challenges the time you release over the course of the year of hydropower.

And we have drought, you know, that's been significant.

I mean, decadal droughts across the west.

That is a threat to hydropower as well.

There are many objectives that govern the the dispatch of hydropower.

There are some changes recently that are really threatening that resource.

It's still a massive resource though.

And I want to underscore that, that is where the majority of the power in the northwest comes from and will come from for years.

Water is something that we've got to get a handle on in Oregon, whether we're in a drought condition, whether we're in heavy rains, low rains, those varying years.

Water is such a precious resource, and of course, our watersheds are what protect our fish.

Some of the most concern over climate change comes from young people.

Today, students are walking out of school to demand that adults, local elected officials, and community leaders join us in taking immediate action to address the climate crisis.

Piper and Mira are high schoolers from Ashland and are members of the Rogue Climate Action Team, local youth group committed to raising awareness and demanding action to protect the climate.

It's so glaringly real that I don't think I can ignore it.

I see the impacts of it daily.

As youth, we are so disproportionately impacted and affected by climate change.

We are the ones set to inherit this earth, and so it feels big.

It can absolutely feel overwhelming.

I think for our generation growing up in a world where it's constantly being pushed at us like, oh, these are the things that we're losing because of climate change.

Always seeing news articles about this year being the hottest year on record.

Species of animals that are close to becoming extinct because they're losing their habitat.

I think that's really scary and it's really overwhelming and it's really hard to see kind of where we each individually fit into that.

The climate change agenda is a hoax.

The climate change agenda is a hoax.

And we have to display our independence for it.

In recent times, fewer people deny that something about our climate is changing.

The results of it are, after all, right in front of us.

But many still doubt whether the issue is all human caused.

You know, I'm not a climate denier per se, but I'm a fossil fuel guy.

We need to do a little more research on that.

You try and talk to the average Joe out there, that we're in global warming, they struggle with that.

Del Fox is a farmer in the Klamath Basin.

He was excited to show us his new solar array, which has saved him money on energy bills.

But Dell has a sense that not everything he hears about the urgency of climate change is real.

When I put my panels on the roof, they were 270 watt Now the same panel is producing 450 watts.

Slow down.

Let the technology catch up, and we will be alright.

Just saying climate change is gonna gloom and doom us, I just, I just don't see it.

Not to the full extent that we should have radical, reactions.

Earth has been around for thousands of years, some say millions.

My personal belief is it's been thousands.

It's a good steward principle.

We still have a tremendous responsibility to not waste.

Whether it's climate change or not, we know we're not adapting.

I think everyone could take a greater responsibility, just like we're seeing trash everywhere now.

You know, how did that happen?

Growing up as a kid, it was worse to be called a litter bug than a communist, you know.

Regardless of how anyone feels about climate change and whether or not it's human caused or leading to the changes we see around us, our energy system still faces a major problem.

The supply of fossil fuels is finite and may not last much longer.

Lucy, do you know you're in television?

Whoop.

Lucy, up on the come on.

Up there.

My name is Charlie Hall.

Fundamentally, I'm just a kid that likes to fish.

Initially, I was interested only in understanding natural ecosystems, studying the flow of energy from the sun to the plants, to the little shrimps and little fish, to the big fish and so forth.

When I started looking at human dominated ecosystems, what many people will call economies, to me, they're just another ecosystem.

Doctor Hall made a significant discovery about energy and ecosystems while working on his PhD dissertation in the late 1960S.

At that time, the literature on fish was all about territory and staying put, and the fish were not supposed to move.

And so I, put in what's called a weir.

I blocked off the stream at an angle to catch the fish.

And the first day, I knew I had a dissertation because they were full of fish moving.

You know, late at night out there, because I had to take chemistry samples all day around the clock, I came up with a concept of energy return on investment.

How much energy did the fish use in their migration, and how much did they get from being able to exploit different ecosystems as their productivity pattern changes?

Another example, the faster the current, the more food drifts by, but the more cost for it to swim.

The dominant fish will be where he has the highest net energy gain, where the difference between the gains and the costs are greatest.

So there appears to be natural selection, like, for the fish in the stream, for maximizing their power or their useful energy.

So that's where the concept of energy return on investment came from, and we applied it originally to migrating fish.

And, you know, I worked twenty five years on that, and then then we worked on this for looking for oil.

So if you take one calorie or one joule of oil and invest it into looking for additional oil because it's a very energy intensive business, how much do you get back?

And we found that over time it had gone from 30 to 1 in the 1970s to about 10 to 1 today.

Oil production in the United States peaked in 1970 and it went down every year so that by 2007 we were producing only half as much oil as we were at the peak in 1970.

And how did we get away with it?

We were importing.

And then these guys in Texas came up with the idea of fracking.

It's a huge industry devoted to cracking the shale rock thousands of feet beneath the ground and freeing the precious fossil fuels inside.

In the early 2000s, technological innovations and economic conditions made fracking, a process first invented in the 1940s, commercially viable at a large scale for the first time.

This caused an oil boom in the United States, reversing the decline from the 1970 peak.

By 2015, fracking accounted for half of domestic oil production.

It's now over two thirds.

And today, the United States is the top oil producing nation on Earth.

Yes.

It's a wonderful revelation.

I mean, it's American capitalism at its best.

We thought Peak Oil was 1970, and we would be in real bad trouble today, except for fracking.

You get quite a bit of oil in the first two years, and then it drops off.

So you gotta keep drilling them.

And for how long?

Well, everybody's talking about running out of sweet spots.

What's that mean?

It means that the EROI of fracking, which is decent, is going to be declining.

Oil is going to cost more in the future because you have to use more energy to get it.

Everything we have in our economy is based on oil.

So what are the implications when oil is no longer cheap and energy is no longer cheap?

Filled up your car recently?

All the time.

Gas is more expensive.

In real terms, it's four or five times more expensive than in, you know, 1960s.

So the real price of oil has been creeping up.

What how are we gonna see that?

Inflation.

We see it now with inflation.

People are complaining about inflation.

Well, folks, that's biophysical reality.

Whether it's resource scarcity driving up prices or environmental damage threatening our communities, multiple factors pressure us to find a new way to run our energy system.

Oregon's state government began tackling these issues by setting relatively straightforward but highly ambitious goals for renewable energy.

Our current climate goal, the one set in 2007, is that we would reduce the evidence of greenhouse gas emissions to a reduction of seventy-five percent of where they were in 1990.

Those goals by definition are always gonna be aspirational.

Based on science, they demonstrate where we think we need to be by a given year, by 2040, 2050, but they're never gonna have the force of law behind them.

So it's they're good guideposts.

But whether or not you have goals in statute doesn't mean you achieve what you want out of that unless you do the work on the ground.

We also passed, in that year, the first significant piece of legislation around requiring utilities to use some portion of renewable energy in the energy that they are dispersing to communities.

In 2021, when I was chair of the Climate Energy and Environment Committee, we passed one hundred percent clean electricity to set a goal for the state's investor owned utilities, which control about seventy-five percent of the electricity.

So that by 2030, we hope to be at eighty percent renewables, or non fossil fuel is the way it's defined.

By 2040, we expect to be at one hundred percent.

These goals are have a little bit more force of law behind them.

The Public Utility Commission, which regulates the big utilities, are monitoring their plans to get to those goals.

So we are carefully looking at whether or not we have the right things in place.

It's not gonna be easy.

But it was a great step forward.

Oregon has done well passing climate and energy policy, but it hasn't always been a smooth ride.

We do not have a quorum, and we cannot proceed with today's session.

For the second time this legislative session, Senate Republicans have staged a walk out this time in protest of House Bill 2020.

The bill includes a plan to cut carbon emissions in Oregon and would invest money in clean energy jobs.

But it would also impose restrictions that some fear would hurt the economy.

We kept telling leadership this bill was gonna devastate rural Oregon, and leadership did not believe us.

Well, you know what?

I think after yesterday, they might believe us now.

Well, we learned many lessons out of those walkouts.

One is that we really learned to talk about the economic benefits of renewable energy and to talk about the jobs that are created and to talk about the benefits for rural communities without necessarily talking about our climate goals.

I mean, there are clearly inherent climate goals that we're trying to achieve here.

But if we can talk about these and their benefits to rural eastern Oregon or other places in the state that may need a little economic boost, we're gonna get a much better response.

And that's really what we did when we talked about one hundred percent clean electricity.

Clearly, this is a climate strategy, but if you do that successfully, it means that lots of little communities get some kinds of benefits, and that's really important.

That's where we start to see some bipartisan support.

You know, I saw before I went into the Oregon legislature, you won't be able to work with the, Democrat.

Their party, they vote one way.

They vote lock stop, where the Republicans tend to be pretty independent.

But I've met ten in particular in the house side that I really believe have hearts.

I'm not saying we're friends or anything, but when I see the effort, this team is doing what they can.

Sure, I'm trying to persuade them on what my way of thinking is.

They're coming to the meeting, the fire meeting, and I think they'll contribute a lot, and that's of great value.

The '24 session gig was definitely better.

Definitely better.

I think over the years to come, we're gonna see more bipartisan votes, hundred percent clean.

We had one Republican vote in committee.

We didn't have any on the the floors of the House or Senate, but we also didn't have a walkout.

Right?

So we're figuring out how to talk about things, and how to really cue them up in ways that are beneficial to people who may be skeptical about climate but certainly want the benefits of these programs for their communities.

So you would say, like, support for adopting renewable energy is becoming a little bit more bipartisan?

I think absolutely it is.

You have to meet people where they are.

You know, often people say I'm gonna come up with an approach, and I'll be able to convince them.

That's not the way it usually works.

Where we hit the wall is when we try to put hard stops, when we try to put limits on what can happen.

Cap and trade clearly would have put an overall limit across the state.

When we try to adjust just the aspirational goals that we talked about earlier in this session, it was very controversial.

But the same legislators are responsive and supportive of looking at things like permitting and sighting standards that are standing in the way of renewable energy development.

They want these projects for their communities.

So we've we've definitely made some breakthroughs, I think.

We have to talk about it in ways that entice people into the conversations so that they don't just approach the conversation with a close mind.

And once they're looking at what the developers can offer in terms of jobs and increased property tax revenues and sometimes even investment in the communities, what's there not to like?

Oregon's climate goals aim the future of our energy system away from fossil fuels.

But for now, Oregon still receives a large portion of its energy from coal power plants in other states.

Because we still use coal on our system, you know, we're sometimes questioned rather sharply about why that is.

It goes to that need for a dispatchable, large capacity, generating source.

Now we recognize that those have significant environmental impacts, and we have reduced our coal output significantly, and we expect that to continue.

But in order to replace the role that dispatchable baseload power systems give to customer service, you're going to have to replace that with something that can be equally as dependable and dispatchable.

So there is no doubt, I think, that we have to wean ourselves from fossil fuels as much as we possibly can.

For Southern Oregon, solar is undoubtedly the dominant solution we have.

Wind is a significant benefit.

As you're probably aware, there's an effort by a number of folks to promote offshore wind off the coast of Southern Oregon and Northern California.

That part of the coast is described as the Saudi Arabia of wind.

The wind is so relentless, and I think folks who go to the beach know how relentless that wind is.

Just a couple of years ago, in the United States, solar and wind outproduced, in terms of new projects, coal and natural gas.

Renewables are becoming the cheapest energy resource of choice.

We are looking at other options, some of which the technology is still in development.

We're looking at renewable hydrogen.

We're looking at trying to really exploit our geothermal options.

One of the things that is clear from our experience is that each generation source has advantages and disadvantages.

What's most exciting about our business right now is the expansion of renewable energies generally have no fuel cost.

That's been of great benefit to our customers because fuel cost is one of the major costs of producing electric power.

What are your thoughts on renewable energy?

Super excited.

It kind of amazes me almost because I think it's such a cool process, and there's so many things that I feel like we haven't discovered yet and things that we are now really starting to implement in, you know, many different aspects of renewable energy.

In order for Oregon to meet and maintain its greenhouse gas emission reduction goals, we have to replace fossil fuels with electrification and electrification with renewables.

The amount of renewables that we need to do all that electrification for electric vehicles and all sorts of other kinds of processes is gonna increase.

So we're gonna need a lot of renewable resources.

We're gonna have a big quiver.

Every one of those arrows that's a renewable resource is gonna be necessary for us to actually meet our goals and maintain those goals and get to net zero, if not negative emissions so that we can recover from overshooting our our greenhouse gas emissions.

Maximizing those renewable resources are gonna be part of the agenda moving forward, but there's trade offs.

Solar panels are great, but they take up space, habitat for wildlife.

There is concern, in coastal communities about offshore wind.

There's no such thing as a completely benign energy source.

There is no energy resource that you can build that doesn't have some kind of environmental impact.

You know, if it's coal or natural gas, we got greenhouse gases that it pumps out.

In coal, we're digging up giant pits for coal.

With hydro, we're damming up rivers and impacting fish.

Whenever we're promoting efforts to address the climate crisis, one of the things we always encourage folks to do is reflect on their energy use and try to conserve energy as much as possible.

And that, of course, means being as energy efficient as possible.

What's the first power plant we should acquire?

It's through energy efficiency.

That is the least cost power plant.

Least cost generation exchange that we can make.

And that's actually why things like EVs are a really great thing because they are way more efficient.

Although a lot of that load shifts to the electricity grid, so I know it makes some of the electricity providers a little nervous.

But heat pumps, better insulated buildings, all those things make a huge difference.

We've had a number of different programs including energy efficiency and helping Oregonians to obtain supports they can use to make their homes more efficient.

And that was particularly important because we know that the federal government is stepping into this place.

There's gonna be what I describe as a tsunami of money coming our way.

We wanna make sure Oregonians are really ready for that.

How would you describe your relationship with energy?

Not what I would like it to be.

I would like to be able to afford to put solar panels on my house.

I'd like to be able to afford a an electric or a hybrid vehicle.

Lower income people, there's really not a lot of options of how to participate other than walking and biking, which I do both.

So I'm always hoping that there's gonna be big improvements happening very soon.

Everyone should be able to participate, and it's essential to making an energy transition happen.

But in order to bring everyday people along, people who don't own homes or drive the newest cars and who could never afford the upfront costs of new energy technologies.

In order to bring all of us along, a substantial investment is needed.

When I mentioned climate change, what's the first thing you think of?

Well, I think about gridlock because the fact of the matter is until 2022, we essentially had fifty years worth.

It goes all the way back to Richard Nixon.

Nothing worked.

2010, I decided I was gonna come up with something new, and we did.

And twelve years later, it became law.

The Inflation Reduction Act that the Biden administration put in place is the largest investment in climate reduction actions in the history of the world, and it trickles down to the states.

And it's purposefully designed to get back down to the people, into Oregonians.

We're gonna have literally hundreds of millions of dollars flowing into Oregon from the Inflation Reduction Act to do things like build more solar on people's rooftops, put in more energy efficient and low greenhouse gas emission heat pumps, and do weatherization of people's homes.

The Inflation Reduction Act had several major pieces, and most of them came from the finance committee.

It had the clean energy legislation that I wrote in the spring of 2021.

It was about ninety percent of what was finally in the inflation, you know, reduction act.

We allocated a little under four hundred billion dollars for clean energy investment over a ten year window.

So all of this is bringing money into Oregon from the IRA.

It's just starting now to come in.

We have hardly got any of that money yet.

We've done the applications, we've got the awards, but it's just starting to trickle in.

I think ten percent of the IRA monies have actually been spent.

Most of it's still yet to come.

There'll be programs that local governments can enact.

In other cases, there are direct benefits to consumers.

I put in my own house two heat pumps in last year, and on my taxes, I'm gonna get a tax credit, to help support the cost of that.

Seeing this federal money coming our way, one of the things that we funded in 2023 was just a navigation system because we know that there's going to be money there.

We want Oregonians to get everything they can.

And yet dealing with federal programs, even state programs, can be pretty overwhelming.

So we're trying to figure out how to set up easy access so that people know what programs are available to them, have the ability to really assess them, to decide if it's a wise choice, and then are able to follow through with contractors who do the work and do it right.

And that's obviously a lot of money that comes to different communities, and pretty much everybody had their hand out.

I was no different.

I wanted to make it work, still do.

But yet, if you don't accept that money and try and put it to good use, then it's gonna go somewhere else other than your communities, and so it's a real tough deal.

The moral of the story is that in the energy field today, carrots still work better than sticks.

Briefly The finance committee had never done anything like we put together in the spring of 2021 ever.

In a hundred years, all they did was just hand out tax goodies.

And I said we're gonna throw the tax code in the garbage can, with respect to energy, and we came pretty damn close.

Where's the balance on the climate change program?

It's become a really dogmatic religion for a lot of people in my view.

Just keep that money in the bank.

Don't be quick to spend what we don't have.

One important point about cost, everybody says, oh, that's too expensive.

That's only half the question.

The other half of the question is compared to what?

If we don't do this, we have to do something else.

We can't just sit around and do nothing.

That's not an option in most cases.

So if we don't build more solar with energy storage, we have to build more natural gas plants or coal plants, then what's the trade off?

Compared to what?

So you have to compare those two things.

People talk about the cost of mitigating greenhouse gas emissions as being expensive.

Compared to what?

Compared to adapting to the effects of climate change?

We're already seeing that in spades.

The wildfires, the sea level rise, the floods.

So all of that has an enormous amount of cost associated with it.

We haven't really figured out what that's gonna cost, but in my personal opinion, I think it's multiple times more expensive than the mitigation's ever gonna be.

Is more technology building out more energy systems, just in a new way, a solution to climate change?

Or is it a change in behavior?

Or does it need to be a little bit of both?

What is it in your view?

It's both.

We definitely have to reform the way we do things.

We need to reduce the amount of fossil fuels we burn.

That's what creates climate change.

We can do that through being more efficient through new technology or changing out technology so that we don't want fossil fuels and electrifying things, but also sometimes just doing less of something.

Yes.

We have to use the technology because there's a huge demand for electricity.

We have to work together with energy, with a lot of things.

As the technology gets better, there'll be more of that.

But in the meantime, we still have to burn fossil fuels.

I sure can't produce enough to run an electric tractor, but I use GPS in my tractor, and my pivot is GPS controlled.

So you have to be willing to to go with the technology, but at the same time, you have to do it smart.

You get these polling results that say renewables have, like, in the eighty percent favorability rating and we should do them.

And then we get down to specific projects and people object to them because it's in their backyard.

And so they're personally impacted by it and they don't like it.

It's the distance between the general and the specific, which happens all the time.

We started selling green power back in the early 2000s at electric utility I worked at.

We would poll, and people would say, if we put this on and you paid five bucks, would you buy it?

And we got like eighty percent of the people said yes.

So then we do it, and three percent did it.

The general is a great idea.

The specific idea, where it impacts me, falls apart.

And I think that's just a general human nature thing, and something that we have to constantly deal with and try to mitigate as much as we possibly can.

And then sometimes we just don't do it because there's enough opposition or because this is the wrong thing to do.

But if that rules, on a very big scale, we won't be able to work our way out of the climate change crisis that we're in.

I think it's easy to criticize something or focus in on the negatives, but as long as we're making balanced decisions and making informed decisions, we need to change how we're doing it at the moment.

I would never want to say, right, we're gonna rely on coal and oil for the rest of time because that's not sustainable either.

We need to start diversifying and understanding exactly what those solutions could look like.

Forty years of doing this stuff, every resource has been controversial.

Hydro is controversial.

Wind is controversial.

Coal is controversial.

Solar is controversial.

Natural gas is certainly controversial.

So, we have to muddle our way through.

You know, you listen to the news, and people have no idea what we're running into.

But that's another story.

I guess you'll ask me about that later.

Do you think that climate change ultimately is something that we will overcome?

It seems that we can, but do we have the the political will, the philosophical will, to actually tackle that problem and get there?

The answer is yes, but it depends on political leadership.

And Oregon's had leadership.

I mentioned Tom McCall.

We're gonna need it again.

Serving the Oregon legislature is quite a privilege, and I'm enjoying it, building some key relationships, learning a great deal.

Oregon has tremendous opportunities along with, as you know, many issues, many critical issues we have to solve.

I need to be able to encourage people.

I need to be able to say honestly that we're on a path that we can sustain.

There's a tremendous amount of depression that at least teenagers will cite associated with their understanding of climate change because this generation gets it.

They understand what's happening.

What do we want?

climate justice.

When do we want it?

Now.

In general, I feel really hopeful.

I feel super excited.

I just think that there's so much in the works.

I think we do have so much technology, so many people who are really coming into climate activism and really starting to make big strides towards climate justice.

That doesn't really mean I don't still feel scared.

I think there's a lot of fear.

There's a lot of thought that, oh, you know, it won't be as reliable or, you know, maybe in a resilience event, I'll be worse off.

You know, I just know what I have now.

I think that's just human nature.

I know what I have now and change is scary for a lot of folks.

But I think we have to talk to the opportunity.

I mean, how much better things could be.

It's amazing.

So I see a world in which, gosh, you know, not only is your car better, but your appliances are better, your home is more comfortable, and you're more secure.

I am hopeful most of the time, and I would say this is because I see that we are making changes.

There is a desire for change.

The technology to make the transition does exist.

It is a matter of cost, and it's also a matter of cooperation on a global scale.

So if we can figure those things out, I think it's certainly possible.

If we're going to grow as a society, we should be able to deal with this in a meaningful way.

And that means we can deal with it.

I am a little bit of an optimist when it comes to humanity.

I like to think of all the good things we've done and how when pressed with the uncertainty of a positive outcome, we've managed to pull it out no matter what.

We can adjust our behavior, and when I say we, I mean we globally.

What we do in Medford isn't going to change the global climate trajectory, but if we don't do what we can, we have no capacity to encourage other people to do what they can.

This is America.

We've always been alright.

We can do things that no one else on earth can do.

And I think we're actually going to be able to solve this.

It might not look exactly like we want it to look like, and it'll still have a lot of problems, but we're gonna be able to get there.

Yeah.

I'm optimistic.

I have great faith in human nature, ironically, when you look at what's going on in the world.

There's a lot of progress happening right now, and as people catch on and care, they will find solutions.

In spite of everything and maybe even because of everything, people are starting to recognize the importance of community, and working together, and collaborating, and communicating, and creating the future that we want.

If you look up at the very top, well it might be hard to see, but there's actually a woodpecker hole up there already, and I'm just really excited to see wildlife.

You know, I love birds.

I'm a big bird watcher.

Energy Horizons is made possible in part by the Elizabeth Maughan Charitable Foundation, the Four Way Community Foundation, and by the Members of Southern Oregon PBS.

Thank you.