CLIMATE CHANGE AND ECONOMY: IMPACTS, RISKS, AND STRATEGIC THINKING FOR THE FUTURE.

• Position: Proceedings of the 43rd Canada-United States Law Institute Annual Conference: Can the United States and Canada Cooperate on Climate Change? - Discussion

Moderator: Richard Cunningham

Speaker: David Terry

Speaker: Grant Goodrich

Speaker: Karlis Vasarais

MR. PETRAS: All right. Ladies and gentlemen, if everyone can take their seats, we are about to start on this next panel. One thing that I would like to ask everybody to do now is to take out your calendar and mark April 16 and 17, 2020, as the date of the next Canada-United States Law Institute Annual Conference, April 16 and 17, 2020.

More information to follow. Thank you.

Now, we are going to have our panel on climate change and economy, impacts, risks and strategic thinking for the future. To chair this panel is a member of our executive committee, Richard O. Cunningham, international trade partner at Steptoe & Johnson.

Dick has been a longtime supporter and member of our executive committee. He is one of the leading international trade lawyers in our country. He is always traveling off to places like China and South Korea and Japan. He just spoke yesterday on Brexit and China trade issues, and he is here today to lead this panel.

Dick?

MR. CUNNINGHAM: Okay. Thanks, Steve.

The British television show "Monty Python's Flying Circus" always used to begin with John Cleese sitting at a table like this with a microphone like this, and he would say "and now for something completely different." And this will be different.

We have talked about climate change and what it is. We've talked about the broad binational-national policies of climate change. Lots of things have been going on with climate change taking place at the state level, at regional levels, and among the corporations of Canada and the United States that have to deal with these issues, and we have a panel to address this major issue from those standpoints.

I am going to introduce--and by the way, we have a particular unique--you only get this from CUSLI aspect of this panel, which I will tell you about--we have three panelists who couldn't be better for this purpose.

David Terry has 25 years of experience with wind, solar, and other energy issues. He is Executive Director of the National Association of State Energy Officials. He participates in energy policy discussions at the highest levels of Congress, at the White House, and internationally.

Grant Goodrich, hometown boy makes good, is Director of the Great Lakes Energy Institute here at Case Western. Previously, he managed the international research project and the Earth Institute at Columbia University, and earlier in his life he was Olmsted Scholar and studied international relations at Slovenia. I mention that last for a particular reason, which I will explain in a moment.

And finally, Karlis Vasarais will present some perspectives from the private sector. He is a low carbon energy entrepreneur with particular focus on emerging process efficiency technologies, on the innovation of fuels and on specialty chemicals produced from waste.

He is of Latvian descent and serves as vice chair of the Latvian credit union, and therefore, I can confidently say this is the only climate change panel that will give you perspectives of both Slovenia and Latvia. So let me turn the panel over to David.

MR. TERRY: Thanks, everybody, thanks Dick.

As Dick mentioned, I am Executive Director of the National Association of State Energy Officials, and just to give you a moment of a lens of sort of where I am coming from or how I view things, our members are the 50 governors, energy directors around the country. We represent all of them as well as the territories.

They have an economic lens as much as an energy lens. These are not regulators. These are folks that are developing policies. The typical governor after life, health, and safety is worried about jobs in the economy in an energy context. So I guess I would say, in short, our members have been at this confluence of climate energy, technology, and the economy for the last 30 or so years.

We have been heading that direction. I think we are finally there in earnest, and I guess the other sort of preface to my remarks is that there are some people that are glass half empty, some are glass half full. Fair warning, I tend to be glass overflowing, so it is an upbeat message for the states.

There were really three areas that I wanted to hit on, and a little bit is the context of climate environment and energy technologies and where we have been. For a very long time, many of the states didn't say the word "climate." There were political connotations to it that were challenging. At the same time, they were moving energy policy ahead in many places in pretty fascinating ways from an economic development perspective and also from a climate perspective, even though we really didn't think of it that way. I want to talk a little bit about that.

Secondly, some of the things that we see on the horizon right now, just the change that has occurred in the last six to twelve months, both politically and economically, in some of the states I think are worth touching on.

And then, lastly, a little bit about what we see coming down the pike in the relatively near term that I think is worthy in terms of climate, clean technology policy, economic development, and some of the costs associated with it.

I guess at the outset, when I think about cleantech and climate and innovation, in the late '80s, early '90s, our organization started one of the first combined government--state government-federal government private sector cleantech investment programs that had never been around. It was early risk capital and venture capital before venture capital really called cleantech "cleantech".

It didn't go very well. It was not very successful, quite frankly. We learned a lot from it. We did it differently ten years later, but we invested in things like trying to make wind power cheaper through various technological investments, trying to improve various materials involved in efficiency, manufacturing, and so forth, a whole variety of things, and some good things came out of it but from a commercial perspective not so much.

About ten years later in the mid '90s, we started a joint cooperative research development demonstration investment program among states, the private sector and the federal government, and it was focused on particular cleantech areas. Again, we didn't call it "cleantech," but it involved very high end building efficiency technologies, transportation chemicals, et cetera.

A few of the things that came out of that are interesting, the country's first plug-in electric hybrid school bus came through a joint investment between the state of Ohio's Energy Office, North Carolina, Washington State, Oregon, New York State and the Department of Energy and a couple of private sector companies, and that model is still on the road today.

So that was sort of the round--really weren't aligning policy very well, but we were trying to align research and demonstration dollars, and I think we had some good success. So there is this past kind of collaborative activity that I am going to return to at the end of my remarks that I think are relevant for some of the challenges we have today.

The other piece that was happening at the same time were policy actions by the states. We haven't had a federal climate policy as everybody knows in any serious way. About 15 years ago at a Nazio (sic) meeting, I made a very flippant remark. It wasn't intended to be. It got a little bit of a laugh, and it got me in a little bit of trouble.

But I will say it again for context, the Congress, U.S. Congress would probably act on climate in a serious way when we had a polar bear and an ice cube in the Potomac River. And it was meant for effect, and it really wasn't meant to be disrespectful, but we tend to act at a crisis level at the federal level even as states move forward.

And we think often of the Californians, the New Yorks, et cetera, that are maybe taking progressive actions in this area for quite a number of years, but there are other states as well, and I think they are instructive about how we move forward.

If you look at Iowa, Governor Bransted, who left a couple years ago to be Ambassador of China, longest serving governor in the country, he started in the late '80s with the first renewable electricity standards in the country, it was voluntary, but it was the first one.

You fast forward--he was a great energy governor--Iowa has no discernible coal, natural gas, or oil. He knew that. He understood the economic implications of it. He also understood the environmental attributes of some of the technologies and resources they had in the energy space. That led to the policies that supported ethanol development.

Iowa produced 40 percent of its electricity last year from wind. And now, they are moving forward with solar with Governor Reynolds' leadership; places that you don't expect.

We see the same thing in Texas with wind and storage and a variety of other areas, and I point those out only because those haven't been done under a climate umbrella, but they have been critically important to moving those states forward, and when we look at where things are--okay. The rate, I will try to speak up.

The other points I would make are more recent. We see a number of states now moving in new areas of grid optimization, the activities. North Carolina, for example, is looking at their grid in earnest. The new governor has called for a climate plan, which the energy director is undertaking there. Massachusetts is moving full bore on offshore wind as is nearly every state from Virginia north to Maine. This is a tremendous resource.

The early leaders in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, some of the other states are bringing the costs down rapidly. So the opportunities that we see, they are all happening at the state level in technology, are economically driven. I think the climate crisis and the cost associated with it, our ability to solve those are not only dependent upon international relationships and coordination...