work very well and since neither one of the   because i'm a federal employee i have to be a little cautious about what i say in public settings on certain topics  so so you'll have to draw conclusions from what i'm what i what i'm saying some inferences and i trust you're an educated audience you can figure out and i'm just i'm not going to be per script if i will try to outline some options for you but so any interpretation that you might have that this is a policy recommendation or i'm telling you should do something those are not the views of the federal government there are my own personal views and i will so please take that  o a little by way of bio i'm a belmont resident i moved here five years ago and live in a two family belmont's three with my mother in law and my wife and three kids  whom are in the belmont public schools and another who will be there in a couple years served in the peace corps as an environmental education volunteer in paraguay i came back from peace corps went to  got my master's in public policy at the kennedy school down the street and i've worked it will be ever since two thousand and seven so for twelve years now where i manage a division of  where i was the lead author for departmental wide study about what would translate what my trip what are the trends in transportation and what my transportation looked like thirty years from that and look and see what's changed what's what's kind of continuing along the same path and so and it's also a very good framework i think for talking about transportation talk about transportation supply and then i'll talk about new transportation technologies and then i'll conclude by talking about those options so transport demand i think you know when you if you're  concerned about emissions associated with transportation then you're probably also concerned about how much people use few calls vehicle miles traveled v t and the biggest driver of e m t is simply population growth so and and that's a pretty easy you know when you look at population growth that's a pretty relatively easy thing to predict over the next you know over long periods of time it's pretty the census kind of has that down and you know nationally i think we can expect thirty to forty million more people by two thousand and thirty five they're going to want to buy cars most likely and want to drive them and that will increase you know and so there will be an increase in demand they're probably also going to live in the south west in the sun belt cities that typically don't have robust transit systems another reason why they will probably want to own vehicles and drive and they will probably live in suburbs that's where most population growth is occurring in fact in ex urbs where they can afford to live where the jobs are so again those are will all drive demand for vehicle travel there are some promising counter trends to increase in demand and i'm not sure that they are they're probably they're promising from a from if you're concerned about growth a vehicle miles traveled but there may be not promising for if you are who can't afford a car because you have college debt so we're seeing homes difficulty managing their college debt there's also you know the surveys have shown that many teenagers in particular would rather have a smartphone than a vehicle so there's some change and preferences is also i think the other i suppose you call this promising trend is just that there's more options you don't necessarily have to own a car if you live in a urban area in particular it's a lot easier not to own a vehicle that we have a car share so we have bike shares we have ride share so we have a lift zip car birdlime you can ride you can ride an electric scooter in many places to where you want to go now those those are all sort of exciting new options i don't think any of them really if you look big picture you know the modes share you know maybe they take up one percent of trips  twelve percent of trips it's not going to make a big difference in terms of put much of a dent in the overall demand for vehicle travel and there's questions about those business models it's not there's no there's very little proof that that these are sustainable profitable business models yet although i know left have had less just had a very successful i p o and planning one and they're valued at very high rates but at least for now they're not making money so i think that's something to keep in mind but but there are options there and there are a reason not to own a vehicle and if you don't own a vehicle then you're probably less likely to use a vehicle so you know they're particularly useful in urban areas i'm not sure how in x serves and rural areas how much use we'll see there so those are some significant trends there's also i think we have to so there's really passenger travel surface passenger travel i think we also have to look at globalization as a driver for moving away from sort of vehicle miles traveled but just overall overall transportation demand you know international trade is increasing it will probably continue to increase and that's drives overall transportation to manage means that goods that we purchase from across the world are coming from further distances  coming through ports that are creating congestion at certain gateways and yes so that's another just driver of demand and congestion is just to having freight trend is e commerce and urban delivery when we st wrote this in two thousand and fifteen we were like well we're not sure whether economists commerce is going to increase  demand for freight freight travel or not or whether there's enough of a tradeoff like we're reducing shopping trips but we're increasing local deliveries it seems pretty clear now that the increase in local deliveries is more than offsetting the reduction and like trips to shopping malls for people it's just so easy to order something online and get it the next day so so that's definitely that's i think a significant trend and that's a step we've seen that's just a steady increase in the percentage of retail sales that are e commerce year after year so i don't see that slowing anytime soon so solving urban delivery is is going to be a major transportation challenge and another final sort of economic straight trend that i want to highlight is just the we've moved from being an oil importer to an oil exporter gas prices have are have become relatively stable you know and and gas prices are a major you know the lower the gas prices the more people are going to use their vehicles the less they're going to use transit that sort of it's not really been the case and as long as we are producing oil domestically and cushioning the oil shocks since result we're probably going to  demand side that i see i think it's also worth noting that you know when we were writing this we were just coming out of a recession and we were seen increases in transit and feel empty plateau  d and as we've come out of the recession we've seen d m t just shoot right back up and transit you start to decline again so a lot of this really is tied up with greater twenty five years now the federal gas tax and states to have had varying success with raising the gas tax and and  infrastructure is just so darn expensive it costs a lot of money to build rail transit in particular high speed rail  in california the cost concerns there have are have created a lot of problems for california and i don't see us i think it's very unlikely given europe so until we solve the cost issue of how much it costs to build infrastructure it's going to be very difficult for us to build alternatives to vehicle travel let alone enough highway capacity to solve congestion so i don't think that building more infrastructure will nessie necessarily solve the issue of demand in any near term  just put some paint red paint on the ground and you have a plus only lane i think bus rapid transit it's a very relatively affordable way to  make transit more attractive reliable the fish and it would be great to see more of that and cities and i think some of the local pilots  here demonstrate for those of you that take transit the potential benefits of that the time savings that you can create by dedicating right of way to alternative modes another important this is a policy option but there's also a trend and this is one way that we are finding to build capacity by pricing right using to expand their roadways so and pricing there's a good way to to manage demand you can keep  a lane of traffic free flowing by using dynamic pricing by raising the tolls during rush hour say when the demand is the greatest so you can keep sort of a steady flow through that lane and there are equality issues to that we're used to having free transportation but there's also i would say a lot benefits for people across the income spectrum because to having that sale passive if you need to get to the airport if you need to get to your babysitter on time having free flow lane existing because it's priced in a certain way can be extremely valuable to a driver so so on the supply side you know we're not i think that kind of covers a lot of what i'd like to say about infrastructure supply and there are some promising areas and to not be so such a downer there are some there are some problems i see a lot of promise in new technologies  can now order and over a lift we can check to see if our buses on time we can get quick routing information in time information reliably at a push  planners has you know increased exponentially and has the potential for us to be much more make much better decisions both on an individual basis and on a policy basis in issue with that is that a lot of that data is in private hands people seem to be much more willing to share their data with google than they are with the government maybe that will change those attitudes are changing and i don't know probably people will no longer be willing to share data with anyone i don't think for they are willing to share it with the government but there's a lot of as a researcher i can say that we as a government researcher i would love all your data because i think because there's a lot of things we can do to make better decisions  drones are interesting there are a lot of fascinating applications that are more than just having you know amazon drop drones out of some blip in the sky and deliver your home packages you know disaster relief survey and there's huge applications in agriculture we have just we're just at the practice surface of applications for for drones but i do not see them  their best to like create solutions like geo fencing around you know prevent terrorism so that you're not allowing like a drone to fly over the stadium for example but there are like two percent of car sales and that percentage hasn't increased in the last five you know that peaked in two thousand and thirteen so again that's i think really tied to gas prices like this you know consumers are smart they're going to look at their bottom line unless they are wealthy enough to sort of make the decision that i will feel better and i would be doing my part morally to be able to make those moral decisions right and i don't think most americans are enough to make those moral decisions so and that i think brings me to a point i'd like to that inequality and to me that is the defining issue of our time and i think when you look at inequality has for the issues you're talking about today just in terms of who consumes transportation and how much they consume and who consumes the fuel you know having served in the peace corps in paraguay i can tell you that it's not paraguayans that are taking up that are using that are  creating the most emissions so i think we have living in a wealthy community as we do in a wealthy country as we do we have special responsibilities and and i don't and i think we have to take that into account when we're thinking about solutions as well while we would love everyone well you may say well more people should use transit the job exists accessibility to the number of jobs that you can access with a car and in a half hour in boston you can access more than three times the number if you have a car you can access more than three the number of jobs in a half hour than you can on transit in an hour or so a if if your top concern is let's make sure everybody can get to a good paying job then maybe a solution is that more people should have access to view so i think that's just it's important to think about tradeoffs in all of this and and and i guess the other interesting you know when we talk about inequality too is we see an increasing turn towards now more people who live in poverty live in suburbs them in cities and we see increasing economic segregation and job sprawl and what we're seeing is people living in poverty outside of the transit system and that and or having to travel two hours by transit to get  and i think that is you know an issue that doesn't get enough attention and that when we talk about when we look at the sec goals like reducing the mt for example i think we also need to look at the tradeoffs in oh you know i skipped over that one major technology that i know the most about which is automation so automated vehicles right so we're cut i think we're at  like least i feel like i'm at the downward slope on the hype cycle for automated vehicles you know there's a lot of car companies now that are saying we will have fully automated highly automated vehicles where the driver doesn't need to pay attention for portions of the ride by two thousand and twenty i'm very skeptical of that but the fact that they're saying that maybe that means that by two thousand and twenty five we'll have  you know big dead seams and but in the meantime you know those vehicles are i think what we will see is increasing amounts of automation so we'll see things like traffic jam assess where if you're in a traffic jam it's like a super cruise control it keeps you in your lane and it speeds you up and slow if you down with the rest of the traffic so just conveniences i think it a link that will increase  save energy main mainly say fuel and possibly eventually you don't have like the the truck behind doesn't even have a driver right now over the when we do have we probably will have fully automated vehicles i'm not sure maybe by two thousand and thirty five that can at least go at least on the interstates possibly in cities as well that opens up a whole you know if you can have an or hell and the hell scenario is that everybody owns their personal own personal automated vehicle they take it to work they don't park it at work they send it home  corporations have find all sorts of applications for having sort of like roving office space for example just we have so many automated vehicles that it gets massive congestion and i think in the long in the near term most of the scenarios involving automotive automated vehicles involve increases in v m c increases in congestion to heaven and i think that's probably most likely but the the heaven scenario in this is if policymakers can get things right involves shared automated electric vehicles connected to the infrastructure so able to  get communicate with like traffic signals say their vehicles are shared so they're used they're constantly in use there's constantly passengers they're not deadheading they're not moving around without any passengers in them and they're  well regulated their use is well regulated so so automated vehicles have a huge promise we have you know automobile crashes thirty seven thousand dollars people a year die and automobile the leading cause of death next to suicide and overdoses for people under the age of forty and it's a huge it's a health crisis it's a safety crisis and if automated vehicles can address that i think those immediate benefits are worth it but there are i think serious concerns about how much additional to the by making driving so convenient and so keep a pet potentially  how much you still drive and how much congestion and i think the other thing to keep in mind too is unless they're operated in fleets if they are not personal if everybody owns their own automated vehicle  create more congestion so until you can reach that sort of needy ninety percent then you can start to change infrastructure more closely i mean probably what we'll see is like a dedicated automated vehicle lanes but again if those are like personally owned automated vehicles like is it only people that can afford like your fancy automated vehicle that can take the automated vehicle infrastructure i think there are serious equity concerns with with  scenario like that and i guess you know and that brings me back to inequality one more time just in terms of the research as long as there's massive inequality in the united states what is going to drive technology development is the wishes of the richest americans so we had a tech developer come into the fold the center and talk to us about some exciting technologies that they're developing and his biggest question for us was when can i have a flying car and it's like really when can you have it because you know you live in silicon valley the traffic is terrible the solution for millionaires and billionaires is to fly over the traffic while the masses and you know the fuel consumption and noise and all the other concerns for the rest of the public i think are are not on the forefront of their minds so and i think that's symptomatic of some of the inequality in our country that that's what drives the technology what we focus our investments on in terms of so i'll conclude was just some policy population last they'll be need for the more we can build housing closer together the less need there will be for people to get in their cars to go places because they will be in a  place mode shift we've talked and talked a little bit about that there's policies that you can put in place to encourage more transit use more use of shared vehicles we can do things to increase we that can be a way to manage to me so i think those are those are some sort of broad policy options when you're thinking about how to address the issues you're concerned about in transportation  hundred and one cities and towns so greater boston for us is defined basically as the four hundred and ninety five arc we're a public agency we're a mission based public agency so we've been around for over fifty years we're created by the legislature but we're really focused on helping our cities and towns with smart growth and sustainability and regional for the nation so it's kind of the focus areas that kind of are the lens for all of our work we do work in clean energy obviously the department that i'm here representing you work in all that work in that lens and climates one of our big focuses especially in more recent more recent years to kind of drive the work that we're doing so much the next that's a very small now that i see it up there but roger is free to distribute also on our website this is just kind of a summary of a lot of the things that my department does so we don't need to spend time on that but we work on regional and one on one from a community clean energy and climate mitigation and resiliency projects plans and policy with our cities and this kind of change obviously company and it obviously manmade but you know it it's kind of exceeded where scientists had even been predicting a few years ago for the effects that we're seeing and kind of what we need to do to to address it and to really mitigate mitigate those impacts from happening so now really you know even the paris time the court of originally was saying we're two degrees celsius is really all that we could sustain to not have catastrophic climate impacts and now the global community really recognizes that it's probably more like one and a half degrees and i would be surprised if that continues to kind of have to ratchet down and the urgency with which we meet that was the schools it's going to ratchet up so it's a it's a good time to be thinking together as community what we do about this issue and go on to the next time you know two thousand and eighteen again you know it's just it was the th hottest year on record of course that's out of the basically the last five years or so for all those four years and we just as we see  parlance it's those really most likely not at the federal country level but at the state level at the regional level at the city and town level that are going to be able to make those differences on the ground and we're seeing this you know we're seeing this every day and this is something that you know as the federal government might not be stepping up to the degree that all of us may wish it's even more important that cities and towns are taking the lead in many ways so there's mayors and managers  not all massachusetts california cities and towns it's all across the country so i want to talk a little bit about some local tools to to really work on this issue and you'll hear it next from even more locally here belmont specific and you know what your road map and what you'll hear more about that is it's really already using a lot of these ideas and putting forth a lot of these strategies so one of the things that you're there and spoke a lot about is electric vehicle thomas vehicles and so those are both things as we as we move forward a kind of new way of mobility a new way of picturing and kind of understanding the streetscape we hope that it expects that electric vehicles picture and you know most of those are gasoline diesel internal combustion engine regular cars like most of us have now picture all those cars as electric vehicles now picture all those cars electric autonomy vehicles it's still filled with cars that hasn't solved a lot of the problems so it's obviously very important that we carbon i have the transportation sector not only is that for our nation one of the biggest sources of emissions it's the biggest source here in massachusetts it's forty percent or thereabouts of our emissions profile in massachusetts for most cities and towns and as you'll hear transportation here in belmont and in most communities is one of the biggest sources of emissions so yes we need to electrify we need to get to zero emission vehicles whether it's you know battery electric vehicles or hydrogen fuel cell vehicles which there are a few of those that are not there we need to find a way to do that massachusetts has committed twenty eight million three hundred thousand syrian mission vehicles on the road and twenty five pledge we did that a couple of years ago the number of other states but we're very far off from that goal so far so i said three thousand by two thousand and twenty five and we're going to guess about where we're at right now that's that's a long way to something that and we usually have been pretty good here in massachusetts and actually meeting those goals that we set so there's a lot if we are going to meet that goal that needs to change across the state that needs to change in every city and town that needs to change with all of your personal habits all of our personal habits buying and leasing and renting and using vehicles and it's something where in order to really see that decline in transportation emissions that's going to be a very big part of it so that's one of the big one of the big missions that you all have rethinking your vehicle and your transportation space as thomas vehicles probably do somewhat come online more and more we need to make sure policymakers but also the communities that are talking to the policymakers that those are lots of vehicles if you just thought of thomas vehicles come on board and they're not a laptop or not zero emissions it's a huge missed opportunity and those are going to be in the fleets for a very long time and yet it's not only cities and towns and personal residence there are mentions it's fleets you know it's workplace and it's a big coca cola and said that sent trucking companies and all these things need to be pushed in a lot of cases through policy through consumer behavior and attitudes toward this so smarter cars and smarter ways of using is a very very big issue but as i went through that thought exercise a minute ago that doesn't solve many of the problems we still have a lot of congestion w likely have a lot of sprawl we still would have an equity is very huge lee in our in our system where people are really forced to live very far away from jobs and schools and recreation so what are the other kind of policy tools and strategic programatic tools that we can use to to reduce the congestion and the amount of cars so we need to think about those alternatives to cars and just some of the you were thinking about like i and you know really good pedestrian infrastructure it's you know it's shared bikes and it's shared with you know cars so that you have fewer made many fewer cars for the number of people that need to use them because maybe you need one you know once or twice a week to get too far when you store something like that or yeah you have to pick up their kid once in a while but they're not using it every day it's kind of taking advantage of that shared economy that we have been somewhat moving toward so there's a lot of ways of thinking of a more complete plant just more to let you know kind of about what other cities and towns are doing on this and how there might be some lessons planned could user is using that is good to know about in terms of your electricity supply so you might have heard about might not we are deregulated our electric utility industry and that allowed for anybody really to get a competitive supplier rather than your utilities electric supply in most an investor owned utilities is what i'm talking about not it just felt like plant communities so a lot of the more those with more expertise and more bandwidth have done that over time university use big companies cities and towns but you know most people living in their homes or small businesses have done this and what it is is i forgot to explain to you what it is is an opportunity to like i said get it a different supplier for your electricity supply so that you have more control over what that phrasing is the length of the contract is if it's working well the benefits are a longer more reliable contract in price and it's the way that we have the model we're bringing in more renewables to that supply so you guys have probably heard of renewable energy credits reps that are kind of offsets often for emissions there are wrecks that we consider to be much better here in massachusetts they're massachusetts class one rex and what that means is the state has to fund a relatively narrow category of local or new england anyway local renewable energy sources that are the cleanest out there solar and small scale and small scale hydro anaerobic digestion in some cases and that those credits for those you are then helping build demand for that those highest quality renewables if work to bring more energy into their your supply so just from this list of communities in the program that we've had going so far that demand that it would create by bringing in those those extra massachusetts class one rats those extra n plan it's not a small number of her massachusetts there are so many ways and i know that from some of the programming that's out on the table that you can start to bring your supply more so it's great about this program is i'll say that it's an opt out program so everyone is automatically enrolled in it and you have a choice at any time with no fees or anything like that to opt out of it but as studies show with opt out programs generally ninety plus percent will stay in a program so it can be really really impact now this is something to i learned from roger that you guys have taken a really big step on recently so this example is from the town of wayland about a year ago in their town meeting they took a resolution that all energy or all municipal buildings new construction from  buildings would have very high performance of basically be out a net zero level of construction and they're one of the st in the state to really put that forward some other cambridge has been building to pretty much that standard has a really good plan for that lexington and some others have been building to that standard their schools and hurst has put forward a relatively similar type of program that they adopted within the last two years and it sounds like to you now that belmont really has committed to net zero buildings or thereabouts  for their public buildings and that's really exciting news and is a huge step that you guys can do so buildings are the kind of the other big sector of emissions and i feel hear more about that and that's true again statewide that is one of the biggest areas to keeping in the heat or the cool and the keeping out we don't want a new hot or cold and so by building buildings like that that's a great st step forward in saying to your city or town this is really important to us it's going to save us probably money in the long run it's going to be resilient in the long room it's going to really set a good model for what we expect to hear from our buildings and the next step is you hope that cities and towns can help move residential and commercial buildings to that standard as well and we'll say we don't in massachusetts have an ability to affect our own building code in a lot of other jurisdictions every community can have its own building massachusetts that's not the case so nasa chooses we have one state building code that everybody has you can't into a stretch hope which most music done specially green communities like belmont but where the stretch could stand right now you're still mostly using that base building energy and then there's a few things that apply the commercial buildings large commercial buildings that are a little bit inspection services your facilities managers things like that but what you can do here locally is you can say well i have it's own building we're going to do x y or z you can say we really encourage you to do x y or z as long as it's voluntary and say that action plan update over the next year but the current three boston report kind of model what they need to get to their goal of carbon neutrality by two thousand and fifteen and that's where a lot of cities and towns are moving and one of the places where encouraging them to move is to not unfortunately it looks like eighty percent by two thousand and fifteen is likely not to get us where we need to go it's still a great place to be starving but many now are saying we need to be net zero by two thousand and fifty we need to be carbon neutral carbon free by two thousand and fifty so boston has that commitment among a number of others this report that you can i don't mind the carbon free boston report shows how you can how they model all the different things you need to do to get there doesn't mean boston is going to do all of them or that they're exclusive of any other possible solution but then look at what you do with all that existing building stuff there's basically eighty six thousand buildings in boston that will still be there in two thousand and fifty so when we do about those and obviously much smaller scale for belmont in most cities and towns but by a group in the midwest that works on energy efficiency and just kind of talks about all the benefits of a better building code so and i'm giving you reasons that you may want to advocate for and think about advocating at the state level for better building  other plants some also local like cambridge summerville and some from their way seattle vancouver one from texas just to kind of again point to that fact that that net zero planning and carbon neutral planning is really something now that taken off as cities and towns think about how do we get from here to there and what are the strategists much like the road map that you'll hear about soon so that's very much not something we've been helping cities and towns with a lot and one of the ways that we 've really been approaching the idea of net zero is not just on the energy side or even really just on how we traditionally think about climate it has to do with kind of the holistic view of how we make communities better places and how we want to how we want the  how do we get all those parts of our community getting to zero waste hopefully at some point you know in the coming years how do we bring our community and all those points and how do we know that together so we're getting a more equitable society that's also creating jobs creating savings and creating a better life so i'll end my presentation there those are just some of the websites on any p c site where we have some additional resources and you're free obviously there to reach out as part of green community is one of the options in criterion one to comply with that is to create a solar overlay zone and that's a pretty similar example so with that you've had dozens two thousand and ten cities and towns creating these solar overlay zones for them saying you know like area that we're to market in here you have to be able to put on solar by right and then you know you don't have to go through a special permitting process to do that's making much easier streamlining the process of putting solar if you could take it up a trainings and supporting cities and towns on districts for for years now but a number of cities and towns have kind of put in this district idea where they are encouraging or hiring depending on the jurisdiction and many different things that would make that go friendly toward getting toward real world climate smart kind of development so yeah so there's that's that's not totally crazy idea and i think it could be a really exciting i am hearing way to go yeah you have a lot of things to consider with conservation and when you can offer development and when transportation and yeah there'd be a lot of considerations i don't know the details of that site but it's something that could be considered  on energy committee and i don't work for the federal government so i guess you can say whatever you  and really that's a lot of that is asking how do we get to zero emissions because as tammy alluded to that's really our long term ultimate goal eighty percent is going to be an interim goal and for that matter getting to that eighty percent it's probably not going to be a matter of doing what we're doing now one percent better every year it's going to be doing things that are quite different ways of doing things with zero emissions technology so how do we get heading towards the next so how much direct diesel and our cars and trucks and from burning fossil fuels to keep buildings and natural gas those are really good so what do we need to do to get rid of those and there's always we get us all the way there for the energy that we're still using to heat homes in the winter and to move personal vehicles because of probably will be personal vehicles in belmont for the st seeable future we need that energy to be provided by  footprint comes down to personal decisions by twenty five thousand people so people come to the road map saying well what can i do personally to affect climate change of course there are lots of decisions individuals made that impact choices around food and meat consumption has hired every cultural missions and basically every thing that we buy has an associated carbon footprint so that's all you know there are a lot of decisions people can make and i wouldn't want our focus on electrification and belmonte missions to take the sort of educational need to i think most people kind of understand that if i buy more and i can save my house better that that is moving things the right way for climate but i don't think people are fully internalized that turning t we need to go over the next few decades really going to need to change how we eat for must have some of this direct emissions are the biggest single thing that they can influence personally and also i think there's sort of  a distinction between the decisions we make monthly weekly daily and which we want to be doing in the right direction so i'm going to bike there or drive there and what am i do eat what am i going to do with my trash and all those things we decide on an ongoing basis when we're tackling kind of with the road map as those decisions we only make once a decade or so that things like vehicles and heating systems that were made them have impacts for further decades so we really want to those moments of opportunity for changing vehicles or heating systems don't come along very often we want to make sure we don't miss those those rare opportunities to one where they become a lot of people already because otherwise we lock in every time we buy a new fossil fuel vehicle that's going to be on the road historically incentives have been structured such that to try to reduce electricity which is generally been a good thing if you're talking about light bulbs and so on but but yeah in this context we hope hope to see electricity use so yeah in our road map is to to ramp up electric vehicles as a percentage of new vehicles such that we get fifty percent of new vehicles being evey's by two thousand and thirty which is we consider a sort of plausibly optimistic scenario based on the drawing in part on studies that were submitted to me looking at electrification in the northeast when i was there and mentioned we're not very far along nationally right now but other places like say like norway or have already hit that or run of the opposite way around and use it to cool the sun and some people have heat pumps in their homes that they use for cooling and many people don't realize they can use them for heating in the winter there's a lot of public education i think can be done on  and this to speaker so i would simply ask you to repeat the question so the folks at home care can do it so time let's start on the far right in terms of existing buildings the importance of reducing emissions there there's very little transparency or insight into an existing buildings energy profile if you're to buy it or at least a rental and is there anything being done or that we're doing on that on that level  d so there actually has been legislation introduced last year following some pilots for home energy efficiency scorecards that was put out by the governor we supported it as did many other organizations and that would've been looking at it wouldn't be quite as expansive as i would like at the start but it was it was a good start where the buildings four stories or less that would be included in this and that for that at the point of again they haven't i believe done that yet there is another piece of legislation i forget which represented or that does somewhat capture that as well and we're supportive of it so that's one mechanism but i'll also mention that the state through the department of energy resources and done a few highlights of these type of scorecards have also been done in europe and they have not really been done here in the united states yet but we as a state and i think the springfield area pretty small pilots but the the way that massive kind of works is it comes through all of the investor owned utilities working together to put forth three year energy efficiency plans every three years the energy efficiency advisory council also mandated by the and we're really happy to see in that that there is funding for this current energy efficiency plan for the utilities to put forth this i'd like to start piloting in really starting span the energy efficiency scorecard so i'm hopeful that that will give another mechanism that that will actually come to be something that is scaled up we'll have to see i think it's mostly the demonstration kind of levels the last thing i'll kind of point to that is in the works are gaining some traction and i would encourage everyone to go to it's an acronym i don't remember don't ask me what helix stands for but basically it be pulling that energy efficiency data as well as we can kind of get it from different sources and putting that through the m l s service which is the real estate service and making that available so they just put that together with them last year and i think it's now up and working i don't think it's something that's nearly ubiquitous yet but i think that's another platform that might provide an avenue to have more of that kind of transparency  where we kind of all our work there's lots of you know power in our system several times to drive up the cost because people say that bridge is ugly i don't want that bridge gave me a pretty  you know i think that you know i think it comes from you know we did the political and structural institutional barriers that we see with things like that but really the only realistic scenario that we could come up with was just sort of this policy is really just this because that's all we've seen for the last quote plus and you know it's it may seem a little depressing but there's no indication i mean you know maybe something like the existential global crisis such as the one that we're discussing today visit my friend in arlington and there's no bus that goes there's never going to be a viable boss route that goes from the belmont from cushman square to arlington cemetery but i can take it now i have the option to get here vehicle there at a very reasonable price so so there that is kind of i think filling the holes i mean if you're concerned about energy consumption one of the least energy efficient modes of transportation is empty box amps and we have a lot of empty boxes because again the way we make decisions very difficult for them to say we're not going to run this bus route to your community or we're going to stop running the boss right eight o'clock because after that it's no longer we're not making any money and it's something energy efficient so  last couple of years we do have a natural gas boiler that we didn't replace we hardly ever use it they redid down to negative five and i think this winter there were a couple of times we turned on our natural gas boiler  in the morning to help get the house he did a little faster we would have been ok without it i have little kids but they were warmer than we were like we could have just put on even more layers until really the pumps were able to get up a little bit more to steam they do struggle a little thank you very much i want to end with four different announcements number one is next week at seven o'clock a week from tonight and you know in the lead in the i'm an art gallery which is the top floor of the home or office building two additional speakers george back rack who is the former head of the the environmental a vast juicers and peter fox planner who is the director of the institute that prepare carbon free boston number two is if you have heard anything tonight or picture interest now mark climate action dot org is the energy committee's website and you can go to the  climate action dot org and get more information number three please please please do not leave without signing in if you have an interest in what's been said tonight and finally