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Transcript

Climate Change & Real Estate · Simmer Down

0:00
Kathleen Biggins: How we're going to handle today is we're going to divide this presentation into four parts.
0:04
Kathleen Biggins: One is how do we know that it's actually happening.
0:07
Kathleen Biggins: This is to arm you to talk to that cranky uncle at Thanksgiving dinner about how we actually know it really is happening.
0:14
Kathleen Biggins: The second is how significant the consequences are and will be.
0:19
Kathleen Biggins: And the third is how the world is pivoting, how it is transitioning to try to get us to a safer place.
0:26
Kathleen Biggins: And the fourth is some observations on what we believe climate change will mean for your industry and some of the changes that are coming for you.
0:36
Kathleen Biggins: So let's jump into the first part, how we know what's happening.
0:40
Kathleen Biggins: That second part is the microstructure.
0:43
Kathleen Biggins: So the way we know what's happening is because we understand the basic physics of how we house gases work.
0:56
Kathleen Biggins: First of all, does everyone know exactly what climate change is?
1:00
Kathleen Biggins: Yeah.
1:02
Kathleen Biggins: So it's it's okay, so let's start at square one.
1:06
Kathleen Biggins: I'm sorry, I should have started right here.
1:07
Kathleen Biggins: Climate change is our it's just the changes in our long-term weather patterns.
1:13
Kathleen Biggins: Things like hot and cold, uh, rain and snow, wind currents, and even water currents.
1:22
Kathleen Biggins: And when we talk about them, we talk about them and how they have changed since the mid-20th century.
1:28
Kathleen Biggins: And the reason that they are changing is because we're changing the composition of our atmosphere.
1:34
Kathleen Biggins: And we're doing that primarily by burning fossil fuels, which without greenhouse gas emissions, and also secondarily through our light piece of plastic.
1:42
Kathleen Biggins: And that has ramifications that kind of escape the current natural system.
1:47
Kathleen Biggins: So we know what's happening because we understand how greenhouse gases work.
1:53
Kathleen Biggins: It has been well understood for over 150 years and it is not controversial.
1:58
Kathleen Biggins: But I want to kind of bring us back to sixth-grade science class to remind us all how they do work.
2:04
Kathleen Biggins: So when solar babies comes down, it passes through the atmosphere and strikes the Earth's surface.
2:10
Kathleen Biggins: Much of that energy is absorbed.
2:12
Kathleen Biggins: And what it is, it is reflected back at a different wavelength.
2:22
Kathleen Biggins: And this new wavelength is partially captured by a teeny tiny portion of our atmosphere that is comprised of greenhouse gases, less than 1%.
2:31
Kathleen Biggins: And these greenhouse gases are primarily carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and even water vapor.
2:40
Kathleen Biggins: Without this teeny tiny portion of our atmosphere being comprised of greenhouse gases, we would have a frozen climate.
2:48
Kathleen Biggins: We wouldn't be here.
2:49
Kathleen Biggins: So they play an outsized role in controlling our climate.
2:54
Kathleen Biggins: But when we add to them to run across the fields in our land use practices, it simply means they do a better job.
3:01
Kathleen Biggins: They capture more of that reflective energy and radiate it back down to the Earth's surface, warning us up further and adding energy into our climate system.
3:12
Kathleen Biggins: Another way to think about this problem is the balance of that.
3:19
Kathleen Biggins: I think we all know there's a balance between plants and animals, but we may not know there's also a balance of where nature stores our in the earth, in the ocean, in the atmosphere.
3:32
Kathleen Biggins: I think if we consider these two parts of the fossil fuels, what they are, it will help us understand what's going on.
3:39
Kathleen Biggins: So fossil fuels are little bits of plant and animal matter that fell to the earth millions of years ago and that filter open and the high heat of pressure that turned back into cool as an elemental part of it.
3:54
Kathleen Biggins: What we call today oil, gas, and coal.
4:00
Kathleen Biggins: And humans put in a lot of wow, really rich in energy, really cool, really store, but they use it.
4:08
Kathleen Biggins: But in doing so, humans were unwitting to take the carbon dioxide that nature had sequestered deep underground over millions of years.
4:28
Kathleen Biggins: And humans started poking it up into the atmosphere at the alarmingly fast rate of 40 billion tons of carbon every single year.
4:38
Kathleen Biggins: Much faster than it really happens in nature, upsetting the balance that have existed really since human civilization has existed.
4:47
Kathleen Biggins: And we're putting up the overflow of carbon dioxide.
4:54
Kathleen Biggins: This graphic shows that all the way back 800,000 years, carbonioxide naturally stayed between 150 and 300 parts per million.
5:05
Kathleen Biggins: So these would be the natural cycles that are getting all the time through ice age and fog, and ice age and pond.
5:13
Kathleen Biggins: And then you can see in 1910 we wrote out of the natural cycles, costing over 300 parts per million.
5:20
Kathleen Biggins: Today we are in the 400.
5:22
Kathleen Biggins: If we were to continue to work at our current levels, we would get close to 1,000 parts per million by the end of this century.
5:32
Kathleen Biggins: And we also know it's happening because new technology enables us to measure.
5:40
Kathleen Biggins: There are satellites up in the air today that can literally measure the emissions and where they are coming from.
5:47
Kathleen Biggins: So we can identify the source.
5:50
Kathleen Biggins: And we also have the ability to identify the atoms of the air that come from our different atomic complexity, different basically.
6:00
Kathleen Biggins: So we know that we are the ones that are causing this change.
6:04
Kathleen Biggins: And scientists have evolved enough that we not only know what's happening, we also can begin to put the documents together on how much is contributing to the clean cost of what's happening in the store.
6:22
Kathleen Biggins: So through the new sciences of attribution, we now can look at a major event and say, wow, climate change wasn't all or wasn't.
6:32
Kathleen Biggins: And it was more likely because of climate change will meant more expensive because of climate change.
6:38
Kathleen Biggins: This is a great example.
6:39
Kathleen Biggins: This is the world's last summer.
6:42
Kathleen Biggins: I think we all remember how hot it was in our own Southwest when Phoenix was cooking for so, so long.
6:49
Kathleen Biggins: But Phoenix wasn't the only place cooking.
6:51
Kathleen Biggins: There were many parts of the world that were extremely hot.
6:55
Kathleen Biggins: In fact, four billion, half of the world's population, were in areas that were extremely hot that had been made three times more likely to be that hot due to climate change.
7:07
Kathleen Biggins: And, increasingly, we are now getting the ability to better predict what's happening.
7:16
Kathleen Biggins: And that means that down to a granular level, to an individual address, we have a better sense of what risks that property will be exposed to in the future.
7:28
Kathleen Biggins: So hopefully you're with me that climate change is indeed happening.
7:35
Kathleen Biggins: Let's move to the second part about just how significant those consequences of climate are and will be.
7:43
Kathleen Biggins: Because quite honestly, I think most Americans, 72% get that climate change is happening.
7:49
Kathleen Biggins: What I don't think Americans really have done is internalize what it means and just how significant the changes are that we have made.
7:59
Kathleen Biggins: So I'm gonna spend a minute on the slide because it's to me the big picture slide, so bear with me for a second.
8:06
Kathleen Biggins: On the bottom, we have time going back 20,000 years.
8:10
Kathleen Biggins: On this axis, we have temperature from about 9 degrees colder to about 11 degrees hotter.
8:17
Kathleen Biggins: The yellow is average global temperature, and the white for milestones for reference.
8:21
Kathleen Biggins: 20,000 years ago, we were in a glacial period of an ice age.
8:26
Kathleen Biggins: There was a mile of ice over Manhattan, and much of the world was uninhabitable.
8:31
Kathleen Biggins: And then over about 8,000 years nature moderated, coming up to what more or less than the average global temperature for the last 10,000 years, which is right around 60 degrees Fahrenheit.
8:43
Kathleen Biggins: It isn't a temperature that the earth has been at very often in its long history.
8:55
Kathleen Biggins: It is not the default choice that if we knock it off, it wants to return back.
9:00
Kathleen Biggins: And when we hit that 60 degrees, guess what?
9:03
Kathleen Biggins: We have to settle down.
9:05
Kathleen Biggins: The little divot over here, the ice age, is when the glaciers came down.
9:26
Kathleen Biggins: It was about a degree and a half colder, and that caused all sorts of food deprivation, leading to upheaval and even more.
9:33
Kathleen Biggins: Again, showing that a small temperature change on the Earth's surface can make for big changes on how we experience life on the planet.
9:41
Kathleen Biggins: And then you can see the temperature going up, up and away, landing somewhere between 3.6 and 10.8 degrees Fahrenheit hotter by the end of this century, depending on what we choose to do.
9:57
Kathleen Biggins: So let's think about that.
9:58
Kathleen Biggins: Nature had 8,000 years to literally march trees from Mexico to Montana to create ecosystems and the biodiversity that has supported us for 10,000 years.
10:10
Kathleen Biggins: And now, through our activities, we are potentially triggering a similar delta in the next 100 years.
10:19
Kathleen Biggins: And that's scary, right?
10:22
Kathleen Biggins: And that is what brought all of the nations of the world together to say, hey, we can't go there.
10:29
Kathleen Biggins: We can't go to those high numbers because at those levels we aren't sure we'll be able to handle what nature will throw at us.
10:37
Kathleen Biggins: Instead, we need to keep at the 1.5 degrees Celsius increase or a 2 degrees Celsius, which correlates to a 3.4 degrees Fahrenheit, because at those levels we think we can adapt and we can mitigate and be safe.
10:55
Kathleen Biggins: So let's take a quick roll down on what is changing.
11:02
Kathleen Biggins: And this is a graphic from NASA.
11:05
Kathleen Biggins: That shows how average global temperature has changed from pre-industrial times to today.
11:15
Kathleen Biggins: When it is blue is colder than average, white average, yellow warmer and red higher.
11:24
Kathleen Biggins: So I had to connect that.
11:46
Kathleen Biggins: So as you can see at the end, the red really comes with underway.
11:49
Kathleen Biggins: The thing, so A, the Earth is influenced by other things besides just carbon dioxide.
11:58
Kathleen Biggins: The Earth's orbit, it's wobbled and it's tilt.
12:01
Kathleen Biggins: So that is on a circular basis.
12:03
Kathleen Biggins: It's on like 22,000 years, 4,000 years, and I'm making this up eight or 11.
12:08
Kathleen Biggins: You know, so it's on a cyclical period.
12:11
Kathleen Biggins: In addition, there are natural causes.
12:14
Kathleen Biggins: And what we found during that period of 8,000 is the southern ocean started to exude carbon dioxide into the air.
12:22
Kathleen Biggins: And they're still figuring out why, but it was through natural causes, and it took 8,000 years to bring that temperature up.
12:29
Kathleen Biggins: It's not even so much that the temperature is going so high, it's the rate of change that doesn't allow civilization and also other species to evolve to handle the new normal.
12:43
Kathleen Biggins: So as you saw at the end, the red really comes propenduin, and that's because we aren't just breaking records, we're really shattering them.
12:53
Kathleen Biggins: As you can see from this graphic, 2023 was the hottest year ever recorded.
12:57
Kathleen Biggins: It was about 1.4 degrees hotter than the pre-industrial times, flirting with that level that we really want to stay underneath that 1.5.
13:07
Kathleen Biggins: And actually, the 10 last months have all been the hottest of those months recorded.
13:13
Kathleen Biggins: So in other words, each of the last 10 months has been the hottest recorded.
13:16
Kathleen Biggins: And it means we're experiencing more hot days right here in New Jersey.
13:21
Kathleen Biggins: Newark experienced 13 more of those super hot, risky heat days during the summer versus 1970.
13:29
Kathleen Biggins: And that's all predicated on emissions that have been put up in the past.
13:34
Kathleen Biggins: What we are experiencing are from historical emissions.
13:38
Kathleen Biggins: So what will happen with the emissions we're putting up today?
13:42
Kathleen Biggins: Well, they are going to impact our kids and our grandkids.
13:46
Kathleen Biggins: So taking a look ahead, and this is an average of 26 different climate models, you can see that it is projected that if we continue on the current emissions path, we would have temperatures where our grandkids close to those experiences in Western Georgia by the end of the century hotter.
14:08
Kathleen Biggins: So as I mentioned, when things get hotter, um influences in other natural systems as well.
14:26
Kathleen Biggins: And one of the areas that it really impacts that we're seeing everywhere, and it's just warmer oceans and rain water, warmer air water.
14:44
Kathleen Biggins: So when conditions are right, it's more likely that we'll have to work.
14:51
Kathleen Biggins: And of course we've experienced it right here.
15:03
Kathleen Biggins: And right here in our state of New Jersey.
15:09
Kathleen Biggins: And that's all that extra rain because we developed it.
15:25
Kathleen Biggins: You can see from 1972 to today, we have many more improving surfaces.
15:32
Kathleen Biggins: So there's less area for the water to get toward naturally.
15:37
Kathleen Biggins: And of course, that also is right here in the country.
15:43
Kathleen Biggins: You can see the red is uh developed area.
15:47
Kathleen Biggins: And what it means is that storms are more powerful, and even places that have been here for a hundred years, like this house in Lambertville, are now being washed away.
16:02
Kathleen Biggins: And again, it's only going to get worse as we get hotter because more water will be in the atmosphere.
16:10
Kathleen Biggins: Now the reverse is also true.
16:12
Kathleen Biggins: I mean, maybe any wetter.
16:14
Kathleen Biggins: We're also getting drier.
16:16
Kathleen Biggins: And that's because these hotter temperatures dry out of our soils and our panels.
16:20
Kathleen Biggins: And that means less water gets down to our atmosphere, it literally plays a havoc with our ability to grow food.
16:28
Kathleen Biggins: Um, and also, while this isn't really a New Jersey issue, I'm putting it in because we're hearing so much about it.
16:34
Kathleen Biggins: Climate change is kind of a havoc with our surface water, especially out of west.
16:40
Kathleen Biggins: And that's because it is changing our snow pattern.
16:44
Kathleen Biggins: So if it is warmer, it means that precipitation falls later in the year and snow.
16:50
Kathleen Biggins: And if it is warmer, it means that the snow melts earlier in the spring.
16:55
Kathleen Biggins: And that means there's less of that snowpack water downstream when we need it in the summer for cities, for farming, for hydropower, for fossil fuel power, even for wildlife.
17:06
Kathleen Biggins: And we're seeing this out west as we know in phase, and again, that is anticipating to get worse as we go further into the century.
17:14
Kathleen Biggins: So climate change is both giving us too little water, and we're also giving us too much water, and in both cases it's often too dirty.
17:23
Kathleen Biggins: Too dirty because our aquifers get too concentrated, and too dirty because our systems aren't affecting these new drains, and so overflows happen with other chemicals and just regular wastewater.
17:34
Kathleen Biggins: Another thing that's happening that is directly tied to climate change is an increase in natural disasters.
17:42
Kathleen Biggins: It's not your imagination.
17:44
Kathleen Biggins: They're happening more.
17:45
Kathleen Biggins: And again, part of it is the fact that we are adding more energy into our climate system, as we talked about without re-radiating.
17:55
Kathleen Biggins: You can see in this graphic from the National Weather Agency, that in 2023 we had a marathon, we had 28 $1 billion natural disasters in the country.
18:11
Kathleen Biggins: And intriguingly, um when we talked to insurance professionals, and we actually posted an event simply to talk about climate change and insurance with insurance and that chart doesn't even reflect what you're making.
18:30
Kathleen Biggins: In fact, they're paying out more for the more uh frequent smaller events, the smaller things like windows and hailstones and floods and things that don't even necessarily make the one billion dollar market.
18:46
Kathleen Biggins: And so the actual destruction coming from this changing climate is even bigger than what we see on that initial map.
18:53
Kathleen Biggins: We are a coastal state, so let's talk about sea level rise.
18:59
Kathleen Biggins: Um lottery on this one, guys.
19:03
Kathleen Biggins: Um, average.
19:10
Kathleen Biggins: The global average is at nine inches in the 1900, we have 1.134 inches already.
19:18
Kathleen Biggins: And it is projected if we were to anyone currently, we have anywhere from uh the best case scenario three to five, the worst case scenario six to eight by the end of the century.
19:28
Kathleen Biggins: And a lot of that is tied to what happens to the ice shells in Greenland and the reason that we lost the um the lottery though is really interesting.
19:38
Kathleen Biggins: It's the fact that the glaciers ended just at um exit nine of turnlight.
19:45
Kathleen Biggins: That was the southernmost part of the glacier and the glacial period.
19:48
Kathleen Biggins: And the pressure of that ice actually pushed the land mass south of that up.
19:54
Kathleen Biggins: When that ice melts, it means now our part of New Jersey is beginning to go down to subside.
20:02
Kathleen Biggins: So we're going down as the ocean's coming up, and we're also using our water very quickly, which is compacting our soils and causing us to subside more.
20:12
Kathleen Biggins: So we are really vulnerable to climate change at sea level.
20:17
Kathleen Biggins: And we're seeing it.
20:19
Kathleen Biggins: We're seeing it in Bayhead, but we're seeing it all around the country where just on a sunny day, not even a storm, floods are messing up school bus's ability to pick up hip and um impact on businesses and commerce.
20:32
Kathleen Biggins: And we are indeed seeing a lot more sunny day flooding.
20:37
Kathleen Biggins: This gives you a sense of just how much flooding is coming on high day, and again, not high to storms.
20:43
Kathleen Biggins: And we are the third most vulnerable state as far as real estate to sea level rise after Florida and New York.
20:54
Kathleen Biggins: Um, it is projected by a group called uh from First Street, called Risk Factor, that 385,000 properties are in the uh phase of central fundrest, and that also includes river rain risk, so it's not all just at the shore.
21:12
Kathleen Biggins: Um that's projected to increase by 19% by 2015.
21:16
Kathleen Biggins: It's also degrading our land, it's causing those forces.
21:22
Kathleen Biggins: So we're seeing woodlands and farmlands kind of being turned into salt.
21:31
Kathleen Biggins: And something that I don't think we think of much here is that it's projected that as New Jersey, it's wetter in the spring, and it's drier in the summer, that we'll have more forests.
21:44
Kathleen Biggins: And also, what I didn't know until I started delving into this is that the East Coast is actually more vulnerable than the West.
21:53
Kathleen Biggins: In part because so many of us live we were so heavily that so many of us.
21:59
Kathleen Biggins: Live near the wilderness surface.
22:02
Kathleen Biggins: So we are living close to woodlands, and we don't think about it now.
22:06
Kathleen Biggins: Um, but as things get drier, it is anticipated that as much as 48% of councils in New Jersey will be at greater risk to water.
22:15
Kathleen Biggins: Let's take a look at the fact that the oceans are heating up.
22:20
Kathleen Biggins: Now, why would we care about that in New Jersey?
22:24
Kathleen Biggins: Why would we care about oceans getting hotter?
22:27
Kathleen Biggins: Anybody?
22:32
Kathleen Biggins: Okay.
22:33
Kathleen Biggins: I'm not here to fit with like white.
22:38
Kathleen Biggins: Well, a couple of things, actually.
22:39
Kathleen Biggins: The water gets hotter, hotter water expans.
22:41
Kathleen Biggins: That's part of where's driving sea level rise.
22:44
Kathleen Biggins: Hotter water impacts our sea life, right?
22:46
Kathleen Biggins: So it's impacting our ability to have the efficiently know and the efficiently fake.
22:51
Kathleen Biggins: It also is the power source for her.
22:55
Kathleen Biggins: And while we don't get them, and when we get them, you can get them pretty badly.
22:59
Kathleen Biggins: We don't get them as often as our press down sound.
23:02
Kathleen Biggins: But because the waters are so hot, it means that these storms are forming further away from the equator and saying stronger further away from the equator.
23:12
Kathleen Biggins: And because of what we're talking about, the atmosphere holding the water vapor, they're dropping more rain.
23:21
Kathleen Biggins: And again, as we get later in the century, that means that we will be more vulnerable to more powerful hurricanes right here in New Jersey.
23:30
Kathleen Biggins: And we can see the patterns are just changing, they're intensifying more quickly, and there's even special amongst the scientific community creating an category fix because their wind speeds are getting so strong.
23:44
Kathleen Biggins: And we know that it's not just a storm.
23:49
Kathleen Biggins: When one of these natural disasters hits a community, it has long landscaping that.
23:54
Kathleen Biggins: It can take over 10 years for a community to recover and sometimes even longer.
24:00
Kathleen Biggins: And I don't need to go through the slide, but I think we can kind of think through the ramification.
24:06
Kathleen Biggins: If it's extremely hot, it impacts our health, it decreases human productivity, it causes all sorts of havoc with our farming and with our water systems.
24:17
Kathleen Biggins: And in many places, it can disrupt transportation.
24:20
Kathleen Biggins: Roads literally, railroads buckled, lines can't take off if it's super hot.
24:26
Kathleen Biggins: Rivers get too low to bring cargo up and down.
24:30
Kathleen Biggins: So it really translates across the economy.
24:33
Kathleen Biggins: The same thing with our severe storms and wildfires, it threatens not just our people and our communities, but also our infrastructure, our hospitals, our police stations, our airports, and all the.
24:46
Kathleen Biggins: So I think when people think of climate change, they think, oh, it's a little hotter.
24:52
Kathleen Biggins: Not such a bad idea on winter skate.
24:55
Kathleen Biggins: It has so many ramifications for our health, our safety, and our economy.
25:02
Kathleen Biggins: That when you think about it, it really is important that we stand up and notice.
25:08
Kathleen Biggins: Speaking of economy, this is from the BlackRock Institute taking a look at where they expect to see local GPP impacted.
25:15
Kathleen Biggins: You can see much of the Midwest and the town has decreased local GPP.
25:19
Kathleen Biggins: We're kind of neutral.
25:21
Kathleen Biggins: And it's really the very, very top.
25:22
Kathleen Biggins: And it's not just BlackRock that says this is from the largest real estate, not real estate, insurance company in the world, Swiss Red.
25:35
Kathleen Biggins: But they project that we have a 3.2 degree increase, which is kind of a bit fast right now, we would lose about 10% of our GDP, and that the world in total would lose as much as 17% of the GDP.
25:50
Kathleen Biggins: And that has real replications for our investments.
25:55
Kathleen Biggins: Because our investments are tied to the economy.
25:57
Kathleen Biggins: And I put this in because I know money and health is sometimes based on your assets.
26:02
Kathleen Biggins: And obviously, a lot of people use the stock market as a way to grow their wealth.
26:08
Kathleen Biggins: It is projected by movies that these sectors will be significantly impacted by climate change.
26:14
Kathleen Biggins: And we report that as much as 10% of the top countries in the world will be downgraded this next decade because of climate change pressures.
26:22
Kathleen Biggins: So have it put in there as well.
26:25
Kathleen Biggins: And this one, again, is a little counterintuitive.
26:29
Kathleen Biggins: We all hear about migration, we hear about how difficult this problem is and how we are feeling pressures that we've never felt before.
26:38
Kathleen Biggins: Climate change is exacerbating.
26:41
Kathleen Biggins: Because as some of these areas in Central America and South America and Africa and other areas are getting much less habitable, much more difficult for people to raise their families here, and they are moving.
26:53
Kathleen Biggins: But intriguingly, and perhaps importantly for New Jersey, scientists predict that as things get hotter in our home country down south and in the Midlands, that many people will begin to migrate from there further north.
27:08
Kathleen Biggins: So, especially around the Great Lakes, which has such a great freshwater resource, those states have been labeled the climate refugee states, where they expect many from our many Americans to move to as we get to the second part of the center.
27:24
Kathleen Biggins: Okay, so that was pretty dire, right?
27:28
Kathleen Biggins: That makes a pretty good guess.
27:30
Kathleen Biggins: But the good news is the world has got the memo.
27:33
Kathleen Biggins: The world is something we've heard what the left above is doing.
27:37
Kathleen Biggins: They're leading the way.
27:38
Kathleen Biggins: Other companies are also stepping forward and saying, we can't go there.
27:42
Kathleen Biggins: It's not good for our bottom line, and it's not good for our customers, and it's not good for our.
27:47
Kathleen Biggins: So what is happening?
27:49
Kathleen Biggins: The economic equation about this issue really has been turned on us yet.
27:53
Kathleen Biggins: We now understand the cost of continuing on our current path, and we now have new ways, due to human ingenuity and entrepreneurship, to power our abilities and create a viable quality of life without continuing to flip up carbon dioxide foundations at the same level.
28:11
Kathleen Biggins: We can wean ourselves away without destroying our world, which is really an important innovation.
28:17
Kathleen Biggins: So what you can see here in this graph is probably work that shows how renewable energy, wind and solar, have gone so precipitously.
28:28
Kathleen Biggins: Wind has dropped 70% in the last decade, solar 90% in the last decade.
28:35
Kathleen Biggins: So that on a global basis, apples to apples, no subsidies, solar and wind are as much as 40% cheaper than fossil fuel sources.
28:45
Kathleen Biggins: And think about those down there.
28:47
Kathleen Biggins: Fossil fuel sources are extracted, they're things that we get from underneath the earth.
28:52
Kathleen Biggins: Wind and solar are technologies.
28:55
Kathleen Biggins: They're things that as we build more of, we learn how to do better.
28:59
Kathleen Biggins: And as we build economies of scale, they go down and cost.
29:01
Kathleen Biggins: So this is predicted to go down significantly by the end of the century.
29:06
Kathleen Biggins: So it's not even a fair fight now.
29:08
Kathleen Biggins: It's going to be less of a fair fight than we get in the next two or three years.
29:12
Kathleen Biggins: And what that means is that in all of the major emitters of the world, China, which is number one, the US, which is number two, and India, which is number three, renewable energy is the cheapest new form of energy out there.
29:26
Kathleen Biggins: And that's translating into the marketplace.
29:30
Kathleen Biggins: In 2023, 86% of all new power generation that came online in the United States was fossil-free.
29:38
Kathleen Biggins: It's expected to be around 95% this year.
29:41
Kathleen Biggins: And investment is shipped.
29:43
Kathleen Biggins: You can see that last year globally we had $1.8 trillion put into clean energy versus 1 trillion into fossil fuels.
29:53
Kathleen Biggins: And other countries are integrating much higher levels of wind and solar, quite successfully while growing their economies.
30:00
Kathleen Biggins: We are a bit of a lagger at this point, even though we're coming on strong.
30:05
Kathleen Biggins: And I actually want to say that even with our own country, many states are leading the way.
30:10
Kathleen Biggins: Iowa, which we wouldn't think would be a major renewable player, gets 66% of its electricity from wheel.
30:19
Kathleen Biggins: And Texas is the number one producer of wheel.
30:22
Kathleen Biggins: So we are seeing the economic playout around the world and in our states to really drive this new technology forward.
30:32
Kathleen Biggins: And in addition, there are a lot of new innovative technologies that are coming that would enable us to have clean, firm power.
30:41
Kathleen Biggins: Firm meaning when you want it, you don't have to depend on the blowing wind or the shining sun to act as a backbone to support a power system that included a lot more renewables.
30:54
Kathleen Biggins: Some of the ones that people are super excited about are fusion.
30:57
Kathleen Biggins: This is something that's always been out of reach, but is now coming within reach.
31:02
Kathleen Biggins: Our own Department of Energy has projected we should build a pilot plant by 2040.
31:09
Kathleen Biggins: There are nine pilot companies that promise to have fusion on the grid at the end of the 2030s.
31:16
Kathleen Biggins: Microsoft has bought a power purchase agreement.
31:18
Kathleen Biggins: We will see.
31:19
Kathleen Biggins: If we want it, it will come.
31:21
Kathleen Biggins: This is a power of the sun, it's clean, and it can be used for so many applications, kind of the holy grid.
31:27
Kathleen Biggins: They say if we invest on it, it can be a reality.
31:30
Kathleen Biggins: But it is a price.
31:31
Kathleen Biggins: No?
31:36
Kathleen Biggins: Yes.
31:37
Kathleen Biggins: Okay.
31:38
Kathleen Biggins: It's kind of the new darling of the energy world.
31:41
Kathleen Biggins: So we can take all that excess solar and wind because sometimes we throw it away.
31:47
Kathleen Biggins: We have so much of it we can't use it, we just throw it away.
31:50
Kathleen Biggins: So instead of throwing it away, what if we used it to break up water atoms into hydrogen and oxygen?
31:58
Kathleen Biggins: And then what if we took that hydrogen gas and stored it for weeks, months, or turned it into ammonia and used it for fertilizer or fuel, we could store that as well.
32:10
Kathleen Biggins: What does that let us do?
32:11
Kathleen Biggins: That lets us take wind and sun and store it.
32:15
Kathleen Biggins: Right?
32:16
Kathleen Biggins: And it can be burned a lot like natural gas.
32:19
Kathleen Biggins: So it can be used in long-term shipping and air travel and things like that.
32:24
Kathleen Biggins: And so there is a race worldwide to be the leader in clean green hydrogen.
32:31
Kathleen Biggins: Geothermal.
32:32
Kathleen Biggins: It's not your grandmother's geothermal anymore.
32:36
Kathleen Biggins: It is new technologies are enabling it to play a much bigger role.
32:43
Kathleen Biggins: In part because of fracking, some of the technology that we learn from fracking is very applicable over here.
32:49
Kathleen Biggins: We're also finding that old abandoned oil wells and gas wells can be used for geothermal.
32:55
Kathleen Biggins: And so this is expected to move into Texas and Louisiana and other areas where we never thought geothermal could play that role again.
33:03
Kathleen Biggins: Clean and firm.
33:04
Kathleen Biggins: And then neonuclear, this is one of those small little nuclear plants that are being talked about with their SMRs, and other countries are moving with a much way more quickly than we are, but we are our last nuclear uh plant that came online down in Georgia took 14 years and it was $14 billion in the budget.
33:26
Kathleen Biggins: China is building up in China.
33:28
Kathleen Biggins: So other countries, especially China, especially India, two of the bigger that we really want to lose the energy.
33:39
Kathleen Biggins: There's a lot of new technology coming in that we don't have to capture it from the air, from the water, and also this is the first 80% of our energy.
34:01
Kathleen Biggins: We have technology that enables us to use the current The Wire's currently around the field.
34:31
Kathleen Biggins: We can round them in the burn and fire.
34:34
Kathleen Biggins: Simple innovation has a major amount of patients are being able to meet this challenge.
36:00
Kathleen Biggins: That means that buildings are a critical place to start in decarbonization, including our appliances, including what we put inside of them.
36:31
Kathleen Biggins: But also that they are vulnerable to the risk of climate change.
36:37
Kathleen Biggins: So some of the new ways that they're talking about building are carbon-absorbing concrete fire favor houses that are built into the ground.
36:46
Kathleen Biggins: These are down in Australia.
36:47
Kathleen Biggins: So the fire goes over 73.
36:49
Kathleen Biggins: There's one that is built without water so that the wind will go around it in a cocaine-crone area.
36:55
Kathleen Biggins: And this is nano paint, which actually has a little nano particle that allows the solar radiance to help back at a different wavelength.
37:02
Kathleen Biggins: So it doesn't have to be a gas.
37:05
Kathleen Biggins: And as we heard from the lesson, there are buyers now who are integrating their values into their purchase decisions, and not just on the client, but in general.
39:55
Kathleen Biggins: So if all of a sudden you're losing access to those really high properties, what does that mean for your ability as a city to continue to provide the same amount of services and repair for more services because of the damages and pressures of coming up?
40:32
Kathleen Biggins: They're going to have to build more infrastructure, they're going to have to raise roads, they're going to have to bring in more sand, they're going to have to build seawater, they're going to have to build better drainage, right?
40:41
Kathleen Biggins: They may have to raise their firehouse, they may have to fix the fix the hospitals.
40:46
Kathleen Biggins: There's a lot of changes we need to do to harden ourselves for the new world we have created.
40:51
Kathleen Biggins: There's also a lot of pressure from the state level saying we need to be smarter, we need to do more on the municipal level.
40:59
Kathleen Biggins: And New Jersey's kind of at the forefront of that, so you guys have already lived through it, but in many states it's not happening yet.
41:05
Kathleen Biggins: And then there's also just a question of quality of life issues.
41:08
Kathleen Biggins: If your road is being flooded, I don't know, nine times a year, and if the water is coming up to your front yard three times a year, how much do you stay in that want to stay in that house?
41:22
Kathleen Biggins: And say you have a huge hurricane and you're built up and you're not that you last, but the bushes torn in, that the looking center turned it in, that maybe the bridge was washed down.
41:32
Kathleen Biggins: How long do you want to stay?
41:34
Kathleen Biggins: So every person will make that choice for themselves, but it's not.
41:38
Kathleen Biggins: And then also, if people abandon their properties and they get underneath the tide line, then cities might have responsibility going in, taking out the segments and the other things that would otherwise found the water.
41:51
Kathleen Biggins: Who's at risk?
41:53
Kathleen Biggins: Home buyers, home builders, landlords, mortgage investors, insurance companies, missing miles, and both stay up from that.
42:01
Kathleen Biggins: And what is being done?
42:05
Kathleen Biggins: What we're seeing on a national scale is that banks are taking a look at how financial institutions are taking a look at their risk of exposure.
42:14
Kathleen Biggins: They're asking for higher down payments, they're looking to sell those mortgages more quickly back to Ready May and Ready Met.
42:23
Kathleen Biggins: And there is a push to look at shorter mortgages because these climate risks get worse as we get into the century, get into the next couple of decades, and so it is an anticipation that there'll be shorter mortgages offered in order to protect the financial institution.
42:39
Kathleen Biggins: Regulatory changes that we're seeing, higher density development, restricting development in dangerous places, changing housing zones and building codes, revising land use, using predictive models again say this is kind of new, but banks and mortgage companies are using them on a property level to evaluate what they're doing.
43:02
Kathleen Biggins: And importantly, for the very first time in New Jersey, as a leader, we are beginning to look at banking rules based on what we know is coming versus what historically happened.
43:15
Kathleen Biggins: Other states are still basing their flood data on things that happened as far back as 1889.
43:21
Kathleen Biggins: So we don't live in that golden way.
43:26
Kathleen Biggins: And so New Jersey really has been a leader in looking forward and predicting what's coming.
43:37
Kathleen Biggins: The towns are being held accountable for strong water management at a higher level for real balance.
43:43
Kathleen Biggins: Insurance, of course, is also under pressure.
43:47
Kathleen Biggins: We spoke about that in the beginning.
43:49
Kathleen Biggins: This is uh what Swiss Greek, again, the number one insurance company in the world, as said natural disasters could increase their costs by 60% by 40%.
43:59
Kathleen Biggins: And they expect that will increase it by 5.3% per year on the global basis by 2040.
44:08
Kathleen Biggins: In addition, we're saying that insurers are being much more proactive of mandating mitigation and hardening enhancements in order to get insurance.
44:17
Kathleen Biggins: So even if you can get it, it may cost you something to get there.
44:20
Kathleen Biggins: Okay.
44:22
Kathleen Biggins: Again, predictive modeling is happening at the insurance level, the reinsurance level.
44:28
Kathleen Biggins: It is important to know that your insurance pricing is impacted by what is happening around the world because the reinsurance companies are active around the world and they are a big part of the cost to your insurance company.
44:42
Kathleen Biggins: So if it happens in California, if it happens in China, if it happens in Dubai, it could impact your rates right here in New Jersey.
44:52
Kathleen Biggins: And this is really interesting to me.
44:55
Kathleen Biggins: If we have any lawyers, I'd love to talk to you about it.
44:58
Kathleen Biggins: If we can predict what's coming, is it an act of done?
45:05
Kathleen Biggins: So if we can predict what's coming, what are the legal ramifications of building in that flex or building with materials that are too flimsy for what we know is plumbing as far as engine and water?
45:21
Kathleen Biggins: It starts changing the equation about what can be covered, what can be expected, who's responsible.
45:30
Kathleen Biggins: So someone has said that they would like to be a lawyer in the next couple of decades because that's where a lot of the action is going to be.
45:39
Kathleen Biggins: And I and I believe that.
45:41
Kathleen Biggins: Okay, I talked about the predictive model.
45:44
Kathleen Biggins: This is just one.
45:44
Kathleen Biggins: This is called Risk Factor.
45:46
Kathleen Biggins: It is from First Street.
45:48
Kathleen Biggins: I ran it from my home on Nelson Ridge and Hopewell, New Jersey.
45:52
Kathleen Biggins: And what shows is that I'm not close for water.
45:55
Kathleen Biggins: I'm going to be fine on flood.
45:57
Kathleen Biggins: Heat, those super hot days that are coming, there are going to be more of them in the future, so I am going to be impacted by heat.
46:04
Kathleen Biggins: I'm going to definitely be impacted by wind.
46:07
Kathleen Biggins: Again, looking at the types of swarms we're getting, the types of hurricanes that are predicted.
46:11
Kathleen Biggins: This one knocked my flats off.
46:13
Kathleen Biggins: Before on wildfire, on Nelson Edge.
46:17
Kathleen Biggins: It's like, are you kidding me?
46:18
Kathleen Biggins: But then I thought about all the woodlands around me, and I'm like, oh my gosh, I never ever would have thought of that.
46:24
Kathleen Biggins: But when I get turns, they work, right?
46:27
Kathleen Biggins: So, um, and this is available for you guys into your subscription if you want to go deeper.
46:33
Kathleen Biggins: So, what does that mean?
46:35
Kathleen Biggins: Well, as I told you, um at the Paris Accord, we were on an incredibly dangerous trajectory, a crazy trajectory, which again is why the world came together.
46:45
Kathleen Biggins: We were on this level.
46:46
Kathleen Biggins: The policies that have been enacted since Paris, we have come down to the round level.
46:53
Kathleen Biggins: And there are promises that get us down kind of closer to the yellow level.
46:57
Kathleen Biggins: We need to be at the green level.
46:59
Kathleen Biggins: We need to put the pedal to the metal.
47:01
Kathleen Biggins: We need to do more.
47:02
Kathleen Biggins: When we hear we're doing too much, no, no, no.
47:05
Kathleen Biggins: We need to embrace the actions that are in place, including the inflation reduction benefits.
47:11
Kathleen Biggins: We need to use those.
47:13
Kathleen Biggins: And we need to continue to find ways in our own lives and in our country's discourse of pushing even more action.
47:23
Kathleen Biggins: And if we do, our kids and grandkids will have a very different future.
47:27
Kathleen Biggins: Take a look at this graphic that shows how generations will be impacted again by the emissions we're putting up today.
47:33
Kathleen Biggins: Here, Gen Alpha, those who were born after 2013, will here in the Newark area feel temperatures that are almost seven degrees hotter if we stay on our current emissions at.
47:46
Kathleen Biggins: But if we make the cuts, if we use the technologies and we create the policies, they could experience as little as two degrees hotter.
47:55
Kathleen Biggins: What a difference.
47:57
Kathleen Biggins: And that is based on what we choose to do.
48:02
Kathleen Biggins: So what we choose matters.
48:06
Kathleen Biggins: Thank you.
48:07
Kathleen Biggins: And I look forward to having your question.