Blog Archive for January, 2012
Q&A: Envisioning Minnesota’s future electricity system
What do Minnesotans want their electricity system look like in the year 2040?
That’s the question a group of civic, business and community leaders are working to answer as part of a nonprofit policy forum.
Annie Levenson-Falk, policy director for the Citizens League
The Citizen League is a “multi-issue, multi-partisan” organization that aims to build common ground around important policy matters in Minnesota. The organization is just turning 60 years old, and over the last six decades it’s worked on “pretty much any state policy issue you can think of,” says policy manager Annie Levenson-Falk.
The organization brought together about 100 people last year (including policy experts from Fresh Energy, which publishes Midwest Energy News) to begin envisioning the state’s future electricity infrastructure.
The group recently released a report covering the first phase of its discussion, which identified affordability, competitiveness, efficiency, self-reliance, and minimizing environmental impact as goals to strive for. In the next phase, beginning early this year, the group will attempt to develop policy recommendations to help meet those goals.
Midwest Energy News spoke with Levenson-Falk last week about how the project is progressing:
MwEN: How and why did the Citizens League decide to look at the state’s electrical system?
Levenson-Falk: Electrical energy is one of the major [issues] that we are working on. The way this project came together is that our members identified electrical energy as an issue that is not at a crisis point in Minnesota, so it’s not something that’s at the front of a lot of people’s agendas unless you work in the field, but it is really important for the future of the state. It’s a lot of major infrastructure, so change happens over the course of decades. So we really need to get out in front of this before it becomes a problem.
Minnesota is pretty well positioned in terms of our university, the research that we do here, the business community that we have here and the things that are developing. We really want to take advantage of this opportunity to be a leader on energy issues. A lot of people already are working on electrical energy, and we don’t want to overlap things that are already being done, but a lot of that work is happening within particular sectors, the focus of business or if it’s solar or wind. They don’t often come together and work across sectors with a long term view of what’s best for the state, what that state needs.
Who’s involved and how has the process worked?
We’ve had more than 100 people involved overall. It’s really a host of folks from the business community, from different types of utilities, academic, environmental organizations, citizens who aren’t affiliated with any particular group but are interested in good policy and because they want Minnesota to succeed.
When you’re talking about something like electricity it’s so ubiquitous that everybody has an interest in it.
What does an ideal Minnesota electrical energy system look like?
Everyone pretty much agrees on six or seven key characteristics, like it has to be affordable, it has to be efficient, it has to be sustainable… those types of things, which you can’t really say no to. When you start to dig a little bit deeper, everyone has a different meaning behind those. So the point of our first phase was before we start talking about how do we make it affordable or efficient, let’s talk about what that actually means.
The next phase of the project is going to be: how do we get there?
Why not just leave this up to the utilities and their regulators to worry about?
Utilities are certainly doing a lot of work on this, and Minnesota is in a better position than a lot of other states … but we really heard there is a lack of a space for folks from the utility sector, the business sector, the community, citizens, environmentalists, to all come together and talk about the common good for the state and the long-term focus.
How do you plan to keep this from becoming just a document that sits on the shelf but is never implemented?
We really take that into consideration in all of our policy work. We try to involve the people who are impacted by a problem to help define it and come up with the solutions, but then we also say when you’re coming to the table you have to bring your resources with you. What “resources” means might vary. Obviously if you are the head of Xcel versus a residential customer, the kind of experience and expertise and resources you bring to the table are different.
The next phase is going to be convening a lot of those same people to come up with recommendations to reach [those goals], and then hopefully along the line we’ll have those people involved who need to be a part of moving those recommendations forward.
The Citizen League’s Electrical Energy Phase I report is available here. People who want to get involved with Phase II can contact Annie Levenson-Falk at alevensonfalk@citizensleague.org or 651-289-1072.
Greener buildings, with no upfront spending?
Sen. Al Franken
Over the past decade, about $12.5 million has been spent on county building retrofit projects in Anoka County, in the Twin Cities’ northern suburbs.
The improvements are helping to cut the county’s energy bill by hundreds of thousands of dollars annually, and yet taxpayers haven’t had to front one penny.
The projects were financed through a tool called energy savings performance contracting, in which a private partner foots the bill for energy efficiency projects in exchange for a percentage of the money customers save on their energy bills.
Sen. Al Franken, D-Minnesota, hosted a webinar Friday at the University of Minnesota’s St. Paul campus to promote performance contacting and other energy efficiency financing tools for government and commercial buildings.
“What’s great about this is it just is common sense,” said Franken, a member of the Senate energy committee.
In October, Franken launched an initiative called “Back to Work Minnesota” to encourage building retrofits as way to cut energy use and create jobs.
The White House has also recently promoted energy savings performance contracting as an energy-cutting, job-creating strategy.
Andrew Dykstra, director of facilities management and construction for Anoka County, was among the speakers at Friday’s event.
A decade ago, the county faced aging infrastructure, rising energy costs and increasing budget pressure, Dykstra explained. The county decided to partner with Honeywell’s Energy Services Group on a series of efficiency projects.
The county has 2.5 million square feet of facilities to manage. Energy Services Group proposed several improvements, including lighting retrofits, insulation replacement and heating and air conditioning upgrades.
The energy services company guaranteed the county a level of energy savings. Instead of asking for payment upfront, the company collects a portion of the county’s annual energy savings each year until the projects are paid for.
If the energy savings don’t materialize, the company pays the county what it expected to save. “Anoka County is not on the hook,” Dykstra said.
Franken also spotlighted property assessed clean energy, or PACE, financing. Edina, a Minneapolis suburb, recently became the first city in Minnesota to establish a PACE ordinance.
Under PACE, a local government issues a bond on behalf of a building owner to finance a renewable energy or efficiency project. The bond is sold to a private investor and secured with a special property tax assessment on the building.
The Benefits of Energy Savings Performance Contracting (from Friday’s webinar):
Dispatches from the oil boom
Image via Andrew Shay
There’s been plenty of press about how North Dakota’s oil boom is affecting long-time residents of the area, but most of us know little about the day-to-day life of the thousands of workers who have flocked to the state to work in the oil fields.
This morning, Bob Collins of Minnesota Public Radio directs us to the blog of Andrew Shay, a 24-year-old Minneapolis man who has moved to a “man camp” in Williston, North Dakota to work for Halliburton.
Shay’s blog, titled “I Am Here,” reads a bit like a wartime memoir. As one would expect, the hours are long, the work arduous, but there’s also the challenge of filling downtime and dealing with more mundane tasks, like learning the math to convert cubic feet into barrels.
In a posting from earlier this week, Shay describes a trip into Williston to stock up on supplies:
Things are wild here. Everyone’s looking back, or forward; talking about the good days’ or talking about how they are gonna spend there cash when they get home. Every dude that we trained with has been out to the field so far; I think we are some of the last ones to get out. The guys who i trained with offered good advice, and wish me luck; but most of them just say; be safe. And I guess that’s the key; be safe.
Curious about what it’s like inside these massive dorms? EnergyNOW took a look inside back in November:
Power from hog manure slow to catch on in Midwest
Researchers in North Carolina have created a better way to convert hog manure to energy, but producers in the Midwest are unlikely to rush to implement it.
Their reservations are based on a combination of factors, but center primarily on the upfront costs involved.
With low energy costs and a price tag that can top $1 million, anaerobic digester systems, which capture methane to produce electricity, simply don’t justify the investment, producers say.
That’s particularly true as grant support that has been used to help offset the costs of such projects evaporates, they say.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced earlier this month that their Rural Energy for America Program, a large source of funding for farm-based renewable energy projects, was allotted $25.4 million this year, down from $75 million in 2011.
“These are expensive to put in, and if we already have cheap electricity rates the cost to make our own power still isn’t cost effective without getting grant dollars to install these systems,” said Bill Crawford, the president of the Minnesota Pork Board.
Anaerobic digesters have been around for more than a decade, and can be found across the Midwest. In agricultural applications, they are primarily located at dairy farms that have larger concentrations of animals and a better economy of scale.
Officials in Iowa, which is by far the largest pork-producing state in the U.S., as well as in Minnesota and Wisconsin said they knew of no hog farms using such systems. There is at least one in operation in Nebraska.
The North Carolina system was built, at a hog farm with 8,600 hogs that produces 400,000 gallons of waste a week, after the state incorporated hog manure into their renewable energy standard.
Renewable portfolio standards in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois count anaerobic digesters as sources of renewable energy, but do not require their use.
Developed with the backing of Duke University and Google Inc., which are purchasing carbon offsets from the project, the system includes the same basic features as traditional anaerobic digesters.
But it is set apart from previous designs because it also includes a basin that removes ammonia and other pollutants from leftover liquid so that it can be used for irrigation and on the farm.
Builders say it also reduces the level of nitrogen, phosphorous and other pollutants in the manure, creating a usable fertilizer. Previously, farmers with unusable manure put it into lagoons that could degrade water and air quality.
“I think the important thing to note is that the potential exists to harvest the energy value of the waste to facilitate further treatment of the waste and assist the farmer with his operations as a whole,” said Gus Simmons, the director of engineering at Cavanaugh & Associates, which designed and built the system.
The North Carolina system is capable of creating around 500 megawatt-hours of electricity a year. Officials say that’s enough to power around 35 homes, although the electricity is being used entirely on the farm now.
It cost $1.2 million to build and, although a cost analysis is ongoing, Simmons said it has proven to be more efficient than expected, and that it will likely pay for itself within a decade.
Future systems could presumably cost less because the price tag included research and development costs that future developers won’t have to absorb. The designs are also being made available to the public, and the system can be built using equipment that is readily available to farmers.
“We tried to ensure that this system could be operated easily by a farmer using conventional style farming equipment, and were very deliberate in our design approach to create a system that was as close to conventional farming processes as possible,” Simmons said.
Still, despite finding promising results in the year the North Carolina system has been up, Simmons acknowledged variables between farms around the country – including climate, scale and energy costs – make each situation unique.
“Every farm is different, so it’s not as though you can replicate the exact dimensions and capacity and expect the same result,” he said.
Photo by dannyakright via Creative Commons
Should red and blue states be green and black instead?
A presidential election year is upon us again, and that means the return of maps splitting the nation into red and blue states.
James Lenfestey thinks we should be seeing green and black instead.
Lenfestey, a Minneapolis poet and former journalist, spoke at a monthly Environment Minnesota breakfast Tuesday about the politics of energy. (Environment Minnesota is a member of RE-AMP, which publishes Midwest Energy News.)
The oil and coal industries have influenced U.S. politics so much in recent decades, Lenfestey explained, that many red states would be better represented as black for the oil and coal interests they support. Blue states, meanwhile, have led the way on green energy.
Lenfestey’s first exposure to the fossil-fuel industry’s political machine came while working as an editorial writer for the Minneapolis Star Tribune in the early 1990s. After writing editorials about climate change, he began receiving mail from an organization called the Global Climate Coalition.
The now-defunct GCC was among the earliest fossil-fuel backed groups to begin spreading scientific-sounding misinformation about climate change issues. He calls them Potemkin villages — fake groups meant to give the appearance that science or the public is behind it.
The mission of these groups has been to confuse the public about the science behind greenhouse gases and global warming. They not only borrowed strategies from the tobacco industry, but some of the same individuals who defended tobacco now work for these fossil fuel groups.
The latter claim is documented in the recent book “Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth About Climate Change,” by Naomi Oreskes (who penned an editorial this week in the Los Angeles Times and appeared Tuesday on NPR’s Talk of the Nation.)
Lenfestey characterized it as an information war, and the side that believes society needs to take action to curb greenhouse emissions is “absolutely losing” the public battle.
One reason countering climate misinformation is so difficult is that those spreading it only need to sow enough confusion to stall action. “All they want is stalemate,” said Lenfestey.
Another factor that makes it challenging is the state of media. “My old game, the mainstream media, is very much part of the problem,” he said. The amount of coverage of climate change issues has plummeted in the past half decade, and much of the coverage that remains focuses on the controversy rather than the facts.
How do climate-change believers turn the conversation around? Lenfestey offered some advice for how people can better communicate. When people criticize government subsidies for clean energy technologies, for example, remind them that hydraulic fracturing wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for years of government support.
Perhaps Lenfestey and President Obama’s speechwriters are reading the same pointers, because that’s how Obama framed the issue in Tuesday evening’s State of the Union speech.
“[I]t was public research dollars, over the course of thirty years, that helped develop the technologies to extract all this natural gas out of shale rock – reminding us that government support is critical in helping businesses get new energy ideas off the ground,” the president said.
Obama only mentioned climate change once in the speech, in noting that Congress is too divided to take on the issue at all.
Lenfestey noted that presidents and their advisers have been talking about the risks of climate change or fossil fuel emissions since the Lyndon Johnson administration. Whether more energy-politics-as-usual will follow this speech is to be seen.
Playing the health card
What does this bowl of carrots have in common with a smart meter? Keep reading.
Today’s story on smart meter opposition takes a closer look at health claims made by critics of the technology.
Smart meter opponents say radio waves emitting from the devices can be harmful to human health. But existing research has found no evidence to support these claims, and many common household devices, like baby monitors and wireless routers, put out similar doses of microwave energy.
There is equally thin evidence to support claims that power lines are a health hazard, as reporter Dan Haugen found out earlier this month. Opponents cite concerns about magnetic fields from high-voltage lines, which are in reality only a fraction of the strength of the natural magnetic field one is exposed to merely by standing on the earth.
Similarly, numerous reviews of research have failed to find evidence supporting claims that wind turbines are a health hazard. The latest, conducted on behalf of the state of Massachusetts, found only that the noise from turbines could potentially cause sleep disruptions, echoing earlier studies.
So why do these claims persist? Two reasons.
One is that they can’t be fully dismissed – while there’s no solid evidence to date to support these health claims, there’s always the possibility that science simply hasn’t uncovered a connection yet. So while it’s incredibly unlikely that a power line will give you cancer, science can never 100 percent eliminate the possibility. And a few minutes on the internet will turn up dozens of “experts” raising the alarm about just about anything (for instance, baby carrots). For some, that’s all the proof that is needed.
But a more important reason is that these arguments appear to be effective. While we’ve learned to internalize the risk from our cell phones or the microwave oven in the kitchen, new technology (or development that is new to our neighborhood) is more of a mystery. So these claims often get repeated without question in media coverage.
“Linda,” an opponent of a power line project in Montana, put it rather candidly in her comment on Haugen’s post:
Health problems or not, I think many people just have no interest in living under these things. They are loud, ugly, invasive and ultimately reduce quality of life/property for those forced to reside nearby. Not to mention that the benefit of these things is rarely seen by those who have to carry the burden of housing them, yet they see others further down the line having no negative impact but receiving all the “good.” Unfortunately, none of those things seem to hold up very well in court, so people hold on to the health threat potential, as small as it may (or may not) be.
So the fundamental debate here isn’t whether these things are harmful to your health. The opposition is driven more by a sense of fairness – not wanting to bear a disproportionate share of the burden for our shared electricity infrastructure, as well as a desire to control changes to the physical landscape around one’s home.
All of which is completely understandable. But until we all start generating our own electricity, these things have to go in someone’s backyard.
Is there a way to continue developing our electricity infrastructure without disenfranchising affected neighbors? Your thoughts are welcome below-
Photo by Edgar Barrera via Creative Commons
Energy storage creates many winners, so who pays?
The benefits of energy storage projects are far reaching, from reduced maintenance costs at power plants to less price volatility for electricity customers.
That raises a tricky market question for pumped-hydro, compressed air and other types of energy storage projects: Who should pay for them?
Technical difficulties postponed a webinar on Friday, when backers of a recently abandoned energy storage project in Iowa planned to debrief the industry on lessons learned from the project. The group did release its final report, published by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratory.
Among its recommendations is a call for electricity grid operators to develop tariffs that would allow storage developers to collect money from others who would benefit.
RELATED: Scrapped Iowa project leaves energy storage lessons
The Iowa Stored Energy Park was to have been a 270-megawatt compressed-air energy storage facility located near Des Moines. The association of municipal utilities that was exploring the project terminated it over the summer after concluding that Iowa’s sandstone aquifers weren’t suitable for compressed air storage.
In the eight years they studied the concept, the team says they learned several lessons that might help other bulk storage developers, and most of them apply regardless of the geology or storage technology used, they say. Many of them deal with economic, legislative, and transmission issues.
Here are some highlights from the report, Lessons From Iowa:
On economics: Compressed-air energy storage facilities cost more to build than natural gas generators and have similar operation and maintenance costs. However, bulk storage facilities can be more cost-effective than conventional generators because of other “unique attributes” that can make other plants more profitable. They decrease the amount of cycling — dialing output up or down — that needs to happen at other plants, which helps those power plants run more efficiency with less wear and tear. Storage facilities also help reduce hourly price volatility in a market.
On transmission: The potential for the Iowa storage to reduce or defer transmission line investments was “disappointing,” the report says. The project offered “little or no such benefits.” The reason is that the storage facility wasn’t slated to be “collocated” next to a generation source, such as a wind farm. That means there’s potential for the energy to encounter congestion between the power plant and the storage site. “[L]ocation of the storage on the transmission system, particularly relative to generation facilities that could benefit from the storage, matters.”
Who gains, who pays: The benefits of energy storage projects spread far beyond the owner, unless the owner also owns all of the nearby generation. Lessons From Iowa suggests that electric grid operators should come up with a system of tariffs to help “commoditize” these benefits, such as reduced cycling and maintenance at power plants. The existing computer planning models used by utilities do a poor job of modeling the benefits of storage and would need to be improved.
On renewable policies: Bulk storage facilities help utilities get more value out of renewable investments. Wind tends to blow most at night, when electricity demand (and prices) are low. Being able to store energy until daytime when it is needed enables more renewable development, which is why states should allow energy storage projects to count toward their renewable energy standards, the report argues. “Legislation or other policy initiatives are necessary to enable the full benefits of storage in encouraging and supporting renewables development.”
On community relations: Energy storage developers can’t forget they need to win the support of people who will live near the facilities. Lessons From Iowa recommends being as transparent and accessible to the community as possible. The local community should be involved in where the facilities will be located, it says. “Community objections to a new project are often based on lack of information.”
On geology: This is what ultimately derailed the Iowa project. Finding an aquifer that will work as a site for compressed-air energy storage is “time-consuming and challenging.” Also: “problematic.” The economics of this project looked favorable enough, but “the geology was a negative factor.”
The Lessons From Iowa report is available for download at http://www.lessonsfromiowa.org.
At green business summit, a call for direction on energy
Wind farm development is expected to grind to a standstill if federal incentives aren't renewed this year. (Photo by Randy and Sharon Green via Creative Commons)
Green tech business leaders say the uncertainty of federal production tax credits (PTCs) set to expire at the end of the year, along with a lack of a federal energy policy, have begun to hurt their future prospects.
Meeting with Minnesota Rep. Betty McCollum in St. Paul on Tuesday, a group of businesspeople said the lack of a clear, dependable energy policy has slowed their growth, particularly now, with the looming PTC extension deadline.
As green company representatives ticked off a list of concerns – the loss of subsidies, the declining American leadership in renewable energy, the influx of imported solar panels in U.S. markets, the lack of a coordinated energy policy – McCollum called for them to get politically involved.
McCollum said there’s no reason for an ideological split on green energy since these companies create high paying jobs and renewable industries have been growing quickly. After the next election, McCollum predicted the Minnesota delegation would work together to support the PTC and other subsidies to help solar, wind, geothermal and other renewable energy sources.
A 2009 report, The Clean Energy Economy, and looked at data from 1998-2007. The Pew Environment Group, which sponsored the discussion, said its own recent study showed clean energy jobs grew 9.1 percent last year nationally, compared with 3.7 percent for all jobs. In Minnesota, green jobs grew by 11.9 percent, compared to 1.9 percent for all jobs.
But those figures could see a steep decline if a host of government subsidies go away and if more policy planning fails to fall in place.
WindLogics, Inc. chief executive officer Mark Ahlstrom said his wind forecasting company was “seeing a huge falloff” in the number of projects this year. He’s had to trim his staff to deal with drop in business and he’s concerned wind won’t have much of a future if the PTC elapses.
“Without the production tax credits we won’t see any new projects next year,” said Ahlstrom. “We need to find a way out of this and we need a long term policy but we’re not there yet.”
Judy Poferl, president of Northern States Power, a division of Xcel Energy, Inc., highlighted Xcel’s recent announcement of a pullback in wind energy purchases. Part of it was due to having exceeded state mandates for renewable energy generation, she said, but the lack of a guiding federal policy on wind played a role in the decision, too.
Large utilities planning for the future have difficulty when the policy landscape keeps shifting, she said. Xcel has been “out in front” on buying renewable energy but “if the rules change, you could be in a bad spot,” she said.
First created in the U.S. Energy Policy Act of 1992, the PTC offers wind developers a 2.2 cent per kWh tax credit. The solar industry’s version of the PTC – called the “investment tax credit” – doesn’t expire until 2016.
Another program that just ended, the Section 1603 Treasury Grant Program, gave manufacturers a cash grant of as much as 30 percent of the cost of a project in lieu of tax credits. The attendees agreed that the program, along with others, largely pay for themselves with more jobs and tax payments to the government.
McCollum said the coal, natural gas and oil industries all have significant subsidies which rarely get highlighted in Congress or the media. The full cost of pollution from those industries in terms of higher health care costs is never accounted for, she said.
The partisan nature of the debate doesn’t make sense, said McCollum, because many conservative states, such as Texas, have huge green economies. But in Washington today green businesses “are seen as a drag on the economy,” she said, something she hopes to change.
EDITOR’S NOTE: An earlier version of this post misstated statistics from the Pew Environment Group.
Changing the conversation to conservation
In Kansas, it seems, the first rule of climate change is: Don’t talk about climate change.
That’s what EnergyNOW found in this segment (originally aired in August) on Kansas towns that have embraced renewable energy and conservation efforts in large part by avoiding politically divisive conversations about global warming.
Take, for example, Father Kerry Ninemire of Salina, who was heavily involved in the formation of Interfaith Power and Light, a religious group formed to fight climate change. Ninemire was unable to convince his own congregation to sign on with the organization (“It got associated a little bit more with the Democrat party. And Kansas is very Republican.”), but they nevertheless adopted efficiency measures that helped the church cut energy use by 10 percent.
EPA Administrator: Science is good for policy, business
Good science leads to good policy, which also happens to be good for business.
That was the message delivered Tuesday by U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson at an event hosted by the University of Minnesota’s Center for Science, Technology and Public Policy.
Jackson spoke about the central role that science plays in the agency’s decision making, as well as efforts to combat the stereotype of the agency as being “detached” or anti-business.
“The choice between our environment and our economy is a false choice,” said Jackson.
Speaking to students, faculty, policy makers and environmental advocates, Jackson emphasized that science forms the foundation for any standard or pollution limit the agency proposes.
In the past, the announcement of a new policy proposal has always come with calculations on cost estimates and health benefits. Today, though, the agency is as likely to include job creation forecasts.
Take brownfield and Superfund site cleanups, for example.
“We’re getting toxic pollutants out and putting economic opportunity back in,” Jackson said.
New pollution limits on mercury and other emissions from coal-burning power plants are expected to create new demand for scrubbers, which will lead to new business opportunities, she said.
“When you set an environmental or health standard, you create a need,” said Jackson. In other words, you create a market.
The recently adopted fuel-economy standards, which will push automakers’ average fleet efficiency to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, will save consumers an estimated $1.7 trillion at the pump.
Chrysler and General Motors are hiring engineers to help develop new vehicles and technology to meet the targets. “They are moving forward because they now know the rules of the road,” Jackson said.
But the economic ripple effect goes beyond Detroit. Jackson pointed to aluminum producer Alcoa, which is expanding its Davenport plant in anticipation of higher demand for lightweight vehicle materials.
“Without a doubt, environmental protection is good for the economy,” Jackson said.
Federal regulation can also help industries avoid having to deal with a patchwork of state and local regulations, which is one reason why automakers welcomed the new fuel-economy rules.
Jackson also spoke about the political climate in Washington. Public health and environmental protection have historically been bipartisan issues, she said, noting that President Nixon created the agency.
Today, the agency faces a Congressional majority that’s determined to dismantle environmental regulations.
“I do not feel like the lone voice, but I do feel like the other side has the megaphone of money,” said Jackson.
The EPA, and anyone who cares about environmental protection, needs to “expand the conversation,” Jackson said. For example, it increasingly talks about the positive economic impact of regulations.
Right-to-know laws are among the most important laws states and local governments can create, Jackson said. Nobody, regardless of their party, likes to live near pollution, and that information can mobilize action.
Change will depend on finding the facts and making them available to the public. It’s back to science.
“We have to continue to have loud and strong discussions about the role of science,” Jackson said. “Continue to just pound home the importance of science in our society.”
