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MS. EILPERIN: Good afternoon, and welcome to Washington Post Live. I am Juliet Eilperin, deputy climate and environmental editor here at The Washington Post. Thanks so much for joining us today for two conversations about energy efficiency.

My first guests are joining me to talk about energy efficiency in buildings, which account for the most significant portion of carbon emissions worldwide. We've got Donnel Baird from BlocPower and Jason McLennan from McLennan Design. Welcome to you both.

MR. BAIRD: Glad to be here.

MR. McLENNAN: Glad to be here.

MS. EILPERIN: Jason, I'd like to start with you. Where did your idea for creating buildings that are positive for the environment instead of a drain on the environment come from?

MR. McLENNAN: Well, I've been a longtime believer that we need to change how we design and build everything. I learned at an early, young age that we need to do things differently. So my entire career has been based around green building.

I have been doing this from way before it was cool, and I've been delighted to have worked on now many of the greenest buildings in the world that are‑‑

MS. EILPERIN: Sorry. I can't hear anything.

MR. McLENNAN: I'm not sure why. Can you hear me now? I'm not on mute.

MS. EILPERIN: I'm so sorry. I've been having technical difficulties. Let's see if we can hear. Okay.

MS. EILPERIN: Sorry. Can you go ahead? Now I can hear you crystal clear. I'm super sorry about that.

MR. McLENNAN: No, it's okay.

So just again, as background, I'm an architect and have been doing green buildings for my entire career. I actually knew I was going to be a green architect when I was a young kid and have been pursuing the most energy‑efficient and green solutions for a long time and way before it was cool. So this is something we call the "pursuit of living buildings," buildings that are not just less bad for the world but actually good for the planet.

MS. EILPERIN: Got it. And, Donnel, you have a slightly different approach on this topic because you're coming from the vantage point of making some of the technologies that are inherent in building efficiency more attainable for all here in this country. What prompted you to kind of start BlocPower and start targeting energy efficiency in some of the older buildings that we have here in New York City and elsewhere?

MR. BAIRD: Yeah. I'm so excited to be here. So I run a climate tech company, BlocPower, and we focus on greening existing buildings, particularly buildings in financially underserved communities like the ones where I grew up. I know these buildings. I know these communities. I did have a chance to travel the country as a senior staffer for both Obama campaigns, and I saw in my travels and work on both campaigns the patterns of energy insecurity, of energy poverty, of lack of investment, and lack of technical assistance to properly maintain heating, cooling, hot water systems in buildings so that families could be healthy.

These systems can be dangerous if you don't take care of them. You know, they can blow up and kill everybody in the building, and so there definitely is an equity and environmental justice component to greening existing buildings.

So I was a liaison to the U.S. Department of Energy in 2009 and 2010. We invested, you know, 6‑ or $7 billion in trying to green low‑income buildings like the ones that I grew up in, and a lot of it didn't work.

And so, since then from that day to this, I've been focused on what I see as an amazing opportunity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improve the health of low‑income communities, save low‑income communities money on their energy bills, move America off of reliance on oligarchic, autocratic, fossil fuel countries by reducing our reliance on oil and gas for buildings.

MS. EILPERIN: Right. And, obviously, both of you are really trying to prompt broader transformations in our built environment, and so, Jason, it's one thing to obviously come up with ideas about how to make greener buildings. It's another thing to scale it up and really make sure that it's being broadly adapted. Can you talk about some of the challenges that you faced as you've tried to make this not a niche sector but a broad sector here in this country?

MR. McLENNAN: Yeah. No, that's a good point. When I started my career, green building was definitely kind of a niche thing. It was really for the true believers, if you will, tree huggers, if you will, and there wasn't a lot of projects when I started my career.

It's really changed. I like to say that the wind used to be in my face, and now it's at my back, and what we're finding is that huge sectors are now trying to change how they do everything. The tech sector, in particular, the standards that they're building too are radically improved from just a few years ago.

Higher ed is another old category where buildings are getting better, but really across the board. We just finished in Seattle the world's greenest sports and entertainment venue, the Climate Pledge Arena, for the Seattle Kraken. So even sort of massive projects that are part of a civic infrastructure are going green in a deeper way now.

But it's still, you know, a huge area to go into, and definitely, [audio distortion] and the residential stock and affordable projects are just tiptoeing into this area at this time.

MS. EILPERIN: And do you think that‑‑just to follow up on that, so do you think‑‑you know, you made the reference to say, for example, building codes. I mean, does it really take kind of some of those policy changes to make this happen? Is there enough momentum in the private sector in itself to do it? What's your sense of what's kind of essential to make broader change on that front?

MR. McLENNAN: Well, we need to‑‑we need to both pull from the top and push from the bottom. So we definitely need codes to keep getting more stringent, and of course, we're seeing that in California. In Seattle, where I live, you know, the building codes are leadership level for municipal scale.

But we need to go beyond codes. Codes are really the worst allowed by law, when you think about it. So we can raise the bottom, but we also need to have aspirational projects and examples, and we need corporate leadership and private leadership to build better buildings. And we need to go way beyond code compliance if we're going to tackle climate change.

MS. EILPERIN: Got it. And, Donnel, so, you know, buildings are obviously by‑‑are inherently these permanent structures which by some estimates, you know, a commercial building can last for 60 years. Obviously, big apartment buildings, you have some of these challenges. So, when you look at what have been some of the‑‑both the obstacles that you've encountered in making some of these older buildings green or greener and in terms of how you've been able to get beyond that, what's been your experience on that front?

MR. BAIRD: Yeah. So we are based in New York City in Brooklyn, and, I mean, we have projects where the buildings are a hundred years old, 150 years old. The energy system is 60 years old, so quote geriatric.

We had a project where there's a 150‑year‑old Catholic school where the heating system was a coal‑burning system, and, you know, you would like shovel coal in the basement. There would be like a pile of coal in the corner. You'd have a shovel, and then you'd throw it into the coal furnace, and that's how the building was heated.

And then, like, 30, 40 years ago, someone came in and said, "Coal? That's horrible," and then they shifted from coal to, like, burning oil.

MR. BAIRD: So, like, a giant truck pulls up and pumps oil into the basement, and then you burn that oil to produce heat or hot water year‑round, and all of the, you know, pollution that emerges and smog from burning that oil for hot water very day in that school is released into the school and into the cafeteria and into the surrounding community. So these are some of the challenges and opportunities.

Obviously, when you're dealing with very old buildings you run into asbestos. You run into lead and mold, and so we actually have to train workers on hazardous materials mitigation in order to navigate these projects.

We're very excited about a new project that we're launching where we're going to decarbonize 100 percent of the buildings in a whole city, and so we're going to take a whole city, all of the buildings off of fossil fuels. We're going to move them off of oil, move them off of gas and make them 100 percent electric, and so every building in the city of Ithaca is going to become a green building.

We have seven years to accomplish this, but hopefully, we'll get it done in four. And we look forward to hopefully inspiring other cities around the country and around the world to decarbonize all of their existing buildings as well.

MS. EILPERIN: And I know that a key part of what you're doing Donnel is, you know, you were often pitching this as an investment opportunity, right? I mean, whether you're‑‑sometimes you're talking to private investors. Obviously, you talk to, you know, the federal government to get them to give grants, right? You skipped a class to be able to go talk to DOE to help launch this off the ground. Can you talk about, you know, to what extent has the climate changed from that? Especially, obviously, we're in‑‑we're having some economic challenges right now. How have you been able to make that pitch, and have you gotten a sense of whether it's become easier or more complicated in time as you've been trying to broaden the reach for BlocPower?

MR. BAIRD: Yeah. It's interesting. We have seen a bunch of momentum, as has been mentioned by my colleague here, in the green buildings industry, and you do see major initiatives from the Biden‑Harris team and their administration focusing on greening buildings across American and scaling up energy efficiency.

The president recently, like yesterday, I believe, used the Defense Production Act‑‑I think that's what it's called‑‑

MR. BAIRD: ‑‑which is something that allows the president to say, hey, like, we've got a foreign policy crisis, and we need to order American manufacturers to produce particular pieces of hardware that we need. And so what he ordered was that American manufacturers need to produce solar panels and heat pumps, which is an emerging technology that allows us to make buildings all‑electric and to reduce fossil fuel emissions from buildings by as high as 70 percent. And so the president ordered American manufacturers to start producing these technologies.

It is interesting. There are conversations. We had a chance in talking to Senator Schumer's team and talking to Senator Manchin's team and Senator Manchin himself. You know, how can we produce American green buildings' products, solar panels and heat pumps, and then export those products to Europe so that we can assist Europe in moving their buildings off of gas from Russia? This is an interesting way to think about the foreign policy implications and opportunity of the green buildings industry as well as all the local American jobs that can be created. I mean, what if we started manufacturing a bunch of solar panels and electric heat pumps in West Virginia? How does that change what we can accomplish as Americans together with regard to climate change?

MS. EILPERIN: Got it. And, Jason, how is the green building industry changing and building efficiencies changing in a way that you see as kind of the most exciting area, or what are the prospects that you see that are just underway now that are going to have long‑term impact on, say, greenhouse gas emissions and some of the other environmental challenges that we have here?

MR. McLENNAN: Well, I am most excited about the whole decarbonization push. So I'm glad to hear my colleague's efforts in that area, and it's the same with us. We're trying to get people off of their addiction to fossil fuels any way we can and as fast as we can.

We shouldn't be cooking with gas. We shouldn't be using natural gas or coal‑fired energy for anything anymore. We have all the technologies we need now to live in a world that is powered with renewable energy and is fully electric, and so that is the trend that we're seeing. We have a ways to go, but we're going to win this one.

Beyond energy, it's important to remember when you're talking about green building that it's not just energy that we care about. We care about people's health and their well‑being. So we look at indoor air quality. We look at the toxicity of materials. We look at how materials are made that we build our homes or retrofit existing buildings with so that we don't have a toxic legacy. We look at issues of water efficiency and water conservation measures and many other things. Green building is a very holistic way of looking at how you design or operate anything to ensure that it's better for people and it's better for the planet, and so we're seeing a lot of movement in all those areas finally.

MR. BAIRD: Yeah. I just‑‑

MS. EILPERIN: Donnel‑‑oh, go ahead.

MR. BAIRD: I just want‑‑I just want to add quickly to Jason's point because I think it's so important, that green buildings are healthy buildings. Fossil fuel buildings are unhealthy buildings.

There is a recent study from Stanford‑‑Jason, I don't know if you saw it‑‑that came out a month or two ago that measured the amount of toxic chemicals that gas‑burning ovens release into our homes, and it turns out, according to the Stanford study, that even when you're not cooking with your gas‑burning oven, it's still releasing nitrogen dioxide. It's still releasing carbon monoxide, and worse, it's still releasing methane into your home. Now, that's your oven.

What about your hot water heating? What about your heating system in your home?

So, I mean, if you think about it, if you're going to, like, dig up dead dinosaurs and burn it in your basement or in your kitchen and then you're going to breathe it in, it's not good for you and your family. And so we know that the rates of chronic childhood asthma correlate with cooking with gas stoves in kitchens, and we do expect that cooking with gas ovens is going to end up being like lead paint.

Lead paint used to be this really cool innovation. We thought it was like a great idea to have lead paint, spread it all over America, and then it turns out that it causes neurological devastation in children.

Similarly, the fossil fuels that we burn to cook with, to heat hot water, to heat and cool our homes have devastating health impacts. So I just want to double‑click on what Jason highlighted around green buildings being healthy buildings.

And to go back to your earlier question, that is how we scale, right? There's a group of people that are going to want to save money and save the planet, and they're going to go green for that reason. But, as a young parent, I have a two‑month‑old baby. Like, I would do anything to make sure that the air that she was breathing is healthy when she's 40 but also now, and so, if I can get rid of my fossil fuel appliances in my home and ensure my newborn's health, I and all parents are going to take all steps to do that. And I think that health piece is very important.

MS. EILPERIN: Thanks. And just picking up on that for my last‑‑I think we will probably have time for one last question which, Jason, I wanted to ask you about, which is obviously there's a considerable expense that's involved in making buildings more energy efficient and have your home be more energy efficient, and can you talk about what are some of the avenues that are less expensive, where there are opportunities to go green that aren't a huge barrier for average Americans, for example, and that you've seen?

MR. McLENNAN: Yeah. I think the cost thing is a bit of an old story. I mean, I think that it used to be very true that a lot of the things we talk about were more expensive than conventional ways of doing things, but that's been changing over the years. And I do tell people that regardless of your budget, regardless of how much money you have to spend, there are things you can do to improve the efficiency of your home, the efficiency of whether it's appliances or just your operations in general. There's always something you can do, and obviously, it's easier in life, if you have money to do all sorts of things, but people shouldn't be deterred from starting a green journey, if you will, based on economics.

And the truth is that if you are looking at green building as we're talking about, you will save money as well. So this is a better economic proposition, definitely in the long term.

But if you're, for example, needing to do a retrofit in your home now and that's a moment when you are going to be spending some money, there are better choices to make that are within your budget across the board, from appliances, windows, lights, everything, and people shouldn't assume that they can't go green. They should not assume that anymore, and they just need to do some research and reach out to different groups that have lots of information, and there is a lot of information available on the Web for sure. And a lot of nonprofits now share tons of resources on how to green your home and your office.

MS. EILPERIN: Great. We are out of time, so I just want to thank both of you, Donnel and Jason, for taking the time to join me in this conversation.

MR. BAIRD: Thanks for having us.

MR. McLENNAN: It's a pleasure.

MS. EILPERIN: You're very welcome.

I will be back in just a minute with my next guest, Lauren Faber O'Connor, who is chief sustainability officer for Los Angeles. Please stay with us.

MR. BORZYKOWSKI: I'm Bryan Borzykowski, a business journalist and founder of ALLCAPS Content, and I'm here with Ramya Ravichandar, vice president of Sustainability Products at JLL Technologies, which is a division of JLL, a real estate leader that's focused on building and investing in commercial real estate technology.

We're going to talk about how smart buildings and commercial real estate tech are reducing the sectors and the planet's carbon footprint.

Ramya, thanks for being here.

MR. BORZYKOWSKI: So buildings account for 40 percent of global carbon emissions. As investors increasingly pressure corporations of climate action, how is commercial real estate evolving?

MS. RAVICHANDAR: Well, Bryan, I have good news and bad news for you. It is true that buildings are estimated by the World Green Building Council to account for at least 40 percent of global carbon emissions, but in a recent JLL report on decarbonizing cities and real estate, this percentage was much higher. It was based on audits across 32 global cities where you found that the contribution to carbon emissions was 60 percent, and in some cases, it was upwards of 70 percent in key business centers like London, Tokyo, D.C., New York, and others. Well, that's the bad news.

The good news is that the government policies are pushing property owners to meet new sustainable LEED requirements. We're seeing this flurry of mandates to lower emissions in the near future. A good example is your New York Local Law 97 that will go into effect in the next two years, and it will apply a financial penalty to buildings that breach a set emissions limit.

So now property owners are scrambling to offset energy consumption to avoid penalties, but it's not just investors for feeling the impact of climate risk regulations, but it's also the other players such as your carbon occupiers, your enterprise tenants, who are seeking greener and greener buildings, because now there are new proposals such as the one from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission where they would be required to provide a detailed report on their climate‑related risks, emissions, and net‑zero transition plans.

So, yes, buildings are absolutely one of the biggest contributors, and it impacts every decision from investment to finding out you're right before your strategy.

MR. BORZYKOWSKI: We're seeing now a lot of more buildings outfitted with smart technology, and I'm wondering how smart tech might help in that sustainability cause.

MS. RAVICHANDAR: Oh, the one‑word answer I have for you is "data," right? As an industry, we've always had data, but it was in silos, incomplete, and frankly, a lot of it just plain unusable.

So, with new smart tech that's coming into play, we can now solve that first mild problem. Whether it's reading real‑time energy data from your meters or tracking occupancy trends on different floors, when you start getting access to accurate timely data, you have the right foundation to build out applications that solve specific sustainability‑related problems. If you want a baseline emissions, check. If you want to optimize energy distribution in your portfolio, can do.

I actually want to talk about the very specific example of how we're doing it at JLL. Very recently, we required a virtual engineering platform called "Hank" that uses machine learning to control a building's HVAC systems, and it does this by creating a digital twin of the building and generates a full‑system audit. What is disruptor and differentiated is it does this autonomously and, in the process, delivers on energy savings, tenant comfort, and indoor air quality. So that's an example of how technology can be used to collect building datapoints, transit, normalize it, and then run your mission learning algorithms to make the building more receptive to dynamic emissions.

And the really good news is buildings don't have to be new to implement this technology.

MR. BORZYKOWSKI: So where do we go from here? I mean, how do we see buildings evolve in their adoption of smart technology and in their readdressing sustainability issues?

MS. RAVICHANDAR: Yeah. I think the next few years, we should expect a more evolved interpretation of smart buildings. Today there are powering point solutions, pick your tenant experience or specific energy‑efficiency use cases, but I see a growing realization to achieve your ESG goals or sustainability goals. Smart buildings are the backbone. They are the fundamental infrastructure pieces that can help accelerate your targets in a path to moving away from a report‑centric culture to an action‑oriented, solution‑driven culture, and the time we have to execute on these actions is rapidly shrinking. In the grand scheme of things, we had decades to address climate risk, and now it feels like we just have days.

So we can no longer be the weakest link in the chain. I'm going to say it is time to code our way out of this.

MR. BORZYKOWSKI: We do have another minute. I'm just wondering, is there any advice for people watching this for companies that may be wanting to adopt smart technology or think about sustainability? What advice would you have for them?

MS. RAVICHANDAR: Yeah. I think it's exciting that you get to work on something that's so mission‑driven, and so when you're exploring new technologies to bring into play, don't be risk‑averse. Sustainability is an urgent problem. It's an emerging area, which means you have to be bold and disruptive when you think of the solutions. Test them, pilot them, but don't shy away from trying something new.

MR. BORZYKOWSKI: Great. Well, Ramya, thanks so much for joining us today. Now I'll hand it back over to The Washington Post.

MS. RAVICHANDAR: Such a pleasure.

MS. EILPERIN: Welcome back, and for those of you just joining, I'm Juliet Eilperin, deputy climate and environment editor for The Washington Post.

Joining me now is Lauren Faber O'Connor, who's the chief sustainability officer for the city of Los Angeles. Lauren, welcome to Washington Post Live.

MS. FABER O'CONNOR: Thanks, Juliet.

MS. EILPERIN: Excellent to see you.

Okay. As the intro video noted, Los Angeles has become known for its progress on sustainability, and one of the things I'm curious about, particularly as someone who covers four eyes to politics all the time, how much do you think the city's progress on decarbonization comes from a shared consensus among its residents and where things stand politically within Los Angeles right now?

MS. FABER O'CONNOR: Yeah. Thanks for the question.

I think that in L.A., it is an absolute that we must not only take on the climate emergency but that L.A. has a responsibility to lead. You know, we hear that from business community. We hear that from local frontline communities and our most disadvantaged neighborhoods who are bearing the brunt of extreme heat of significant degraded air quality and living alongside some of the fossil fuel industries that are legacy here in Los Angeles, and we're hearing it also from our own‑‑you know, from even within the city who want to lead, from our labor partners who see the long‑term changes in the economy. And so not only do we have the opportunity to lead in Los Angeles, but as the owner and operator of the largest municipal electric and water utility in the country, as the owner and operator of the busiest port in the western hemisphere, and the owner and operator of the, maybe, third busiest airport in the country, we actually must show the rest of the world and have the opportunity to show the rest of the world how it can be done.

MS. EILPERIN: Got it. And tying back to my earlier conversation with Donnel and Jason when we were talking about, obviously, what's going on with buildings and how they're such a major source of emissions, one of the things that L.A. and you and your team are doing right now, right, is looking at what is your decarbonization plan for buildings in the city. Could you talk through what those designs look like, kind of how do you get to total decarbonization when you're looking at that sector?

MS. FABER O'CONNOR: Yeah. Buildings are an incredible‑‑incredibly important part of the overall mix.

You know, in 2019, Mayor Garcetti set out L.A.'s Green New Deal, which is really one of the first times that a megacity has been able to put forward a plan that demonstrates how to uphold the Paris Agreement, how to really set a trajectory for our emissions reduction that stays within the bounds of meeting the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold for global warming.

And buildings, as was described in that panel before‑‑and I had a chance to listen to it‑‑play an extremely important role. As was discussed in L.A., buildings account for the largest source of carbon emissions in the city, over 40 percent of the emissions, and it plays‑‑buildings play such an important, kind of simultaneous role to our work to decarbonizing the electricity grid.

So, in L.A., we really boil it down to what we call the "Five Zeroes": a zero-carbon grid, zero carbon business, zero carbon transportation, zero waste, and zero wasted water. And those energy sectors, so the electricity grid, transportation, and buildings, they really work hand in hand.

As you heard by the panelists before, it's pretty simple. A fossil fuel‑powered building is a dirty building, and a decarbonized building is a clean building. And we have significant challenges with regard to air quality in Los Angeles as well as being a leading city when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions.

So, when we look at what are our opportunities for the design and the redesign of buildings in Los Angeles, you really have to meet energy efficiency with decarbonization and actually swapping out the use of fossil fuels, and in our case, that's natural gas.

MS. EILPERIN: Right. And so‑‑and I do want to ask you a couple questions related to that and fossil fuel. So let's start with what you're doing to clean up the grid because, as you said, the kind of power that's flowing into these buildings is inextricably tied to the emissions that are coming out of it. So what's happening on that front, and how are you being able to make progress?

MS. FABER O'CONNOR: Yeah. It's exciting because what we found, that the decarbonization of buildings really is kind of a necessity to a successful decarbonization of the grid and vice versa, and I'll explain what that means.

So a few years ago now, we set out to‑‑and the mayor really, you know, directed the city to figure out how can our electric utility, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, figure out and chart its course to a 100 percent renewable energy grid, and we were able to team up with the National Renewable Energy Lab, which is one of the preeminent labs at the Department of Energy, the U.S. Department of Energy, and we undertook a three‑plus‑year study, the most comprehensive study that not only has NREL ever done or Los Angeles has ever done, but they think is the most comprehensive study of a grid as complicated as Los Angeles' grid ever done in our history.

And so what they found‑‑we didn't know it was going to happen at the end of the study. We didn't know what it was going to show us, but we knew we had to figure out and answer these questions.

We gathered an advisory group of stakeholders across Los Angeles from the labor sector, from environmental justice, from the tech sector, large customers of the department, ratepayer advocates. Everyone coming together to really understand how we were designing the study helped us design it, and what we came out on the other end, now a year ago, is that L.A. can move to a completely decarbonized grid, and we can do it in a way that keeps the grid reliable and affordable.

So we found that we can‑‑you know, decarbonizing the grid is affordable, achievable, and reliable, and so that led Mayor Garcetti to accelerate our zero‑carbon grid goal by 10 years to 2035, which matched the ambition that we're really the first to match the ambition of President Biden that he set out at the beginning of his term for a decarbonized grid by 2035. And what we found in that study is not just that we can do this, but that the more we focus on not just the pursuit of solar and wind and batteries, but the more we focus on decarbonizing other end uses, so our buildings and the transportation sector, and the more we focus on energy efficiency, the greater the societal benefit and a reduced cost, because essentially you're spreading out the cost of that transition across‑‑you know, now we're plugging in our buildings into the sun and into the wind. We're plugging in our cars, and we're reducing costs of those buildings to operate by pursuing deep energy efficiency. So it makes sense for the utility to invest in all of those things at once.

MS. EILPERIN: Got it. And, understandably, you've invoked Mayor Garcetti's name a couple of times, given that his administration has been shepherding the strategy, but we are obviously in the midst of a mayoral contest, right, where you now have a runoff and a couple of candidates, which should be noted have different views on how to‑‑or, you know, have different levels of prioritization when it comes to climate change. Can you talk about what components of the Garcetti administration strategy would be essential to continue under his successor, whoever that might end up being, in order to keep L.A. on track to meeting these climate targets?

MS. FABER O'CONNOR: Well, as we said, you know, this is all interconnected, and so with climate change, you really can't solve the problem without tackling‑‑I mean, you essentially have to walk and chew gum at the same time. And what I would say is that, as I mentioned even with the LA100 study, it included a stakeholder group of more than two dozen people representing organizations and members across all of Los Angeles, and we've done this sort of inclusive approach to policymaking and program development across our energy efficiency work when we created the first ever comprehensive, affordable, and multifamily retrofit program, which is really our first to address decarbonization of equipment in buildings focused on affordable and multifamily, income‑qualified [audio distortion].

We did this in concert with a number of organizations who represent the populations that we're trying to serve, and so we really believe‑‑I really believe that the work of L.A.'s Green New Deal is embedded in our public. The public will hold our elected officials--whether that's city council, the mayor, and whether that's the appointed general managers of our city department, they will hold everyone accountable.

And, also, what we've done is we have embedded these policies and these programs across the city. This is not something that sits with any one mayor or any one city council office. This is really the work embedded in our utility, in our port, in our department of transportation, in our department of building and safety where right now in real time, they're working on new building code to achieve the decarbonization goals that we are‑‑that we've set out. So all of these things really, I believe, have staying power and have the support from the public in order to gain and maintain support from our elected officials.

MS. EILPERIN: Got it. And, Lauren, you just mentioned the port. So I have to ask, given that in 2020, you had more bad air days than you had in the last 23 years, what are you doing to fix that issue, which has obviously been a tremendous challenge when we've seen, you know, the shipping and the challenges in this pandemic?

MS. FABER O'CONNOR: Yeah. I mean, air quality is another incredibly interconnected challenge. You know, Los Angeles has the worst air quality in the country, centered in the area around the port. So we know that we have a significant responsibility, and we're not shying away from it.

Now, there are times where we can do all the things in the world to clean up our air, and then we have a massive wildfire, whether it's in Southern California, Northern California, or other parts of the West that blow into the city. And we saw that happening in 2020, days where I would look out here in my home, look out in the window, and it was just orange skies. It felt like you were on planet Mars.

And so we, again, have to tackle all of these issues. We have to prepare ourselves and really take on the challenge of climate change in every corner of our capabilities across the economy.

When it comes to the port, we have not shied away from this problem, whether that's dealing with our ships, our trucks, our cargo handling equipment, the equipment that are actually on the docks moving the cargo itself. We've set out extremely ambitious goals to decarbonize on‑dock equipment by 2030 and all the 10,000‑plus trucks operating at the port, those large semis, by 2035.

We did that in 2016, and now just in 2020, I believe it was, Governor Newsom followed suit and made that the law of the land in the state of California, so another way we're‑‑Los Angeles is really the tip of the spear.

We have spent tens of millions of dollars and are investing more to transition that technology, to push the technology of zero‑emission trucks. We're not waiting for a bridge of natural gas trucks, which we're‑‑you know, still aren't here in any massive proportions. We have said no. We are moving to zero‑emission vehicles, and our port is behind us all the way.

We have now set in place a Clean Truck fund rate that is raising funds every time a dirty truck comes in and out of the port. It's raising funds that we are then putting back into investing in and helping drivers transition into zero‑emission vehicles as well as deploying the supporting electrical infrastructure, or it could be green hydrogen, where we've demonstrated both technologies at the ports in order for that zero‑emission transition. We are investing those funds. The state is providing funds, and we've really been engaging with the federal government to also provide those funds.

MS. EILPERIN: And another question about electric vehicles, as you're talking about zero‑emission vehicles, clearly, this has been, as you mentioned, a real focus. I know I was just talking just last week with Matt Petersen, who obviously does a lot of innovation in L.A., about kind of‑‑again, as we were talking about earlier in this conversation, how do you broaden‑‑you know, you take things from being a niche, more elite way of, you know, purchasing something to a broader sense. He was talking about pilot programs in public housing and ride sharing where it was giving a sense of making it easier for folks to use‑‑you know, use on a short period electric vehicles and get a sense of what their driving patterns are.

Can you talk about how you're working to broaden a scale and make sure that, you know, as many Angelinos as possible can take advantage of something like electric vehicles?

MS. FABER O'CONNOR: Absolutely. Yeah. We have to move and transition our vehicle fleet, whether that's the light‑duty passenger vehicles, as you say, and the trucks and the vans over to zero‑emission version.

Now, when it comes to helping everyone transition into an electric vehicle, we are doing a number of things. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power provides a used EV rebate, so not for the charger, for the actual vehicle itself, provides $1,500 for if you buy a used EV, and if you're low income‑qualified, it actually goes up to $3,500.

We also are paying for the cost of installing chargers, whether that's residential or commercial. We have more commercially deployed chargers in the city than any city in the United States, over 18,000. We blew past our 10,000 chargers by 2021 goal. We're now at over 18,000, and we're doing that because we want to make sure that people, you know, don't have any anxiety about where and how they're going to charge those vehicles, whether that's an employer lot, in multifamily units. You know, L.A. is a renter city. So we know we have to put EV chargers in multifamily dwellings or right by them, so big focus there, and that's where we've really seen the proliferation, because whether that's the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power or the third parties that are also installing chargers, they see that that's where they can get the most utilization. And they're really fulfilling a need. So we've gone hard on those areas.

But, also, single‑family residential, we basically cover the cost of doing that installation and buying the technology itself. So we've really been able to support that and focus on ensuring that we can build out that infrastructure, and we are building out that infrastructure in disadvantaged communities. Even if in the near term, they may have lower utilization, we want to overcome those barriers and set that very clear signal for everyone to be able to transition.

But even if you're not getting into your own vehicle, you don't have to own an electric vehicle in order to benefit from having the availability of these vehicles. We have deployed a program called BlueLA. It started off as a pilot. It started off as a pilot from funding that we received from the California Air Resources Board, which came from the state's cap and trade program back in 2015, and we launched it a couple years later, which is the first in the nation, a zero‑emission car‑sharing program designed to serve low‑income communities. And when we mean serving low‑income communities, we mean siting the vehicles and the stations in those communities, setting price points and membership levels, where low‑income members can become part of the program.

We've also employed and have volunteers coming from the neighborhoods themselves, so that we can really go out into the neighborhoods and bring in that membership.

We know that over half of the trips being made are used for essential trips, whether that's groceries, to school, doctors' appointments, job interviews, and we know that over half the membership are low income‑qualified.

So now we've been able to expand it, meeting over a hundred vehicles, doubling that in the next couple of years, expanding what parts of L.A. that we're serving. That's been a really successful model, and that's why you heard Matt, where we begin to think about, okay, maybe we can go into low‑income housing projects and really serve individual communities at a time for a lending library that our housing department put together in some of the housing‑‑public housing that they serve.

MS. FABER O'CONNOR: So we're doing those kinds of programs as well.

MS. EILPERIN: Great. And, Lauren, we're almost out of time, but I did want to ask briefly about water because, obviously, climate is affecting L.A. as well. My colleague, Josh Partlow, has been writing about, you know, the end to outdoor, you know, restrictions on watering your lawn. Can you talk a little about what you're doing to improve water efficiency in that real quickly? That would be great.

MS. FABER O'CONNOR: You're right, huge challenge for the city, huge challenge for the state, huge challenge for the West. In L.A., we're really addressing water through a multipronged approach. There's conservation. There's stormwater captures, so building out green infrastructure in the city. So, when it does rain, we can capture that and store it in our underground reservoirs as well as water recycling.

So the mayor is committed to basically losing no water to the ocean by 2035 and will completely recycle and beneficially reuse all of our wastewater.

On the conservation side, you know, it's made headlines of late that in the state of California, we are reducing the amount of outdoor watering that we are allowed. The city of Los Angeles is already 50 percent more water‑efficient than the rest of the state, and so we have now moved to two days a week of outdoor watering. And we'll see. We'll see if that is going to really meet the goals that we need to continue to conserve or if we have to tighten even further, but we have a number of efforts to provide water‑efficient equipment and, you know, appliances to people's homes as well as on the commercial side as well, spending a significant amount of dollars and our own investment to help commercial buildings and industrial buildings‑‑

MS. EILPERIN: Lauren, thank you.

MS. FABER O'CONNOR: ‑‑and residential coefficient‑‑

MS. EILPERIN: I have to stop you there. Thank you so much for joining‑‑

MS. EILPERIN: ‑‑for this conversation, and thanks to you, our audience, for joining us here today. I’m Juliet Eilperin, and to find out more about what we have coming up, please go to WashingtonPostLive.com to learn more and sign up. Thank you.