Our guest this episode is Erandi Trevino of Public Citizen, Houston. Erandi grew up in Houston and has been concerned about the pollution in her neighborhood since she was a young child.
Before joining Public Citizen in Houston as a Climate Policy and Outreach Specialist, she was an Advocacy Fellow with the Fulbright Association in Washington, DC, where she worked on education policy, nutrition, and financial regulations. During her time in DC, Erandi also volunteered for the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute.
Earlier in her career, Erandi assisted the Permanent Representative of Mexico to the United Nations in New York. She has a law degree from Fordham University and degrees in International Relations and Latin American studies from Seton Hall University. Following her graduation there, she received a Fulbright Grant to teach English in Belo Horizonte, Brazil where she became fluent in Portuguese.
In this episode we discuss the following topics:

• The coalition of companies and other institutions that are partners with this new project called the HyVelocity Hub and their claims to be able to build an “ecosystem” from the existing hydrogen and pipeline industry in Houston to make clean hydrogen.
• HyVelocity Hub claims that they will be able use carbon capture to make “clean” hydrogen (called blue hydrogen) using existing hydrogen production plants.
• How credible is Houston’s Clean Hydrogen Roadmap in general?
• Is HyVelocity’s goal of achieving 2kg CO2 / kg of H2 is realistic?
• RMI currently estimates 20 kg CO2 / kg H2 with Texas’s current fossil-heavy power grid.
• How credible is HyVelocity’s vision “to serve disadvantaged communities by providing jobs and higher labor standards, reducing local pollution, and supporting and complying with the Justice40 initiative?
• Who are the powerful investors in this endeavor and how are they affecting the plans for these plants? Are they listening to local concerns or just greenwashing their environmental challenges?
• What is Public Citizen doing as a local activist to get some oversight on this HyVelocity Hub project?

Resources:
Center for Houston's Future
Houston Healthy Port Communities Coalition
Environmental Defense Fund - Better Hubs - Expring Decarbonizing Industry
Greater Houston Port Bureau's Project 11
On Breath Partnership's "What is Port Houston's Project 11?" 
Erandi's Contact Information
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Our guest, Dr. David Konisky is a Lynton K. Caldwell Professor with the Paul H. O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University, whose research focuses on U.S. environmental policy and politics, with particular emphasis on environmental and energy justice, regulation, federalism, and public opinion.

David came to our attention through a PBS interview in which he described Indiana industries reducing their greenhouse gas emissions by an impressive 27% over the last decade, largely without a state organized campaign or incentives.

He has authored or edited six books on environmental politics and policy, including Fifty Years at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency: Progress, Retrenchment and Opportunities (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020, with Jim Barnes and John  D. Graham), Failed Promises: Evaluating the Federal Government's Response to Environmental Justice (MIT Press, 2015), and Cheap and Clean: How Americans Think about Energy in the Age of Global Warming (MIT Press, 2014, with Steve Ansolabehere). He has been the co-editor of the journal Environmental Politics since the beginning of 2021. 

Konisky’s research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the Russell Sage Foundation.
Konisky earned his Ph.D. in political science from MIT. He also holds two master’s degrees from Yale University: one in environmental management and one in international relations. At the undergraduate level, he studied history and environmental studies at Washington University in St. Louis.
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Topics we discuss include:

• Indiana’s greenhouse gases emissions are down largely due to substituting gas power generation for coal, with six more coal-fired plants scheduled to close by 2028. Without a concerted government effort, what caused this to happen? Market forces? Local advocacy? Something else?
• While the gas-fired plants replacing the coal-fired ones emit less carbon dioxide (CO2), they still emit some CO2, and the gas pipelines that feed them can also leak methane gas which is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. Is the transition to gas helpful to the climate, or is slowing the transition bad for the climate?
• How much resistance is there in the state and local governments in Indiana to transition to clean energy? Who is causing this resistance?
• Will the Biden Administration’s Justice 40 initiative be effective in addressing economic and environmental justice issues? Can efforts such as these be effective in both rural and urban communities?