. . passed on november 4 three interesting laws and these were not laws passed by the regular laytors, but by the congress and these are laws of the land now. the first is to regulate crypto currencies. you know exactly what you are investing in and know the rules of the land. the second is the way to regulate the underlying technology and here is how blockchain will be regulated so we know. the third is how to regulate service provider, especially fiduciary service providers, exchanges, banks, anyone dealing with the fiduciary side.

so they have a very clear vision of what they can provide and who they can provide it to and how they can provide it. and we really, really need to get there. the thought that i have this picture and this is the president and a very interesting talk with that dinner and she spent 30 seconds on the regulations and the prime minister of the country is the main architect behind that and what she said what i am really interested in is how is this going to make the world a better place. it is interesting because she focused on people and focused on people's rights and this is is what countries are thinking about and i am grateful that we are doing this in pedestrian.

we need to do this to the top. have you ever thought of alexa in that way? where she is kind of alive. because she is, right? the privacy issues that we are dealing with in the world that we live today and where you have the devices that are listening all the time, and data that is essentially being sent to centralized powers, right? and we make the naive assumption that, well, these are all good actor, right? i call the general classification of companies google-apple-facebook, alibaba, 10 cent and we make the general assumption that these are good actors. they're not bad actors. they're commercial actors, right? they have to do what is right by the commercial needs and for the shareholders and your privacy rights might not always be their priority. the blockchain provides a very

interesting model for us to build privacy in. ashley covered a few point there is and decentralize the data model. data, you probably heard before s the new oil, right? this is the new currency of the future. and if that data belongs to eight companies, then we have a huge problem. and potentially one government, right? we're also heading to a point where largely because of a.i., my background is in a.i. and i have been head of an a.i. company for 12 years. it's actually going to trigger a lot of not just blue color, but white collar job losses and estimates show close to 50% of the global work force with a.i. and thinking about how to leverage the decentralize the data and the blockchain and create economic incentive where is people can earn an income

from the daily activities and from the data they produce is going and that allows us to solve. and finally, coming to our conversations around the environment, there is a lot of interesting work that we're seeing already with different companies that are trying to target environment in general, environment issues across different solution points and i want to go into -- i won't go into anything in detail right now. and we can talk about it in questions or offline, but there is various different models around this. energy, of course s the most common one that we have seen. a lot of companies are decentralize energy and decentralize energy markets and create peer to peer markets so that people can start generating energy from their own solar panels or their own miniature windmills and allow others to

buy into that. pluck into the grids and we're seeing the same thing happen with carbon credits. so there is a whole bunch of different models that are being played with right now. the good news is coming back to what i started with, we're really early in the game. no one here needs to panic about how far behind we are. but we need to act. and so there are models in place and there are companies that are already doing this. some very successfully. some not so much. some will survive and become the blueprints for how we go about to do that whether at a government level or the private industry. there is a couple of examples that i will share with you quickly. we can go into a lot, many more details later and happy to send you a list of all the companies in the space if you have interest in going through them

and seeing what makes sense. power ledgeer is one of the earliest companies in this space that the australian company raiseded a lot of money from the model that we talked about earlier and can be done to get people rich and they have shown to be very responsible. they have great leadership. that is something we look at very carefully when we bring companies into the silicon valley blockchain society. bill ty who many of you may have heard of here, he is considered one of the top venture capitalists and is our local lad from the bay area. he's the main advisor to this project. and basically creating a peer to peer trading microgrid decentralized platform. the energy web foundation is very interesting. they are a u.s. entrepreneurs who going back to my conversations about regulation

decided that they're better off building what they are building in europe. and this is where i often ring those alarm bells when i talk to our regulators and anyone in government. these are not the kind of companies that we can afford to lose because we're trying to figure out what kind of regulations we're going to put in place to prevent the i.c. scammers, right? let's not cut off our nose to spite the enemy. they are building an open source platform that will allow the energy sector to build their own solution. and when there are conversations that you are willing to have around the strategy forward, these are the companies that i would like to bring in and introduce to you to piggyback off the lessons already learned and some of the open source platforms that they have built. i will skip this impact because

they are focused on carbon credit usage and decentralized that platform. i will end with a quote that i really, really love that basically says people don't have ideas. ideas have people. and we've come to that stage now where we went through the cycle of 2015, 2016, even 2017 being first time founders trying to build this new, sexy protocol and most of us in this room probably don't understand what that is. 2018 has been about experienced founders trying to solve problems, problems that have to do with society. and we see, i would say, about 30% of the companies that we see are founders trying to solve problems that exist in society and make humanity better.

that is very, very exciting. so i will end here. happy to take questions. >> what excites me about this space is if i am going to pay money for something, which i won't do because we are commissioners up here together, but i am going to pay you money something, i have to give it to you and technically speaking you and i am going to vinemo and send it from my bank to your bank and all that is happening is the bank is saying i sent you some money. nothing happens. not like they are moving it from

one bank vault to another bank vault, radioit? but we are relying on the bank to be the middle person, the middleman who will tell us what it is. if i want to buy something at the store and know it that's fair trade or it's organic and i want to know that the wheat that was grown was organic and i want to know that the sugar that went into it was organic and i want to know that it came through sort of the processing plant that followed these things, i have to rely on all those middle organizations and also to do that. and if i want to vote and know that my vote is being counted, right, i have to rely on middle organizations to do that. i think that the excitement around this for me is the decentralized piece of it. the fact that there is this ledger where i can give you the money and if everyone up here just says, she got the money from heather, then we all just agree that the money went to you, right? instead of having the bank say that the money went to you. so that to me is the exciting part of this.

and i guess on a very pointed level, would like to say specifically around things like -- i have heard you say a couple of things about carbon trading. can you talk to us about the ways that this distributed ledger system is being applied there? and kind of walk us on that kind of a level through how some of that could work? >> so think of the example you just took and you explained that really well. the proof that you gave the money to debbie. think of carbon credits in the same context, right? today the carbon -- first of all t carbon credit ecosystem is really convoluted and you are relying on a third party to prove that the carbon credits were properly earned an were properly applied, probably assigned to you, and that you can use them in the way that you are intended to use them, right? and so you go back to the concept of providence. how do you know that you earned those properly?

how do you know that those are yours to have? and that those are yours to spend and you spent them in the right possible ways? right? and so a decentralized carbon credit platform allows for that to happen using the same context and the same concept that you explain for the money. that there is a consensus mechanism to prove on a public blockchain system that the actions required to earn the credits were made and based on that, the credits were then assigned to the party. and there is roof that happen and no one can dispute that later and the distribution of the credits and the application of the credits and again happens on the same blockchain. so it's a public blockchain. that is what companies like veridium are creating. there will be for every company that we see doing something like that, there's five, six other projects at the same time. we're really happy right now so

it's not going to be a winner takes all because it's so early on. this is super early. and carbon credits is one aspect. the underlying energy web foundation approach of saying, look, let's build up the decentral tiezed infrastructure and then -- decentralized infrastructure, and anyone can take that and we want to use it and it's open source and are not making money on the understood lying platform and we can apply what they want to use it for. that would be an example of how carbon credit trading would work with a system like this. thank you. i have so many questions. so i have the philosophical question and then the super concrete question. i will start with the

philosophical one. when i think about where sometimes industry goes wrong with new technology and introducing it to the public is g.m.o.s, genetically modified organisms. for a long time we had no idea what that meant and it was an obscure thing in a lab, and monsanto did this, i think, disservice in a way by the first publicly understood example of a g.m.o. was roundup ready corn. so the first time that the lay people saw what a g.m.o. could do was something that for us was no value. in fact, it was the opposite of value. it was horrendous. it was the ability to use more pesticide because the crop wouldn't die. so you could use unlimited roundup because your crop was resistant to roundup because of g.m.o.s and that as that first example of something that people could

understand has really colored the world of g.m.o.s. i am not saying they are wonderful and there are a lot of problems, but there could be beneficial uses that are now -- we went way back because of that out the gate. so when you talk about that there is the companies that want -- that 30% of the companies want to do the right thing. that there is this problem -- the problem is not technology, but philosophy. so i feel like we could repeat that same mistake because bitcoin is what we think about with blockchain and we don't know how to separate. it feels like it's the same thing, and that is where the energy use is, and i have so many questions about your examples, sorry, ashley, about where bitcoin is needed an when it's not, but i just wonder how for us as a commission on the environment and as thought leaders in a place like san francisco, we might use our

collective interest in the planet to influence a company and help a company get out in front so that the examples that are concrete for us look helpful and not something that is just bitcoin and making a few people rich who understand it. >> i could not agree more. history may not repeat itself, but it definitely rhymes. and i think in many ways we are going down the same path. so the same mistakes as 2008 are being repeated. we just have to be more cognizant and we are trying to do that as much as possible. push the companies that are focused on doing the right thing, doing it responsibly, focussing on making society better. and getting capital their way. so if there is a way to support these kind of companies, right, both from a private perspective

and the government perspective, then we should be doing that as priority. >> that is my invitation to both of you is what we do, and what you saw earlier this green roof ordinance, for example, that is an example of the city of san francisco sending signals to the marketplace that you, the people, the companies who are ready to develop green roof technology, living roof technology, you will have a market here. and we're going to give you a signal that two years from now it's going to be mandatory, so there is an economic benefit to being ready. so as my invitation to you is to help us think, what are those companies that might have an idea that we can develop legislation on and that shows that it's the intention of our procurement office or our legislative policies that would send a signal that that's the right way to go? and i don't know what those examples are yet. i am intrigued by some of the things. >> i have a comment.

i would invite you, director, and government organizations around the world, to send a signal to the market and pick a project yourselves using employee blockchain technology for good that is one of the best ways to show public use that's beneficial. that is the chicken and the egg thing, right? i need to understand it well enough to know what that is? so i am ready to do that. i just need your help. we don't need to wait for the private sector, right? many good signal cans come from government employment and what you can do is put out an r.f.p. or r.f.i. to develop something and think of a good way to screen that or explore and choose the best technology providers without having and develop it yourself. >> very quickly on that, there's some interesting lessons to be learned from what the city of

munich is doing. i actually advised the bavarian finance ministry, and the city of munich is basically doing just this a.i. and blockchain and it's a private-public partnership. they brought in some of the biggest companies and the family offices and they brought in obviously government infrastructure in the city of munich itself. they're looking at companies that are building blockchain solutions that can genuinely affect their citizenry and citizenry globally and they are backing them with the infrastructure that the city can bring. they're backing them with funds that the public-private partnership has brought. and it's been really effective. i was in munich last month, and i got to see about five companies that are doing really meaningful stuff. they have all the pitfalls of a normal startup. when you have the support and the infrastructure from the city, you can navigate some of those pitfalls much better,

right? so it's very important. we kind of get into this whole private and you don't want to get involved in government and you don't want to get involved in city and that could not be more myopic. when we can piece this together and when we think about the kind of companies that are fundamentally hl eping humanity move forward, we can't do that just private. we'd love to -- you let us know how you would like us to be involved, and we're in. >> thank you. commissioner sullivan. >> really interesting to hear some of the environmental use cases for blockchain, and i don't feel like i am knowledgeable enough to ask any questions about that, but when i think about where government intersects with blockchain and crypto currencies, i go back to the ireland example. and the tremendous amount of energy that is going into crypto currencies especially bitcoin. is anybody talking about what

government cans do about that? is there anything short of banning them that can be done by governments and whether it's probably not cities but state or national governments to reduce the amount of energy lest ireland become france or japan? >> so we haven't actively seen and some of the numbers are crazy, right? the daily use of energy for bitcoin can power close to 4.9 million households, right? 18 house holds and then places like iceland where the government is pushing a lot of thermal energy to help mining operations there which will help use more green energy to do this. which is one part of addressing it. the other part, of course, is --

and ashley kind of eluded to that. there is a movement away from proof of work, which has been the standard consensus mechanism which is there. at at the end of the day not just from the overall energy consumption perspective, but the future of the space and the viability of the industry will be about governance. if we can find the right governance models that meet the right balance between energy, efficiency, validity, and consensus. and that's where it needs to head. we haven't seen too many government regulations around the energy piece yet. >> thank you.

>> it is hard to wrap our heads around what kind of projects could we envision? and is this energy creation and that is done in a noncentralized way. it's kind of hard to imagine enough energy creation here to be able to pull everything into a noncentralized area in san francisco, but what are some of the -- if we wanted to do a munich style approach, what are some of the things that are more concrete that we could wrap our heads around that would serve our desire to do something good for the environment or something good along the lines of climate? or are those things that haven't been and to learn for an example and how to get involved and to do the four projects that we saw and that has little to do with energy and environment and it has more to do with let's create infrastructure and promote these

companies. low-hanging fruit, though, we can look at carbon credits, right? that's low-hanging fruit. look at decentralization of peer to peer energy models and you can tie in with what tesla is doing with the solar panels and create a decentralized market or encourage a company to come here with a decentralized market. and tie that with identity. i mean, i think if you were looking at what can the city do to begin with? and then obviously energy is one piece of it. but the most fundamental and looking at dubai. and what dubai did is basically said we'll put the drivers licenses to the blockchain. once that is done, you have mroked identity in. now -- you have locked identity in. now we can say we know who the people are and they have privacy and anonymity as much as they would need to have.

now we can build around that. if you want to build carbon credits around knowing who the people are, it is much easier to do than to start with carbon credits as a platform and not have the fundamental, really low-hanging fruits in place. that would be my approach. i think part of the problem here is you guys don't know enough about what we do and that's matched with us not understanding, in my case certainly, virtually anything about what you do. i certainly understand more now than i did before i came. for myself, i mean, one very clear option, i think, that exists which i can't figure out how it would help the city so much, but the trackability

thing. if you can with confidence know that the head of romaine that you have in the refrigerator isn't going to kill you, you don't need to throw it out. and we, i mean, that's sort of an immediate need it seems to me that if there were companies that were interested in interested in and committed to tracking the food that people eat, that would solve a problem that would take a problem that is much more fundamental here. i could be wrong, but i think it's going to be harder to get drivers licenses on blockchains in america than it would be to get the food tracked. so i mean, that's the only

example i have been able to think of. i mean, i suppose somebody mentioned f.s.c. before. there is a whole lot of things we could track if people wanted to. but i have problems trying to figure out in this civic space where we don't actually make monetary transactions all that often and blockchain and is it a communication device? >> i might recommend if we can shift over to the slide i made with key potential capabilities. do i turn this -- >> the one with the three?

>> oh. so we can -- you could have a different approach to look at these and see where there's some kind of pain happening where these could solve some problems and the need for transparency or coordination or hardware resilience of the databases or censorship and fraud resistance. and generally speaking, out in the civic and government, we see a lot of good use cases for developing countries which don't have as strong institutions and organization around them. where we can see public procurement tracking, voting, these types of use cases. for more efficient and developed countries -- >> but this actually gave me an idea. we could track what people put in their black, green, and blue bins. >> okay. >> and then we would be able to go to somebody and say, you

don't get the system. and we know there are -- we know there are a lot of those people. but we could. i mean, i am not saying we should. i am not saying we should. but you could come to my house. >> that is food for thought. director? >> thanks. i have a follow-up question. it is so funfy that commission wald was thinking about lettuce. when i was typing and when you were talking, ashley, i used lettuce as my example, too. i can understand if you have a container of lettuce -- let's say we want to track the province of organic. [please stand by]

>> you would -- you would -- you could trace it to a specific container and then know where that container has been. >> oh, right. right. >> and so with the -- with the e. coli outbreak with romaine, so certain heads of the romaine had e. coli, you could see which containers that they were in and then see where those containers came from, and that's the source. >> and it's because -- >> and then, you throw out all the associated -- >> the packaging that's around that individual head of lettuce has an individual rfin. >> no, the large crate, the boxes. >> i'm not still distinguishing how that one -- >> yeah. generally, you wouldn't distinguish the individual head of lettuce.

it's more the batch it's associated with. for a high value item, an item where the price is a lot higher, and you want to individually scan it, that makes more sense, but for cheap produce that's in batches, it would be inefficient even on a supply chain level to scan the individual heads individually. and you do have to trust -- you're right, when the heads of lettuce get taken from the farms, they get put in this cargo, you have to trust that's done well and this original farm is organic. and you have to know when it goes from the farm to the box to get shipped out that there hasn't been any counterfeiting at that point; that those are the real lettuc that came fre t that box. you need to trust the origin point in some other way.

>> so can i follow up on debbie's question because the other thing i don't understand really at all -- i don't even understand the multiexample, but i heard it, and i think i know what they're doing is how you meld the needs of centralization, which is the regulation, whether it's initial offering or the -- what is the division of -- definition of organic and who makes the crate so it can't be compromised, how you meld that kind of system, which i'll call the sort of command and control system, with the decentralization that's the hallmark of this whole process. you can't have a million different definitions of organic

on these little -- not little, i didn't mean it that way. on individual blockchains even if they have, you know, 100,000 people on each one of them. or i -- i mean, we wouldn't want

that. organic has to mean the same thing for everybody on all of the blockc >> i think the -- the trick is not to think about decentralizing everything.

lettuce may not have a tracking model, when that arrives at different points along the way, it is certified as having reached those points and not having been tampered with with this specifically model. and when the lettuce is taken out of the container, it started getting tag, right? it has a unique number. so in the case of e. coli outbreaks, can not only look at and say where is the tag that that was sold at, you can tie that back to what was the batch it came in, what was the container came in, that container came in a larger shipping container, and you track back to all of the affected places that we have to

withdraw this lettuce from and whether or not it was tampered along the way. so it's not simple but it's not that it hasn't been thought of, either. >> any other questions? fascinating and so many questions and so much to learn and so much potential at the same time, and also want to ask if there's any public comment on this item? good evening. >> hello. it's been a long time. eric brooks. i am not speaking for any of the organizations that i work for this evening because this is very speculative territory and i don't want to step over that line, but i will say that i learned about and started studying bitcoin and investing

them in 2011 and started dealing in them in 2015. so you should bring me into this space. a, i love bitcoin and cryptocurrenciys. they're going to revolutionize the world. bitcoin is not going to be creating nearly as much greenhouse gases in the future as it does now because of things like the side chains and the lightning network, and i did explain that in more detail if people want to ask me questions because i'm going to get to my three minutes. and i'm also invested in power ledger and i'm invested in a lot of other -- and in supply chain tokens and things like that. and i want to start there. the conversation you just had shows that cryptocurrencies and supply chain and certification is not going to help you.

you still to have have a certifying body when you put the lettuce in the box. that's not going to help. that applies in spayeds to carbon credits which are already bad and cryptocurrencies and blockchain is not going to help in carbon credits because you need a certifiers there, and we've got certifiers there, and it's not working, so i would recommend against that type of thing. so you're asking for use cases -- well, another thing that needs to be said is we've got to be really careful to hopefully make this so you're not just hiring a middleman like uber to be a token man for you in this purpose. most of the people in the i.p.o. is a middleman for the blockchains themselves.

i would like to see the sf program create its own coin. you've got a bunch of business and homeowners in san francisco. some of them will put solar up and battery storage in their facilities. some of them won't, and cleanpowersf could create a nonprofit noncorporate city cleanpowersf coin for people that have solar panels in their roof to exchange their energy with people that don't. and -- and private -- on private exchange. the only time cryptocurrency makes sense is when there's a private exchange of value. all the other tracking and value stuff, all that can be done with databases in a much more efficient manner without using the blockchain at all. i hate to be a downer on that, but that's the reality. and i'm open for questions if people want to dig deeper into what i know. >> thank you. any other public comment?

ashley, i mean, thank you so much for that -- for your presentations, for being with us today. anthony, next item. >> thank you. >> thank you. >>clerk: the next item is item 8, director's report. updates on the department of the environment, administrative and programmatic operations. the speaker's debra felder. the presentation is the director's report and the operation is discussion. >> i just want to say thank you so much. >> put it on a blockchain. >> yeah. that was really interesting and lots of food for thought, so we will be back in touch. thank you. thank you for taking your time, yeah. [applause] >> oh, my gosh. okay. so you got a long director's

report in your packets that gave you detailed items in terms of what we've been working on. as you can see, there's just a whole range of things from the way we're looking at environmental justice to the way we're working with affordable housing and our energy programs. zero waste is going very, very full bore ahead with the new system and helping especially complicated accounts like multifamily buildings and large commercial office spaces to figure out spaces as well as the small guys, so we've been very busy in that way. we have been working also on the zero waste front on infrastructure and on policy. on the infrastructure today, recology celebrated the opening of what they all their west wing, which i keep thinking about the white house, but it has nothing to do with that. the west wing of recology's

tunnel road facility was expanded for the compost because the amount of compost of organics that we collect on a daily basis is so massive compared to the original size of the collection area that it was being overwhelmed and we were having challenges of keeping getting it through throughput. we have this challenge where all the organics will be emptied and literally pushed off a cliff, off an edge onto a waiting truck below, and they can weigh it and send it off to the composting facility. so we are really gearing up to handle the organics, and now it's a question of the outreach side of making sure we generate as much as we can. and we can -- if anybody would like a tour of that, just let me know, and we can think about -- it's not actually all that

gorgeous. it's a big, concrete area, but it's interesting on the scale side to see that. also, we've been working on zero waste facilitator legislation. neha, our fearless city attorney, has been working very hard with all parties to draft amendments and make it a strong piece of legislation. i want to thank commissioner aun, who on his personal private side, came and talked about it. but it's been -- it's gone through a lot of evolutions. i think it's a really important tool for our zero waste program because if it gets adopted by the board of supervisors, it will give the department a added tool to address large commercial accounts like large multifamily and large office buildings who want to essentially just pay their way out of zero waste by just paying the increased charges and fees and not really trying to improve their status

at all. so it will give us a way to require the hiring of people whose job it is to think about zero waste in these businesses. so it's very exciting, it's been a long time coming, and i think, knock on wood, we're approaching the finish line on it. recology launched their better at the bin campaign. we had a wonderful -- they have a new truck that's really fun, so i think in the straw ordinance -- well, the plastic litter and reduction ordinance that you weighed in on had to be amended for the disability community because of the need for plastic straws as a tool, not a convenience, to use their words, so there's been a lot of activity in the last couple months around zero waste from the legislative side, the infrastructure side, the ordinance side. i feel like we're getting our arms around the push and it's going to help the mayor talk about what we're doing to meet our commitments from the global climate action summit where we

have new zero waste commitments from the city. for the future, i would just say that christmas is coming, the holidays are coming. if you aren't already aware, and we have some holiday traditions in the department of the environment. one is our green christmas tree program, which is literally buying a live tree -- or renting a live tree, i suppose is the way it is, because after you decorate your live tree, they be it goes back to friends of the urban forest, and they plant it. so we're putting a big plug for that. if you'd like more information, let me know. there's also our annual tree chip event that you are welcome to come to that we are demonstrating on live t.v. how -- the idea that people should put their christmas trees out on the curb at certain points in time and they need to take all of the tinsel and everything off so they can be chipped, and we have a lot of fun putting christmas trees into the chipper.

so if you'd like to join me in that event, let me know. it's kid friendly to watch. it's definitely not kid friendly to do. so i'd just advise you of that. the last two items are on december 5, at lunchtime, that's a wednesday, we are going to have a very special speaker in our lunch and learn, dr. elizabeth deaker, she's going to be talking about her research on gender and environment and specifically using that bike study as a model. she's apparently a very distinguished scholar, and she will be coming to our department on wednesday, december 5, at noon. would love to have people there to listen if you're interested. and the next day, december 6, which is a thursday, in the

evening, from 5:00 to 8:00, at the main library, the curet auditorium, we are going to show a movie, the devil you know, to show a movie about teflon and the chemicals in them. you may remember we banned the use of fluorinated chemicals in packaging, so we will be on a panel, along with other people who made the movie and other environmentalists. i can't say that it's a heart warming movie. so the part that becomes heart warming is that you, the commission on the environment, the board of supervisors, and the department of the environment are doing something about it, and that is what gives

me hope. so with that, i would like to see if there are any new staff in the room. i see one, two, if you would come up and -- three, i see -- there are three new -- please come up and say your name, your program you're working in, what your role is, and where you came from, if you can remember the three things. >> my name is sierra. i work for -- with -- on the team of toxics residential reduction, and i'm -- what do -- i'm going to do? >> what do you do now, and what did you do with the program. >> so before i came from cal state northridge, and i graduated in may. i worked at t.j. maxx. i studied environmental health and occupational health and safety at northridge.

and my position now as a toxics residential associate, i do right now battery site visits at retail walgreens stores, and i do healthy home presentations. i'm getting ready to do that, too. there's also helping residents when they call, they ask me questions about where to safely dispose of their household hazardous wastes, so yeah. thank you. >> welcome. >> hello. my name's elizabeth felter, and i'm joining the climate team. i'm a hazards and climate resilience analyst, and as my title makes obvious, i'll be working on the hazards and climate resilience plan, which is across several different departments here in the city. before that, i was with the bay conservation development commission, working on their sea

level rise adaptation planning program? and before that, i work with the national oceanic and administration digital coast partnership, so done several years of sea level rise specific work and really excite today broaden the scope of the climate change and resilience topics that i'm working on. i'm really proud to be a part of this great staff. thank you. >> thanks, elizabeth. >> thank you. >> my name is bitan chin, and -- >> into the mic. >> testing? okay. hi. my name is bitan chin, and i finish my master's this summer in u.c. santa barbara, and my degree was in environmental science and management. and now -- so i joined the energy team a month ago, and specifically, i work with barry

and ammon on green buildings. so now, i mainly work on the operations side of the existing commercial building ordinance, yeah. so before i came here, i interned with the national center of ecological initiatives. it was a lot of interesting data stuff. happy to be here. thanks. >> thanks. >> welcome. >> okay. that's it. >> any questions for director rafael, commissioners? >> just one. the two events, do we -- if people are interested, commissioners are interested, when should we -- is the deadline to let anthony know or -- >> for both of those, i -- you know what? i don't know about the movie, if there's a limited number of spaces.

certainly, for the lunch and learn, you can just let anthony know on the day of so he makes sure you're in the system and can get into the building. and anthony will let you know if there is any deadline or preregistration for the movie because i actually don't know the answer to that. >> thank you. is there any public comment on this item, the director's report? >> good evening again, commissioners, eric brooks. this time, i will put my organizational hats on, so i'm here with san francisco green party and our city san francisco and californiians for energy choice. first i want to bring to your attention something that i e-mailed a little while back and make sure that you see it about why -- i mean, director rafael brought up in previous reports -- excuse me -- renewable -- quote, unquote renewable diesel, and i said

something very cautionary about that, that it's not any better than the body that we use now which is largely made out of soybeans and creates irreversibility land use change. so take a look at -- irreversible land use change. take a look at that. you can e-mail me if you have my e-mail address. i also want to bring up the fact that lately, the clean energy -- san francisco clean energy advocates in san francisco that have been working so long and hard on community choice and cleanpowersf have started meeting with the mayor's office about bringing the sort of model that sydney, australia has for a complete county renewable master plan to san francisco. and that shows promise. we've only just begun to talk to them about it, but it would be great to have the department of

the environment get involved and the commission get involved in that, as well. and some of those talks are with director of workforce development arce who you're familiar with, commissioner wan, and if you could get actively involved because of that connection, that would be awesome. another thing i would say is really crucial that this commission work on, and i think you've got the charter ability to do it, i -- since the latest wildfire, there are a lot of very angry consumers, angry people that got burned out of their houses and watched their friends get burned out of their houses, angry environmentalists that are already -- we are going to have, in 2019, probably the biggest grassroots coalition that we've ever had to fight for community choice, to fight for localizing energy so we can start getting rid of

transmission lines, and the number one fight, the beginning fight, will be -- will be to say to pg&e and the other utilities, you are not going to pass your wildfire liability costs to the consumers. that's not going to happen. we're already beginning a no campaign, and we're going to get strong on that. and it would be great to have the mayor's office, the board of supervisors, and most importantly, the commission on the environment and the department be involved in saying that loud and clear with us. thanks. >> thank you. any other public comment? next item. >>clerk: the next item is item 9, committee reports, highlights of the october 17, 2018 operations committee meeting and the october 22, 2018 and the november 12, 2018 policy committee meetings. this item is for discussion.

>> i will try to be brief, given the lateness of the hour. at the october 22, 2018 meeting, the policy committee did a very deep dive on the commitments that the city signed onto during the global climate action summit with a focus on the zero waste and green bond commissions. robert haley came to our committee to talk about the department's part of those commitments, and we had a great presentation by mike brown, who manages the environmental finance programs at the p.u.c. about how he does his work in that program on green bonds. and then, we received a very

full and fascinating presentation on all of the department's recent state and local legislative initiatives. we heard in particular from jenn jackson who talked about the toxic legislation that we have been involved in, including debbie mentioned the furniture one, right. and then, finally, charles sheehan, the chief policy and public affairs officer, discussed all the things that were before the board of supervisors this year that implicated the department's work including the plastic and litter reduction ordinance and a number of others. it was a very interesting

meeting. and then, our most -- what would have been our most recent meeting, the one in november , was cancelled. >> commissioner stevenson? >> for -- on october 17, we had a meeting of the operations committee along with our finance and administration program manager, he gave us an update on the budget. there was a slight change between the budget that was presented to the commission in january and the budget that the mayor approved? we went over that, and then, kara gurney, who's a senior engagement specialist at the department gave us a presentation on all the outreach efforts that happened for the new bins in certain neighborhoods, so we still got to learn about that. and finally, the outreach program manager, she gave us an update on the bin top or battery