So I can't ever keep their names straight I don't know which goats are which.
The second-biggest one with the goatee; that's Aaron Rodgers. Aaron Rodgers. I
did not name that one. How come your friends wanted to name him aaron rodgers so badly?
A football player I think he's known as the GOAT? Ah yes, the GOAT.
They're our most famous residents. There are five of them, and we use them as our mascot because
people who come to visit and tour, they always are amazed to see that we have goats doing something
that's uh usually you need lawn mowers for. So they're our natural lawn mowers, they're there to
help us keep the weeds from getting out of control in the areas that haven't been developed yet.
When I started with Exxon-Mobil back in 2003, I knew that fossil fuels had to be on their way out.
And I expected that over the course of my career, I would be part of transitioning
away from fossil fuels. They talked about natural gas as a bridge fuel; a bridge fuel to renewable
energy future. And I believed that. But over the course of my career I saw that bridge fuel
become a bridge to nowhere. It ended up that natural gas was something the fossil fuel industry
wanted to keep doing. I just couldn't be a part of it, I felt I was doing more harm than good.
And I didn't want my daughter to grow up without hope, that there was a way
to live differently and to transition away from fossil fuels. And so we went online,
we looked for a sustainable community, and this one seemed to be the most promising. 'Hey Melissa
thanks for coming to movie night last week.' 'Yeah it was fun!'
The GEOS neighborhood is a decarbonized, fully electric neighborhood that has no fossil fuel.
We have no natural gas lines, so you don't have to exhaust any carbon dioxide; any pollution from
fossil fuels from these houses because they're built so that they don't need as much energy.
The reason why natural gas furnaces are so needed is because American houses are built to be leaky.
And because they're so leaky, you have to have these natural gas furnaces in order to
meet the energy needs of heating the homes during the coldest days of the winter. But
if you have very tightly insulated homes, then you don't need natural gas furnaces. Instead you
can use very efficient heat pumps which are like refrigerators except they can also heat the home.
The main electricity usages is actually for the heat pumps.
While the remainder of the electricity usage is for charging our electric vehicles.
I'm a long time New York-trained investment banker. Moved to Colorado years ago. I
raised money for oil and gas which is a very prominent industry here. About 10 years ago,
I began to realize that that there was an issue with climate and with global warming
and the development of solar interested me. So I began to get interested in seeing what it
would take to raise capital to begin to fund that part of the industry at a more aggressive level.
I find that people here are much more thoughtful about their impact on the environment,
whereas in Houston, it seemed like almost everybody's livelihoods was tied in some way
to oil prices. I tried to put solar panels on my rooftop and my homeowner's association blocked me.
I felt isolated in the sense that my concern for the climate crisis was either dismissed or seen as
a threat. I feel that the people here feel like they're at the forefront of a major change that
they believe in. About 65-70 percent of the homes in the US are still heated by fossil fuel. The new
ones - amazingly - are continuing to be heated by fossil fuel. But by taking it home and heating it
and cooking with gas, what you do is you create about 2,000 pounds of carbon a year into the
atmosphere, which we cannot stand. It's now more economic to use natural power that's renewable
with this system that these homes use. It's really not that difficult.
Thanks you all for helping me with writing the public comments for the metro meeting last Tuesday
and how we wanted to talk with Chad about why he didn't respond to us with regards to the natural
gas line that he wants to bring over from the Westwood-Mesa neighborhood over there down here.
Across the street from our development, they're planning to install natural gas lines by using a
community that already has natural gas lines and extending their pipelines into the next section
of our development. And the new developer who took over initially put out a press release saying that
he would build upon our core principles of sustainability and net-zero living.
But it turned out that those are just words, and this outraged us. Yeah so
Chad responded to the public comment that we made that he didn't want to have a response because he
felt that this should just be water on the bridge, that there's no reason for us to argue, and that
he just doesn't want to respond because he doesn't want to argue about it anymore. We
came together in our Metro District board meetings in order to make our outrage heard. We started
to be active with the City Council and the city Sustainability Committee and now we're active in
getting media involved and getting people to know about what's going on. And getting as much
attention as possible to make the builder aware that there are consequences if they put in natural
gas lines. If everyone could live in a net zero home, and it would be cost-effective to do so,
we would obviously all do that. That is uh that would be awesome and I think we'll get there
someday. It's just not there yet, and so the obstacles are upfront cost. Because of market
demands, we could not do net-zero geothermal on a production scale. These homes will still be
50 times more sustainable than something that was built in the 60's and 70's and 80's right and so
our view is that building great homes is better than building no homes that would be perfect.
I feel very much rewarded in seeing my daughter grow up here and seeing her
internalize these values. And she's seeing how important it is to have a voice
about these matters. That was a mistake that I made when I was
in the university, I thought that if I just focused on technical research, that other
people could take care of policy. But really, scientists and engineers, they need to be part of
making their voices heard and influencing policy to be able to be a part of the solution.