(upbeat music) (upbeat music) - Welcome to "At Issue".

I'm H Wayne Wilson.

Thank you for joining us for a conversation about the environment.

Excessive heat in the southern tier of the United States, rainfall and lack of rainfall, all contributing to a question as to what is happening with the environment?

And to have that discussion, we've invited the executive director of the Illinois Environmental Council to join us.

Deb Walling is the executive director.

Thank you for being here.

- Thank you so much.

- I mentioned drought.

Phoenix in particular, weeks upon weeks of exceeding 110, dust storms that we've never seen in Illinois, et cetera.

I mean, you could go down a list.

So what's your assessment of where we are with the environment, both nationally and Illinois?

- We are definitely experiencing climate change.

These are some of the changes to weather patterns that scientists have predicted for decades.

And we are seeing them hit now.

And I don't think, you know, there's not an individual weather event that you can look at and say, oh, climate change.

But when you look at the number of extreme weather events that are happening, whether it's 100 year storms that are no longer happening every 100 years, they're happening every year, extremely severe droughts, dust storms, the impact is enormous.

We are seeing it, it is hitting, it is hitting Illinois and sometimes in very tragic ways.

For example, those dust storms that killed a number of people south of I55 on Springfield.

- You mentioned climate change is definitely here.

And there may be a climate denier in the audience saying, Deb, what are you talking about?

You know, the weather changes, it's changed, there was an ice age, et cetera.

What do you say to climate change deniers?

- Yeah, well, so it's really interesting because I think that a lot of the work I do, I work with a lot of folks that definitely deny climate change.

You know, there's a lawmaker in Springfield that was on the House floor talking about climate change not being real and just his, you know, this is the hot air, it's from these folks that are down here and screaming about it.

And he's somebody that I work with a lot on soil conservation and soil health.

So I think to me, it's not necessarily about convincing people about the science of climate change, because when you review it, it's accurate.

You can't go through and read all the peer reviewed research, you can't go through and see literally thousands of different pathways of scientific inquiry that point to a change in climate, from wildlife to water.

Just lots of different scientific inquiry point in that direction.

And so to me, it's making sure that we have the policies that we need to address this issue and making sure that people have the default option, because I think the majority, the folks that are understanding science understand the science of climate change.

- Let's talk about what the state legislature can do.

We're gonna talk about what we can do in a moment.

But the state legislature two years ago, when the governor signed the bill to create the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act, we're two years in, how are we doing?

Because climate was the first word in that bill.

- Yeah, I think that we are doing great so far.

There are some pieces that are delayed.

There are some pieces that are going great.

When we look at that bill, I have seen solar pop up all over the state.

I've seen solar in far southern Illinois driving through it.

I've seen solar in the, you know, Jo Daviess County in northwest Illinois.

We are having solar on people's roofs, there's utility scale solar that is going everywhere.

And we're seeing that.

And I also talked to the solar industry and they are hiring in a way that they have never hired before.

So I know that that piece is kicking off and we are facing a solar jobs cliff before we pass the bill.

It is doing great.

There's some pieces related to equity and job training that I think are behind.

Some of that is because of economic conditions in 2022.

We have to do some hiring.

I know there are positions open with DCO to make sure that the workforce hubs are moving forward.

And there's training positions that we're going to need.

We gotta get a whole new workforce of people trained to do these jobs here in Illinois.

And that piece I think has been delayed a bit.

We'd like to see it move forward.

But so far so good.

I think we're seeing really positive impacts to communities.

- There's a balance here because we just can't turn off the coal powered or the oil powered plants and say, well, we've done that, we've eliminated the pollution from those smokestacks.

And solar isn't there yet, wind power isn't there yet, even though Illinois I believe is a second or third ranked state for amount of wind power in the United States.

So how do you work that balancing act?

Just can't say shut down.

As a matter of fact, the bill says coal powered plants should be shut down by 2045, another 22 years.

They have to meet certain, you know, milestones in the interim.

So how do you make sure that balancing act, that we do supply enough wind power, et cetera?

- Yeah, well, so most plant coal plants and even natural gas will have to close down by 2030 in Illinois.

And there are some that are open until 2045 based on where they're located.

And some municipal utilities and rural electric co-ops made a really bad deal in prairie states and still have some financing on that.

So we are headed in that direction.

And I would argue to folks that are really into coal, coal plants were closing and were not economical even before renewable energy was hitting, before we passed this bill.

Coal plants have been trying to compete with natural gas and not doing a good job.

They're just not economical and they have fewer and fewer workers.

You can run a small coal plant with just 30 people.

And those are great jobs and we don't, you know, we need to make sure that those are replaced.

But you're not having 1000 people running some of these small coal plants.

So I think we are heading in that direction with solar and wind.

And we're fifth in the United States, actually, Oklahoma just passed us in terms of wind production, which is Oklahoma.

But you know, when you look at some of those problems related to reliability or capacity, you see a lot of countries in the world that are producing much more than we are.

We're still at below 10%.

And you have countries that are powering their entire economy, everything reliably off of 40% or 50%, depending, you know, some of those geothermal countries can do 100%.

But you see countries that have far more than us not having those issues yet.

And so I think we are headed in the right direction to be able to meet those timelines of having reliability, of having battery storage, and being able to power everything off of solar and wind, our existing nuclear plants.

And heading there with a carbon free power sector.

- Let's talk about nuclear.

Because Illinois does have quite a bit of nuclear power.

Senate Bill 76, and at the time of this taping I don't believe the governor signed that yet, but that makes a lot of changes.

It changes the 1987 moratorium on new nuclear plants in Illinois.

The '87 bill said, no new nukes until the US finds a place to put spent nuclear fuel in storage.

This bill changes that.

What changes does that propose and is that the right step?

- Well, so we opposed that bill, and we have an opposition in general to nuclear power as not being clean energy.

It is zero carbon, but it is something that creates a tremendous amount of waste and issues for the community, uses a lot of water.

So we're not into nuclear power.

Although I would say as I look at our community, there are more and more people that are interested in nuclear power as a future energy source.

But you know, we have an opposition to nuclear power.

We are really concerned about this bill.

There's a couple of pieces that the sponsors brought up of why they want it.

One are these small modular nuclear reactors and one are large capacity nuclear facilities.

So I'll deal with each of those.

These small modular nuclear facilities are a little bit hypothetical, a little bit real.

I think there's pilot projects where they've gone into place.

And a small modular nuclear reactor could be like one to five megawatts.

It's really tiny.

And you know, like one wind turbine is one to 1.5 megawatts in capacity.

So that's just kind of what you're doing.

So you power maybe a factory off of it.

And when you look at that, I think that we're not quite set in terms of regulating these nuclear reactors that like, really, if run incorrectly could have tragic emergency consequences.

There's ways, if they're run incorrectly they could get people sick.

And so, you know, if you're a resident living in a residential area and you don't know that the factory next to you now has this one megawatt nuclear reactor, you deserve some say.

And I'm not sure that we are set up yet for individuals to have that say.

So that's small modular.

But I think, and I know we're gonna talk a bit about capacity in the MISO area and Ameren territory, because that's been some issues that have been brought up.

A lot of the sponsors brought up nuclear facilities, large nuclear facilities as an answer to capacity.

But when we're looking at some of those capacity issues, they may be a little more short term and need short term fixes that we have solutions for.

These nuclear facilities, the last one built in the United States was built in Georgia.

It took 13 years to go from approval to being in the ground.

And only the first unit is on right now.

It cost 10 times as much as folks thought.

And when you look at the cost comparison to renewable energy, solar or wind energy, nuclear is far more expensive.

I have some doubts about whether we're gonna be building new facilities within Illinois with just how much it costs.

So we'll see what the governor does with this particular piece of legislation, but regardless of whether it goes forward or not, we're gonna need some new guidelines on those small modular nuclear reactors to help communities decide whether they want them.

- Let's talk about carbon.

There's been a lot of discussion about we need to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

And there's several ways of doing that.

Putting it down into the ground, there is the proposed pipeline that's coming through Peoria County in part with liquified carbon.

Where does the environmental council stand on what we do about carbon capture?

- Yeah, so I think we don't support a full ban on carbon capture, because when we look at our entire economy, we need to take all of the carbon out.

And there's gonna be some hard to decarbonize manufacturing facilities that we're gonna have to capture and store that carbon.

But it should be very rare.

And we are incredibly concerned about all the pipelines that are predicted.

The one thing that's for sure is that companies like ADM and BP are looking at Illinois and its geology as a carbon storage hub for the nation.

That would be tragic and awful.

We do not want that to happen in Illinois.

And I am very nervous about that.

You know, all of these pipelines are being proposed and that is for that reason.

And I don't wanna see carbon dioxide pipelines all over the state.

I don't think landowners want them.

And just to talk about, oh, it's CO2, like we breathe that out, right?

There was a very tragic accident in southern Illinois.

And what folks don't realize, you know, if we're surrounded by CO2 there's no oxygen, we can't breathe.

So that's something that can kill people from a CO2 release.

But then also what you don't realize is your combustion engines cannot run if the air is full of CO2 where you're at.

So if you have an ambulance, a fire truck, you can't run it.

You don't have oxygen.

And so in the tragic example that happened in far southern United States, the emergency responders couldn't get into the area because their vehicles couldn't run.

They can have gas masks with oxygen all they want, but they can't drive that ambulance in there.

And so I think that really makes me very nervous.

I don't wanna see pipelines everywhere.

And we are not a disposal site for the entire United States for carbon dioxide.

- Yet carbon dioxide is part of the problem.

Methane is another problem with the atmosphere.

So what's the solution?

And we keep pumping, you know, exhaust fumes, et cetera, into the atmosphere.

- Yeah, well I do think that we are going to need to close off any sources of carbon dioxide.

So one of the things, if we're a disposal site, if we are closing our coal and natural gas plants it's not fair for Illinois to be a disposal site for Indiana to keep its coal plants on.

They need to make that that switch and move over to cleaner sources of energy that are better for their communities.

I mean, we're talking carbon dioxide, but there's lots of other pollutants from coal plants.

And so I do see, you know, there's gonna be a place where there's carbon we're going to have to take out of the atmosphere.

We should look at how to do carbon storage as safely as possible.

I don't think we should be trucking pipelines of carbon dioxide from all over the state, all over the country, to central and southern Illinois and our geology.

It's really scary.

- And then there's a question of automobile exhaust.

To many people, electric vehicles are a little bit too expensive right now.

And they don't travel as far as, you know, we travel.

You know, we wanna drive more than 300 miles before we have to, you know, sit for a while and charge a vehicle.

How are we doing in making that transition to get to, because that would be a personal decision to help the environment.

- Yeah, well, so I see a bunch, and transportation is now the largest source of carbon dioxide of any sector.

So we've gone from the power sector which we've been addressing, and we're rapidly declining, to transportation being the largest sector.

So that's the piece we need to hit next.

And I have to start all the time, you know, we need to make sure that there's better public transit and active transit options available.

It should be safe to bike and walk and take public transit for short trips, and for commuting trips in areas where it's located.

We're about to face a $750 million shortfall with the Metropolitan Chicago Transit agencies in 2025 from some of the the COVID leftovers and federal government.

So we're gonna have to address public transit.

So we do need to look at like, how we are building our roads.

And we can just look up to Minnesota for things that they've done.

They just this year, Minnesota already has a piece that if you're gonna increase vehicle miles traveled by increasing roadways or widening roadways, you need to offset those vehicle miles traveled.

And they added a lot of teeth and greenhouse gas emission goals to their law this year.

I think we should consider something like that in talking about our transportation planning, which everybody knows Illinois transportation planning has been very political and not very data driven in the past.

And we've been working to change that by passing a data bill related to transportation planning.

So that's going underway.

But, so that's where we're starting is transportation.

But then we get into electrification.

And obviously not everybody's gonna be able to afford an electric car.

And even right now there is a rebate from the state of Illinois that is not fully funded, which I think is extremely problematic and tragic.

It wasn't fully funded last year, it's not fully funded this year.

And yet we're saying people can get a $4,000 rebate.

I think that piece needs to be better funded so I'm hoping that moves forward.

I'm hoping we see more of a used car market as we see things move forward.

And I want people to have access to electric vehicles.

We did a bunch of stuff this year on making sure that people's homes could be EV ready, because you do need a 220 volt charger in your garage or you know, in your neighborhood.

I know a lot of people are doing it without their own personal space.

So making sure that that's easy to get to is really important.

But then, you know, beyond electric personal vehicles, we really need to be looking at things like buses and trucks.

And of course there's Rivian in Bloomington-Normal, there's Lions Electric that is out of Joliet.

And we are producing those vans and trucks right here in Illinois.

We're using them right here in Illinois.

I think that piece is the best for air quality, and the most exciting, that we're, you know, beyond passenger vehicles, which is cool tech.

This other tech is really exciting.

- When you use the word environment, that covers a wide territory.

So let's turn to lead.

And we know that Galesburg had, you know, lead pipes and et cetera.

How are we doing?

And I know it's by community, but how are we doing in getting rid of lead pipes so that we have less lead?

And for that matter, I suppose you could say lead paint that's been covered up over time.

What's the situation with lead in Illinois?

- Yeah, I think I would like to be really positive about this, especially because this is a problem that we know how to solve.

We just need the political will to be able to do it.

And the longer and longer these sources are available and touching on children, the more it's just gonna keep continuing to cost us.

I mean, just lead is a problem in terms of how it affects especially child brain activity, and can contribute to all sorts of increased costs in the education and criminal justice system.

So starting there, we have to address this issue.

CDC says zero level of lead is safe.

And when we're talking about lead service lines, we're talking about drinking water out of a lead straw.

And more people are drinking water out of a lead straw in Illinois than any other state.

Which there recently was a controversy because there's money at the federal government, and Florida claimed that they had more lead service lines than Illinois does.

They do not.

And they turned in some information about the lead service lines by converting a lot of unknown lines to say it was lead, even though those probably aren't lead.

So I'm just gonna go with, we have almost all the lead service, we have 1/8 of all lead service lines in the nation in Illinois, and we need to move forward with replacing those as expediently as possible.

And it's gonna require money.

But if we don't spend that money now we'll be spending even more.

- Technology sometimes causes problems for us.

What we decided was good 50 years ago turns out to be not so good.

And so let me turn to the question of PFAS, polyfluoroalkyl substances.

They're in everything, the air, the water, the soil, in you and me.

Is it too late?

Or, I mean, I suppose it's never too late but how do we control this?

Because I mean, non-stick surfaces have PFAS in them.

- Yeah, well, and PFAS, you know, there's a lot of research that I'm really nervous about in terms of public health that shows a lot of effects with respect to infertility, cancer, neurotoxin issues.

And it is a huge concern of what it is doing to our bodies.

And it's in so much of water.

I think that at a personal level, people should be making choices to reduce the amount of product containing PFAS that they have close personal contact with.

So makeup is one piece, and a lot of even Sephora or Alta have lists of clean makeup and making sure it doesn't have PFAS.

Cookware, changing over your cookware to something that doesn't have PFAS in the non-stick technology is critical.

That's probably one of the best steps that you can personally do.

- So we should go back to cast iron skillets?

- Yeah, well, I mean, I cook almost everything off of cast iron or stainless steel or copper.

I mean, 90% of, and I cook a lot, 90% of my cooking is cast iron.

It's got iron.

You just gotta make sure you season it well so it doesn't stick, but it works just as well as the non-stick if you do it right.

And you're getting the iron in your daily diet.

- There's so many different areas of environment when you use that term.

And so I'd like to turn to green space.

There's lots of parks in Illinois.

We've been to many of them.

Is Illinois doing well in terms of conserving green space?

- Illinois is not doing well in terms of our nature-based climate solutions.

We're 49th out of the 50 states in the amount of preserved land per capita.

So for each person.

And you could look at that and say, oh, it's the prairie, and we did all of this agricultural work with the prairie.

But we have some amazing gems in Illinois that I love to visit.

Whether it's going down to the Shawnee National Forest and all of the canyons and bluffs there, all of the bluffs that are lining the Illinois River, the bison in Midewin or Nachusa.

We have a beautiful state.

And I think that I've really loved working with Governor Pritzker on things like the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act.

And I'd love to see him taking nature more seriously, because our DNR can, you know, it's funded.

It's not well funded.

It's not pursuing federal funding.

We are not doing the work that we need to do in terms of capital improvements at these sites to make sure that visitors have the basics, and that we're not doing a whole bunch of graffiti at Starved Rock or putting litter all over the place.

So there's so much work that we need to put in.

We need to take nature seriously within the state.

- Jen mentioned Midewin.

That's up near Joliet and it's a marvelous place to go to.

Jen, one final thought and just real quickly.

And that is the question of, we're told to recycle, and yet I know that some glass is not being, we recycle it but it gets down the recycling center and it's ground up and put into a landfill.

Where are we with recycling?

- Well, I think number one, consumers just need to continue to follow what they've been given by the recycling system.

They need to put it in, you know, even if you're feeling pessimistic about where it's going, do those things and make sure that you're doing it correctly.

Don't put plastic bags, don't put styrofoam in your recycling.

But I'm optimistic about where it's going in terms of policies we can consider in Springfield that will fund and protect the system.

- And with that, we are out of the half hour.

We thank you so much.

Jen Walling is the executive director of the Illinois Environmental Council.

Thank you for being with us on "At Issue".

- Thank you so much.

- And we thank you for joining us for the conversation.

We'll be back next time with another edition.

This time we're going to be talking a little bit of history.

A new look at 1673 and the French colonization of Central Illinois.

Join us for the next "At Issue".

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