The 2025 Marshall Earth Day panel — hosted in the Dean’s Board Room of Popovich Hall Tuesday — featured a lineup of speakers affiliated with clean energy: President Carol Folt, Santiago Flores, Matthew Langer, Nicole Hagen and was moderated by Geoffrey Garrett, dean of the Marshall School of Business.

Folt began with short remarks about the urgency of clean energy for our climate. She added that she feels more optimistic about the environmental movement now than she did five years ago.

“[It’s] not because we’re getting everything our way; we are not,” Folt said. “But we’re seeing so much more conversation like this. I do believe idealism is a great thing. I’m a huge idealist. I want it to come from my heart, but I think in order to get things done, you have to have that practical application.”

Folt said she was most excited about transportation and green medicine. She said 25% of carbon emissions come from “dirty medicine” — medicine produced at great carbon cost. There is an “opportunity” to work with the city to make transportation cleaner and reduce carbon from inefficient transportation lines or from emissions from idling trucks at the harbor.

Langer, chief operating officer at Clean Power Alliance, added he’s most excited about electrification, such as electric vehicles displacing internal combustion engines.

“The big movement you’ve seen towards electric vehicles is because people want them,” Langer said. “It’s not because somebody gave them incentive to buy one. It’s because there’s consumer demand for a lot of these things. The costs are coming down, the technologies are improving, and more and more people are seeing that and wanting to get more electric appliances.”

The conversation turned toward EVs, and while Langer said that EVs are still popular across the board, Folt suggested that while they are popular in the American market, it is a smaller market from a global perspective.

“[India] wants electric vehicles; Africa’s got the biggest growing middle class in the world,” Folt said. “If you’re not thinking about that, you’re going to be so completely ruined by countries that are actually creating cheaper electric vehicles. So you’ve got to … look at that global mindset.”

The conversation turned to potential impacts of the current trade war between the United States and China, namely on the wind, solar and battery resources that come from China. Hagen, an associate at Angeleno Group, discussed these using First Solar as an example of a company whose stock has survived the trade war thus far. 

“There is a future state where these companies do well over the next five years. But in the next two to three, it will become ugly,” Hagen said.

Folt said the winner of the trade war would be whoever came up with a better battery first. She called current batteries a “mess,” and said electrifying a public transportation fleet isn’t optimal with unrecyclable, “dirty” batteries. 

The panel then touched on whether overregulation in California was impeding clean climate initiatives and innovation. Flores, founder and CEO of Pure Energy Stream, disagreed, using the examples of Assembly Bill 1305 and the Warehouse Actions and Investments to Reduce Emissions program, both of which target carbon emissions.

“It’s a very simple thing,” Flores said. “Most of these companies are multi-billion conglomerates, and the least they can do is measure their energy management systems to reduce emissions. If they don’t, they’re essentially getting a points/penalty system. So they’re getting fees by the state that’s generating income for the state and small municipalities.”

Hagen said that developing land for clean energy projects like solar farms can also get tied up in environmental protections, preventing the project from seeing the light of day. She said, despite these trade-offs that slow down development, ultimately, the laws exist for a reason. 

Folt was asked the same question, specifically regarding the Bakersfield-Fresno high-speed rail project. She said that the bureaucracy of smaller entities able to hold up larger projects can slow down development.

“It’s how you run a university,” Folt said. “If every single department gets to make a decision that overturns every single other department, it’s the same battle all the time.”

The panel closed on the Trump administration’s steps to repeal some of Biden’s pro-environment policies. Flores said the way forward was tax equity, tapping into government subsidies similar to affordable housing. According to Flores, this method was one of the ways the country escaped from the Great Depression. 

Folt reminded the audience of the importance of the battle for a cleaner climate future and stressed the importance of keeping hope, regardless of adversity. 

“There’s nothing that makes me feel more concerned than when I see us thinking about turning back [on] clean air and clean water,” Folt said. “What? Why would we ever do such a thing? But the important thing is that you find another way.”