Rick Weddle (Site Selectors Guild): Welcome to "Site Selection Matters" where we take a close look at the art and science of site selection decision-making. I'm your host, Rick Weddle, president of the Site Selectors Guild. In each episode, we introduce you to leaders in the world of corporate site selection and economic development. We speak with members of the Site Selectors Guild, our economic development partners, and corporate decision-makers to provide you with deep insight into the best and next practices in our profession.

In this episode, we have as our guest, Didi Caldwell, principal with Global Location Strategies, one of the world's leading site selection consultancies for manufacturing and industrial companies. Today Didi will talk with us about how community or state action to combat climate change is emerging as an increasingly important site location factor. Join me as we welcome Didi Caldwell to "Site Selection Matters."

Didi, the interest in sustainability is clearly escalating. The new administration's push for climate change programs, renewable energy jobs, plus the recent announcement by BlackRock chief, Laurence Fink, calling for companies to actually disclose plans on how they'll support a net-zero economy all seem to reinforce this point. Take a minute, if you will, to help our listeners understand why this is important, specifically to site location, and what a net-zero economy actually means.

Didi Caldwell (Global Location Strategies): Thank you, Rick. It's great to be here with you. We've seen an increasing interest from our clients in net-zero and other sustainability goals over the last, I would say decade. Net-zero essentially means achieving a balance between the greenhouse gases that we put into the atmosphere and those that are taken out so that we can achieve a net-zero emissions. It differs from gross zero, in that gross zero would mean that we're trying to take out all carbon dioxide emissions, which is, I think most people would agree, is not achievable with today's technology. But net-zero accounts for our ability to take out greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere through nature or through other technologies.

Rick: So that would mean we're not making it worse, right? If you're at net zero, it's do no harm, kind of.

Didi: Exactly. And the widely accepted increase in temperature that we can achieve... We have to get to net-zero in order to achieve an overall warming of 2 degrees Celsius or less. That's what the scientists are telling us, that we need to in order to avoid major environmental damage and beyond social and all kinds of other things that scientists are telling us that degrees Celsius is about where that threshold is. And in order to achieve that, we really need to get to net-zero and as quickly as possible.

Rick: You know, there's a lot of details and a lot of substance to be understood and learned in this. But, you know, we've been talking about global warming and climate change for a long time now, some more intensely, some less intensely, but some of us actually remember back when Al Gore first raised the conscious level with the release of the movie, "Inconvenient Truth." Why do you think it's coming to the forefront now, after all these years?

Didi: Well, there's a couple of reasons. I mean, one thing is that was sort of a call-to-action, but we really didn't have the technologies, at least not at a price point where we could implement those technologies back when "I