W.R. Grace

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 62nd running of the list.

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This year's Fortune 500 marks the 61st running of the list. Wal-Mart claims the top spot again. See who made the list.

Wal-Mart stayed on top as its sales crept closer to half-a-trillion dollars. Apple moved into the top five. And UnitedHealth Group continued its steady climb. 

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W.R. Grace (GRA): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings

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W.R. Grace | Fortune

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Crate & Barrel is evolving from a home furnishings importer into a multi-hyphenate design, B2B and AI-assisted powerhouse, with plans on expanding its retail footprint while using new technology to change the way customers shop online. As geo-political shakeups in trade and supply chains challenge the businesses’ operations, CEO Janet Hayes says the company is focusing on offering high quality products to forge ahead.

Crate & Barrel Wants You To Know They Are Much More Than Crates & Barrels | Behind the Business

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I would have never believed if someone said 5 years from now the company is going to grow over 55%. You're going to triple the bottom line. Long known for wedding registries and modern home decor, Crate and Barrel has grown into a $2.5 billion powerhouse. We've been Reinventing our retail fleet and really doubling down and investing now against a backdrop of tariff headwinds and supply chain volatility, the company is focused on new consumer touchpoints and delivering tech-driven speed under the leadership of CEO Janet Hayes. As the next generation buys fewer homes and online options multiply, how can Crate and Barrel win in the consumer wars? You can see this kind of iconic picture here of the crates and barrels and hence the name started to form. Somebody walked in and said, What's the name of the store? And they just kind of said, I think it's Crate and Barrel, and that's where the name came from. Crate and Barrel was founded in 1962 by Gordon and Carol Siegel as a way to bring Americans high quality home furnishings from around. The world. This is what we call our atrium, which I think is so beautiful. It has since expanded into a multi-hyphenate brand, offering design services, catering to kids, and curating gifts. The German retail company Auto Group bought a majority of Crate and Barrel in 1998. By 2011, Otto Group was Crate and Barrel's sole owner. Despite revenue losses for Otto Group this year, Crate and Barrel was a significant driver of the company's positive earnings. Janet Hayes took the helm in August of 2020, 1 of the most uncertain times in the company's history. In the five years since, they've dealt with three major crises a global pandemic, supply chain turbulence, and the current geopolitical pressures of tariffs. Each time we come out stronger, I would have never believed if someone said five years from now the company is going to grow over 55%. You're going to triple the bottom line. A key part of Hayes's strategy has been in diversifying the company's customer base, growing various streams of revenue while staying focused on Crate and Barrel's core brand identity. Can you walk me through each of your brands and give me a sense of which ones are your biggest revenue drivers? Uh, we'll start with the Crate and Barrel brand. That brand I think most know, and if you ask someone on the street, they'd. Probably pull up a really warm memory of oh I registered there it starts kind of at the beginning of that registry and has grown into quite a big brand and then there's CB2 which is going through in my opinion, a really beautiful evolution. It's much more kind of design focused than crate and barrel, meaning appealing to the trade. They don't have in-house design. They use designers around the world. Then there's Crate and Kids kind of fulfills a couple of rooms in the house that we weren't kidding and really has an aesthetic that matches the crate brand. We also have Hudson Grace, which is a really beautiful, entertaining, and gift brand. And then we are bringing up a couple of other new brands as we are talking, not allowed to be out yet. The company is now doubling down on these 3 pillars. Investing in new technologies, expanding its retail footprint, and broadening its customer base beyond the individual consumer. What will come up pretty big in the next couple of years is our B2B business and our franchise business expanding globally. Oh, tell me about those. So the B2B business one I'm really excited about, we're one of the few companies that can do a whole home or a whole restaurant or a whole hotel from our brands and deliver a really different aesthetic. When you start to put all the different brands together, when thinking about the retail home furnishing landscape, a lot of different players out there, of course, you know, you associate IKEA with like the affordable, accessible designs, restoration hardware, the luxury. What lane do you really want Crate and Barrel to own? We need to be known as beautiful quality, beautiful products, and reliable service, and I think that is how we will win. Oh, this is gorgeous. Yeah, so over the past few years we have been making a lot of evolutions to the brand in order to drive growth. Crate and Barrel is rethinking their retail strategy, including customer experiences like Shop and Shop, offering free in-house design services, and appealing to local markets. In the Chicago market, we love chili, we love football, we love beer, we're simple people. Obviously you're constantly seeing all this data from customers. Was there ever any insight from a customer about a specific product that really changed how you either designed it or imagined it in a store? An example I would give you is our. beds. What we heard is that there weren't enough choices. They want a custom fabric on the kids' bed too. We have a bed that we love and we brought it into a local factory and we're able to customize and put the whole custom wall against it so designers can pick from all of the fabrics that we just saw together in the design desk that came from a customer. In the next 5 years, Crate and Barrel plans to expand their retail footprint. 45 to 50 new stores will be popping up in new cities across the country. Tell me more about doubling down on the physical retail expansion. Why now? Why a time when other people are maybe shying away from it? We are in a really beautiful position of not being overs stored, but we also hadn't really dreamt of a new storm model. And in the last 5 years we have put a new storm model out into. The United States market. In fact, we just opened our 7th, and they are proving to be incredibly lucrative and efficient and giving great service and inspiration to the customer. What we did is reinvented the idea of it to be about 40% smaller, one floor, so you can really see the whole home when you walk into one floor, and the customers love it. But those ambitious plans for expansion will be happening against the backdrop of geopolitical changes which are setting up supply chain challenges once again. President Trump posted to Truth Social announcing a new round of tariff hikes targeting six additional countries. Hayes says she's well positioned, having laid the groundwork in her early days of leading the company during COVID. What it was like felt like day to day, hand to hand combat, but What we were doing was really preparing us for the future. How are you dealing with the current instability? Have tariffs affected you in the business at all? They have, I think most CEOs probably anticipated that there would be some geopolitical disruption as a new administration took place, but I think at the speed and the magnitude that it is happening with the tariffs, I don't think probably a lot. CEOs anticipated the company's workload. We've moved business back to the United States where applicable, and I'm happy with where we're moving, but it is not to be underestimated how difficult it has been. On day one that this tariff news came through. I called everyone together and said, do not make a fast move. Quality is our main objective. Crate and Barrel has also used AI to help tackle supply chain challenges. We are anticipating and executing embedding AI into the business across all of this new technology, so it will and is embedded into the supply chain now and we're already seeing efficiencies and gains and being able to coordinate orders faster and more complete for our customers. In 2023, you made this big new tech announcement. You walk me through what exactly that was and since then what you've implemented in terms of this new tech. It all started a little bit before 2023 when our growth, I said we found kind of some cracks in the foundation and so we pulled together an investment roadmap led by technology to deliver a new warehouse management system. labor management system, transportation management system. We had dreams of a new point of sale system in the stores that started to connect that data and then a website that desperately needed to be updated after years. In addition to the back-end systems, Hayes is implementing new consumer facing technology, giving a whole new meaning to online shopping. We have all different kinds of customers, and some of them are very tech savvy, don't want to go in the store, don't want to interact, but still might need help and want to shop in new and different ways. Hence the virtual store. Do you see a world on the consumer side in which a consumer could say design an entire home or a portion of their house? Using AI and never have to step foot in a store, or do you always think that we're going to need these physical spaces? I think we're going to need the physical spaces. If anything, we have to keep asking that same question to ourselves every day. What makes that physical space relevant for the customer in the future? As Hayes positions the brand for the next generation, it's her approach to both the physical and digital spaces that she hopes will set Crate and Barrel apart. Your youngest consumers Gen Z, Gen Alpha, these digital natives who I think sometimes flock to these more digital only brands, how do you plan to encapsulate this new generation of consumers who are so used to online first and, and do you have a plan for, for the next generation of Crate and Barrel users? We believe very. Much an online first and actually the large majority of our sales are online. We're very digitally dominant. I don't think that that generation wants things that are coming at them en masse. That's what they're telling us. So we've got to personalize not only their shopping experience but their marketing experience. We've got to pay attention to what they're doing in social channels and we will. We're going to develop much more. rich content if it's how to decorate, how to cook something, how to pull something together, we owe them more content than we're giving them right now and that will come. But I think at the end of the day it won't differentiate service. How they want to receive it and when they want to receive it is again something we need to listen to and anticipate and be ready to react to.

Smartphones, data centers, connected vehicles, wearables—is there any category in which SoftBank-owned Arm doesn't play? As the AI boom drives a need for energy-efficient compute in more places—and increases competition across the globe—Arm's chief executive outlines how the company's advantageous architecture and unique business model will drive it to new heights.

Within Arm's Reach

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Renee, welcome to the Fortune Stage. Thank you. So excited to have you. So before we dive in, I want to give the room a sense of scale because I don't think everyone here is familiar with how pervasive arm is. You're in our phones, laptops, fridges, stoves, you name it. So give us a sense of how pervasive, um, arm is. Yeah, so what, what we do, uh, is, uh, a product called a CPU. Which is the brain of every modern electronic device. So I would say that each person probably maybe uses 50 to 100 armed CPUs on their person or in their home. I can assure you everyone has one today because we are. In literally every single mobile phone built we're in all the iPhones, we're in all the Android phones, but we're in Ford F-150s, we're in Teslas, we're in data centers, we're in washing machines, the brain that powers everything. So when you turn on your smart TV and all those apps come up and you're basically trying to pick whether it's YouTube or Amazon Prime. That whole operating system that's running on the TV, that's all running on an AM CPU. Uh, company's been around 35+ years. No, we're just talking. It's Cambridge University started in a barn in Cambridge with an ambition to be the global standard for CPUs, and that mission they accomplished it. I, I, I also want to double. It's not just devices you talked about data centers and you recently announced that in 2025 50% of all computes shipped to top hyperscalers will be ARM based. Tell us more about that because that that's kind of not expected. It's a little counterintuitive and also back to the history of ARM, um, we started in in a in a barn in Cambridge, and it was a joint venture between a chip company called VLSI Technology and Apple. And they were looking for the first chip for a first PDA known as the Newton if people remember that that device, which was a PDA way ahead of its time relative to running off batteries, had a display. There were a million things wrong with it, but what it needed was a low power CPU, something that could run off a battery, and that's how ARM was conceived, was a chip to run off batteries which fast forward served us incredibly well because back to the. To the mobile phones because the battery power is so key there and you're running off batteries, Energy consumption is key, power efficiency. So that is really the application space where we're quite strong. Fast forward to these modern data centers that are running 100 megawatts, 500 megawatts, gigawatts. Energy efficiency is everything. So ARM had gotten into the cloud data centers a number of years ago, general purpose cloud with Amazon and Microsoft and Google, but when Nvidia made the choice with their Grace Hopper chip and then Grace Blackwell, they needed a CPU to pair up with the accelerator and they chose ARM. And because Grace Blackwell is literally every single AI identity center compute. Being done, we're there too. So hence, hence our big number 50%. Incredible. Um, you've made a bold statement that ARM is the only compute platform delivering AI everywhere from milliwatts at the edge to gigawatts in the world's largest data center. What makes ARM uniquely positioned to play in this space? So let's think about the data center application we just talked about, right? These giant AI data centers that are using GPU acceleration, um, they all need a CPU as well because the CPU does all of the, the management of the data, prepares the data that goes in the accelerator. There's just a huge codependency there. You can't have a GPU without the CPU. That's fine when you've got. 50 megawatts to deal with 100 megawatts, but when you go to a very small application where wearable glasses, where you have maybe 2 watts of power, you can't put a GPU there. Simply put, you have to find a way to run that AI accelerator on the CPU platform. So that's where we play. So we not only have a solution up in the cloud, but we have a solution in the smallest devices. We've been talking about this all day, but I still would love a raise of hands if you believe we are in an AI bubble. Because perhaps you've changed your mind since the morning when Ali asked the question. OK, um, who thinks we're not in an AI bubble? OK, I think. And who, whose answer is like it depends, complicated. Yeah, I would say like 3rd, 3rd, 3rd. What do you think? Are we in an AI bubble? I think it depends depends on how you define bubble. If, if, if the definitions of AI bubble is that the stocks are overvalued and the PEs are running way ahead of themselves historically, you know, you know, maybe, uh, that's not something frankly I spend a lot of attention on. If you ask the question of are we an AI bubble relative to the technology being relevant and powerful, absolutely not, 100%. I feel that in my bones. And, and you might ask, well, why are, why are you so convicted about that? You simply just have to look at the, the areas that AI tends to help us with already. The the previous speaker was talking about vibe coding where you, you go in and, and you ask a question relative to write me a piece of software. Well, imagine a world where you go to AI and say, write me a business plan, right, or write me a way that I could come up with a novel concept to build a company that could solve this level of problem. Take life sciences. Uh, I've always thought that the killer app for AI is around health. If you look at one of the bottlenecks in drug discovery today, it's actually around trials, human trials. If you could replace all of that with AI and have AI instantly tell you from the time you're starting R&D that you know exactly what the trials are going to look like and you've accelerated drug discovery by 1015 years, that, by the way, all of what I described is going to happen. None of that is an if statement. It's a when statement. So when I think about AI and and the changes it can make for humanity and the planet and where we are relative to its capability, we're so early and the benefits will be so profound. So I, I'm absolutely not believing we're in any kind of bubble. Yeah, um, I'm gonna take audience questions in a moment, so please tee up your questions. You know, a lot of attention goes into the training of these AI models, but as demand for AI increases, the prediction is we're going to need more and more AI inference, and this is You know, the shift is going to benefit ARM. So tell us more about how you think about kind of the training inference. Yeah, and again, another example of why I don't think we're in an AI bubble. So just backing up for a moment, what is training? What is inference? Training is teaching a model to do something, uh, whether that is teaching you to recognize images, answer questions about history, solving an enterprise problem, etc. etc. Months and months and months of time spent training a model, training chat GPT. And OpenAI takes 3 months, 6 months, 8 months to train this giant model. That's training. Once the model is done, it's released to the world, and on our phones we can ask a question and the question comes back with an answer. Sometimes it thinks it takes some amount of time to give you the answer. That's inference. OK, so the giant use case as you think about it, of course, is inference. The more. Sophisticated the training model is, the more inference we're going to use. First things today, still researching companies spend more time training than they do on inference. So all this compute, these 100 megawatt data centers, they actually spend more time training than doing inference. And you say, well, why is that? Because there's just so much still that the models can get smart at. Inference is the use case that happens everywhere. It happens in the cloud. It happens in your car. It happens in your earbuds. And again, back to, you know, what is good for arm to your question. Those will all run in areas that generally will have an arm processor, so we think as inference explodes, and it will as more and more of these models get sophisticated, you're going to run these AI workloads everywhere. It will be ubiquitous. We will not think about AI running in the cloud or AI running in an edge device. It's just software. That's how it works. Do you have any questions? The audience, I'm not. Yes, there's a question at the back. Please share your name and organization. Sure, Julie Michelle Morris, I'm always here to ask about cybersecurity and the security of this, um, so. The single source, the supply chain, of course, makes me a bit nervous. Um, does it keep you up at night to know that the weight of the world is on your shoulders? Uh, we have a very unique situation in the semiconductor industry, and we were chatting about this, uh, uh, in the, in the green room prior, where, where chips were not so interesting for, for a number of years and then they got really interesting and, and one of the Events that made it so interesting was COVID, and when you lost your key fob, it took 52 weeks to get a new one. It was a bit of what is going on here. Well, that was just a function of the semi supply chain has many single points of failure, not just ARM. There's TSMC which is in a very obviously. Interesting part of the world geopolitically where it sits. TSMC is by far and away the provider of all these AI compute chips. Everything Nvidia builds is from there and AMD, Broadcom. That's a single point of failure. There is a very sophisticated device that has to go into these fabs that comes from one company on the planet for EUV. It's a company called ASML, Dutch company. They're the only people in the world to build EUV machines. There are a set of mirrors that go into that EUV machine made from a company in Germany called Zeiss. They're the only company in the world that makes those mirrors. So yes, I don't know if it keeps me up at night, but it is something the entire semiconductor supply chain has been learning to live with. But I will say, and you've seen this partially with the Trump administration, this acceleration to move manufacturing back to the United States, I think is a step in the right direction. There's a lot of criticism in terms of. How long it will take, and there's no question that it will take decades to get to where it was because it took decades for it to kind of get to the point that it is, but we have to start and I'm glad to see that it's starting because it's necessary. Well, when we were, yeah, there's a question here. When we were prepping for our call, um, I mentioned that I'm an investor in an early stage chip company that's very focused on AI inference. So perhaps you can give us a sense of like what does the competitive landscape look like. Well right now the leader is Nvidia by far and away, and they do almost everything relative to training and inference. Now when you have such a large competitor in such a large market that of course begets lots of competition, and there will be lots of competition from a combination of sources. You'll have hyper scalers doing their own chips, whether that's Google TPUs and that's gone on for a number of generations. Microsoft Meta AWS and then you'll have specialized companies trying to do chips around inference not only for the cloud but also for the smaller edge devices. So I would never try to second guess or underestimate Jensen and Nvidia. I worked there for many years. He's an amazing leader in an amazing company, but the opportunity is so large and so the scale is so broad, you will see other players, no question about it. And Iman and Kumar, so you know I do agree on the Nvidia side, uh, so building off of that, how do you see the hardware landscape evolve, right? So you know, grasshoppers, for instance, the bandwidth between CPU and GPU is increasing. So as these models get bigger, you know, agents, long context, it's all memory and bandwidth centric. So how do you see the. Ecosystem evolve and what would the, you know, CPU of the future look like? Yeah, no, it's, it's a wonderful question because. Ultimately when you're handling these large AI models and the models are if you enter chat GPT or enter a question into it or Grok and it says thinking and you're wondering well why is it thinking it's not the computer that's thinking, it's the computer that's waiting for data to come into the computer to figure out how to make the answer. That's memory bandwidth. So I think what's going to happen over time is you're going to see some innovations in memory technology. You're going to see innovations in packaging. You're gonna see innovations in interconnect. In other words, what's the material used to connect between the devices? Is it light? Is it a different kind of photonics? Is it a different area in terms of other interfaces? So I think back to your question on innovation, if you're, if you're investing in this space, it's a bit of the wild, wild west because people are looking for all kinds of different levels of innovation there because it all has to get solved. Selfishly, I think ARM is going to be in a wonderful place there because most of that traffic needs to run through or around our devices, and we're very involved in a number of activities in that space. Can we talk about physical AI, and that could be robotics, autonomous vehicles, drones, but also these small embedded AI first human-machine interfaces or wearables. And again, what does that mean for ARM? Well, again, because just about everything that you described is going to require something from a CPU standpoint to manage the activity, we will be involved. So then you get into physical AI, what's what's taking place there, and you see this a little bit with autonomous vehicles. In fact, I was reading an article that was in the New York Times this Sunday. It's, it was rather amazing. I was looking at Waymo and the number of accidents that Waymo had conventional accidents compared to human drivers. And it was about 1/10 to 1/20 just looking at and they were looking at different kinds of accidents, right, in terms of lane incursion or intersections. So there you have a data point that says, OK, autonomous physical AI is is starting to see benefits in in the cars and Waymo, wonderful company, they're all over San Francisco, is kind of autonomous 1.0. It's got all kinds of equipment on there. It's got LiDAR, it's got radar, it's looking all over the place relative to how to drive autonomously. The next generation using LLMs are they need less cameras, they need less devices, and why is that? Because they're actually using AI as opposed to looking at all the physical areas to make decisions on how to drive and how to how to move forward. What does that mean? It's going to really accelerate. Robotics, humanoids, things that can do factories, I think in the next 5 to 10 years, and again ARM will be involved, you're going to see large, large sections of factory work replaced with robots. And, and part of the reason for that is these. Physical AI robots can be reprogrammed to do different tasks. One of the issues you've had with factory robots in the past is if it was a pick and place machine for a factory, they're just optimized for one task for one task. The software was for one task, the hardware was for one task. Now if you can design a general purpose humanoid that the software is all AI and it learns by doing. It's going to completely replace a large set of factory workers. So I think in 5 to 10 years, and back to the geopolitical comment, I think it will level the playing field for countries because you will start to see physical AI be a great enabler for other economies. Quick question, because we're almost out of time. Renee, good, good comments. Um, AM is dominant. X86 is struggling. Risk 5, we'll see. Um, you talked about so many customers, right? Why then Is I'm going moving up the stack, um, going into building chips aren't you competing with customers, um, you know, what's the calculation there? Yeah, I don't think I said anything about that, um, 10, you know, it's a Silicon Valley rumor. Yeah, one of the things that we see is, is huge demand for our technology. And one of the other things we see is that the the speed required to develop products is just the demand on it is just getting faster and faster and faster. Part of that, and AI exacerbates it in the sense that. The models are moving far, far faster than the hardware can keep up. So when you sit where we do in the platform, in other words, the compute sort of starts with arm, it's not unnatural for customers to come to us and say, If the computer and models are all running on your platform anyway, instead of waiting for your IP, why don't you just build something for us that could be quicker. That is something we do listen to. So as I've said in our earnings calls very carefully, that is something we continue to explore largely because customers are pushing us for it. And why are they pushing us for it? They just want to get their end products out faster. Renee, last question, what are you most excited about for 2026? You know, I, I, I think that this continuance of, of AI and the acceleration of what we're doing, it to me, it's like, it's like being in Disneyland. It just opened, uh, we have hours and hours and hours to spend. Um, I was at a panel where. Someone said, give you a bold, give me a bold prediction for this time next year, and I said no one will be talking about an AI bubble a year from now. And then someone asked, because it popped? I said, I'm not gonna say big for that, but I, I just don't think we will. I think people have embraced a year from now that we're well on our way. I love that Disneyland just opened. Thank you for the conversation, Renee. Thank you.

Mat dos Santos, General Counsel, Managing Attorney, Our Children's Trust Grace S., Youth Plaintiff, Held v. State of Montana Moderator: Kristin Stoller, Fortune

Impact Initiative 2024: The Case For Climate Action

Photography by Rebecca Greenfield/Fortune

It's being called a landmark climate lawsuit and the first of its kind in the United States, a group of young Montanans aged 5 to 22 sued the state arguing that it put fossil fuels over their health. The court agreed ruling that the state's actions violated their constitutional right to a clean environment. One of the young plaintiffs and an attorney on the case is going to join Fortune's editorial director, Kristen Stoller in just a moment. But first, we want to hear, we want you to hear from Elizabeth Stern. She's part of the Swiss female climate elders who also won a case against their government for not doing enough about climate change. It's another example of how private citizens across generations and borders are taking climate matters into their own hands and prevailing climate change is affecting women above the age of 75 very strongly during prolonged heat wave. That is the population group that more likely dies prematurely. We are all women who had been activists all our lives. We knew how to fight for our rights in a peace movement and the environmental movement, the women's movement. So what is, what is my message for young people. First of all, a big thank you that they are putting part of their young life, which is meant for learning, for playing around that they have to work on something that should be a given for them like it was a given for me. So to these young people, I applaud you that you want, you are on the winning side and just keep going on to express the message. Oh, all right, good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us and great message from Elizabeth Stern. I'd like to welcome Matos Santos General counsel and managing attorney from our children's trust, the legal nonprofit group that brought the case on behalf of the plaintiffs and Grace s who is one of the young plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the state of Montana. Now because Grace is a minor. We're withholding her last name for her privacy. So Matt, I wanna start with you. So we just heard from Elizabeth Stern in the Swiss case. Uh Can you talk to me a little bit about how you advise the, the Swiss woman and then how that also relates to your case and give us a brief summary of, of the Montana case. Sure. Um Thanks so much for having us and for allowing us to speak to all of you. It's really a pleasure to be here. Um The, the, the, the case that you just heard about which we colloquially call the Swiss Grannies case is um really remarkable. They said uh a new press in Europe, um looking at human rights from the lens of an incredibly vulnerable population, right, older women who have huge huge um reactions to extreme heat whose bodies may not be able to tolerate um different climate consequences. And that's what we do at our children's trust by representing Children. We're representing one of the most vulnerable populations in the world. Um 2 billion lives, right? 2 billion children's lives are at stake because of climate change. And it's not just because Children born today are going to live with the consequences of our choices, right? For the next 90 years. But it's because for the 1st 26 years of their lives, we know that their brains circulatory systems, lungs are all developing and having climate pollution or extreme heat will have lasting consequences on the rest of their lives. Amazing grace. Why did you decide to get involved? So I first, you know, started thinking about environmentalism early in high school where I was working specifically on like plastics production in my hometown. And during doing research for that project, I read that the US uses fif 50 million plastic straws a day and I was like, that's a little bit more than I can handle on my own. And so I was looking for ways to have a bigger impact. Uh And around that time, I heard about this lawsuit that was happening in Montana and I was like, that's pretty cool. And I talked to my parents and they were like, well, it's probably not gonna go anywhere but it would be a great learning experience. So then I emailed the attorneys and became a plaintiff in this case. Um, and I think that the point here is that I was looking for a way to have a bigger impact. And for me at that time, that meant approaching the government and asking the government to take control to do what they are responsible for in protecting both the environment and their people. You now, do you feel like this case? And I, I guess grace, this is for you too. But do you feel like this case is already creating a, a precedent for, for others? Yeah, sure. And um so I, I think that any time you have a victory like this cases around the world will look at it, right? So even though it's in Montana and it's binding only on the Montana courts. Um Right now, I I know that there are other case cases that are moving forward that are actively citing the held v state of Montana case. And in fact, we had another big victory just this here in Hawaii and part of Hawaii's willingness to come to the settlement table and really reach this like one of its kind um settlement agreement with us where the state of Hawaii has agreed to decarbonize their entire transportation system, not net 00 emissions by 2045 I think is a product of the incredible work. Uh Grace and her co plaintiffs did in Montana and I know we have um some images to illustrate the, the fight that you're going through and, and some of you with Grace as well. But um and here we are which are are great. I love these um Grace. Why do you think it's important to center a case like this on young people? Because we saw with Elizabeth, they centered it on a as Matt calls it the Swiss grannies. What is, what is so important about the youth? Well, you know, I have mixed feelings about this. So I'll give you the full transparent answer here on one hand, I think it's super important to center youth because we are extra vulnerable. We will be around for um many more decades, hopefully. And so that gives us more time to be influenced by climate change, to see our lives changed by this. Um I think it's also I have a resistance to how much conversation we have about centering youth these days because I worry that sometimes we talk so much about giving youth a platform about putting youth, you know, in, in um you know, as part of the, the conversations that we're having that we don't actually listen to what the youth are saying. And I think the message has been very clear from youth for about a decade now, in terms of the changes we want to see, you know, we want to see a mission introductions, we want to see a livable future. And I think that's probably enough to work with for now. I totally agree and I wanna come to the audience for questions in, in just a second. So start thinking of those. Um, but not one for you in the, uh, before that, what are the rami ramifications of lawsuits like this for us energy policy? And what about corporations? How should they be thinking about this? Yeah, sure. So, I mean, in a like a what we're trying to do right through these state cases. And we also have a couple of federal cases here and in Canada and Mexico um is to create a, a clear pathway for green technologies to come in and replace what is a rather entrenched fossil fuel based energy system. So I think that by setting the standard, so we're not. So, I mean, I'm sure folks have heard of the, the cases against the fossil majors that are happening everywhere, both for fraud and other things. Um Our approach is very different. We're trying to enshrine a constitutional right in state and federal constitutions around the world, that is a value, right? That value, meaning like if we prioritize a clean and helpful environment like we did in Montana or a livable climate like we do in Hawaii, that will have consequences on the prices and the priorities that governments and then I think industry make um in developing our energy system. So while it is not a like A to B line, I think it's our, our intention is to create a pathway for any emergent technology to have a viable opportunity as opposed to fighting against just the existing fossil fuel infrastructure. Yeah, if I can jump in here for a second, I think um one of the things I've learned throughout being part of this case, right? Like I said, early high school, I was so confident that policy, that government was the way to have the biggest impact. Uh because, you know, that's what you learn about in high school government classes. But, you know, over the course of this five years that I've been a part of this lawsuit, I've understood firsthand just how slow government processes can be both, you know, bureaucracy and you know, regulation and everything. And also the court system also tends to take a bit. And so I've realized recently, like within the last year, the power of the private sector and especially in terms of your kind of dynamism, how nimble you all can be in your decision making and the the way that you can drive change in our society, whether that's, you know, through public perception of what is, what is right, or whether that's through, you know, working with the government. But I think you have a lot of power or in this, in a way that I didn't understand before. I mean, I thought I was going to go into the government my whole life and within the last six months I'm like, hm, maybe I should take a look at that private sector. So I guess I, I applaud all the work that you're doing and, and I ask that you keep it up and that you set your standards even higher. Yeah. And I can say high school government did not prepare me for, for any of the stuff you learn in the real world. So it's, it's important to get the real life experience. Any, any questions they have here in the audience. Ok. Well, I have a lot more. Um, so I'm gonna ask away. Um, now why do you think tying climate justice to civil liberties is a winning strategy? Why do you think that's so important? Yeah. So you just have to look at the history of our country to understand that, um, like Children and civil liberties and frankly the ability to see sort of what, what is truth, what is justice? Um, all go hand in hand. And a lot of so prior to being at our children's trust, I was at the ac lu where I worked on a lot of issues, um, on behalf of LGBT young people who had been discriminated against, um, immigration rights. Um, and, and one of the things that I think we're sort of seeing is this through line um of all of these various causes going back to, you know, desegregation suffrage where um you know, Children are really at the forefront and often when we are making these decisions, like as a country about our values, we are thinking about our future generations, maybe it's our niece and nephew or grandkid, our, our, our, our newly born daughter. And um and I think that ultimately these that like we should just be listening to them for some of the solutions and some of these intractable problems because folks like Grace, I think have great answers. I see we do have an audience question if you could state your name, title and company too. That'd be great. My name is uh John met with Deloitte. And uh the question I had is, can you talk a little bit about what of what actually was the decision? What, what would be the practical effect? Like what changes in Montana as a, as a result of the decision? Sure. So the district court. So in Montana, there's no middle court of appeals, there's the district court and the Supreme court, the district court in Montana essentially held that the um that their constitute right. Grace's constitutional rights had been violated that the statute that prohibited Montana from evaluating emissions or climate impacts when citing a new power plant um was unconstitutional. So, um the, the very immediate practical effect was the striking down of that statute, which prohibited them from even assessing, um, climate impact when they were doing, uh, you know, citing a new power, um, facility. Um, but they're sort of broader impacts. I think that are, we'll have to see, I think a little bit what the Supreme Court says in Montana. But, um, the broader impact is that, like the judge said, every additional ton of carbon emissions, um, is a constitutional violation at this point because we have already put the dial way past 100 so, um what does that mean for the future? I think that likely means that now every new power facility will have this much higher threshold standard to satisfy before being cited. And children's constitutional rights will be have to be part of the equation when they're making these decisions. And now I think the audience may have also heard of another big case that our children's trust worked on, which was um Giuliana versus the United States. So that was a climate case that spanned a nearly a decade and three presidential administrations. Um which I think is, is absolutely wild. What did you learn from that case that you took into the Montana one? Yeah, I mean, so Juliana is a big federal case that's looking at the, you know, substantive due process clause. Like many of us in this room myself included have rights today that did not exist when I was born, right? I can marry my um partner um who is of, you know, was born the same sex as I was, um which was emerged as a right from the federal constitution in 2015 after the obergefell decision, um Juliana seeks to enshrine this a similar um substantive due process, right? But a right to a livable future, right to a stable climate in our constitution. Um It is, it, you know, one of the things that I think we learned through Juliana was that um you like the federal courts are going to take a long time and that having an effective state by state case strategy. Um And really, we looked at the sort of same sex marriage cases when thinking about this was really something that um we needed to be investing in because in order to move, I think the federal courts, there needs to be a groundswell of movement from the States first grace, what's next week? Because eventually you're no longer going to be a youth activist. Um Where, where are you going to take this and, and your case next? And how are you gonna work to support climate change? Great question. Um Trying to graduate first. Yeah. So that's my plan. Uh my interest now um is kind of almost in reaction to our lawsuit. I've realized, uh you know, the impact that this will have on Montana that I think generally are awesome. But I think a lot of the resistance in the state comes from the fact that our state is traditionally a fossil fuel estate, we are still massive coal producers. Um And of course, I think that needs to change for the climate, but I also see the impact that that will have on our communities. Right. And so my interest now is how do we uh go about these energy transitions in coal communities and ensure that these places will still be around afterwards? Right? Because we have this mine in Montana in Butte Montana, which you may have heard of that massive copper mine and when the mine shut down, the city was just decimated. And so I want to make sure that that doesn't happen for these Montana communities. And so now I'm looking at, you know, this concept of a just transition. Um but particularly for rural, um native communities, places that are often not considered in this uh utility driven uh transition. And that for you, we're, as we all very much know, we're in the midst of a another election. Um How are you looking at, uh what could happen next month and how that could affect your, your future cases and the one that you have going on right now? Yeah. Um, the panel this morning was interesting. Um And sorry, uh I, I, you know, I look, we're gonna be one of the things that's true about our children's trust is that we've litigated no matter who's in office, right? Because governments today have basically invested in this fossil fuel infrastructure that had, you know, for the last 50 plus years, while many of them very actively knowing about the consequences. And so, um in some ways, it is uh not important to us, um who's in office because our cases are really about these, you know, like, how do we change the future of what is, um, you know, about our, like our constitutional values, how do we, how do we use our values to change our future decisions? Um But at the same time, of course, it's important, right? Like the, the person who holds the, um I think somebody said yesterday that, you know, people take their cues from the government, um which I, I think it was the mayor of Atlanta actually said that, that people can take their cues, their government. And I think it's so true. And so if you have somebody in office who's an active climate denier, um I, I think that's a problem. I think that's a setback for us and it makes it harder to have these conversations, whether we're having them around, uh you know, a conference like this or at the dinner table with our, our friends and neighbors, um or in the policy arena. And so, you know, of course, um uh you know, I, I have my, my hopes and dreams about the outcomes of the election um that I can't talk about because I run a 501 C three. and, but, uh, but yeah, that's, um, but I, but I think that, but it really does matter. It does matter quite a bit. And I would like to add that it shouldn't. Um, because I'm from a state that, you know, now is, is solidly read. But historically has been able to blend this idea of conservatism and conservation which you might notice, have the same root word there. And so I, I think it's um important to recognize that climate has been politicized. Obviously, I'm hoping you all have thought about this before. Climate has been politicized. But, but it, it does doesn't have to be right. It doesn't have to be a political issue. It's about rights, it's about economic progress. It's about how we're gonna come out of this challenge ahead of where we are now. Um And I'm, I just want to acknowledge how sad it is that it's been taken into that political arena with such um venom attached to, to that conversation. Well, very well said and thank you both so much for joining me. I appreciate it. Yes.

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