are very excited to spotlight an exciting new report on this topic and we have two co-authors with us tonight. It is a fantastic report. We shared the link with many of you. I have had the privilege of teaching a class on plastic pollution at Bennington College in Vermont, which is now available online. And I have to say, if I just had this report a couple of years ago, my life would have been so much easier. And if you are like me and you are a public policy nerd, I have to tell you pages of amazing references starting on page 126 of the report, useful definitions on page 164 and a really interesting legal framework on page 167. This is the crowd that gets excited about those kind of citations and references. There is a lot going on in this field. Just last week alone, our friends at Oceana released a poll that they commissioned by the polling firm called Ipsos. And that poll found eight in 10 American voters supported taking local, state and national action to reduce single use plastics. And what I'd love about that poll is the eight in 10 support was bipartisan. It was Republicans, Democrats, independents. Also, just last week, the little company called Coca-Cola announced that they are committed to shifting to 25% reusable, returnable beverage containers by 2030. Couple details still need to be worked out but that is an indication that we're moving beyond recycling and finally getting to reduction, refill reuse. And this year, state legislatures across the country are looking at extended producer responsibility policies. The important thing is to get the details right. So my colleague, Jennifer Condon with Beyond Plastics, myself and a team of other policy experts spent part of last summer drafting a model extended producer responsibility law bill that we hope becomes a law. And that is available on our website which is beyondplastics.org. So in thinking about our webinar tonight, I kept also thinking about that recent Netflix movie called Don't Look Up. I assume many of you have seen it. I personally prefer romantic comedies but I watched this because it was about climate change. And since seeing that movie, I've been haunted by the final words by the actor Leonardo DiCaprio. His character said, right at the end of the movie, the thing of it is we really did have everything. The thing of it is we really did have everything. And that also applies to our ocean. Generations of people have enjoyed clean water. We have strong fisheries that feed millions of people a good protein source. We used to have very healthy coral reefs which serve as nurseries for fish. And the ocean really does have everything but it's now facing the double threat of climate change and plastic pollution. I honestly believe that the report that you will hear about tonight is a game changer. Information is power. This information will allow all of us as individuals, as academics, as organizations to work for change. So we have two of the co-authors of the report with us. They're very modest and they're going to say it was a team of co-authors which is true that these are two technical co-authors. I'll introduce them at both at the same time. They will speak to all of us this evening. And then if you have questions, type them in the Q&A section at the bottom of the toolbar. Chat mercifully has been disabled but we welcome your questions and we'll get to as many as we can. So let me tell you just a little bit about our speakers. Margaret Spring is the Chief Conservation and Science Officer at my favorite place in the world, the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Well, perhaps it can be competes with the Catskills and the Adirondacks for me. She has decades of experience in environmental law and policy. Margaret served as Chief of Staff and later Principal Deputy Undersecretary at NOAA. Prior to her tenure at NOAA, Margaret served for eight years as Senior and General Counsel to the US Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation where she advised members of Congress and developed key ocean and climate legislation. She's also been an attorney in private practice and she's an expert on the Federal Superfund Program which has some interesting lessons for cleaning up our ocean. We're also joined this evening by Dr. Rashid Sumala. Rashid is a professor and Canada Research Chair in Interdisciplinary Ocean and Fisheries Economics. Rashid is the Director of both the Fisheries Economics Research Unit and the Ocean Canada Partnership at the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries at the University of British Columbia. He was also appointed to the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs. His research focuses on bioeconomics, marine ecosystem valuation and the analysis of global issues such as fisheries, subsidies, illegal fishing, climate change, plastic pollution in oil spills. What a fascinating series of fields I could talk to you for hours. So let me turn the floor over to Margaret Spring. Listen to every word, then we'll hear from Rashid and then open the floor to questions. Thank you, Margaret. Great, well, thank you, Judith. And thank you, Jennifer. I'm going to share my screen and hopefully that will work because not always does it work. There we go. Can everyone see that? I hope you can. So as Judith said, I'm Margaret Spring. I'm now at the Monterey Bay Aquarium but I was played a role in bringing this report reckoning with the U.S. Roll and Oaks Global Ocean Plastic Waste to fruition. It was actually reported the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine and it was requested by a bipartisan group of Congress people through the Save Our Seas 2.0 Act and it was sponsored by NOAA's Marine Debris Program and I'm so glad to be joined here by one of our members of the committee that put this report together, Dr. Rashid Samila. And speaking of the committee, this is a list of the 10 experts who the National Academies pulled together from a range of disciplines and expertise to write this report. We had an amazing and wonderful committee. We met almost entirely, we've never met in person. We met entirely over Zoom and so somehow we still are friends and definitely are excited about this report. So thank you, Judith, for those great and supportive words. I'd also like to recognize not only their work but that NOAA's support in funding this report and of course the staff of the National Academies, terrific. Susan Roberts may be on the phone. She's our Ocean Studies Board Director, brought this to fruition with her team, Megan May, Bridget McGovern and Kansas CDL Sherry, fantastic team. We couldn't have done it without them. So just to give you a sense of how big a report this is, we spent over a year working on it. We reviewed hundreds of studies and held public meetings where we heard from lots of experts from the sponsors of the legislation represented by the offices of Senators White House and Sullivan, again, a bipartisan team, federal and state agencies, including from NOAA and EPA, legal experts, industry and waste management organizations and scientists and conservation groups. And together, I just wanna assure you that we came to consensus on everything in this report. It is a consensus study. So as many of you know, plastics are widely utilized throughout society because of their useful properties from durability and flexibility to lightness and strength. And of course, inexpensive, they're inexpensive too, in many cases. They're found in a wide range of consumer and industrial applications and in medical settings, the use of plastics has improved patient and worker safety and have also been used to advance healthcare treatment. But plastic waste is present in essentially every marine and freshwater habitat from streams and lakes to beaches and deep sea sediments. The global production of plastics worldwide is increasing and the amount of plastic waste generated at entering our environment, including our ocean is also projected to increase. To date, voluntary actions while important have not been sufficient to reduce the blow of plastic waste and the economic costs of addressing the problem are substantial. For example, in terms of direct costs, the US spends roughly $11.5 billion on cleanup from trash leakage into our environment and state cities and counties together spend at least $1.3 billion. This doesn't even include the value of lost revenues or services, which we do discuss in the report. And those are data from trash, not just plastic, but that is a huge percentage of trash is plastic. The report is the first synthesis of scientific knowledge about the United States role in ocean plastic as defined by a very specific six part statement of task. And I agreed with Judd Judith that this was a big job because it hadn't been done before and it was sorely needed, I think. We hope it'll also serve, I'm glad you hear it already. She's brought this up that it's a source document, 30 pages of references, tables and appendices, your heart's delight, lots of texts to move through. And the other, the good news here is also that because NOAA commissioned this report prior to the enactment of the bill, this was only the first of many reports coming out of that. So we couldn't cover everything in this report, it felt like it. There are a number of other reports coming out from the Save Our Seas Act. And so we look forward to seeing those specific studies come out. You'll see from this that the committee approached the task in a very systematic way, starting with the production of plastic to its transformation to plastic waste, this is plastic and then there's plastic waste, and then to the ultimate fate in the environment and the ocean. Our top recommendation, what was it? Well, the report's overarching recommendation responds to the sponsor's request, specifically that we recommend, quote, potential means to reduce the United States contributions to global ocean plastic waste. And this recommendation is that the United States create a coherent, comprehensive, and cross-cutting federal research and policy strategy to identify, implement, and assess intervention spanning plastic production, use, disposal, and input to the environment. And we set a date for doing this, and getting this strategy out there at the end of this year and then look back at it in 2025. And this is a very active year already with the State Department already announcing support for a global treaty, so things are moving. No single solution can greatly reduce the flow of plastic waste to the ocean, but a suite of actions or interventions, as we call them, because we're nerdy, from source to sea can reduce ocean plastic waste and achieve environmental and social benefit. And the committee recommended that the US take action in every single one of these six stages of the plastic life cycle. The committee's three other recommendations relating to solid waste production and tracking and monitoring would be part of this larger strategy. But first, let's review what the committee learned about the US contribution to global ocean plastic waste that led to these recommendations. And for that, I'm gonna be turned this over to Rashid, who will explain the report's findings on plastic production waste generation and waste leakage, which all underpin the call for this national strategy. Rashid. Thank you very much, Margaret, and also Judy for the amazing introduction and all the work that went into this. For me, I see this as a big privilege to get the chance to share the results of one year of work with 10 very interesting, intelligent colleagues, whom we haven't met in person, but met online and managed to produce this. And so thank you all for making time to come, about 420 of you, roughly, online, which is amazing. So the first point I'm going to make is about the growth of plastic production. Now, global plastic production has increased nearly 20 times from 1966 to 2015. 1966 to 2015, 20 times, 20 times, think about that. North America, we're roughly around the average, 19% the growth of the total plastic production in the world. So 20%, 19%, if you compare that to the population of North Americans compared to the rest of the world, that already tells you something. However, I want to note that we found that, the committee found that international system of plastic production trade and use complicates the effort to fully quantify. So I'm putting this as a caveat. This is the best science we could find. And as you know, the best science is always progressing. So this is our best knowledge now. And let's go to underline that, you know, in inaccessible or non-existent production data also makes it difficult to quantify exactly US contributions, right? We would like you to note that. Yeah, now we go to slide number 10, please, my boy. And the second point is that the US, US municipal solid waste generation is two to eight times per person greater than in many other countries around the world. So, and this shows in my last slide where I said the North America is 29% of the total, right? That shows up here. So we do produce a lot of this per capital. And I say we here, I'm based in Canada but when it comes to plastic, we are like one nation actually in terms of the consumption. So I could say that, right? And the US should therefore substantially reduce solid waste generation, you know, both in absolute quantity and also per person and the two are related of course, in order to reduce plastic waste in the environment and therefore the environmental, economic, aesthetic and health cost of managing waste and litter. You know, the reason why we care about plastic entering the environment and the ocean is that it's partly it affects life in the ocean but it ends up affecting we the people, right? So there is that connection. Next slide, please. Now, US has a very high plastic waste generation rate, right? And the majority of the plastic waste is landfill. So you see the growth there of different forms, the way we deal with this. And many citizens actually believe that recycling can solve the problem or even is probably already solving the problem but this is not what we see in the data. Recycling is only about 8%, around 8% of the total waste that goes in, right? So, in fact, from the first principles of thermodynamics recycling cannot do it, there's always leakages as we will show later. So we need to do more. And this goes to Margaret's point about all the six stages, the US and the world in fact, Canada should actually have strategies for each of the level from production all through to when it enters the ocean. Next slide, please. Now, plastic waste can leak at multiple stages from use through to final disposal. And at each of these stages, something leaks out. And when you think of this, since I'm an economist, when you think of the leakages on where they happen, the big problem we have is there's a mismatch and disconnect between those who either, most of the time, not deliberately, allow this leakage to happen. The cost to the environment and to other people, health and so on, is not only on them. So the mismatch between benefits and costs are actually part of the problem you see it all through. And we need to deal with this actually in terms of policy, right? In order to start solving the problem. Next one, please. Transport and distribution of plastic. We spent a lot of time on this. And we have, among the 10 of us, there are really deep aspects in this. And I'm going to talk about our general finding here. And what you find is that, yeah. So there are many pathways, as you would expect, where plastic actually gets into the ocean and other environment. Now that we know a bit more about the production, it's very important to really look at the transport and the many pathways. So one of the findings we actually came up to is that although the transport of plastic waste to the ocean in the US cannot be comprehensively estimated from available data. And this is important. You don't need to comprehensively estimate this before you can take action. We know enough, right? Individual studies show sizable transport of microplastics and microplastic waste along a variety of water borne and airborne paths, as well as direct inputs from shorelines and marine activities. So again, if you want to deal with this, you have to understand the transport, how it goes, and then we can put interventions to try to find out. Another finding in our report is that plastic waste discharged to the ocean varies greatly with location and time. Reflecting variability in plastic waste generation by different sources. The effectiveness of the waste collection and variability in the transport processes such as river, stream flows, ocean waves, currents and ties and waves. The picture I'm painting is that this is not an easy straight forward thing to understand and study this. We are making progress. Scientists are looking at this. We need more efforts. At the same time, we do know enough to be able to take action. Next slide, please. Now, the distribution of plastic waste in the marine environment is complex and dynamic. That is what I've been trying to explain all along. Still, the report is full of good stuff, like Judith said, and you will find references. And actually, the rate of production of papers is unbelievable on this area at the moment. So studies are going very fast. Here is another finding for you. Plastic have found us contaminants throughout the marine environment, including in marine life in the animals. But plastic amounts of volume in specific reservoirs or in the ocean as a whole cannot currently be accurately quantified from existing environmental data. We emphasize this a lot because we need to understand more. We need to learn more. And therefore, we need to know where the knowledge is. Take stock. That's what we've done and show the way into the future. Next slide, please. Now, plastic waste is having devastating impacts and life in the ocean. Lake plastic waste is having devastating impacts on our ocean, on the wildlife in the ocean, and actually this translates to people. You can see this picture here. My God. Can you imagine if you see your dog in this condition, how hard-broken you will be? And this is an image from Hawaii, actually, a monk cell, which if you look at it, you see this. Think of your dog because they're quite similar. You see how much you feel about the impacts of this. So it has real life consequences, not only for wildlife, but for people also. Because why? As I will say later, the animals see plastic, microplastic. They think it's food. They eat it. They think it's algae. Then we eat the fish. And what happens? We get impacts. Again, studies are beginning to show more and more the effects of plastic on the health of people. All right. Next slide. Marine life, they ingest this thing, the plastic. They get entangled by the plastic, and all this leaves to hurt and harm and pain, and actually economic losses and social losses, cultural losses that come with all of this. So studies today shows that 900 marine species are known to suffer from plastic ingestion or entanglement, so loss of animals. And so another good reason for us to really deal with this. These two graphics you see here, the pig species known to take in, that is the yellow, they ingest the plastic, or become entangled, as shown in the red picture there. Marine debris and are based on review of studies through 2014 by Suzanne Kohn and her colleagues. This was published in 2015, so you can find it in our reference list. The sizes of the boxes you see there represent how many species of each group that are known to ingest or become entangled in marine debris. The larger the box, the greater the number of species in that group that has been affected. And you can see there are really large boxes there, so the effects on animals is serious. Yeah, let's go. Please, next one. Now, there are impacts, and I've alluded to this before. It's not only the impact on marine life, but an evaluation of specific impacts of plastic was beyond our study scope. However, for some context, some discussion of the diversity of impacts of plastic waste is provided in the current report in our chapter one, the introduction in chapter three. You will find material in chapter five on distribution and the fate of the plastic, all connected to this window. That's not a big ask for us as a committee. We still couldn't get away from putting this material in there because it's important. Next slide, please. Now, regular standardized and systematic data collection is needed. And all through my talk, you have seen me emphasize how complex, how there are things we don't know. So this is one of the big recommendations we have that we need regular standardized, systematic data collection to help us understand the extent of plastic waste in the environment, and therefore, help us develop effective interventions and evaluate progress in reducing US plastic waste. The beauty about this report emphasizing the US is that US is a big producer of plastic products. It produces a lot of waste, but US is a leader. There's a lot of talk about China and Russia, but if you come to the base of it, for the rest of the world, US is a leader and continues to be the leader. If the US tackles this well, I can assure you many countries around the world are going to follow suit, right? So it's a leadership thing we're talking about here. Next slide, please. Tracking and monitoring, to be able to measure, you have to track and you have to monitor and you have to then do the measuring. And that measuring then provides us the kind of information we need to be more precise, more effective in our policy designs. Next one, please. National Marine Debris Tracking and Monitoring Framework. Yeah, the nice thing is actually the US has a number of efforts already going on. The committee recognizes the Marine Debris Tracking and Monitoring conducted today by NOAA via the Marine Debris Program, the Marine Debris Monitoring and Assessment Project, and beyond, right? We also recognize that NOAA efforts addressing Marine Debris and environmental plastic include and represent multiple NOAA line offices scattered all over the country. So, and this is quite good, right? Because then the coverage can, we can push up the coverage to make sure this is truly national. This figure depicts the recommended components of a national Marine Debris Tracking and Monitoring network consisting of research and community-based initiatives. And the communities are important here because they are the first to see this. They are the first to sound and allow and the researchers pick on this. And so if our policymakers who listen to communities and the scientists and the researchers, then we'll make progress on this. Today, the absence of a cohesive system system has prevented integration of desperate and sometimes granular data sets into a meaningful hole. Now, I think the US has a lot of elements here that can be put together to give us a more cohesive and coherent and consistent, more comprehensive picture of things. And that will then help us to move forward as my grade is coming on now to tell us more about what to do with all this information. Thank you very much. Thank you, Rishi. Yes, this is, I know this is a complex slide. There's a lot of information in the report about this because it was a specific request from the sponsors. And so, but just know that if you're involved in a community-based effort, it could be linked up and we hope it will be to the national system. So, in the report, our conclusion was that without modification of current class practices in the United States and of course, worldwide, plastics will continue to accumulate in the environment, particularly ocean with adverse consequences for ecosystems and society. Yes, there are opportunities for action to address plastic waste. And I know most of this audience is interested in that. The story of plastics is not a foregone conclusion. And there are many ways to address this prevalent and pressing problem. The committee observed many important themes in its review, which Rashid has already previewed. First, there's a need and ability to act without perfect knowledge. There's a need for a systemic approach involving actions across multiple institutions. There's also a need for government as well as industry standards, goals, criteria and rule to guide this work. And there's a need and opportunity to deploy economic instruments to incentivize change. And the co-benefits actually are important and they've been previewed also. Social and environmental equity is an important opportunity here. There's a number of sections in the report talking about that. And also recognizing EPA's focus on that at this time. Also that recognizing that greenhouse gas emissions are associated with the production used and disposal of plastic is something to keep in mind. And those are goals that we have as a nation. Technological innovation is absolutely an opportunity here and you're seeing a lot of that come to the fore. And also there are economic opportunities to sort of level the playing field, make sure that people are not burdened by cost but also there's opportunity associated with creating new product. So the US can and should take systematic action interventions in each of these six stages as we discussed and such an approach would help avoid there's a current mismatch which we note in the report between the sources and production of plastic products and the waste and management systems charged with the waste. They're not sized to deal with each other and there's no system to make sure that it's all gonna work and they're nowhere near a circular economy in other words. So just to go through this because it is complex, we're just gonna go through each stage quickly. At the production stage, reducing the amount of plastic produced can help decrease waste stream management needs. As I said, for example, that could be reducing the production of plastics that are not reusable or practically recyclable. And we have a lot of information to report about the challenges with recycling and I don't have time to go through it here but I'm sure you know it well. At the materials and product design stage, innovation can develop substitutes that are reusable more easily recycled or that biodegrade using principles like green chemistry. A focus here could be those items most likely to become waste and leak into the environment and you have those data of course, at least from the beach cleanup. At the waste generation stage, the intervention would focus on reducing how much waste we generate by reducing the use of plastic products with short disposable use periods as in many single use products. These can include product limits, which you're seeing a lot in the states and local governments, as well as targets for recycling and reuse such products or materials, or of course incentives to procure only those certain reusable products. This can include efforts to increase collection of plastic waste, excuse me, this can include product limits like plastic bag vans you've seen and targets for recycling and reuse. At the next stage, improving waste management and we're getting into EPA territory definitely here, interventions would focus on improving solid and other waste infrastructure including leakage control and accounting. This can include efforts to increase the collection of plastic waste, improve recycling, waste isolation, capture or treatment to avoid leakage. And at the stage where plastic is in the environment already, well actions can include recapturing the waste from brown litter, stormwater, or directly from waters where it accumulates such as beach cleanups and we've seen a lot of that activity and it's so welcome. But even after plastic waste enters the open ocean, however, these tend to be expensive, particularly at sea recovery, which can also be inefficient and impractical given the large scales involved and fragmentation of plastics into microplastics. Finally, there's plastic waste disposal in the ocean, unfortunately. And so this stage would focus on reducing these directed intentional and unintentional discharges from vessel point sources or platforms. And it includes a lot of actions governed under many specific ocean vessel solution laws and treaties like the Marple Treaty. But also it includes things like releases from abandoned or lost fishing and aquaculture gear. And a lot of those efforts have been focused on US attention as well as global attention because of endangered species entanglement. So there are opportunities for many stakeholders across at least this intervention framework. So this is not just government, but I think government has a role to play in organizing this. The National and State governments have critical roles there, not only organizing but motivating people to help towards a larger goal. And the committee recognized that the US has taken action in many of these stages. We're not saying there's been no action in each of these stages, but that a coordinated systemic approach would be more effective. In fact, what we observed was that the US federal interventions we've documented in the report really focus on stages three through six, maybe largely four through six, cleanup and local waste management, which still can't stem the leakage because of the large volume of flow relative to the available resources that we have. And interventions will also be required in production material and product design stages one and two. And then of course, increase emphasis on decreasing the waste generation in three. We need to do that to equitably distribute costs and enable more effective and cost efficient intervention. There are also lots of opportunities to learn from others. States and local jurisdictions have been operating as US policy laboratories for a lot of these early stage interventions, whether that be something like bands or extended producer responsibility procurement guidelines, things like that have been tested in a number of states. And other nations have been piloting approaches to an entirely systemic approach as far as their circular economy plans. And you see that in the EU as well as in Canada to be getting in that. So there's a lot to learn from the what's been tested and not only here at home, but in other countries. So we ultimately felt that the federal leadership is going to be needed. United States needs to pull together and think, look at what it's doing already but also make it a lot more comprehensive and cohesive. There has to be research to support this too but in tandem with that. We think this comprehensive approach would better organize actions across the range of federal agencies and programs as well as non-federal actors. It can build, as I said, on the existing legal authorities and record agency efforts. We could adopt new models that are being tested and fill important gaps that we identified in the report such as the need for goals for reducing waste, plastic waste in the ocean. Economic incentives for improved manufacturing and reductions for use and recycling. Reducing plastic leaks in the US waste and solution system and addressing the funding gap and reversing inequitable cost benefits, as I suggested. One of the things that we, I wanna note is that in this report the data available were really about solid plastic waste. We don't have a lot of information on sources and input. And so we don't really know most of our estimates that we used in the report where I would say conservative estimates of how much is being contributed to the environment. But we don't need to know, have perfect knowledge to know that this is a problem and it needs to be addressed at a national level as other countries are doing. We think that the strategy would enhance US leadership in creating solutions to the global plastic pollution and also shaping modern industrial plastic policies. And also, of course, with the United States entering global discussions, it's a really good time to start thinking about it. So this is the report. We've got a nice QR code for you for those of you who like that. We also have some information, some links that you can share. And we'll also make sure that Judith has this fantastic interactive website that the National Academy has put together. You can tell your friends and family about it in a more easy to digest way because a 200 plus pages is probably too much for your family or maybe some of your friends. So thank you so much for your attention and thanks Rashid for joining me on this. This has been great. And I guess I'll turn it back to Judith. Thank you, Margaret. Thank you, Rashid. I feel like we're in the Olympics of plastic pollution tonight. This was a lot of good information. I think it will inspire action. While I have the floor, I also want to recommend a really good book that recently came out, Thicker Than Water, The Quest for Solutions to the Plastic Crisis by Erika Serino. So be sure to check this book out. It's a nice pairing with the National Academy's report. And Erika is a really impressive young scientist journalist who did a good job with that and she did not ask me to hold it up. I don't even know if she's listening. I get the opportunity to ask the first question and then we'll turn it to Jennifer. Margaret, I really appreciated you mentioning that this big issue is really about production, use and disposal. This report obviously dealing with the third thing there. At Beyond Plastics, we are extremely concerned about the large number of new petrochemical facilities proposed to make single use plastics and other plastics, mostly in Louisiana, Texas and Appalachia, causing immense public health harm for people who are breathing in the air toxins, the water pollution. And we just published a report in October called Plastics is the New Coal because of the greenhouse gas emissions from plastic production. So one of the things I love the most about your report is the explicit recommendation to make less plastic. It's obvious, but we don't see that a lot in government sponsored reports. And your report also suggests that we consider the possibility of a cap on virgin plastic production. I think this is significant because plastic recycling has been a failure at only 8.5%. And now we see the very risky false solution of chemical recycling being promoted, which is mostly gasification and pyrolysis producing more fossil fuel, the last thing the planet needs. And I think this focus on reduction is quite significant. So what other recommendations in this report do you see as potential game changers that'll move things along quicker? One of our advisory board members at Beyond Plastic is Bill McKibbin. And he has said, winning slowly is losing. And I worry about the pace. I think this report is going to click in the pace at every level of government, but what else in the recommendations do you think is potential game changers? Well, that's an interesting question. So let me just say that we didn't prescribe specific interventions. We gave examples of what could happen. And we did recommend that an outside group work with the government to come up with very specific proposals. Having said that, we looked around at what was being done. And so I would say that in most cases, a full-on production cap is, I haven't seen very examples of it. However, what you do see is a lot of proposals to put limits on certain products that are not needed and unnecessary and harmful. And so, that may seem like a step-wise approach, but it also is what's being tested right now, as you know well, in states and localities. What I do see is the incentive opportunities here. Now, to me, the signal game changer about this report is that everything has to happen at the same time. The connection of the production end and through design to the end of life thinking, the circular economy approach is absolutely critical. People really, really want that one thing and you cannot get there with the one thing. And so, I'm gonna turn it over a little to Shabashid because he is a champion for economic tools and he knows a bit about it, but the extensive producer responsibility, replacing reorganizing so the burdens are on a different, are on the producer as it is. And we've refined it in a number of other roles. It makes some sense and it's a hopeful thing too, I think it's much, much changing. So, Shabashid. Yeah, thank you very much, Margaret. You've really treated it well. What stands out for me also in addition to this reduction of production, because really, if you look at the whole thing, that is the beginning of things. And you see this in economic models, environmental economic models where you lay out, what you take out, the Beijing and the initial thing. That's what fits up and costing. So, truly, truly, if you want to reduce this, that is where to start. And that is what we managed to get through that. But the second other thing I thought was very interesting is the idea of social justice and the idea of mismatch between those who get the benefit and those who suffer the pain, right? And the idea that the cost and benefits are not, they're just a disconnect. And if you're an economist, this is really where you emphasize and focus on, how do you bring this incentive such that the cost and the benefits match? Because then those doing the action will internalize, as we like to say in the common, is their actions because they feel the pain. So, the social justice angle is really cool. And also, we had a list of gaps. And so, we have gaps in funding. All of these things, I like to say that all your good intentions die at the altar of no finance, right? So, funding is important. And I'm talking about private and public funding. And the public funding is seed money. It's very important. You set up the enabling environment so that private actors can also go in there, reduce their risk and let them invest and make returns whilst helping us fix a big problem, which is plastic pollution. So, yeah, thank you. Thank you. I'll just note that in the report, we did identify the growth potential. And some of the things you're talking about it, the statistics are very shocking. Yeah, Rashid, I love the way you phrase that. Those who get the benefit and those who suffer the pain. And when you look at Cancer Alley in Louisiana and you look at the export of plastic waste to other countries, that is so true. Take a look at the movie, The Story of Plastic, which won an Emmy for Best Documentary. I show it to my students every semester. So I've seen it about nine times and I've learned something new every time. Let me turn the floor over to my colleague, Jennifer Congdon with Beyond Plastics. Questions? Hi, everyone. So, yes, we have a ton of questions in the Q&A. I wanted to just address one logistical thing. We will be sending a follow-up email with a link to the recording for this webinar and it will have the PowerPoint presentation, the slides that you saw. So if you have specific questions about slides, I'm not gonna answer those and I just wanna address that overall. So it's my job to pull out some questions that I think will be really helpful for everyone. And so the first one I would like to ask, and forgive me, I was supposed to find easy ones, but we have a very political crowd. And so I'm gonna ask one that I actually am really curious about, which is how was this report received by the bipartisan congressional body that originally requested it? Oh, I love this question. Okay, thank you for the question. I have to say, of course, you wanna please your sponsors in terms of making sure you did what you were supposed to do. And I have to say that we did what was possible. And we got an amazing positive response from the bipartisan sponsors of Save Our CZAC. They posted it almost the same day on their website together, a very supportive and appreciative of the report, which to me and to our team was very encouraging. We wouldn't have changed anything in the report, but it meant that they really wanted to know the, they asked the question and we answered to our best of our ability. And that was critical. And I was happy to share that. I'm sure Judith has that link, but I'm happy to share that letter because it was quite helpful to us to know that we hit the mark. Wonderful. Great, thank you so much. So another one that I wanted to ask is the fossil fuel industry is adding plastic production capacity, partly to counteract reduced use of fossil fuels for electricity production. They're basically quoting our report from October. How can we counteract that? Regulation, taxes, that's the question. Well, I'll say it was a month of the scope of our report really, what we weren't asked to it. That's one of the challenges and the benefits of the national candidates report is very specific. However, I'll let Rashid weigh in with an opinion he has, and I'll say what I know. Yeah, so economics has kind of helped, right? I mean, the idea of designing incentives such that to deal with the consequences of private action on third parties, right? Essentially, so if this is happening and we see it coming, the thing is to put in the incentive structures and there are two ways, two quick ways you can deal with this. One is through taxes, if it's a negative externality that is going to affect the environment and people in our health, those who don't actually get the benefit, you do the taxes. And I know it's difficult to talk about taxes. Actually, I made a joke years ago, I was talking closer to the White House, I think, and I said, oh, you know, I mean, I'm in the U.S. So I wouldn't use the word tax. I know it's not popular. I'll say we'll give those people negative subsidies, you know, negative subsidies which are essentially taxes, but that is just a joke. And then if you have actions like anyone who is helping us whether through technology, through science, through knowledge to help us deal with this move, right? To reduce it. They are contributing positively. So we have a positive externality and actually we should actually give them positive subsidies, not the negative ones, right? So yeah, economic theory and ideas could help here to stem the tide. Right, and I'll just add that, of course, awareness and publicity about the situation is always important because there's nothing more complex than permitting decisions in terms of when you can comment and when you can provide data and when you can influence. I will say that there seems to be a lot more attention to this issue in the current EPA context, especially with environmental justice concerns and EPA administrator Regan appears to be really paying attention to these issues. So in that climate, it's even better to raise your voices, to share concerns. And it is a challenge because a lot of these, you know, projects are halfway underway, but the same tools that conservation groups use and the other discussion around a decision are are utilizable, but I do think that the information about potential impact and also the information about whether the communities were included effectively in outreach would probably be appropriate. Great, thank you. So maybe one or two more questions, Judith. So what percent, I don't know if this was exactly in the report, did you guys figure out what percent of global plastic pollution is generated by the United States? Oh, you had to get to the complex stuff, yeah. So no, we had, there are many, there's a table in fact that will show you the many estimates that exist about this. But what I'll say is there is an estimate that was created in 2020 by law at all in a paper in Science Advances that we do cite. And in their report, they estimated that based on their, you know, what you know about solid waste and how much we were, they tried to actually include the amount we were exporting to other countries and get a percentage of the estimate of what might be released in the environment in those other countries based on the waste we were releasing. And of course, those are based on 2016 data that we were between the third and 12th largest contributor to plastic waste in the not to say the coastal environment. It is quite a, and you have to, what we would say is there's no specific estimate that's perfect, but the estimates that are out there, which is why we laid them out in this table show the scale of understanding of what could be. And so I guess we would have to say there's no perfect estimate, but it's important. And it's even harder because the United States and Europe export so much plastic waste to countries that don't have the infrastructure to deal with it. And then we turn around sometimes, not we, but some parties turn around and blame those countries for all the plastic loading into local rivers when so much is exported. Yeah, it was helpful to show that we produce at least in terms of urgent resin with Canada and Mexico because that's North America up to 19% of global plastic production. We don't know how much America specifically. And of course, things are changing as new plants come online, et cetera. So, but what we could find, we put in the report. And it is from that, it is from those estimates that we came up with the two to eight times, right? Per capita. From those solid waste. Exactly, solid waste in particular, right? So that gives an indication. I think what we can say almost for sure, you never know for sure is that on average, North Americans produce more waste on average than most places, I mean, not more. Yeah, that's an important point. We produce a lot of waste. That is a top finding of our report that's based on science that I cited before. How much is actually released to the environment in the ocean is what I was trying to get at, which is very, that's how much, and what other sources there are, we're not counting those. That's how we need a monitoring system. So, but we gave the best we could, is my point. It was great. So, I will say maybe before we close down, there's a lot of discussion in the Q&A. We get this a lot about individual action and people feeling frustrated about trying to avoid plastics in their own lives and how hard that is. And we always tell people that while it's great to do all of that and to try to reduce your own waste, it's really important to work towards more systemic changes. And I think that's what Judith was getting at with your report. It really was about needing a more systemic approach to plastic waste reduction. So, do you wanna say any final word about that before we close down? Yeah, maybe I go before my question. So, you say the final, final. As a chair of the committee, right? So, yeah, I get this question a lot. I mean, about fish, right? People tell me what can I do individually, right? And I'm always empathetic to people when they find it difficult, right? You go to the supermarket, you're trying to do the right and it's so difficult and there's mislabeling and all that, right? So, individuals can try, but I really think like you have said, we need the more systemic action. This is why we have government. This is why we have all sorts of structures and institutions because in the VDWA, there are things you just cannot do, you know, even though you try. So, yes, we need that comprehensive systematic setup that will then enable us as private agents to really operate in a way that helps the whole country in this case. Right. I mean, it all does, I would agree with Rashid and it all ladders up, right? And grassroots awareness. Look, we run the Seafood Watch program. Seafood Watch started with people knowing there was a problem, what should I do? Giving them some simple choices. Now, you know what we ask them to do is just ask the question, send the signal into the marketplace. Then you also send the signal into we can use policy levers to send that same signal, but businesses are responding too and you're seeing that. That's what I just wanna say is the fact that, you know, that brands have now made this announcement just a week or so ago is in response to not only the public pressure, but the signals from the economics of this. So it's all coming together. So I would use every avenue you have, one of the things aquariums or groups like Beyond Classic can do is give you, make you aware of the opportunities to raise your voice and organize and I think the other thing is just don't worry about the one thing. I mean, just do as much as you can. And the more you learn, I've found that the more I tell people about it in my own family or my friends, they are making changes and this is very easy to understand. It's so concerning and which is why Congress is interested. So what you're seeing be hopeful. Congress is interested. The administration is reading our report. They're going to this big treaty discussion. Wow, in a year, what has happened? So just keep the voices going.  You will be clearer about what you need to do. Great. So I'll just say that anyone who's looking to get more involved, please write to us at beyondplasticsatbennington.edu and we can help you link into local advocacy efforts. We're happy to get you linked into some of the things happening around the country. Judith, do you wanna say anything else? Yeah, can you put that slide up? So I really wanna thank Margaret and Rashid for a really compelling presentation. And thank you for your service. I mean, you got a lot of other things going on in your life and the fact that you spent a year on endless Zoom meetings cranking out this report with your colleagues is greatly, greatly appreciated. Let me just do the pitch for Beyond Plastics. We're a small nonprofit education and advocacy group. We're not a webinar shop. We don't do a lot. We do four a year. This is our first this year. We'll do another in June. Sign up on our website beyondplastics.org for free email updates. We do not flood your inbox. We just contact you with good resources and actions that really matter. And please consider a tax deductible donation. You can donate online or an old fashioned check. We accept both. So there are those details. We can keep that up. But I think if we were allowed to go off mute and applaud you would hear really, really loud applause for Rashid and Margaret. Thank you so very much. And thanks to all of you for joining us this evening. We love interacting with all of you and have a pleasant evening. Good night. Thank you so much. Thank you so much Judith for hosting. Yeah, well done. It's great. Reason report. It is really cool. I hope some have before they joined us or they will now. I think the questions were kind of about.


Hi. Please introduce yourself. I'm Olivier Kheid. I'm the multimedia lead here at Collabra. And I can show you this is one product that we've contributed to. It's a media tech-based Chromebook. And we've done quite a bit of work around bringing upstream Linux support for various IP blocks that are found in ARM devices. Is it one of the latest Accompanio or one of these two sets? I think so, yeah. One of these latest MediaTek? Yes, one of these. And is it just a regular Chromebook? This is a regular Chromebook. What is Linux? It's ChromeOS, right? Just ChromeOS. This is ChromeOS. This is off the shelf. We just went to a store and bought it. But we've been working on it. The ones we work on obviously we cannot bring. Can you explain what is part of that that you work on? Well, we've done work on, for example, the codec hardware, but also other bits of hardware that we've upstreamed to the Linux kernel. And also we work on with Google on having these devices in the kernel CI project, which is a project to do continuity sensation on the Linux kernel itself. So upstream running whenever someone submits a patch to the upstream Linux kernel, we build it. We work on hundreds of devices. And we report to the maintainers what works and what doesn't. Especially what doesn't. Oh, this work is useful for when people want to run Linux on these, too, right? Yes. Not just the ChromeOS. Not just ChromeOS, right? Because a lot of what we do is we bring the drivers to upstream Linux so you don't need a special kernel. You can just use a standard Linux kernel. Which is useful for someone like Google because they have eight-year support on these things, right? So they want to upgrade the kernel. They just don't want to ship an eight-year-old kernel. What's happening behind you there on the screen? So, well, this is our lava lab. So what we're showing is that we're building different... We're showing all these boards. Yes. So we have continuous integration across all these boards. So the developer writes some code. And then our system will build it for all of these boards, create a system image, boot the board with the image and bring all of the results of all the tests that it turns into a UI where the developer can see. So it's easy if you have a complex system that you might run on many generations of boards, many different types of hardware. Also, the developer probably doesn't have 10 boards on his desk to actually have more confidence in what you build. The lava has been developed for years, right? Yes. It's open and everybody can implement it the way they want. And you have a special way to get it to the next level? So we actually contribute to the open-source projects directly. So it's not like we have our own special flavor. We're actually part of the community. But one of the services we have is that we host a lava lab where we can take people's devices, put them there, and then have both kernel CCI and Mesa CI. Yeah. All right. What else can we film here at the booth? So the next demo, my co-worker here, Marcus will show it. I can show it? Yes. It's an AI demo. What's the latest happening with panfrost? What are you doing here? What we show here is basically a machine learning demo that runs on a complete open-source deck, like operation system. But the important part here is that we use like an open-source graphics driver. And what the demo is about is basically a video compression focused on web video conferencing. So basically at the beginning of the call, we take like one image of the sender and send it over to the receiving site. And then following up, we just extract key points for every image. And we use these key points with the first image that we extracted to reconstruct the face. And that way we are actually able to reduce the bandwidth 10 times in comparison to H.264. Which makes sense because we just transfer the key points for every image instead of the whole video stream. Is this working or just a prototype? This is basically more like a prototype than a full-featured product. But it would be easy to just take it and integrate it into an existing video conferencing software. Because the last three years, I don't know what happened. There was something weird where people had to stay at home and everything and they were doing it as a chance. Exactly. So there's been a lot of talk of, there's been trillions of petabytes of video conferencing bandwidth out there. You could say 9% of it. This complete demo is already open-source. You can just download it, flash it to your embedded board or PC and just use it. And the next step would be to actually integrate it into an existing video conferencing software like Zoom or like Microsoft Teams. You could potentially have Rockchip-powered 4K webcam and if the other guy also has it or even if they don't or I don't know the software has it, then suddenly they can see you 4K image with 10 times less bitrate. Yes, up to 10 times lower bandwidth. So you could do 4K video conferencing with like one megabit? Yes, you could. You probably need like a little bit more capable hardware because like this one is like very resource constrained but it would be possible to run like in 4K. I did a video with NVIDIA once. We talked about some, all kinds of optimizations there. They were thinking of doing, I forgot what it's called, but I guess you like to do everything in the open source so everybody can use it. The question is how soon are people going to use this in products or? We hope pretty soon as I said like the next step would be to actually integrate it but since this is open source we can actually optimize every single bit. As I said it runs like an open source graphics driver which actually allows us to optimize the whole machine learning pipeline to run in real time and also like support like 4K for example. Which is like often not possible even on like NVIDIA hardware like the NVIDIA JetSync. How good is the panfrost? Is it fully working? Everything is perfect? It's like really really good and works like out of the box. Really good out of the box? Yes. All the Mali GPUs? Not all the Mali GPUs. There are like a couple, there are like more support than others but... The newest ones, they get great panfrost or the oldest ones that have problems? It's more like the older like chips are like a little bit more supported and are more optimized I would say. It's always like a combination of software and hardware right? The latest one they call the Immortalis the GPU and it will take a while before panfrost is good for that? So ARM hasn't open sourced the GPU driver yet? No. They don't want? I don't know if I can share too much about this. There are definitely like discussions in this direction. Awesome. What's happening behind you? What else we can talk about here? Maybe we can switch to them because... Do you want to give like a name? Oh Lord. Do you want to give like a name? I really want to say that we take a lot of advice to mark the possible future. All right. Perhaps all at first we'll see. You can ask them to... Just try to go through. All right. Hi. Hello. Introduce yourself. My name is Laurent Pancha. I'm the CEO of 5Ds and Board. We are a Linux consulting company specialized in multimedia and camera support. So what does ideas do on board? On which board? Lots of board actually. So our goal is to enable camera support for all of our customers. We make your cameras work for you. So anyone who needs to capture images to create a product, we enable that. We don't care about the end user applications. So we support customers in the automotive market, industrial markets, medical markets. Anywhere where you need to support cameras, we can be there. So we work with SOC vendors. We are supporting both from an SOC from Rockchip, from NXP, from ST, TI, Exilings, all across the board. And we also work with OEMs who integrate those products and the SOC in their own products to enable them to use them as efficiently as possible. When there's an SOC and it has support for cameras and stuff, isn't it just there or what else do you need to do to make it great? Unfortunately, many things because usually vendors will try to BSP with a custom solution. They will have a camera stack that is vendor specific. So for OEMs, switching from the vendor to another one is very difficult. Or integrating just support for another camera sensor on the same SOC is very difficult. You need to go through a whole tuning process that involves closed source tools that involves usually working with the selecting key partners from the vendors that can be a long and costly process. So we want to create and we are creating a completely open ecosystem with an open source camera stack that solves those problems. We focus on interoperability between different SOCs and different camera sensors so we can make any camera sensor work on any platform. We also work on creating tuning tools to enable our customers to do the tuning themselves at the cheaper cost and leveraging all the knowledge Just behind, I saw Libre computer. Are you working with these guys? Is that your partners and all that? So we are partners of Canabara. They are hosting us on their booth. And Libre computer is indeed a company that Canabara is working with. We have a working camera solution on some of the Libre computer boards. And we partner with lots of SBC vendors. It's nice when I see the AI just makes the video cortex amazing. Are you also a part of doing that? That's a Canabara project. That's a really cool one. That's actually a demo that you can see. Yeah, it's all right there. Yes, it's detecting the face. That's the same one.  So they have created this AI demo and we have worked with them to replace the USB webcam that they were using with a RAW sensor. So now you can use the same demo on any kind of SOC with any kind of RAW sensor. Can you describe one of the really cool SOCs? They are great. But then the camera, the imaging chip is kind of like separate all the time, right? And you have to talk with the SOC and there's... What's the language? There are SOCs that lack camera support inside. So you have to use an external ISP that's usually a chip between your RAW camera sensor and your SOC. That makes it more costly to integrate a full solution. But we do support some of them. We have worked, for instance, with Onsami with some of the external SOCs and developing drivers for that. So those are solutions that we support as well. So depending on the type of SOC you use whether it integrates an ISP or uses an external ISP that is something that we can work with. Many of the cool ones have it integrated directly. But not necessarily the cool ones. I mean, there are lots of interesting SOCs that definitely focus on camera support. They may have lots of other interesting features without an integrated ISP. But otherwise, yes, we're more interested in the ones that do integrate an ISP because that gives usually a more integrated user experience. Is this also stuff here? Yes. So those are samples of a board and system that we support, just a small subset. What are you looking at here? We do have the Debix board is based on an NXP iMix 8M+, that's the first SOC actually in the NXP product line that integrates an ISP. There was a bit of a game-changer for them. But we have camera modules from Audicam, OKDU, Raspberry Pi. This is a cool device, actually. So this is a Raspberry Pi Zero behind the hood with a camera sensor from Raspberry Pi as well, the latest camera module. And it's actually used as a USB webcam. So it runs Linux inside, full open source report. In there. Yes, in there. That's the same one you have here. There. So that's the Raspberry Pi Zero inside.  What's the best platform? Do you want to do a 4K video conferencing? What should I use? So if you go for higher resolutions and higher performance, we are looking at the moment at new SOCs such as the ROC5 board, for instance, distributed by OKDU. That's based on a new ROC chip SOC that's very interesting from the kind of point of view that we're just starting developing on that. So that's something we fully support yet. But for the existing supported platform, yeah, I'm excited. And plus it's actually an interesting one. It's very versatile. I wouldn't say that's necessarily the best one for video conferencing as such, but for lots of industrial use cases, including higher resolutions, we can support lots of applications on that. What's cool about the embedded world when you support a platform very well, it's going to stay for a decade. It's going to stay for years and years. It's going to be useful for potentially millions of products. Yes, it does. And that's also something where I think we have an added value. If you look over here, this is a tablet running or developed by Google. That's a Chrome-wise product. And they offer seven years support and software updates on all the Chrome-wise devices. This one is reaching end of line very soon. And because we have an open source camera like in that, it means that user can even extend their lifetime beyond that. So you can use main line, the main line in external, you can use a live camera, you can use open source software, and you have support even beyond what the vendor would provide. Seven years is already quite long in that kind of market. So that's good support from Chrome-wise, but you can even go longer than that because of the open source ecosystem.  Yes, yes. Seven years from Google and after that, depending on what they use this one. Cool, that's awesome. Okay, so that's a good book here. Lots of action happening. Where are you based? I'm based in Finland personally, originally from Belgium. I've been based in Helsinki. And here, that collaborates a lot of French guys? French, they have a big official Montreal, so certainly French-speaking, not just. In nine years on board, we have seven people we're distributing over already five different countries. Carbide is much bigger with 140, around 140 developers, so they definitely spend a whole globe. And working in the open source, is possible to make money? Absolutely, yes. We're selling not out of work. We have lots of requests from customers. We do not sell our software in need, but we sell consulting services. We work with SOC vendors to enable their products in this whole ecosystem. And we also work with OEMs who want to integrate them later in the product. So any kind of support they need, that's where we come. And all the cameras, all the kind of drivers, that's indeed released as open source. So everybody can benefit from that. But the other way around, we do benefit from the work of other developers. So that's also how we can be competitive. Is it possible that somebody will make really cool devices? I don't know what kind of sensor size is here, but could you have like a one inch sensor, micro-forters, APS-C, I just have amazing video conference or something like that. Yes, absolutely. You could go for really, really large sensors. Usually if we're looking, if we're looking at extremes there, sensors that have resolutions, I don't know, 400 megapixels, for instance, you will need custom hardware to go with that. Because it's such a niche use case that you don't want that kind of of the shelf as you see that will offer all the features that you need. But apart from that, you can go high-resolution, you can go, this one is relatively large, but you can certainly go larger than that. And you support it? Yes, we can definitely support it. You can work with anything people want? Yes. The biggest problem we have actually when it comes to an interrelated point of view is connecting the sensor to the hardware. There's no standardization when it comes to those connections. All those ribbon cables that you see, they have different pin-outs, different number of pins, and so that limits our customers when they want to connect a camera that's not meant to be connected to go on. So there's always some adaptation that you have to do. So having standardization that feel would be great. That's hindering development in little bit. But from a start-up on a view, we can really support anything. As long as we can establish a relationship with the vendors and get documentation to be able to develop drivers, we can certainly support everything. All right. Thanks a lot. You're welcome. Thank you.


We will have the honor to have Richard Gu to finish the day with the talk about historical consistency, causal relevance, and historical token causal description, a causal model modeling account. Please Richard. Thank you, but authorizing the abstract actually was all a paper 80 percent. It's a new one. So it's my pleasure to be here to present my ideas and thank you very much for allowing this to happen. But Alex, I won't talk about metaphysics. And for some reason I don't want to say that I'm going to talk about methodology as well. So I'm just going to present some very basic ideas. And I actually construct seven formal conditions. Some of them are very worthy. So I will use either drugs or a case to explain the formal conditions. And for this historical causal conception, it's all about human history. I only talk about human history. So some basic ideas. So this is the case. And this is the only case. So had Champlain implemented an entire piece of the policy, he did that back down from his data. So this is a historical causal description inquiry. Whether or not this is suitable. So normally we use two variables, a cause variable, a fact variable, and try to see whether or not we can build up some sort of equation to explain. But for historical studies, it's a little bit different. They ask for the so-called historical consistencies. They'd like to know whether or not this kind of fact was likely to occur in actual history, in actual course of history. They are not doing metaphysics. They are doing fact-based science. It's not metaphysics. So the thing is that how to explain historical consistencies, how to formulate the idea of likely to occur in the actual course of history. So this, they want to capture the peculiarity of historical possession. And history is famous with manipulability. You can't manipulate it. So how can I use a causal model in a country to do that? That's oxymoron. But the thing is that the proposal is using a historical thought experiment. That is, depending on causal generalizations or theories of relevant disciplines and historical facts as evidence to create a ground to justify a thoughtful intervention. So that's the idea. And the method, method, is counterfactual backtracking analysis. Now what is counterfactual backtracking analysis? It's backtrack from the charged counterfact, historical counterfact to its precondition. So apparently, those relevant disciplines, the causal generalization theory are going to assist to establish what is the precondition of which. So that's the role they play. And continue the backtracking process until we find a historical fact to anchor the backtracking process. So that's the basic picture. But there's a lot of things you need to explain what's going on here. So I set up a probability distribution requirement. That is, I asked for the probability distribution between historical counterfact and its factor counterpart to be approximately equal or even higher. So that's the idea. Now you may say that, well, it's too idea, right? But my job is to formalize those causal conception, those causal conception. And give this distribution, I can do that. And what is the suitable, reasonable probability distribution threshold? Actually, it depends on historians' expertise, not depends on philosophers, right? So I just set up an ideal condition and based on that, to explain how to perform historical causal conception based on causal model. So this is the case. So this is apparently a counterfact because Chaplin only implemented a piece of policy. So with backtracking precondition, and they said they need a strong national defense force. So you can implement some unyielding diplomacy. So they think that, okay, in this case, the present case, this is the UK's official dominant after the First World War. And it is still a counterfact. So they want to keep backtracking and backtrack to its precondition. And they think, okay, a hawkish cabinet might think, not mine, must think that the strong national defense force is essential. But still, that's a counterfact because Chaplin led a dovish cabinet. So they backtrack to the precondition of this hawkish cabinet. That is, they are hawkish cabinet members occupying substantial positions, and even becoming the prime minister. And this is actually a historical fact. There are three. There's Eden, Cooper, and Churchill. So there are three. So this is historical fact that we can use to end the backtracking process. But the thing is why and how. So this is the graph so far. This is the graph so far. That is hawkish cabinet, sufficient rearmament, a peaceful anti-epicement policy, and the success or non-success of sedentary defense. So that's the graph so far. And this is the variable setup. And I don't need to go into the detail. And this is the equation set. This equation set is actually saying this. Respectively, hawkish dovish cabinet causally connected, insufficient, insufficient rearmament, causally connected to unyielding, yielding diplomacy, causally connected to heat loss back and down or not back and down. So that's the equation, one of the equations set. Apparently, the causal profile of the variable actually is not fully explored yet because we can't see FCM plays any role yet, that is hawkish cabinet members. So my idea is, I assume that this backtracking is a successful backtracking. And I want to, based on the causal modeling, to formalize the correctness condition of a successful backtracking based on which I can explain the advocacy of historical existing inscription. And on top of that, I can explain the advocacy of historical causal inscription. So that's the basic idea. So as far as I can give those correct conditions, then I can explain that each historical counter fact, their consistency. And therefore, if two historical variables, one is the Alice immediate incentive variable, and both one value of them represent counter fact, and are both historically consistent, then the causal inscription is there. So that's the rough idea. So the most important job is just to establish those correctness conditions. That's what I said, the seven formal conditions. So now, seven formal conditions. And we can see that for each backtracking, they can, each backtracking, it consists of two parts. One part's backtracking to a historical fact, and another consists of backtracking to a historical counter fact. So we can talk about it. They have different formal structure. So first of all, a fact. So this is FCM. So that is hawkish cabinet members occupying pivotal position, blah, blah, blah. So that's the anchor in fact. But apparently, by itself, you cannot play a full causal to the hawkish cabinet, because the actual cabinet is dovage. So it can't play the full causal, otherwise it's equal hero inconsistent. But we have reason to say that at that historical juncture, we can assume that something can represent the exogenous variable that we can thoughtfully intervene in. So that's the idea. We can add FCM here, and this one is the exogenous variable. And this exogenous variable will represent the contingent factors related to the tenement of the hawkish or dovage cabinet. So it probably doesn't relate to the party election, some contingent factors. The second of all, the default position is for its value to be zero, because we actually have a dovage cabinet, so that the value is actually zero. And third, that's the requirement. I asked the value of the probability distribution of the values of the variable V is satisfied and required. That is at least a part that is equal or V is even higher. So that's the idea. That's why, based on what I can assume this. So that's why anchor in fact is important, because if there are hawkish members occupying pivotal positions in a cabinet, meaning that the dovage cabinet actually didn't have a landslide victory in party elections, otherwise they don't need any hawkish cabinet members occupying substantial positions. So this gives us sufficient evidence to support that the election result was closed, at least to certain extent it's closed. But it's not up to me to decide the structure as I said. So I just assume it's very closed. So now the question is, the fact is the value of V is one, a zero, sorry. So how can we intervene that? How to do that? So this is the values of actually that's hawkish cabinet or dovage cabinet where artists determined by the function of the values of HCM and V, that is the historical fact and the exogenous variable, and the function is like this. So only when the value of HCM and V are both one, FC, the value of FC is one, otherwise zero. But why I can get this result? Why this function is correct? So let's consider. First of all, FCM is one, is important for why this explains why it anchors the bad tracking process. You don't need to bad track further. So that's why it's there. It indicates that. So this is actually a combination of historical fact, that is there were hawkish cabinet members and the exogenous variable's value is zero as the default position. So this one is fine, right? So there is no hawkish cabinet, it's dovage. Oh, I forgot to say. For illusive purpose, all variables are minor. For illusive purpose, they are all minor. So this is first possibility and if there were no hawkish cabinet members, then N, the value of V is zero. So there is no hawkish cabinet. There were no hawkish, there was no hawkish cabinet. It's quite clear. But how about this one? Hawkish faction actually won. But there are no, there were no hawkish cabinet members occupied any substantial position. I think we don't need to consider this one. This is, this is the real oxymoron. So we don't need to consider this one. So then I explain why the function like this. So why expand this function? Because I think this is the formal structure between these variables, where you bad track to an angry bad. So we can have the first three conditions of the, the three conditions of the first set of all conditions. And the first one is that the, the three variables, the variables are sort of, it's very rewarding. So basically it's the bad track team counter fact that is HC. And the bad track historical fact is HCM, and the exogenous variable V. And they have the formal structure categorized by equation, by equation. So that's the first condition. The second is that the bad track team counter fact. The bad track historical fact, those two variables are endogenous. And only V is exogenous. So we can only thoughtfully intervene in V. And the third is that the, the requirement, the probability distribution requirement, because I want to talk in the ideal situation. So this has to be met. So this is the, the three formal conditions of the first set. So about bad track into a historical fact, bad track into an angry fact. So that's the idea. So the, the second part is about bad track into a counter fact. So I use this as an example that is bad track plus a fissuring element that is RS1 to a Hawkerich cabinet that is HC1. So using this part of bad track to explain the formal structure. So apparently a Hawkerich cabinet is not the only causal factor. For example, the economy after World War I has, had to be booming. Otherwise there, there, there, there was simply no money, no budget to, to faster the reality. So that's simply not possible. So there are some other causal factors related to the realization of a faster rearmament. So I can use you as standing for an auxiliary variable. It stands for the, all causal, the causal complex that representing all the causally relevant residue factors to the realization of a sufficient rearmament. So I just want a variable as such, represent the, the natural output or collective output. They have met, there must be a very complicated structure inside, but I don't need to discuss this. I just say they, okay, all of this you can use a variable representing. So now we can talk about the formal profile of this bad tracking. So the value of R as are determined by the functions of the values of HC and U. HC is Hawkerich, a selfish rearmament or insufficient rearmament, Hawkerich or Dovish cabinets and U is the auxiliary variable and the function is like this. Now again, why it is like this? So we can think about that, go through it. The first possibility is that it's a Dovish cabinet and the auxiliary variable's value is 1. It's a 10. So this one, if it's a Dovish, so it's 0, because it's fact. This part represents fact. Actually the cabinet was Dovish and actually there were no faster rearmaments. So this is fine. And the second one is that a Dovish cabinet and the auxiliary variable's value is 0, meaning that the needed causal complex wasn't there. There's no money, for example. So then no faster rearmament is reasonable. The third one is that there's a Hawkerich cabinet but still there's no money. So the meaning that the faster rearmament is still not possible, so the value of R is 0. And we can notice that when the value of the auxiliary variable is 0, there is no faster rearmament because there's simply no money. So apparently based on that, because I already assumed that this bad tracking is successful, it's sensible. So since it's sensible, so the default position must be U is 1. That must be the default position. Otherwise bad tracking, the whole bad tracking makes no sense. Why do you want to bad track from a sufficient rearmament to a Hawkerich cabinet when there's simply, there was simply no money to faster the rearmament process? If that's the case, why the bad tracking is sensible or successful? So because I assumed that the bad tracking is successful, so therefore the value of U must be 1. That is a fact. Has to be that. And given that the value of U is 1, the values of RS are actually determined by the values of HC, given by this setup. So that's why I say I don't only need one case, I just assume that it is a successful bad tracking and based on that I can formalize the correctness condition. So this is the extending of CC. Expanding of CC, we can add. So this is the subscript, stands for the siliquant, the silvery variable, which level. Since the bad tracking structure are similar, so actually we can put the allergy. The structure is exactly the same. So now we can have a second set of formal conditions. The first one saying is actually this, using cases is much more simple. The variable RS, that's the bad tracking counter fact. And the variable HC, that's bad tracked counter fact. And the auxiliary variable are all endogenous, or endogenous because they're coming from the fact part, not the kind of fact part. And the second one is that the auxiliary variable is fixed to be 1, the value of it is fixed to be 1. Meaning that it is, it represents a factual background condition. That's the factual background condition obtained. So it's bad. It's all there. It depends the character of the, the, the, the party faction. So that's it. So of course historical evidence might show otherwise. Say, ah, not the money was in there. My formulation is wrong. No, my formulation is still correct. What, what goes right is the assumption that assuming that the bad tracking is successful, they only show that the bad tracking is not successful. I need to find a new example. So although historical evidence might show otherwise, that doesn't mean my formulation has been failed. It's different. And finally, since the auxiliary variable value is set to be 1 or fixed to be 1, so the bad tracking, the value of the bad tracking variable is determined by the value of bad tracked variable. That is, rs values are determined by the values of hc. That is, severe armament and hawkish or doggish category. So that's the, the second set of three conditions. So new equation is out. New equation is out. Now we have this, we must have a seven condition. That is, using, using pictures. That is, there is no causal connection between auxiliary variables. That's one thing. Another thing is that there's no causal connection between exogenous variable and the auxiliary variable and the immediate incentive level. There's no causal connection here. So let's explain a little bit. Let's assume that urs is zero when v is one. Let's assume this. Assuming that there's some sort of causal connection. But the problem is this, that if urs value is zero, meaning that it fails to satisfy 2.2, that is, it's not a factual background condition. And I'll, I'll miss that. Assuming that the bad tracking is successful, the u, auxiliary variable has to be fixed to be one, representing the factual background condition. So this fail, formal condition 2.2. And can we say that it's possible that urs is one, when v is one. But the problem is, v is actually zero, meaning that urs is actually zero. And again, it fails to satisfy 2.2 condition. So there's no, no causal connection between the exogenous variable and the auxiliary variable and the immediate incentive level. It's not possible. So the second one is that the, about the auxiliary variable, whether or not they can have causal connection. So as said, the value of ua to b1 represents the factual background condition allowed to a bad track from a is zero to rs is one. To make sense the bad tracking. Because the money was there, so we can have this bad tracking. And apparently, urs, the value of urs is one did the same thing. Meaning that you can bad track from rs is one to rfc is one, that is hawkish cabinet. So assuming there's a causal connection between these two auxiliary variable, then it creates a unique problem. The problem is that there it did, now we have a full core possession in a bad tracking analysis. That is like this. Because the reason why it's of the bad tracking from a to rs actually rely on the reason why it's of rs bad tracking to fc. So this, there's a full character in a bad tracking analysis. And this is just wrong. So that's why there cannot be any causal connection between these auxiliary variables. So, as I said, history is a fact-based science. And you can see that these are all facts. The values are all fixed. They are all facts. So causal modeling is a sufficient tool to carve a sensible causal rule out of the channel. That is, history can use these facts to fix the background conditions. And try to use causal generalization or theories of rather than these beliefs and our historical facts as evidence to do the bad tracking and the kind of factor of bad tracking analysis. And causal modeling just helped to present the formal conditions. The correctness condition of a successful bad tracking, as I said, once this is set, we can explain each, for example, fc is zero as a historical counterfact. The historical consistency description is adequate, because the whole bad tracking is correct. So each value represents a historical counterfact or historical consistency. And any causal relationship, not here. Every causal connection here or causal description here, when one is at the immediate descent level, the causal description is also adequate. So as far as I can use causal modeling to construct the correctness condition of successful bad tracking, I can use them to explain the advocacy of historical consistent description, which are crucial to historian study. And based on that, I can further explain the advocacy of historical causal description. Thank you. Questions? I'll start. Could you bring back the, okay. So I see how you have to exclude a lot of relations for the thing to work, but do you not have to exclude, you know, a hawkish cabinet is inducing and on appeasement and dependency of the rearmament. So do you have to exclude that Harold? Oh, I see. You mean that whether or not there's a rearmament? In perfect. Because the cabinet is responsible to the anti-applicement. So directly or? Well, first of all, there's no, what's that? That's a very, that would be a very long cabinet for a very long time. No, that's hard to say. The causal relations cannot transfer. So the hawkish cabinet can only be the causal or the visual rearmament. So that's the idea, because it is using actually kind of factual and kind of factual cannot transfer the causal connection. I'll miss you, you want to use a kind of a kind of to tinkering with all the problems. Causality could be transitive, but counterfactual. Yeah, that would be a problem. So that's the feature, of course. Okay, okay. It's because it's a counterfactual reaction. Okay. Thank you. Other questions? Jonathan, why are you doing that?  Let's call up that. Yeah, this is really just a curiosity question. So I wonder, I know there's some work in just in history, on counterfactual history. And so I wonder if you've seen some analogies between the formal constraints that you're proposing in this kind of approach and just like, when historians talk about doing counterfactual history, what kinds of guidelines do they give themselves for like, what's good practice? Well, I cannot explain this because I didn't actually spend time to study that, but I have been informed that somebody said, oh, I just read a book. Historians are actually doing that. And I have been told that the historian colleagues of philosophy say that they are doing things like this. So that's that much. And the funny part is this. I asked my historian colleague back to my university, they said, we never use counterfactual reasoning. We don't use counterfactual. We are doing historical study. We don't use counterfactual. So this would be kind of cool if one thing that this work could give, it's like, if they have these kinds of vague ideas about how to kind of structure this to get good inferences, and this could help them clarify, that would be cool. That's the idea. So I'm still working on this paper. Cool. And there are two other options. One is at Alexander Mark, trying to use standard Louisiana semantics to say that, okay, we can use that to talk about historical counterfactual reasoning. So whether or not they can build up the historical causal description or causality. But I have seriously done that. I think that's the main reason for my historian colleague saying that we never use counterfactual reasoning. Possible words. No, no, no, this word, this word, not possible. No possible word. Another is actually Glennon. Glennon tried to use ephemeral, ephemeral mechanism to explain historical causal descriptions. And I didn't spend much time just read one or two papers of his. But I still think that I think his account of mechanism has, why essential problem? Because he thinks that his account is superior than Woodward's, because he can explain the hierarchy. So that the lower level mechanism is the higher level causal generalization, some of the ideas, something like that. So you can use mechanism to explain causal generalization. And when I taught this, I and my students, our question is just that what's going to happen at a button level? You must have a button level.  That has to be the thing. So basically, I think that the Glennons that come, I don't think he can explain historical causal descriptions, although I don't have any. But I know that at least there are two different approaches, not just this one. They are two different approaches. So I will say I probably understood about 20% of what you're doing, but because of the lectures, because I couldn't keep up with all the articles, but for whatever this is about, when the British did re-ar, they deficit-financed it. So the economy did not have to be very good. Right. Yes, of course, of course. But has to be good, to be sufficiently fairly good. We cannot be bad. It has to be to some extent. But it's why you know it's terrible when it's, but it's why it's an exogenous variable. It's anything that will create the necessary condition for the global economy. Well, the exogenous- So the economy, Dunkirk happens, Britain is being bombed, they're losing their colonies left and right from, because of, I mean, this is, they are desperately debt-financing. Anything that they're doing, just if I disagree with you. That's probably true, because I'm not an analogy story. But the thing is, I just assume that this bad tracking is successful. And I say, if given that it's successful, the formal structure has to be like this. Because if the value is zero, the bad tracking just doesn't make any sense. So you are actually saying that the bad tracking is not that successful, which can be true, and likely to be true, but I just assume it to be true after or it's just an example. It's just a case. I just, I want the formal structure. This means that I would defend it. Daniel is arguing for a more complex graph, but you're not saying that the condition of the graph is false. Actually, actually, the paper I discussed a bit more. For example, whether or not we can have a bad tracking about this one, that's one possibility. Can we have multiple, multiple preconditions, not just one precondition, whether over determination and preemption might cause any problem at this graph. So that's why I remember when I said this is the basic ideas. Because I think that I present this once. I spent 30 minutes to explain this. As you said, oh, I just don't remember that. So I didn't. But, but, but for the record, let me prove this to you. It's okay. It's okay. I'm not joking. It's okay. I just don't have time. Oh, sorry. And really fast. So this model can be used to understand, for example, the causal history of a functional trait. Because there is this discussion about functions, what is a functional effect? Are we, they say that a functional trait is actually the selected effect in the history of the system. So they talk about some kind of backward causation to talk about functionalities in organisms. What's the problem? They don't have a model to to put this history. My question is, what are the limitations of variables to know? How many variables we have to know to make a history? Because in history, in general, we have knowledge of a bunch of variations. But in the biological evolution of a system, we don't have, for example, much knowledge because there is a lot of things that happen, mutations and external boundaries, chains that we don't know what's happened. We know, for example, that there is a kind of animal that had some traits and then another animal that had other traits. But we would say, for example, that a trait that we have now is a functional trait because it's evolution of history. And that is a backward causation history. Well, first of all, I'm not talking about backward causation. And second of all, as I said, I can only talk about human history. Human history. Just human history. Because the thing, the whole thing is that I think the last time I did that. So as I said, there's a chunk of historical facts, a lot of historical facts. Just based on those facts by themselves, it's very difficult to develop a causal, to explain the causal loop. So this model, the bad tracking analysis, is bad tracking, not backward causation. Bad tracking analysis can help to establish the analysis. And then causal modeling can help to establish the formal conditions to explain why. At each level, we need historical facts as evidence. And this is a chunk, this is a causal chunk that might be very, very complicating inside. And history, luckily not me, history has to look into to establish, because I think that even if they wanted to establish a bad tracking analysis here, for example, I think the formal conditions are exactly the same. So that's why I just assume that this is a simple but successful bad tracking, and try to construct the formal conditions of the correctness of this bad tracking. And hopefully, this can keep you see. So that's why I think about discuss the orientation preemption, because they might feel that the formal conditions are all satisfied by the causal description is not, that's already the main issue of preemption. And try to explain why this won't cause any problem. So that's the thing. So it's all about human history. And there's something I forgot to say. Oh, okay, there's one thing I have to say. Yeah, one thing that, of course, there must be a limit. You cannot bad track forever, right? I read, I think it's, for me, they said to explain the booming of Western civilization in the 19th century. That's because the Greek won the war of the state war. I think, what? There's other things. It couldn't possibly construct any reasonable bad tracking. It's 2000, more than 2000 years. That's not possible. Of course, it's with the scale limit. But there's a, there's a huge solution. The actual limit of the scale has to be decided by historians. I can't decide that. I can't say that. Oh, you can't bad track to more than five months. How can I say it? For 10 years, I can't say that. Historians.


Sunday's probables it's gonna be Jordan Montgomery riding as I mentioned earlier a scoreless inning streak of 14 and two-thirds innings and once again the Marlins sending Theodore Bogadavis to the mound they have not picked this starter but they will their starter today actually was a pretty good starter that they settled on in Trevor Rogers in the meantime Yankees got to him a little bit doubt lasted him as you said on the pregame listen they're gonna try and do the same to the Marlins pitcher on Sunday but it's Montgomery that's got to keep throwing up zeroes part of that scoreless streak that you referenced is his last start five innings against the Tampa Bay Rays he threw a lot of pitches he ended up throwing 102 pitches but he really did a solid job of slowing down that offense Cruz was new to the raised lineup at that point and you wondered about that matchup from Montgomery handled them very well he got a strikeout he got a big double play in that game but Bob I think we've talked about the Yankees inability to sweep this season this is a series they have to sweep the Marlins are not a very good team this year yes the Marlins have some good pitchers but they're a team that's 15 16 games under 500 the Yankees do not want to be leaving that stadium tomorrow having left the game out there they need a solid performance from Montgomery and they need their lineup to continue to produce they've scored seven runs in two games but it's been enough because the Marlins don't have a lot of offense