Okay, so welcome everyone to today's SOI Centre of Taiwan Studies online book launch. Today we're doing the book launch of Democracy and Rule of Law in China's Shadow, a book that's edited by Ryan Christopher Jones. We're really delighted to welcome Brian back. He was last here in December of 2017. I was just chatting to my students beforehand and noticed I've still got the poster of the December 2017 book talk, which I think, Brian, you did on your own, didn't you, I think? Yes, that's right. But this time we're even more lucky. We're actually joined by two of the chapter authors, and that was both based in Taiwan. That was part of the reason why we decided to do today's session as an online launch. Brian is now a lecturer in law at the University of Sheffield. Brian's travelled quite a bit in his academic career. He's had a postdoc in academia Seneca, and in his last talk in 2017, he was based in Dundee. So now he's come halfway down towards London. But as I mentioned earlier, we have two chapter authors as well joining us. Firstly, we have Jimmy Xu, who has positions in both academia Seneca and National Yangming Jiao Tong University. Jimmy is going to speak in at SOAS for the first time, so we're really delighted to hear about Jimmy's research, or a topic that I think is really relevant to our students, because we have so much interest in Taiwanese social movements. But I don't think we've had enough legal angles on this. That's one of the reasons why I'm really delighted that Brian's brought you all together. And then our third speaker is Professor Guan Xiaowei from the College of Law National Taipei University. Like Brian Xiaowei is someone who we're familiar with, because she was here even more recently. She spoke at our summer school back in 2020, when she spoke about the really fascinating topic about the feminist movement and the decriminalisation of adultery. A really topical issue that we're just seeing that constitutional ruling back earlier in 2020. And like many of our speakers at SOAS, Professor Guan is someone who combines both academic work on legal issues related to gender, but also someone who's quite heavily involved in activism in the promotion of gender equality in Taiwan. And I think this is one of the reasons why our students really enjoy hearing people speak at SOAS, who combine both the academic and activist angles on Taiwanese politics and society. So welcome all three of you. And let me then first hand over to Brian to talk a little bit about the overall project and how it came to fruition. Something that is often, as someone who's edited books, I know how complex and how frustrating that can be. So thanks again everyone and welcome to SOAS. Thanks so much. And I really appreciate the invitation, David. And thanks also to the other speakers for being here, for Xiaowei and Jimmy. It's really nice to see you guys, even if it's only virtually. I'm really pleased to be back at SOAS at the centre of Taiwan Studies. And I think you guys do so much down there. And it's really nice to be included in the program. So as Daphid said, rather than delving into my chapter, which is on court criticism and the rule of law, I'm just going to provide some kind of general comments and reflections on the book. And let me start off by saying, I think publication of the book to me feels a little bit bittersweet. So I'm really proud of the book that we put out. And I think in a large sense, it's kind of a follow up of our previous collection, so which was called Law and Politics of the Taiwan Sunflower and Hong Kong Umbrella Movements. So we have, we cover some of these developments and some of the kind of things related to what happened in those movements. But we definitely go beyond them as well in this text. I think we have some really insightful chapters from a wide variety of authors. And I think we have both well-established and early career authors and a lot of authors from that middle range as well. We have authors from the UK, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore and Australia. So I think it's truly a collaborative project. And it was great to work with these authors. And the process was definitely so much easier because of them. So, thank you, Xiaowei and Jimmy for making things so much easier. I think the book also has some brave chapters that I think say kind of new and fresh things and maybe some things that people are a little bit kind of hesitant to say as well. So I'm really proud of that also. Also, the book is definitely has a personal dimension to it also. So my wife is Taiwanese and I have two children that are Taiwanese, not to mention many friends and family in Taiwan and Hong Kong and other places in Asia as well. So many of the issues that we talk in the book definitely hit home and they impact people that I know and love. So it's definitely a highly personal project as well. And I think it's also evident that these issues stretch beyond Asia and definitely beyond China's shadow. And I think that's readily apparent from some of the chapters in the book as well. So those are a few things that I'm really happy and proud that we did in the book. But the reason it's kind of bittersweet is because let me also say that the optimism that I had I think when we started the project has kind of dwindled a little bit. So we used to talk about kind of interesting legal and political changes in Taiwan. From just a few years back, same sex marriage and kind of some of these new political developments. And now we hear increasingly less about these interesting legal and political developments and more about kind of the fractious relationship between Taiwan and China. And of course, China's desire to kind of swallow or unify Taiwan as well. Well, we also heard Aira Lee saw kind of this, you know, resurgence of interest in democracy in Hong Kong. And I think you probably saw that from about 2014 to 2019, right? Which was a really intense period in Hong Kong. Really kind of a lot of interest in the basic law, you know, what the basic law said about democracy, how democracy was going to be delivered. There was a lot of discussion about, you know, what was genuine democracy and how was genuine democracy going to be delivered. And, you know, some of that I think is definitely dwindled, right? You know, it was extremely difficult to finish up the book when so much change was happening in Hong Kong and on the Hong Kong side, especially with the new national security law and the clampdown on free speech in Hong Kong. So I think it was really difficult to say, you know, when we just had to stop and say, you know, yes, there are still developments going on, but we just have to stop and get this book out and published. So it was very difficult to know kind of when to do that. And I think, you know, let's not forget that, you know, a lot of the things that we're discussing here, I think, you know, are quite serious. You know, we have one author in the collection, Benny Tai, that's lost his job and is currently imprisoned. And for what? Right? For advocating democracy, essentially. Just a couple of days ago as well, we saw that Tony Chung became the youngest person to be jailed under Hong Kong's national security law at 20 years old. He was sentenced to two years and seven months for secession. And the district judge even said, even though the defendant did not have concrete plans to split the country, his goal was very much clear. The charge of secession does not require actual plans. So you can see how seriously Hong Kong is treating speech at the moment and especially things like, you know, acknowledging independence or formally acknowledging that you want independence for Hong Kong. It's almost akin to kind of the way that Western countries would treat something like terrorism. But also, you know, not for this event, but you know, for other events, I've approached authors of this within this collection to talk about their chapters and, you know, they've been unwilling to do so and they're afraid to do so. So I think that also shows kind of where we are in this discussion in relation to kind of speech and how it's developing in East Asia. So the things that we're writing about, the things that we're reading about can sometimes seem, you know, really abstract. But there are people who are living these developments and have to deal with these developments on a daily basis. And I think that should not be forgotten as well. So let me end with kind of two observations. The first is that, for me at least, Taiwan, and you could even say, you know, Hong Kong from kind of 24 to 2019, to me as a reminder that, you know, not everything has to be about economics, right? You know, I think sometimes we lose sight of this and I think especially when it comes to constitutional issues. Of course, economic considerations are relevant. You know, there's no doubt about that. But governmental arrangements, you know, how things are structured, how democracy operates in a particular state can be just as important, if not more so than economic benefits, right? And this, of course, began with that kind of scupper trade pact in 2014 in Taiwan. They would definitely have benefited Taiwan, you know, economically. So sometimes, you know, I think this shows that countries do have to make difficult decisions about things. They could hurt their GDP, right? But in the long run, could maybe be more valuable. And I think that's a valuable lesson, not just in Asia or in, you know, China's shadow, but I think even beyond as well, right? You know, I think that kind of differentiates Taiwan from some of its neighbors, right, who may be really good at kind of the economic bit, right?  But these countries aren't so good at, you know, state structure and governmental arrangement and providing, you know, a plethora of rights and citizen rights and liberties to their citizens as well. So I think Taiwan definitely shines when it comes to stuff like that. And I think the second major thing that this shows is the importance of free speech which is another thing that I think differentiates Taiwan from many of its neighbors. And there's three things I want to highlight here in regards to that. So first, you know, free speech allows for unencumbered dialogue to take place amongst citizens, right? And also not just amongst citizens, but between citizens and the state as well, right? So being able to freely engage with your fellow citizens and to search for that ultimate truth on various issues and problems that society faces. And also for the elected branches, right? And especially the government to know what is important and relevant to the people and to be able to respond to those requests from the people, right? And if democracy is about paying attention to citizens, then knowing what they want is, you know, key there, right? Secondly, free speech allows for people to know their true history, right? Beyond what the state is telling them is their true history, right? Beyond what is known in kind of these official documents, you know, such as constitutions or other things. The state may have one version of history, but free speech allows societies to have more than that official version, right? And that's inherently valuable. And I think something that, you know, Taiwan's neighbors probably miss out on. And finally, free speech allows for people and citizens to recognize and reflect on kind of constitutional mistakes, right? Mistakes exist, of course, in every regime, but free speech at least allows for the recognition and acknowledgement of those mistakes, right? And therefore the opportunity to put them right or to not make them again, right? And I think that also differentiates Taiwan from some of its neighbors. And so those are some kind of reflections on the book and kind of how it came together and some of kind of the important themes that I think it was trying to weave together. But I'd like to stop there and give Xiaowei and Jimmy the floor. So thanks very much. So I really appreciate being part of this project. And actually, last year, after I finished co-authoring this chapter with Ann Zhang of University of Hong Kong, I dealt deeper into into Taiwan's court decisions actually surveyed the whole decade that came before the sunflower movement. And I think there are very interesting things to observe by seeing how the court developed into develop all the models that help it cope with civil disobedience and culminating in sunflower movement. And so today, I will just give you a very, very quick picture of this chapter. This chapter we mean to compare Taiwan and Hong Kong and see how from the law side, from the court side, how do the court evaluate all these cases, very difficult cases, because civil disobedience by definition, by nature is a kind of case that straddles between the legal system and the political system. And so the next slide, please. Yes, please go on maybe several slides down. I will skip some of the because I don't have to explain to you all these basics about all these events. Next, please go on until the next slide. So, okay, so stop here. So I will tell you that the most interesting thing is that how do we compare the two societies? What are we comparing? So we have these court decisions before us. And the conclusions are very different. And there are some similarities, but there are difference. So I think the most important thing is that we have to find a framework, a theoretical framework that organizes all these, the two jurisdictions court decisions. And but civil disobedience literature is not really offering us much because most of it is in the political philosophy, political theory, and actually law from how do we deal with civil society from law's perspective, from the court's perspective. There's relatively rare theoretical framework. So we have to come up with our own. And we found this very interesting book that was actually in the, this version, this version, this edition was issued in 2001, but actually it came out in the 70s. And, and we find the Philip, Nonet and Philip Celtson's three models of law, politics, and society, very interesting. So let me go go through them very quickly. You find the three models very having great explanatory power for us. So the first is repressive law. In the repressive law model, the court is subject to political power. The basically the court identifies itself with the state and identifies itself as one arm of the state. Okay. And in the second model is autonomous law. And in autonomous law, autonomous law model, the court, it sees itself as an independent guardian of law that is distinguished, that is independent from politics, especially from the government. But it came as a prize because it has to distance itself from political questions. So it draws a very, very clear line. At least it tries to. It tries to, the court tries to draw a very clear line between law and politics. So when it comes to more political questions, the court can seem to be very conservative. But that is actually a prize for for independence, because the whole idea of autonomous law is that the court remains independent and remains aloof from political questions and stick to the law. And that is the law is the shelter for the court for it to do its own job. And at times it can use law to check the power of the government. So in this case, the court sees itself more as an independent arbiter of sociopolitical conflict. And the third model is responsive law. In this, under this model, the court sees itself as a social reformer. So it's still, it is still independent from politics, but it is more willing to engage itself with social transitions. So when there are social movement, it might just try to take sides, if the court sees, it does not distance itself from more political conflict. So when it, when the time comes, when the court sees itself as giving the last kick, and bring itself together for the benefit of social reform. So in this case, the court sees itself as a promotion, a promoter of certain direction of social reform. So next slide, please. So now we have the three models and still next, please. So we can have a quick look at, please go on next slide. Go on. A Hong Kong umbrella movement, no need to talk about the facts. So let's go on to the next slide. Joe, you can, yes. So the first series of cases is about Wang Jifeng, of course, him as a leader. And what's interesting is that, okay, the magistrate court or the district court, he was charged with all these charges. And he was found guilty, but he was given actually not so serious sentencing. But when it came to the court of appeal, because the secretary of justice appealed this case, he was not satisfied that the Wang Jifeng and others were given such lenient sentence. So at the second level, at the second instance of court, the court of appeal gave it six to eight months, more severe than the magistrate court. And at the same time, the court of appeal gave strict guidelines for disorderly assembly and degrees of violence. So this is a little bit more severe court decision. Okay, so let's move on to the court of final appeal. The court of final, Joe, please move on. The court of final appeal is the most interesting case in this series. So the court of final appeal says that the guideline can stand, but it should not be applicable to the present case. It should be applicable only to the future case. And so it reversed the severe sentence of court of appeal and upheld the magistrates court's lenient sentence. You can see here that the court of a final appeal here is treading on a very fine line. At the one hand, it, well, you can see that it tries to protect Wang Jifeng by going back to the magistrate court's lenient sentencing. But on the other hand, it seems that it cannot withstand the pressure from, you know, not just from the court of appeal, but maybe from the greater environment that there should be stricter measures being applied to these protesters in the future. So the basic idea is that even if we let go, let you go, just let you go with a lenient sentencing, in the future we're not going to be doing this. You should be watching out for yourself. So next slide. Please go on. Yes. So as we just mentioned, so here there are some very interesting reasoning in this case, but I think for the sake of time, I won't talk a lot about it. So the basic idea is that I think the court of final appeal is trying to wait into a very trouble water, but at the end of the day, it has to call it a day and say, okay, so in the future, things will be different. But so far as we can, we're going to try to protect these protesters. So next slide. So when we move on to Benny Dice's case, we can see, as Brian just mentioned, Benny has gone to jail for this case. And so we can see that in Benny Dice's case, the courts are actually using the stricter guidelines already. Okay, so let's move on. The next slide. Taiwan situation is more interesting. Go on, please. Taiwan's court, actually, you see that for the so sunflower movement has two main parts. The first part is, you know, the occupation of the legislative, the legislature. And for this part, the Taipei District Court case, the Taipei District Court came up with a very innovative decision. So basically, it sees a very interesting element in the criminal statute, saying that trespassing has to have, for a trespass to be established, you have to prove that they do not have, the prosecutor have to prove that they do not have a just cause. And the court sees the element of just cause and say, okay, if you bring into all these considerations of civil disobedience, the justification of civil disobedience, the theories of civil disobedience, all these considerations of their political legitimacy, then it may have a just cause, you know. So the idea is that the court is turning the political legitimacy into legal legitimacy, whereas in, you know, it's not necessarily the case that the court can do so, you know, under the rule of law or should do so. But it did so anyway. So it seems that the court was going out of its way to find them not guilty. Okay. And the next slide, please. So we have another series of cases. This series of cases concerns the other part of Sunflower, which is the invasion of the executive Yuan, the Premier's office. And in this case, especially in that Taiwan High Court, the Taiwan High Court says they're guilty. Okay, they found them guilty, but gave them lenient sentence. But the court seems to be very troubled about letting them go because the court says that no one should be privileged by their political viewpoint. And we are not in the position, basically, it says that we're not in the position to invent law. We are enforcers of law and not to invent law. And so we're not in a position to evaluate the legitimacy of their causes. Okay. So next slide, please. So to make a just to give you a whole picture. Okay. So the Hong Kong court, according to the framework that we just mentioned, the Hong Kong court is actually moving from being under a model of autonomous law to more repressive law. And this is tricky because we don't know exactly just how the courts are making the move because I have discussed with Ann and just we discussed just how whether the court was being driven by somehow, you know, political force, invisible political force, you know, into being more repressive, or it's just those judges seeing the political atmosphere, or they're they're just just exercising their political judgment in seeing that, okay, Hong Kong should not just in the future, if we allow this kind of protest to go on, you know, there will be even more severe situation, we just we simply don't know whether the court was coerced into being more repressive, or it's out of the court's own, you know, opinion or the court's own readjustment of its own rule. Okay. And on the Taiwan court side, Taiwan court is more ambivalent. We can see that I would say that the Taipei District Court that the the first case I talked about is more like responsive law, it's very willing to take sides. But whereas on the Taiwan Taiwan High Court, in the second case, the court remained more autonomous. So it seems that Taiwan's courts have been wavering between these two models. And these two models have their upsides and downsides, you know, for the for the court to remain autonomous, meaning that it distances itself from getting into the political mire. It preserve its own independence. And it preserve its own role, it maintains its own role as a neutral orbiter. But it cannot just just get itself in, get its own hands dirty and take sides.  Whereas on the on the responsive law side, the Taipei District Court, the first decision that we talked about, it also has its risks. Because when the court gets too deeply into the political questions and political evaluations, especially when the court is summoned to evaluate the causes, the political legitimacy of the of the protesters causes, it may get itself into very, very heated controversy in in the politics. And perhaps to the extent because if you can imagine in the future, Taiwan's future civil disobedience, what kind of causes will they be all interested in, or be engaged, you'd be concerned about, whether it's the nuclear power plant, or, you know, the the importation of American pork, you know, things like that, are the court ready to adjudicate on the legitimacy of these causes? So the at the end of the day, the question of Taiwan court is that whether it should normalize all these civil DCB and make them part of the legal system, or just treat the sunflower movement as an exception and leave it at that and try not to normalize it into democratic politics. I think that at the end of the day, that's the challenge that Taiwan's courts is facing. Okay, so I will I will end up here. Thank you very much. Okay, it's really happy to be back to SOA. I have the last meeting with the SOA student, very wonderful experience, and we talked discuss a lot about my topic. And today, I'm going to talk about the same sex marriage controversy in Taiwan. If you look at the table, table of contents of this book, you'll find this title a little bit bizarre, because what does same sex marriage have anything to do with China or China's influence? But the center central concern of this chapter is about the development of direct democracy in Taiwan. So let me explain this. Okay, first of all, this chapter I through reading the materials and documents of the debate during the advocacy and legislation stage of the Popular Voting Act. I found that the legislative debate of the popular voting in Taiwan had not discussed or consider the populist manipulation of direct democracy, nor the possibility of hurting minority groups. So I found that under the shadow of China, the debate on popular voting has been strongly associated with the political debate about the issue of unification and independence that is told to in Taiwan. So you can guess that K and T will do whatever they take to make the popular voting very difficult or impossible. But DPP will try very hard to make popular voting equal to popular sovereignty and a possible tool to realize people's will to support independence. So under these backdrops, when popular voting become realized by the enactment of Popular Voting Act, you can see that the first version of the PVA was very strict. The threshold of the passage was very high. So people usually mark the PVA as popular voting in the birth cage. The evidence shows that from 2003 to 2018, there were six propositions submitted for the ballot. But only the no one, actually, none of them were successfully passed the threshold. After the sunflower movement, when the Taiwan has very high political strength to political reform, the new power party, they vowed to reform the problematic representative democracy. That is the reason why the sunflower movement took place. So they proposed a bill that lowered the threshold of the PVA to just a simple majority vote and the 25% of the eligible voters as opposed to the previous version as 50%. So after the revision in 2017, the ballot questions become very different from the previous six. In the previous six ballot questions, most of them are about the relationship between Taiwan and China. So there were more partisan oriented and about the unification and independence. But after the revision of the PVA, the ballot question become diversified and more down to people's life and the social issues. So they become less partisan. So seven out of the 16 propositions of the last round took place in 2018, seven of them met the threshold. So they passed the threshold and the government should do something to conform with the result of the ballot outcome. So then let's talk about, move on to the relationship, how the popular voting has anything to do with the same sex marriage. Because in Taiwan, there are social movements, same sex marriage movement pushing forward to the legislation. And also they try the litigation approach to achieve their goal. But the anti same sex marriage camp, they try very hard using the popular voting as their strategy to achieve their agenda. So way before the revision of PVA in 2017, the anti same sex camp had already proposed a proposition to oppose the same sex marriage bill in 2015. But at that time, all the propositions submitted should be reviewed by the national referendum review committee. And the committee rejected the proposal saying that the wording of the proposition was to obscure and to vague. Because right then, there were no same sex marriage law or nor any same sex marriage bill passed in the parliament. So what was their target? It is an empty one. So they rejected the proposal. But in this round of popular voting campaign, the anti same sex marriage camp learned that they can quickly collect the signature and very fast through the churches, through the school network. And they think they showcase their ability to push forward the anti same sex marriage agenda. So they think their political muscles are strong enough to push forward their agenda by popular voting if the PVA was revised. So they became to call themselves the silent majority and they began to adopt the popular voting as their movement strategy. So one of their movement frame, the main frame is let marriage and family matters be decided by the people. So they supported the revision of the PVA from 2016 to 2017. They assert that the popular voting is the best way to allow people to exercise their sovereignty. And they are so very important and controversial social issues should be decided by the people instead of by the the PV, the political elites, they call them political elites. And they also not only opposed the political elite in the parliament, they also opposed these the judicial elites in the Supreme Court or the constitutional court. So before the constitutional court announced that it will review the same sex marriage petition in 2017, the anti same sex marriage groups have already expressed their strong opposition. They don't want the judicial elites to decide the the marriage definition. So they not only contended that the definition of marriage should not be a matter for constitutional court, but also should not be decided by any judiciary because it lacked democratic legitimacy. And they asked the justice to step aside of this this issue and not to side with what they call dominant minority. And they think the minority are bullying the oppressed majority. So as you all know that the the constitutional court ultimately come up made up made the decision we call interpretation number 748. So after right after the ruling was rendered, the same anti same sex group have hold the protest immediately outside of the constitutional court. And right at the press conference, they say that the they are going to initiate a popular voting. And the campaign was will be would be launched right after the announcement. This part of the civil code versus special law debate was a little bit complicated. But let me try to simplify it to just two slides. I would say that the civil code versus special law debate was a very unique feature of Taiwan's same sex debate. And that is when people talk about say about civil code, it means it means the traditional marriage heterosexual marriage. When people talk about special law, what they really mean is that they can give the same sex couple of civil union or domestic partnership other than the traditional marriage. So when we talked about whether we are going to give the same sex couple the marriage, we say that do you support civil code, minfa or drunfa special law. So the other the other movement frame is that same sex couples shall be protected by enacting a special law. So in the anti same sex marriage camp, what they really meant that the special law was that we don't want to give you marriage. We want to keep traditional marriage to to heterosexual couples, but you can get some kind of union or partnership, but don't change the definition of the traditional marriage. But after this slogan was proposed, no special law was ever proposed. That means special law was just an empty words. There was no content of any kind. They didn't want to talk about whether civil union is better or domestic partnership is better for the protection of the same sex couples. They just express their their opinion that don't touch traditional marriage. So I tried to I tried to make this chart to explain the civil code versus special law debate. You can see that actually if you even if you say that we use special law to protect same sex couple, it is still possible to give them marriage, not just alternatives. But if you but when you say I want to protect same sex couple using civil code, it doesn't mean that they they can be protected by marriage. They can also be be provided by alternatives in civil code. So there were ABCD positions for possible positions. But when people talked about civil code versus special law code, special law, what the anti same sex marriage camp means is the position D. That is the special law with alternatives. The form of your relationship is alternatives. But when they when people think about civil code or special law, they could possibly think about ABCD. So when I support special law, it could be I supporting same sex marriage given by special law or alternatives given by special law. So there it is very complicated for people to understand what civil code versus special law mean. So the anti same sex camp, they use this confusion and design to proposition proposition saying the first one, do you agree that marriage, the original proposition was the sentence without the underlying words. So at first, they come up with this proposition 10, do you agree that marriage should be restricted to the union between a man and woman? That is the definition of marriage. And the original one, original proposition 12 is the, do you agree with protecting same sex cobbles rights of permanent cap, cohabitation without the underlying words. But the government said when you propose the pop up the Bella question, you cannot do it violating what the constitutional court has already rendered. It means you should protect equal marriage, the right to equal marriage for same sex couples. So the anti same sex marriage came at the underlying words. So it means do you agree that marriage as defined in the civil code should be restricted to the union between a man and a woman? That means in this one, you have to strike out the position A as possibility and it left BCD for people to choose. That is the first one, the meaning behind the first proposition 10. And together with proposition 12, when the underlying wording was added, it means that BCD should be, if the proposition 12 was passed, it should be restricted to proposition C. It means proposition 12 means that you should protect same sex couples by special law. So the answer can be C or D. But when the anti same sex couple doing their campaign, they keep going to tell people that we are supporting the position D. But actually, position D is a violation of interpretation number 748. That cannot be possible. And they know that, so they changed the wording and added the underlying wording to this. So I would call this the populace design for voters confusion. Our voters didn't really know what they are voting. So when the outcome, the outcome is that 7 million people vote yes to the proposition 10 and 6.4 million vote yes to the proposition 12. But then what? How do the parliament enact a law that conforms both the interpretation number 748 and the result of the population votes? Then proposition C is the only possibility. So our parliament passed a special law to protect same sex marriage. So they conform to demands at the same time. So the DDP whip in the parliament, he said during the review, he said, even a person like me who object the same sex marriage must face the authority of the constitution. He said that justice interpreted the constitution and demanded that we enact a law to allow same sex couples to marry. Do we legislators have any room to negotiate and compromise otherwise? But I will argue that what if the structure of the parliament and also the ruling party is the political structure are very different from what we have at that time? Will they conform with their conform with interpretation number 748, which is the decision of the constitutional court and the constitution said that we should protect people's rights to equal marriage. So how about next time? So I would say this time we have a safe result, but we don't know what will happen next time when during the voting, the popular voting process, the populace manipulation again and again was repeated. So I like to quote Ko Jianmin's this statement. He said that we need to bow to the constitution. No one can stand opposed to the constitution, which is the meaning, one of the meaning of rule of law. So what will be next time? So it concludes my presentation. Thank you. Wow, fantastic. So thanks all three of you for your kind of Brian Freese overview and the two of you for discussing your chapters. I've got a lot of questions, but I know you've got some questions as well. So let me just speak to just a couple of things. One is about the future of doing Hong Kong-Taiwan comparison. This is something that's been raised recently with some of my students about whether that comparison is still valid. Does the Hong Kong issue still really matter when we're looking at Taiwan? Because I think one of the things that comes out from Brian's opening remarks and it's come through in some of my students' research is that things in Hong Kong have changed so much. The place has become almost unrecognizable politically compared to just a couple of years ago. So that was the first question about whether the future will still be doing Hong Kong-Taiwan comparison. And the second question was a way I was trying to link Jimmy and Xiaowei's presentations. Because I was curious about, for Xiaowei's case, if you were trying to apply the framework that Jimmy was using, so would you kind of basically, on a slightly different issue, do you see the courts as being fitting into that responsive category? And has that always been the case post-transition? Because when I was listening to Jimmy's presentation, I was also thinking about change in different presidential terms. Because I was curious, like Jimmy mentioned, that after he had done the paper, he had kind of gone back and done even longer term analysis. And I was kind of thinking, if we, let's say, take this framework back into the Lidonghuai era, where we would fit that framework, as it was making a transition also probably from repressive to autonomous, so there were just a few thoughts. Let me hand over to you before I hand over to the audience. Do you want, I'll go ahead and just answer. Yeah, so that's a great question about whether or not the Hong Kong-Taiwan comparative kind of context is still valid. I mean, yeah, I'd say I would struggle to make it nowadays. I think it's becoming, from everything that we've seen, and I think we're even struggling kind of at the end of the book, to know, as I said, kind of, where do we stop? And also, are these comparisons potentially getting a little bit strained because of where Hong Kong was moving maybe as well? So I think, yeah, I think it's much more difficult to make those Taiwan-Hong comparisons than before. I mean, that being said, though, I mean, you still have UK judges sitting on the Court of Final Appeal, and so you still have some of these elements of kind of the Hong Kong justice system that are still there, right? So you still have some foreign judges on some of these major courts and involved in some of these major trials. So people could say that that's valid, right? That that's legitimizing the Hong Kong justice system. I think so there's kind of two elements. I think kind of politically, maybe those elements would be really strained to make a kind of a straight comparison. But maybe if you're just looking at kind of the legal operation of things and kind of the justice system, maybe those are more manageable to make. But yeah, I think you're right. It's getting really strained and I find it difficult to make that comparison nowadays. But I'd be interested to see what Jimmy and Shawei think as well. Shawei, should you go first? Okay, just a quick response to the question about the constitutional court. I would say this one, this term of the constitutional justice, they are really responsive court, because I think they consider themselves a social reformer. So if you can observe what the decision they have made in this term, there are the decriminalization of adultery. There are some about the transitional justice. Yeah. And also the biggest one is considered the same sex marriage. And when the proposition 10 and 12 were submitted by this anti-Sem sex camp, the chief justice may release a press conference and reiterate again that the decision of the constitutional court should be obeyed by people and also by the government. So they are very active and try to persuade people that you cannot. It is impossible to overrule or override the constitutional court decision just by popular voting. Thank you. I agree with Shawei that the current term of constitutional court is quite responsive. And my chapter actually brings up an interesting dimension of studying into Taiwan's judiciary, because a constitutional court is definitely something very special in the whole judicial system compared to ordinary courts. And one thing we have to bear in mind, comparing the same sex marriage case and all the civil disobedience cases, that the same sex marriage case is directly involving basic rights. There are specific people being influenced by such decisions. So it gives the constitutional court a great legitimacy of stepping in and make a decision on whether to be responsible or not. But consider Sunflower Movement. It's about the future, the future of Taiwan's democracy. It's not directly concerning particular person's basic rights. So it's a very, very broad sweeping political controversy. And you can have very strong opinions about it. People can have very strong opinion about it. So the ordinary courts, they do not have that hive of a status as the constitutional court. So the ordinary court has been confused and they are trying, experimenting different ways of responding to this. And I think it's very interesting to see how they do so. And talking about the long term observation, I think I will have to do more study. But from the decade that I looked into, it's obvious that before 2008, the Taiwan's court was in an era when they were transforming from being repressive to autonomous. And by doing that transformation, the court is growing more and more lenient on these protesters, even though they might still find them guilty. But after Mainzhou was elected, especially the second term of Mainzhou, Mainzhou's presidency, you can see that it's very interesting because Mainzhou's presidency has been contested by Taiwan's civil society to the extent that they associate the Mainzhou's agenda as selling Taiwan to China or it is a comeback of the authoritarian KMT. These claims may be controversial and may be overblown to some extent. But that kind of association, the imaginative association, gives the protesters and also a certain portion of the Taiwan's legal professionals a very strong claim to undermine the government's any kind of severe response. So the courts are motivated to try to find ways not just to be lenient, but actually find ways to find them not guilty. And what's interesting is that it is actually bringing pressure on the idea of rule of law. Because I have been invited by the Supreme Court to offer my expert opinion on the Sunfire case. And I do see that a lot of people, especially the prosecutors, the prosecutors are very confused of what they are seeing right now because isn't it law that we have been enforcing? And isn't the law, shouldn't the law be stable and consistent across the board? And everybody enjoys the same access and also the same equal liberties under the law. And why do you, civil disobedience, why do you protesters expect to be treated any different than any other lawbreakers, even though we might, we support giving you lenient sentence. But why do you find yourself so legitimate in claiming that you should be found not guilty? So I find the prosecutors very confused. So now we are in the situation of just whether we, the court, I think the court is also considering just whether we should leave the sunflower movement, consider it as an exceptional stage of Taiwanese democratic development. Just leave it at that. Let's go back to normal. Or we should just normalize what they do and put it into an integral, treated as an integral part of the rule of law. And make the rule of law more elastic, more responsive to those claims of the protesters. I think it's a very tricky situation that Taiwan's courts is facing.


We've heard during the previous very interesting session how innovation has been driving in the semiconductor industry. We'll try to focus in this one on how innovation can also help on climate. So following the COP 27 Paris Agreement, countries now representing about 90% of world GDP have pledged to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050. Carbon is also very high on all corporate boards agenda, following pressure from investors, but also customers, and increasingly stringent regulation. More and more corporates are publicly stating their targets to net zero and are actively working on their decarbonisation plans, which, by the way, very often translates into investments to modernise their industrial estates. But actively reducing the CO2 emission will not suffice. A gap estimated to 10 gigatons of CO2 per year is estimated that will have to be removed from the atmosphere, moving forward via nature-based solutions like reforestation or via technology-based solutions, namely carbon capture and sequestration solutions. As a result, energy transition and decarbonisation require massive investments. And as outlined and stressed by IMF recently, there is so much that public budgets can fund on this front. So many countries, like Canada, Sweden or Singapore, have been imposing attacks on carbon emissions. And to foster proper behaviours, systems like emission-trading schemes are implemented in regions like Europe, whereby corporates are allocated based on their carbon intensity a given number of free quotas per year and overperformance can trade them on an exchange. The voluntary carbon market comes on top of these mandatory schemes or compliance markets. Issued on the back of carbon avoidance or removal projects, the carbon credits are purchased by corporates eager to accelerate their path to net zero. So they are a way to channel and fund projects and project developers that otherwise would be very hardly bankable under traditional project financing criteria. So some refer to carbon credits as to the currency of decarbonisation or the net of net zero. A few weeks ahead of COP28, this session is aimed at providing a little colour around the voluntary carbon market value chain. And it is my pleasure to host today the panellists representing innovative start-up solutions starting with Mariam Almansoori, general manager of Rebound. Sam Atwood, founder and CEO of Air Capture. Christine Inge-Larrison, head of CapFix business development and commercialisation. On Visio, we have Sam Gill, co-founder and CEO of Silvera. And we will start now with a video interview of Annette Nazaret, who is the chair of the board of the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Markets, actively working on the foundations, foundational principles of this market, which by nature is totally bottom-up and today unregulated. Let's listen to Annette Nazaret. It is my pleasure to open this panel about how can carbon credits contribute to net zero at the 2023 World Policy Conference with you today, Annette Nazaret. You are chairing the board of the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Markets. What would you say are the main challenges of the Voluntary Carbon Markets right now? And how is the Integrity Council role in that context? Well, first, thank you so much for inviting me to speak with you today. I'll speak of the challenges first. I'm very excited about the possibility, so I'll get the challenges out of the way. I think it's very, very clear that we have an enormous challenge in fighting climate change. We have a shared goal that really transcends markets, sectors, portfolios, and geographies. This is a critical moment in our history. And so the scale and urgency of the crisis really demands that we use every available tool. And as you know, we have emissions reductions as a centerpiece of this. And that is entirely appropriate. Decarbonization by corporates of their own operations and supply chains must be a priority. But unfortunately, it's too late now just to rely solely on corporate internal emissions reductions or even government action. And that's where the voluntary carbon market comes in. We have to accelerate our transition to net zero by using every tool in the toolbox. It's as UN Secretary General Guterres has said recently, we need everything everywhere and all at once. And so the voluntary carbon market can be a really important solution. But, and we're very, very focused on this, only if it is rooted in high integrity. It holds the power to unlock urgently needed finance that would not otherwise occur and or otherwise be available for projects without voluntary carbon credits. And to quantify the opportunity, the World Economic Forum has projected that the voluntary carbon market could remove 2.6 gigatons of CO2 by 2030. And Morgan Stanley projects that it could reach almost a hundred billion in volume by 2030. So the integrity council for the voluntary carbon market is an independent governance body committed to establishing high integrity voluntary carbon markets that can deliver real impact at speed and scale. And as I said earlier, it has the power to unlock private capital for projects to reduce and remove billions of tons of emissions that would not otherwise be viable. The other exciting thing is that it can channel funding to countries in the global south and help develop vibrant green economies. And it will support sustainable development goals by requiring all new projects to make a positive contribution to sustainable development as well as having robust measures to protect people and the environment. But we know that today it's a relatively nascent market. It's unregulated. And if it's to scale and to live and to deliver on its climate goals, we need to address some of the critical issues that have arisen. So today the quality of credits in the market is at best inconsistent. Trading is fragmented and opaque and not all carbon crediting programs impose consistent high quality standards. So ultimately it's fair to say that the voluntary carbon market today doesn't consistently meet the expectations of purchasers or the urgent needs of our planet. And this is a significant problem that limits the full potential to meet our climate goals. So we think we need to address a number of things. One is certainly standardization. Carbon crediting programs each have their own methodologies. They have differing rules of engagement and highly bespoke transactions that don't provide an environment for liquidity and transparency. Indeed, they create challenging market impediments. So we've created a global benchmark for high integrity carbon credits. The integrity council recently published the CCP's. Could you give us more color about the CCP's? Sure, I'd be happy to talk about the CCP's and importantly how they underpin integrity. There are 10 core carbon principles and they fall into three categories. Those that relate to emissions impact, to governance and to sustainability. You know, it's really important that buyers have confidence that carbon credits are making genuine impacts on emissions. Carbon credits must fund reductions or removals that are additional, meaning that they would not have occurred in the absence of the incentive created by the carbon credit revenues. They have to be permanent. They have to be measured robustly and conservatively and they can only be claimed by one party, which means there's no double counting of the credit. Programs that issue the credits also must meet high standards of governance to ensure that the overall quality of carbon credits is high. They have to provide comprehensive and transparent information on the projects, issuing the credits so that people understand their impact on emissions, society and the environment. They have to use a registry that uniquely identifies and tracks each credit from issuance to retirement or cancellation. And they have emissions reductions or removals verified by independent third party experts. And importantly, the CCPs also break new ground by requiring programs to ensure that high integrity credits come from projects with robust social and environmental safeguards that also deliver positive sustainable development impacts. That is, they make sustainable development a central part of the mitigation activity, not just a co-benefit. They must also support the transition to net zero and not lock in fossil fuel emissions or technologies. So in July, we published our CCP rule book, which sets out the rigorous criteria we use to assess whether programs and categories of credits meet our high integrity threshold. Programs that we approve will be able to use the CCP label on credits, provided they have come from categories that we have also approved. So what do you see also on the corporate side, right? On the demand side, what do you see on the critical path to improve the voluntary carbon market? Well, on the corporate side, it's important not only that we offer a supply of very high integrity carbon credits, but that corporates are using carbon credits appropriately. And so the demand side of the equation is also critically important. And we're working very closely with what we call our sister organization, the voluntary carbon markets integrity initiative. And VCMI is focused on the appropriate use of credits. So basically at the integrity council, we're focused on the supply of credits and also on the ensuring that they, the markets on which they trade are high integrity. And of course we're looking at market mechanisms such as transparency and trade reporting and settlement issues. But VCMI is then focused on the demand side. So we like to say that together we are creating end to end integrity in the voluntary carbon market. No, that's important because that's working from supply to demand. So when looking forward, what would success look like for the integrity council? How will you measure it? Well, of course, we're very interested in seeing the market scale up. As I've said, we don't want to scale the market unless it is rooted in high integrity. But we believe that there's enormous potential. And so, and in fact, we know that there's demand for high integrity products. And thus we expect them to trade at a premium. And trading at a premium of course would create powerful incentives for project developers to enhance their practices to come in line with our core carbon principles. And we expect the CCP's to drive continual improvement in the quality and impact of carbon reduction projects ensuring that the market's contribution to emissions reduction aligns with the urgency of the climate crisis. I think the CCP's will also establish standardized criteria that will drive a shift towards increased transparency but also exchange based trading. Because when we have greater standardization, I believe a larger proportion of carbon credit trading will transition from what we have today, which is uniformly bilateral agreements to transactions conducted through exchanges. And this transition would not only enhance market efficiency but will also provide a platform for buyers and sellers to engage in transparent and fair pricing which would drive broader market participation and liquidity. I mean, I should note when we talk about standardization, I've often been asked, well, what are the CCP's to some extent, what can you analogize to that I understand? And I like to say that the CCP's are akin to listing standards. It's as if we've imposed traditional regulatory principles onto the voluntary carbon market. So if you think of these CCP's as listing standards, the other element of them is that they also require not just a focus on essentially self-regulation of the product by the listing standards but also self-regulation of the programs that issue the credits. And so bringing those principles to the market, I believe will create greater confidence in the market just as we have confidence in other high integrity, robust capital markets. And that's what we're seeking. We're seeking confidence, justifiable confidence based on high integrity. Frankly, we also expect robust trading of futures on voluntary carbon markets as the markets become more standardized. And that I think will create very important price signal because it will improve hedging mechanisms for market participants. It will provide important price signals. It'll also give project developers better ability to manage their exposure to price risk. And this I think will make it less risky to launch new projects, again, particularly in the global South. So by implementing the core carbon principles and encouraging market participants to embrace these high integrity credits, we're creating an ecosystem where the value of emissions reductions are appropriately recognized and rewarded. And this will unlock, I believe, greater capital flows and drive innovation and catalyze the development and deployment of truly impactful climate solutions. Thank you, Annette. This is really very insightful and no doubt. We're looking forward to the success of this entire ecosystem effort because that's what we're talking about for the benefit of, of course, climate change and in general, mankind. Thank you very much for your participation. It's been a pleasure. Thank you. Bye-bye. Okay, so now let's move to pragmatic examples of carbon capture and sequestration solutions and we'll start with you, Matt. Thank you for having made the trip out of the US to be with us today. So you have founded and you are the CEO of Air Capture. A nice name, by the way, for a carbon capture solution. Can you tell us what the solution is about? Yeah, I'm happy to. Thank you first very much for having us here today. So Air Capture is a company that develops direct air capture technology. And what we do is we build machines that have a fan and the fan pulls air through the machine and the CO2 carbon dioxide from the air is collected on the surface of substrates that are inside the fan. In about 15 minutes, we collect all the CO2 and then we inject heat in the form of typically waste steam or low temperature steam that releases the CO2 from the contactor surface which we then collect and try to do something useful with. But we're selling the CO2 into various different markets and converting it into different products such as fuels, beverage carbonation, agriculture. Interesting. And Matt, so at what stage are you in development of the solution and how fast can you bring it to industrial scale? That's a great question. So at present, what we are doing is we're commercializing the technology. So we've built several commercial machines based on a large scale development platform and we're working on selling the CO2 into a variety of different markets. What I like to say is that the world's economy runs on carbon. Carbon is in all the products that we use and many of the products that run the global economy. So we're primarily working in beverage carbonation. We're producing dry ice for the cold chain. CO2 is used very predominantly in agricultural purposes. We have projects converting CO2 into chemicals and fertilizers, plastics, even battery materials for the energy transition and fuels and energy products. Wonderful. So thank you. We'll come back to you in a moment. I'd like now to move to Christine. Christine, with Carfix, you're downstream in the value chain compared to carbon capture. So what is Carfix about? So thank you for inviting me over here.  So with that in mind, our mission is to significantly contribute in the climate recovery by continuously innovating by ways of improving how we can actually store CO2 by mineralization. How we do that, I'm drinking here Pellegrino sparkling water. So what we do, we simply dissolve CO2 just like this and we inject it into the ground where it starts to mineralize into the bedrock itself. So we are not injecting gases, we are injecting sparkling water that has the ability, mother nature's ability to mineralize into the bedrock. So if you move to the next slide please, just as a simple chemical components in the bedrock itself, in our case, we need three ingredients. First, we need CO2. The second, we need basaltic rock. And the third, we need water. What we do here, we dissolve the CO2 in water and then we gently inject it into the bedrock. Once it reaches the bedrock at a very, very low depth, somewhere around an average 500 meters, it starts to mineralize. So the catonic ions in the bedrock itself, they get released and the mineralization process takes place. The easiest way to explain it is that the water is the means of transport. So we can say that the water is the train and the CO2 is the passenger. And once the train reaches the bedrock, the CO2 jumps off the train and the water carries on. So we are borrowing the water for a few, few minutes but the mineralization, this happens in less than two years instead of what usually happens in millions of years and this is a permanent solution. That's impressive. So first of all, congratulations in the previous slide. We've seen that CapFix has made the cover page of National Geographic Recent Issue. This is great. And also recently you've signed an important contract with the European Union to sequestrate carbon in Iceland. Does it mean that CapFix can only operate in Iceland? No, Iceland is, we are an Icelandic company.  So originally, CapFix was a research project between three universities. US, Columbia University, New York, Iceland, University of Iceland and CNRS of the Toulouse in France with the ambition of replicating modern nature's way. This is based upon Persat. Persat is not only limited to Iceland. It covers approximately 5% of all land on earth but approximately 70%, 70% of the ocean floor. So it definitely is not limited to Iceland but Iceland is the origin of the research project and the company so we are now exploring the globe as we can say. Okay, world well ambition then, wonderful. Well, we have, it's not a problem that's limited to UAE, US, Japan or Iceland. It's a global problem. So we have to address it like that. Absolutely. So carbon capture, sequestration, you are so-called in the value chain project developers. Let's now turn to the third party assessor with Silvera. So Sam, Sam Gill is co-founder and CEO of Silvera. We've heard from Annette Nazaret how the principles are important to set the basis for proper qualification of projects from a carbon credit emissions standpoint. So Sam, with Silvera, what's the role of a third party? How would you feature your role in the value chain? Thank you so much. So yeah, just to introduce Silvera and maybe we move on to the next slide. Silvera is a company that's providing data to the whole private sector but also the public sector to try and power the transition. So giving data that's actually showing the impacts and the climate impacts of various investments that are made by the public sector or the private sector. And so when we're working in the carbon markets, what we're trying to do is empower participants with data to show the real kind of impact of any projects that they're investing in. And what we produce is essentially a ratings product showing the relative quality of each carbon offset project. So the individual project that a corporate or a public sector participant might be investing in. And so the difference there when you compare our work with the ICVCM is as Annette says, essentially the ICVCM is trying to produce listing standards. So almost a quality floor. And the ICVCM is applying those CCPs at the program the crediting program and the methodology level. Whereas what we do is we actually assess at the project level using very similar pillars of assessment. So for example, our ratings actually assess the CCPs that relate to climate integrity, but we're doing that at a project level. And so the three key pillars of quality that we look at are the carbon performance of the project. So assessing the carbon accounting that the project produces itself. So if it was, for example, a direct air capture project, we'd be looking at the life cycle analysis of the project, looking at the displacement effects of the power consumption. Or if, for example, we were looking at forestry protection project, we'd be assessing using our own machine learning and satellite data. We'd be assessing whether the reporting that the project produces accurate. So looking at how has the project actually protected the amount of trees that it's claimed, how much carbon is stored in those trees, how much carbon is stored in the soil around it. And so we're essentially using an independent technological stack to assess the claims of the project. The second thing we do is we look at the additionality of the project. So looking at the counterfactual the project's based on. And again, assessing at the project level whether the methodology has been assessed and applied in an appropriate way or whether there's been an over-crediting risk that's been introduced. And then the third thing we look at is the durability of these projects. So essentially what we're doing again is using a methodology or technology stack to assess independently the claims of the project at the project level so that we can give with a high degree of accuracy in assessment of the quality of each individual project. So it's a very complimentary approach to the methodology level assessments that are being applied by the ICBCM, yeah. Yeah, great. And definitely your bridging corporate demand to the project level. So we've heard efforts on the ICBCM front. What would you see as the key factors for boosting the voluntary carbon market moving forward given your position in the value chain, Sam? That's a really interesting question. In many ways, that's the million-dollar question. I think, you know, I spend a lot of time with C-suite executives in the private sector but also policymakers around the globe who are kind of wrestling with this. And I think, you know, and that really helpfully split the problem into two sides. You've got the supply side quality problem and then you've got the demand side integrity problem. On the supply side, I think we're very close to getting to an answer. The data sort of approaches that are being applied by folks like ourselves, Silvera and others are allowing us to get to with quite a high degree of accuracy and granularity and assessment of the quality of any individual project. And we're also increasingly strengthening the methodologies that they use to produce these credits. But I think what the world needs to agree on is what is the paradigm that we're working to? We're not going to be able to get to absolute 100% a certainty on the accounting around any of these projects, frankly. And we also need to come to a clear paradigm around the permanence or durability requirements that we're going to ask the market to meet. So for example, if we were all to agree that if, you know, a carbon credit needs to be stored storing carbon for 100 years, for example, to be acceptable, that would allow the market to start engineering, for example, horizontal or vertical stacking approaches to allow different types of carbon to be used in portfolios. And it would allow us to start regularizing and standardizing the market. But at the moment, there's no clear consensus there on what the actual quality paradigm we're working towards is. So I think there needs to be a clear accepted consensus around the quality paradigm we're working towards. And then on the flip side, Annette refers to the work of the VCMI, which is the demand side integrity body. But again, what is needed is a much wider consensus around what are we asking corporates to do in terms of compensation? So where they're not able to reduce their emissions to absolute zero, what are we asking them to do? What do they get to claim if they compensate their emissions with carbon credits? And what benefit will they actually receive for that? Are they going to get tax breaks? Are they going to get preferential treatment in the capital markets? Are they going to be rewarded in some way? Because the private sector can't act as a charity. So I think that those consensus on the supply side integrity and the demand side integrity paradigms are completely necessary to allow the markets in our move forward and scale. Clearly, a typical market dynamic between supply and demand. So thank you, that's insightful, Sam. I'd like now to move to another area, which is important for climate in general. And Mariam, you're leading a rebound, which is an exchange for recycled plastic. Clearly, the overwhelming development of plastic production is deeply contributing to CO2 emission, but also is a massive waste issue for the planet and pollution is also bad for our health. So how is rebound helping on that front? So first of all, good morning, everyone. And it's my pleasure to be between all of you here today. Regarding rebound, what we want to solve is the plastic pollution problem. And given that virgin plastics is a valuable commodity, we believe that recycled plastics is just as equivalent. There is no scientifically and environmentally proven, as well as economically proven material that can substitute plastics today, mainly because it's a very versatile and useful material. Now, while there are certain types of plastics and additives and chemicals that need to be, let's say, deleted from the chain, there are many other precious types of plastics, which can be recycled and have a market for it. However, just like carbon markets, the recycling market of plastics specifically is very opaque and fragmented. So how do we build trust and transparency today between businesses, directly between buyers and sellers, globally around the world, to be able to facilitate the trade of recycled plastics in a quality assured and regulatory compliant manner? So that's exactly what we do and what we address. And of course, no better way to reach a global audience in a global market than through a platform. That's where digitalization comes in. That's where marketplaces come in. And that's where, I believe, a neutral facilitator such as ourselves helps facilitate this trade in a way where the private sector fulfills demand and supply gaps, but also the public sector is comfortable in the type of non-hazardous materials we're creating a market for. Wonderful, and by the way, you are the only Gulf startup having been awarded the label Tech Pioneer by the World Economic Forum earlier in the year. So congratulations. That's awesome. So definitely plastic waste collection and recycling comes with a cost. And this is very important. And this is why some are promoting the notion of extended producers' responsibility and also the notion of plastic credits to make the value chain affordable. So what's your view on that? So definitely, the recycling plastics market today faces a challenge of, you know, typically this is an economy and I have a background in finance. So, you know, I need to look for the dollar sign and when I started Rebound, I came to understand why there's a pollution problem because financially companies won't pay more to introduce recycled plastics in their finished product if the virgin plastic is cheaper. And we cannot just sit and wait for regulations to kick in and policies to enforce because how much can law enforce at the end of the day when it is applicable in one region but not applicable in the other? I also come from a government and policy background having worked for the cabinet of ministers. So I am aware of what, up to what can the public sector kind of lay on the ground but then how will the private sector start to react? So when it comes to credits in the plastics recycling space, it's important to offset that barter and negotiation price that buyers want to drive down. For instance, if today virgin PET is being sold at around $900 a ton, recycled PET is being sold at around $1,100 or $1,200 per ton. So that roughly $300 difference, the seller of the recycled plastics cannot drive the price as low as $900 because that means that they'll be operating at a loss and unfortunately that's why a lot of recyclers cannot stay in business. The opportunity that credits present here is that it's an alternative revenue model. So instead of just benefiting from selling off the tangible material, they can also benefit from selling the credits that are generated. And while some people might push for extended producer responsibility only on the producer side or pointing the finger at just one entity or one company will not help solve the pollution crisis, it's that entire value chain and stakeholder value chains including governments and municipalities that will help capture this material being separated at source, generate that collection credit, beyond that moving it to an ethically responsible and environmentally capable company which can recycle these plastics and then put it back into the market such as our marketplace where the buyer and seller can deal directly and there's that ultimate level of transparency when it comes to quality too. Interesting and clearly we see that solutions exist and technology is already here that can be used. The question is how fast can we deploy and how fast can we enforce adoption? So funding is on the critical path and affordability of these investments is also, plastic is also a perfect example. So Christine, it looks to me that the carpet solution of carbon sequestration into soil is pretty universal, right? You're talking about that there is a large component of oceans where we can apply this solution as an example. So can it be used also at point source solution and how is your solution is also in my view eligible to both compliance markets and voluntary carbon markets? So a dual source of financing. So what will it take to enforce wide adoption of your solution in particular? Yeah, very good question. I don't have the silver bullet, I mean the magic answer here, but in regards to how we are approaching things, yes, this solution that we are offering, we're not saying it is a silver bullet, but as was mentioned before by Annette, we need all the solutions. This solution can be applied on the voluntary market, yes, and it can also be applied on the mandatory market. If you look at my closest examples are European market, you have a trading scheme, ETS, where you have the government that has the stick on the companies. If you don't do this, you have to pay a certain tax or pay a certain fine. However, in the US, you're looking the carrot, where if you do this, you will be incentivized. So it doesn't really matter which method it is, and it will most likely be a combination of posts. You mentioned before, yes, we have had the privilege of starting this research in 2006. We incorporated the company three and a half years ago with the ambition to scale up and commercialize. We did receive a huge grant from the European Commission earlier last year, about 115 million euros to build the world's largest mineral storage site, which will be done in Iceland. So it is a combination of subsidizing or grants, but at the same time, the uniqueness of the Garfis technology, it is already economical. Just if you look at the entire value chain that we have two commercial operations in Iceland, the capturing, the transport, and the actual mineralization or the storage by mineralization is less than $25 per tonne. That's a very, very low number, but at the same time, it's a totally different aspect than others have. We need all the technologies. This is one of them, and our main objective is now to scale up on a global basis, and let's say be available, because we don't have time. Definitely we don't have time. That's also a question for you. The air capture solution is a deep engineering solution, so certainly it's capital intensive to develop long cycles. And how do you match these long cycles with the financing available on the market? Is it easy? And how do you see affordability moving forward? In other words, how costly is it for companies to remove carbon? How do you see your solution addressing this in a cost affordable way? That's a great question. I mean, I think it comes down to initially the question between avoidance and permanence. One pathway is to avoid carbon emissions, but that could also be counted as taking post-combustion emissions and sequestering them. A permanent removal is different. So what we're focused on is permanent removal of CO2 from the atmosphere by capturing the CO2 and then trying to do something useful with it. When you come to the question of scale and timeframe, this I think really focuses on us very much on our thesis, which is solve for scale. If we take a look at the latest IPCC's AR6 report and we look at the required time frames that are necessary in order to avoid two degrees of warming and we take a look at how much capacity addition of negative carbon infrastructure technology is required to have a reasonable confidence interval of avoiding the worst existential threats of climate change, it is quite significant. We're talking about needing to scale this technology to the point where we're at about 1.5 to 1.8 gigatons of new capacity year over year by 2045 and that's only to have about a 90% confidence interval of avoiding two degrees of warming. And I'll say here now that 1.5 degrees, avoiding 1.5 degrees is totally impossible. We will not achieve that goal. So our focus is how can we develop and scale technology as quickly as possible and get that technology to work and get on the learning curve. So we're focused on kind of two pathways. One is direct CO2 capture disequestration or working with injection sites like Carbfix is doing and we're developing projects in the US here in the UAE and in Oman where we're capturing CO2 from there and injecting it but these are long tail projects that are high capital intensity and require specifically offtake agreements for the carbon credits and the tenor of those offtake agreements has to match what it would require to finance those projects, that's a big problem. Right now in the market, especially within the VCM space, those offtakes are not necessarily bankable and we have to find a way to convert those carbon credit offtakes or bilateral agreements into scalable project financing and to move into that project financing as quickly as possible to get on the learning curve as quickly as possible. So I think the other side of the coin is where I see this technology having huge impact is in industrial decarbonization. Corporates can choose to inset this technology within their value chain and use the carbon dioxide directly within their products or to convert it into other products and this in many cases has a larger impact than even in permanent removal or storage because the carbon intensity of the incumbent CO2 supply is oftentimes two, three or four times the amount that's consumed. So one of the things that I think is challenging is as we move forward to the VCM and we think about how do we create new standards, new practices, and carbon principles, it makes a lot of sense on the nature-based side but as we develop new engineering and hard tech solutions and as we figure out how to deploy these solutions and get them financeable, we have to be careful not to box ourselves in too much. So issues around the question of permanence is a major issue because there are certainly examples where this technology can be used to offset existing emissions and it will have a bigger impact than taking that same molecule of CO2 and putting it into the ground. It may have a three to one or a five to one impact but that still wouldn't meet the permanence requirement. And then the question of additionality is very important because it is not necessarily, it should not necessarily be the case that a project requires, the project economics requires there to be a carbon market offtake in order to finance this infrastructure. That does two things. One is it makes the projects much harder to finance and less bankable. And two is it slows down the scale of adoption and the scale of adoption is I think the most critical part of getting the costs down, particularly as it relates to CDR technologies. Wright's law says if we double capacity, every doubling of capacity, we get about a 15 to 20% reduction in costs. So you can pick a random number right now in terms of how much it might cost to pull CO2 out of the air, call it $600 or $500 a ton. And you could say after about 60 plants that one builds, you could be well down the cost curve of well under $100 a ton, which we think is well within target of the technology we're developing. The question becomes how do you deploy that technology as rapidly as possible, get on that cost curve, but do it in a way that's financeable and bankable so that we can get to scale quickly? Definitely corporate adoption for their own industrial usage. And we see that both these solutions could be dual track, right? Both on reduction, avoidance and removal. It's either way to channel more funding. And this is absolutely needed to accelerate pace and wide adoption. So this is very insightful. Thank you. Maybe we have a couple of questions, a couple of minutes for questions if there are in the rooms before we break for lunch. Is there a micro? Yes, yes. Well, Friedpett Flueger from Berlin. I just want to say this was a fascinating debate. I learned a lot. And my question is to Mariam. We have the COP in front of us before us. So aren't these topics important enough to be placed in the very height of the COP agenda? I mean, we heard yesterday, Mr. Fabius, Mr. Fabius talking all the time about renewables, which of course we all know is very important. But the potential of getting CO2 out of the atmosphere or store it underground is so tremendous that we perhaps should put a stronger emphasis on CCS and carbon capture use in the COP process. And that would be fantastic if your country could pave the way for that. Of course, thank you so much. And as per what I'm aware of within the COP28 team, I do know that carbon is a very prominent topic. I think it's going to have the major focus of the conversations which would be driven. Given also the space of business that I'm in, I'm aware that a lot of carbon capture technologies, trades of carbon credits and exchanges are going to be coming soon. So I commend the COP28 team ahead of time, but I'm sure we'll all be happy and satisfied with the results once COP is over in Dubai. So, inshallah, more positive news soon. Sorry, additional question. Matt made this suggestion of financing startups in the direct air capture field, for instance. Isn't that also something where you should engage? We heard Mrs. Al-Mahiri yesterday saying that you want to put an emphasis on financing tools. So I think this is a wonderful idea of Matt, and if that could be part of the agenda of COP, it would be a tremendous success. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, so those are all very exciting solutions. The question is how do you scale them and what percentage of the overall problem do you think you could solve, you know, each of you in your different areas, of course? I can start. So from COP's point of view, we are commercial, so we are operating two projects in Iceland. The third one is about to start next year. The matter for the technology, it's not, we are replicating exactly how we're doing things. So it's a matter of injection wells. So it's a matter of finding the right subsurface, let's say the right geology. The cost for us is already there, the cost benefit. It's about policy. It's about regulations in each country, in each state. They are different. I mentioned before, I cannot emphasise timing is something we don't have, we don't have time. So coming here and educating people about the possibilities, that's the most important, but policy is the biggest obstacle, absolutely. Matt, on your view? I would second that notion, but I would also add that really I think project finance is at the core of the scalability issue. It provides two functions. First is the project development itself. So figuring out how we can make these projects bankable and scalable, independent of what the costs of the removal is or the product is at this point in time is on the critical path. Because as we scale the technology, even in the earliest stages and highest cost, highest risk of the technology, we are still able to beat the incumbent industrial gas or fuel companies on price parity by pulling CO2 out of the air and making the exact same product. That's without counting carbon credits or things like this. So if we can start banking these projects and scaling it, that will then enable us to start scaling the manufacturability of the facilities. And getting manufacturing up is what we're focusing on right now. So our vision is that these machines should be built like cars are built today. And how do we get from here to there? Once we achieve the automobile scale of manufacturing, our analysis is you ask a question about what size the problem could itself. If we made enough direct air capture machines that are roughly equivalent to the total number of automobiles manufactured per year today, that would solve 100% of the problem. Now, of course, direct air capture is not going to be 100% of the problem. And there's a question of the solution. And there's a question of energy cost and capital cost and all these things. But if we look at it as an infrastructural investment, we have to keep in mind that these negative carbon technologies are additive over the lifetime of the project. It's very different than renewables where you build a wind or solar plant and it doesn't produce carbon. Every year over the 20, 30 year lifetime of these assets, these are removing carbon dioxide. And so I think we have to take a different approach and a different policy approach to thinking about how we can backstop these financings, how we can provide technology performance guarantees and how we can provide credit worthy offtake agreements that are bankable. Wonderful. Any other question yet? Thank you very much. I'm Randy Quartier. I'm the head of the regional economic service in the south of France. So I'm also going to advertise for my country. We're investing a lot in carbon capturing so reach out if you want to invest in France. My question is, Christian, you mentioned $25 per ton. Matt, you mentioned something like 500, 600. Can you give us a ballpark estimate of where the industry is right now in terms of cost per ton captured and how far down the line can we go on that cost optimization that you mentioned as well? Thank you very much. I will start from. So we're looking at, I mean, we support one another. So Matt is starting by catching, I'm taking, and then getting rid of it. So together, we jointly do this. So from the storage part, this is a public paper we have published, so there's no secrets there. And transparency is of course very important here. So we do have our proprietary capturing technology to capture using water scrubber. That cost is approximately $20 per ton. But that's using a type taking directly from geothermal steam. We transport it and then we inject it into the ground. So the rest of the cost is less than $5. But this is a scenario in Iceland. So we are working on this large project we call the CODOTerminal, which is 3 million tons will be mineralized every year. Transported from mainland Europe to Iceland in a liquid form. The cost there will probably be, I would say, around a minimum 25 euros per ton. That is just for the storage part. But this is a first of a kind. So by scaling up and by, you know, having it closer to the source, the cost will be lower, just like it is in Iceland. The cost associated with Director Cap from kind of where we can get to, we're well on the target of getting below $100 a ton of CO2 captured from the air. But pulling CO2 out of the air, it's like, pardon my part of the way I'm speaking, but so what, who cares? That's not useful. CO2 has to be a liquid or a high grade liquid or a supercritical fluid. So we have to integrate systems in order to get the CO2 to a saleable form or to an injectable form. And that requires putting more systems together and that requires additional energy costs and additional capital costs. So when you break down what the overall costs of atmospheric CO2 removal via direct air capture is, today there are some companies that have published results of where there are at. And it typically ranges in the $600 to $800 per ton range. But this cost is heavily dependent upon the cost of energy. So as we scale up manufacturing and cost down the technology, we see no way what a capital cost contribution of the technology over a 10 or 20 year amortized project lifecycle can't be in the 20 to 30 to $40 per ton range. And then if you take the energy costs associated with moving, we have to move 3,000 tons of air for every one ton of CO2 that can recapture. So if you take the energy costs required to do that and to convert the CO2 into a saleable product, we can estimate that that's about 1,000 kilowatts per ton of CO2. So at 10 cents per kilowatt hour, that's 100 bucks. So we are well within the range, even at market priced power that's retail priced power to be in the $100 a ton range over time. But that assumes that we take good progression along the learning curve. And so the question becomes, how do we iterate on that as rapidly as possible? But I see no technological reason why we can't achieve $100 a ton direct air capture within the next five or 10 years. We take that as a promise. And I believe with this, yes, Matt, it's on stage. So I think we'll close the panel because it's time for lunch. We thank you for your attention and I thank all the panelists. And Sam, thank you for having made the time very early. London time to be with us in Visio. And thanks again and have a nice lunch.