It's my exciting duty today to introduce our speakers, Alicia Seiger and Tom Heller, who currently run the Sustainable Finance Initiative here, the newest initiative in the Precourt Institute, newest four. I've known both of them for a long time, and I know they've been struggling as many of us have with why are we going so slowly in climate change policy, and they both kind of through different routes, Alicia's an MBA, Stanford MBA and has worked at the law school and the business school on sustainable finance over the years, Tom's an old school, old school, old time law professor who took a sojourn for 11 years and stood up the Climate Policy Initiative up in San Francisco, so he was gone for 11 years and now he's been back for two years probably to run the Sustainable Finance Initiative. I think they both came to the conclusion, which people like me who tried to do climate policy somewhat uninfluentially that maybe one of the biggest constraints on that was climate finance, meaning getting the money to make the investments that people like me who do the modeling and people who kivots about climate policy and don't necessarily actually make the investments, the money people. So I was thinking about this, it's kind of like the old Clinton campaign speech, it's the money stupid, so maybe in climate policy it's the financing, I wouldn't say stupid to anybody, but I think they wouldn't either. But this is kind of the big, in my mind, over the last 35 years the big truly new thing. Now they've been both working on this for a decade or more, probably more than a decade, a decade to two decade, just slowly coming to this conclusion that finance is maybe the biggest constraint and there are many opportunities under the constraints that you do see, so they're gonna do a talk with a somewhat catchy title, Settling Climate Accounts, Navigating the Road to Net Zero. I hope you all enjoy it. Thank you so much, John. That was a very nice introduction. It is really a pleasure to be here. I know you can't see my face, but I have a big smile on my face, because it's really exciting. This book is finally here in the world. I also feel like this mask is gonna cover my eyes at some point, so if I can't see you, let me know if you can still see me. Thank you guys for coming. I know you in the room get credit for being here, but folks at home, I know you have a choice of what you do on a Wednesday, or Monday afternoon, or whenever you're watching this, so appreciate it. This book, as John just noted is, I mean it's not just a year of hard work, but it's decades, really, decades of study and experience, and so we're really thrilled to share it with you. Just before I get started on the talk, I wanted to share a personal story. I decided to devote my life's work to climate because of a book I read, My Freshman Year in College. I was a freshman at Duke, and I read Al Gore's Earth and the Balance, and it really galvanized my interest and dedication to addressing climate, and I'm not comparing either myself or Tom Heller to Al Gore by any stretch, but I do hope, yeah, I do appreciate the power of a book and to inspire imagination and action, and I hope ours drives you in some new way. So today we're gonna cover 215 pages in 40 minutes. We got a little bit of a late start, but I promise to keep us on time. I'm gonna stick to my notes, because this is the first time we've done this talk, and we have a lot to cover, and I wanna make sure I keep on time because we've got Tom Heller joining us from Venice, special guest star from the middle of the night there, who we're gonna turn to before we turn to Q&A. Before I get too far into it, I've gotta show you these names and faces. I mean, this was a team effort. These are our contributing authors. They are Lorenzo Bernastoni, Esther Choi, So Young In, Richard Kaufman, Mark Rostin, Kim Schumacher, Garish Ramali, and Uday Vardarjan. They are primarily fellows at the Steyr-Taylor Center or the Sustainable Finance Initiative. We've got a few guest stars in there. Many of them are giving talks on their individual chapters as part of So Young Sustainable Finance Initiative seminar this quarter. Hope you can tune into those. But this team project was really born out of the coordination and companionship that came with zooming over the pandemic. And we started with what I would call kind of a loosely associated volume of work that might've looked like a different research paper stapled together, if we were to call it a book. And at some point around January of this year, actually, we realized that we had a collection of really important things to say about the practice of net zero, which itself was emerging as the dominant frame for the climate action story. And so we really got motivated then to double down and make this a real book with an attempt to get it out in time for the COP, which is why it's so exciting. We actually pulled that off. Four month production cycle is a pretty tight turn in the publishing business. And we wanted to help really shape the conversation going into the COP in Glasgow next week, but more importantly, really help kind of reconcile what comes out of it and also offer really a timeless view for practitioners to help serve them long after the COP26 news cycle has passed. I also want to give a shout out, she's not pictured here, but to Sophie Janisky, who's a MBA student who took some time off during COVID and actually helped us as a project manager drive our trains on time, or this book would never have happened on its schedule. So I want to just spend a second on the title because it was intentional and it's fun and reveals the depth, the complexity, and the playfulness. Yes, actual playfulness of this volume. I know a book on climate accounting doesn't sound very playful, but indeed it is when you start diving into the tech. So we aim to settle climate accounts in three senses of accounting. First as a narrative. So we wrapped the volumes technical analysis in storytelling with narratives that ground the reader in the climate action story of past, present, and future. And the book also dives deep into accounting in its more familiar form, right, is the process of analyzing and verifying and reporting financial accounts. And then finally, the book emphasizes the need to nourish and drive greater accountability. So who's gonna make sure net zero adds up? I also want to take a second here to just answer the question you may or may not be asking yourselves, why did they take the time to write a book when the world moves at the speed of tweets? And I would say to that because solving climate requires thinking slow. It requires conscious reasoning. And reading books fosters more conscious reasoning and gives you the space to embrace the complexity of climate action. That doesn't happen reading tweets or even news articles. I would also note that books are fact checked and ours contains many references. So this was really a labor of love. Our goal isn't to sell books and that's not why we're here talking to you. It's really, we hope you'll read it, but really we hope to animate and drive action and hope. So what are we gonna talk about today specifically? So a roadmap for today. We're gonna just beat this roadmap metaphor to the pavement, so forgive me. So we're gonna start with where are we on the net zero road. I appreciate you all have different starting points in this room. I'm sure folks at home have different starting points whether you're an expert or a neo fight I hope you'll learn something from today's discussion. We're gonna cover a lot of ground and in the end I hope you'll be a better driver on the net zero road. So from this starting point we're gonna cover three turns that define the climate action story since the Paris Agreement. Then we'll take a quick bite out of the meat of the book. Part one of the book looks at the dynamics of net zero finance and part two looks at the roles of states in driving markets and transitions. And then we'll turn to the still open accounts looking at what questions need to be settled for net zero to work. And then finally we'll turn ahead by turning nine hours ahead to Venice where Tom will give us a look into the future. So where are we? To start I'm gonna just define net zero. It's the term countries, businesses and investors use to define an end state they will reach by X state usually 2050, sometimes earlier, sometimes later where total greenhouse gas emissions minus removals will amount to zero. For well over a century scientists have figured that changing CO2 levels would change temperatures in the atmosphere. You may not know it but it was actually a woman scientist who first hypothesized about this connection Eunice Newton Foot in the 1850s. The latest IPCC report which I'm sure you are all familiar with has 195 scientists around the world who generally couch everything in uncertain terms essentially screaming in no uncertain terms that humans are causing temperatures to rise. So that's where a turn to this picture to help you understand why we must get to net zero. So let's take a step back 100 million years back and look at global temperatures. So 100 million years ago the earth was a lot hotter. It fluctuated mostly down till about 100,000 years ago when we went through cycles of plus minus five degrees C. That's basically the difference between London being pretty balmy and London being covered in ice. So humans emerged into this picture the middle square here and were basically nomads until about 12,000 years ago moving to the right when the climate started to stabilize. And what happened when the climate stabilized was they could settle into what we now know as civilization. So they could stay in one place. They could build houses, businesses, plant agriculture, plant roots. But as you can see on the far right as a result of increasing levels of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere we're leaving the chapter of a stable climate. It's likely in fact that this year we will depart the band that any civilized person has ever experienced. And that has tremendous implications for societies. Think about the nomads, right? We're now talking about mass migration, climate refugees, uninhabitable regions. Most financial and economic models and indeed most decision making assumes that the future looks like the past only with more growth. And so it goes that future generations will be wealthier and therefore it'll be cheaper to pay for damages later than to invest in prevention now. But those models and assumptions are built on the fundamental assumption of a stable climate. They don't account for exposure to extreme heat, precipitation, flooding and fire and we're departing the world of our financial, economic and mental models. So if nothing else, I hope you take away from this slide that climate change is not an environmental problem. It's an everything problem. We're talking about the stability of civilization as we know it. So this unsettling picture isn't new. Fast forward 130 plus years from UNIS and many scientists and even policymakers were sounding the alarm about climate change and its profound implications. And in 1992, the first major global climate conference got underway in Rio. The first 20 years along the road from Rio was not the uncongested super highway that the original drivers of climate action had hoped for and anticipated. The original plan was for climate action to be governed at the country level through political actors engaging in legal agreements and operating through multilateral institutions. There was a consensus that a single price was rational and necessary. There was widespread acceptance that common but differentiated rules could be applied to advanced and emerging economies until expected growth allowed developing countries to graduate into full and equal status. An implicit in these core tenants was a vision of the future that included stable growth leading to increasing demand for cleaner energy and global convergence around democratic and market-centered principles. How it started veered from how it's going around 2009 in Copenhagen. That's where our tensions ran high at that conference of parties driven by the recognition of how far off course drivers were from the original plan. So it was in Copenhagen where we really said goodbye to the original expectations and it was in Paris in 2015 where there was a near spectacular repair of coordinated climate action but in a restructured constitution to pledge, review and ratchet non-standardized national determined contributions. So instead of a single monitorable instrument priced on carbon that would have allowed an easy integration tracking and review of national climate actions we got a diverse portfolio of regulations and subsidies that far underpriced the social cost of carbon. We got pervasive gaming in the north in north to south transfers of climate finance see the clean development mechanism and growth didn't go as planned, right? We had the, was constrained by the 2008-09 financial crisis in the West and again a few years later in lead emerging market economies and this anticipated convergence to democratic and market-centered institutions stumbled in the West and if anything across Asia a state-driven economic development proved an effective model for managing growth. So it wasn't all bad news, some things went right. So prices of renewables fell, they fell to parity if not below the cost of new coal and gas. Similar progress down learning curves can be traced to batteries and electric vehicles. The haze of climate skepticism that impeded the power of leading edge science lifted across large and politically significant populations. And with that acceptance and socialization of climate science on top of increasing and widespread climate impacts led to a mainstreaming of climate concern. So it's against this juxtaposition of what proceeded as anticipated and what went off course that we can understand three recent turns in the climate action story since Paris. These turns are imagined in our telling of the climate action story and they're largely concurrent and overlapping. The first two turns, the turn to green finance and the turn to risk materialized in earnest after the Paris Agreement in 2015. And the third turn, the turn to net zero hit escape velocity in 2020 and has taken the lead as the world's next perhaps last best hope to get climate action on track. So let's turn to green finance first. This turn was built on the belief that climate progress could be assumed on a type of autopilot where economic growth and efficient markets would propel the world on a path to a low carbon transition. The optimism of green finance centered on the perception that falling prices would make it easy to build only green. It has three central tenants. The first is that as long as there's growing demand and capital markets are efficient, each new investment can advance the transition. The second tenant is that replacing dirty infrastructure with clean would yield job growth with only a marginal reliance on taxes and subsidies and that those would eventually sunset. And finally, the last tenant was that while regulation and new financial vehicles might help green finance, the limits of public budgets and limits of policy reform won't slow it down. Arguably, the turn to green finance stuck the landing for renewables, but the world can't buy its way through the necessary pace and scale required to decarbonize across all economic sectors and geographies. So then, we turn to risk. The turn to risk inverted the lens on green finance and followed its rise by several years. The turn to risk emphasizes the problems that arise when green finance isn't enough. It has brought new vehicles and instruments that ultimately may breed the institutional capacity for coordinated management of transition risk, including things like the task force on climate related financial disclosure framework and subsequent moves to standardize global climate related reporting. But the turn to risk quickly refilled methodological and institutional puzzles. For one, the focus has been on the risks of winding down, but the risks associated with the timing and value of replacing these activities is still unexamined. Second, the methods and models needed to understand transition risk at a useful level of granularity are more in the domain of the financial modeling community than the climate modeling community. This is something Professor Wine and I've talked about and a merger we're exploring here at Stanford. And then finally, last piece of this puzzle here is that both physical and transition risks are highly subject to strategic and political behavior. And as a result, much of the risk on the system is currently being transferred to governments in the form of disaster relief, unemployment benefits, and other bailout schemes. This really limits the incentives for private firms to act and limits the ability of states to respond to further stress. Perhaps the greatest disadvantage though is how far the turn to risk may depart from issues of equity and justice. So the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need to attend to these issues and at the same time made them worse. The turn to risk without attention to equity, risk creating a new wave of climate redlining by limiting investment in the most vulnerable and marginalized communities. So I hope the context setting of the first two turns helps you better understand where we are now in the climate action story and that is this net zero ascendancy. Net zero combines the themes of both green finance and risk.  And it also captures the growth promises of green finance and the regulatory and financial infrastructure of the turn to risk. Its appeal is driven in part by the fact that net zero steers around the principal difficulties of the other two turns. It slides past transition on the upside by ignoring difficult questions around distributing the transitions gains and losses. And through its emphasis on emissions alignment, it avoids the granular and strategic challenges of downside risk. Yet as our research has shown, net zero is at risk of taking the easy road and in so doing, missing its desired destination. That's when we come to take a little bite out of the book here. So again, this is going to be an unsatisfyingly brief tour of the chapters. Hope you read it, but want to give you the preview. So first, this part one explores the dynamics of net zero finance. And taking a deeper look in here, these are the chapters that comprise the first part of the book. So in chapter two, Mark Rostin applies modern portfolios theory to net zero financial markets and products and questions the outperformance claims that abound. In chapter three, So Young and Kim examine the ecology of data sourcing, provision and rating in net zero accounting and identify economic and organizational insights about incentives to game disclosure behavior. They also coin a new term, carbon washing, to define misleading information about carbon related impacts and actions of a company or its products. In chapter four, Mark Rostin comes at us again this time with a look at scope three emissions accounting. Scope three emissions are primarily the responsibility of someone else. So why should anyone be focused on measuring and managing them? In chapter five, Richard Kaufman and Mark Rostin review the history of the asset management industry asking if specialization, fees and intermediation have delayed or stalled financing of the climate transition. And in the second part of the book, we investigate the role of states in shaping net zero markets and transitions. More specifically, our focus on the challenges of accounting for climate through private markets in part one isn't meant to suggest that the world has converged on a common approach. In fact, quite the opposite is true. And so in chapter six, So Young and Esther built a case study of blended finance for green investments in Korea, a state driven society representative of much of the world where the state organizes climate intensive sectors differently than market driven economies. Their case study reveals both global and Asia specific questions about the governance of the sustainability transition. In chapter seven, Lorenzo tackles critical accounting questions for carbon offsets which have catapulted to the main stage in the proliferation of net zero pledges and actions and claims. He looks at how offsets fit with the net zero framework and highlights the challenges with the production of offsets. At the project level, looking at additionality and leakage and at the system level, questions around reconciling corporate action with country level commitments. For those of you who are regular subscribers to Bloomberg Green, you may have noticed that today's feature editorial was about this very issue and questioning Shell's carbon offset claims as an example. In chapter eight, Grish and Tom look at the movement from green to transition finance and question whether new labels lead to more noise or serve a purpose. And finally, in chapter nine, Uday travels more deeply into the scope of transition risk management and focuses on equity. He looks at political theory, US state regulatory practice and the fairness and effectiveness of distributing the gains and losses associated with the climate transition. So after all that meat of the book, we still have some open accounts. Taken together, the chapters of the volume expose a collection of these unsettled accounts, problematic and persistent features of net zero implementation that bring into question both the accountability and credibility of net zero accounting in the triple senses of accounting for climate. These open accounts defy and resist consensual or authoritative settlement, while at the same time increasing incentives to gain the regime. The roster of open accounts fall into four categories, noise, coverage, timing and management. Let's talk about noise. Net zero accounting depends on good data. We don't have it yet. The emerging ecology of sustainable finance data providers, ratings agencies and thematic products is coalescing into a specialized and generally self-governed domain. Last count, there was somewhere around $35 trillion invested in sustainable strategies. If that were true, we wouldn't have a world on fire. So there's a real and still unmet need to drive toward better standards and conventions to protect against carbon washing and to better align incentives that motivate managers of net zero financial products, Allah, Mark Ross and Richard Kaufman's chapter. Some emerging efforts like the IFRS and the Value Reporting Initiative show promising signs globally. And if you've been tracking the news here at home, the SEC, the Fed and even some work Tom and I have done in California are showing signals that there will be moves in this direction in relatively short order. Now we can turn to coverage and boundaries. So even with the best data, confounding questions remain about coverage and boundaries of emissions accounting. How was even the most well-intended actor to measure her scope three emissions? Take the big tech companies, right? They're making net zero pledges, but their emissions are basically zero in the US. All their growth is happening in Asia. So they're having to try to build renewables or price carbon in Asian markets. Or if they make hardware, they're having to zero out the emissions of their largely Asian-based supply chains. So long as governments fail to put a price on carbon, businesses are left to determine their own prices based on their own risk and alternative pathways. That's not an efficient market to say the least. We already saw this movie play out in California with auto emission standards and the US auto manufacturers finding themselves in the hot seat with the Trump administration that didn't want to see emissions governed or essentially priced at the state or corporate level. There are also questions of coverage. Where should the lines be drawn? Should McKinsey count its engagement with big oil and its scope three emissions? What about insurance companies? And how can we avoid the risk that scope three emissions drop by means of accounting rather than any real emissions reductions? Scope three is a big target. Most of Fortune 500 companies emissions are scope three. So we're gonna need strong reporting conventions for net zero to add up. Let's talk about timing. Like comedy, climate action is all about timing. There's little doubt that the future will be low carbon. The only question is whether we can arrive there without doing lasting if not catastrophic damage by being too slow in getting there. Net zero tends to look at 2050 as an end date of transitions completion. The shift in carbon accounting's emphasis on carbon footprints to carbon futures puts substantial reliance on carbon offsets. So net zero hinges on a transition away from carbon intensive systems playing out quickly and fairly across jurisdictions in very different stages of development and political capacity. Such a transition is hard to time. Also net zero is a flow concept as shown on the left but climate is a stock problem as shown on the right. So we ask how conventions can address issues of timing so that the stock of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere stays within desired levels. And who has the crystal ball to see whether it's safer to bet on technologies far into the future or avoided emissions today? And finally, perhaps the sharpest rough edge of net zero in practice has to do with management. Once emissions are known, coverage is appropriately applied and timing issues are sorted, how should actors respond? This remains largely uncharted territory. A close look reveals a wide gap between net zero risk objectives and methods. If the practice of net zero is aligning emissions with normative targets, practitioners run the risk of solving an accounting problem rather than a climate problem. And they run the risks that emissions in the real economy continue largely unabated in jurisdictions beyond the reach of net zero ledgers or self-governed associations. And so with an appreciation of how we got here, the meat of the book and our unsettled accounts, we turn to Tom in Venice to turn ahead. Over to you, Tom. Thank you, Alicia. I think you've done most of the work. I just would like to put a little bit of context around what we're doing. As Alicia said early in her remarks, the turn to net zero marks a very significant shift away from a system that originally started to try and work only through nation states and governments to mainstreaming and in many ways privatizing the agenda for climate action. And in the book and in work that we will continue to do in the future, we're going to hopefully advance the fact that if we make the best case possible for net zero, there's still going to be issues that probably will demand public action. And what I'd like to do is very quickly just point to some of those. I don't want to point to infrastructure too much without the E at the end of the word, but let me just say a few words about each. Stewardship, the interesting thing is that nation states or even subnational governments like California are participants in the net zero system. China is issuing its net zero structure. It calls it N plus one after yesterday. But they are actual players in the game at the same time they are the regulators. And that puts nations, governments in an odd position in which they have to deal with the fact that they are the regulators of this large mass of noisy data that is proliferating in the private sector. In effect, they are both participants and stewards of the system in which they are participating. And in their regulatory role, I think they will have to act to reduce the relative chaos of non-comparability between the different forms and standards for net zero that are proliferating so quickly. On infrastructure, again, I expect governments will have to play a strong role. Basically, we are moving from a system of hard infrastructure facilities that are very complicated power stations one might think of that one can turn on or off to much softer systems in which software that involves and control systems that involves integrating between a great many producers of energy, both variable energy like wind and solar and flexible energy that can be turned on or off whether that is done by firing up a gas plant or creating large numbers of batteries or pumped hydro stations or altering the demand structures that affect when power is available and when it is used. The main point is that the soft infrastructure systems that are so critical to integrating these low carbon systems have very different investable qualities than do many of the physical systems that we have financed largely through project finance. And the nature of financing in tangible assets at large scale, most of which run at zero marginal cost raises a series of questions about whether private investment will be forthcoming in ways that suggest that the kinds of infrastructure programs that we see being discussed in the United States now or in China will necessarily involve substantial amounts of public finance. The third issue, equity. The transitions that are going to occur will substantially change the nature of distributional systems and the benefits that are received from energy and from the disadvantages, the pollution that go along with energy. Alicia had mentioned earlier that we will probably need very substantial funding for those elements that are being wound down in the system just as we need funding for the investment in new carbon facilities that are being built up. And here, if we look at the COP26 negotiations that will take place, we can see that equity is at the very heart of what they are fighting about at the most. Will the North translate $100 billion to the developing countries of the South every year? Will the North pay for loss and damages that are done by climate? Will the various commitments and pledges that are being made to net zero by the developing countries be funded in part by the Northern or advanced industrial countries? Equity is at the heart of this structure and equity issues, distributional issues usually demand the state. The fourth point, diplomacy. We need to coordinate between countries. The essence of the international system as it was first created, talked about the right of sovereign nations to decide how they wanted to trade off economic and social development against sustainability. That principle has been at the heart of the multilateral negotiations since the beginning. But if net zero implies that each corporation in forming its own supply chain might begin to put their own prices on the climate performance of their various suppliers and rearrange their supply chains according to this re-weighted for sustainability dimension thereof, then we're really going to run into strong international structures because the trade-offs that were promised to sovereign nations are suddenly being made by various private actors. And the last point, accountability, Alicia's talked about it, does it all add up? It's a very tenuous and difficult problem that really has been at the heart of the diplomatic failures. By adding up, we simply mean that there are carbon budgets over which various nations presumably have pieces assigned to them. That is, nations are supposed to be able to either emit more carbon up to a certain level or they are asked to maintain their stocks of stored carbon, whether in trees or in the soils at particular levels. The problem becomes if we start creating a lot of offsets and other structures that say, I won't cut down my trees if you pay me and then you can emit. The fact is that we can imagine a spiral in which everybody says all nations say, I'm going to cut down my forest unless you pay me and that will permit you to continue to emit and the whole system will simply break the budget extremely quickly. So my sense is that in each of these areas we have even in the best circumstances of net zero a very large reliance on public sector behavior that covers or touches on each of the activities that are below and we intend to continue working on this. And then if we can just see the last slide please. These are simply things to look out for very carefully. We have to really look out for the downside risks. In other words, we have to worry about winding down what has been 25 to 30% of most of our economies which are in the fossil energy sector. You can't just take those out of the system without creating enormous instability. But at the same time, when we think of the upside of a new cleaner carbon low carbon system, it is a system simply building outwind and solar by themselves because of the nature of these new sources of low carbon energy will not be enough. You need to turn to new systems of market design or policy, new business models and new financing structures. And it may be that we're much better at building out a wind farm than we are about building out new policy structures to deal with the different risk here. We have to look out for to use the last sense of the title word in our book. It's a question of management. Who is really going to manage the timing and the nature of winding down the high carbon system and winding up without leaving a big hole in the economy and without leaving disenfranchised and inequitably treated communities. This process which will go on over the next 20 years. We have done such things in the past when we started in World War II in the United States. We created a special agency called the Office of Price Administration that wound down the still caught in depression economy and wound up the economy that then sustained the United States for 30 years after winning the war. But that was a case which poses challenges in the context of climate. The last two points I'd like to make, look out for mostly in Asia. Asia is really in a different position than we are. We have gas as a hybrid and flexible fuel that can outcompete coal in the United States and in some other parts of the West. In Asia, there really is not supply of gas at prices. Anything like those in the United States as we're now seeing in this so-called energy crisis that many of you may be noting. The fleet of energy facilities in Asia is much younger than in the United States and so it has to be amortized and written off. The fleet is largely on the books of the state, many of which do not have stable financial systems because it's done through state enterprises and funded through state banks. That's a very different situation when the facilities are largely on the balance sheet of firms and in Asia, it has become very clear that they see a sharp connection between the digital economy and the green economy, between sustainability and technical change. And that's the last point I'd like to leave you with. We are going through multiple transitions, ESG, environment, social, governance, all are under substantial change. And it is precisely in the rise of technological systems, AI systems, robotics systems, that we see the possibility of managing much more complex, much more multi-sided energy, transportation, heating and agricultural systems. But the multiple transitions each pose risks, whether it's to the future of work or to the future of money, as well as to the future of a sustainable planet. And it's those multiple transitions that demand coordination that we forecast in looking at the book and where we have every intention of continuing to work on a continuing basis. So Alicia, back to you for wrapping up or moving to Q&A. Thanks, Tom, that was great. Thank you. So I was wondering, you were talking about reaching net zero and this relates to mitigation, but I was wondering if the same analysis applies to adaptation to climate change and if there is room for investments from the private sector in adaptation, mostly in developing countries such as mine, Colombia. Yeah, that's it. Sure, the question was that our talk here in the book seems to focus on mitigation and the question is whether the same considerations are told for adaptation or what the special circumstances are around adaptation finance, and particularly in Colombia. And Tom, I have to turn it to you since you have spent much time in Latin America and South America. I think it's a very strong question. Net zero is definitely focused on mitigation and the failures to reach an international accommodation on mitigation that began at Copenhagen and then moved up toward Paris, but the international negotiations have always been focused on adaptation at the same time. I think that the remarks that I made about equity or the just transition can easily be absorptive of the questions that have been associated with adaptation in the sense that there are both issues of equity and the political resistance that exists among those who in one way or another are going to be damaged by the transition. So it's an interesting phenomenon and I think I'll simply leave it at that, Alicia, that the issues that are at the heart of the relatively difficult and stalled negotiations that we'll pick up next week in Glasgow are principally, at this point, about equity and when one starts to talk about loss and damage and who bears the responsibilities, both for the opportunities of building up low carbon but also recognizing the costs that are imposed in order to deal with the consequences of what has already occurred are at the very heart of the negotiation and sadly enough, at the present time, nothing within the net zero accounting allows for firms or any other actors who are adhering to the net zero rules to get credit for activity that may be remedial on the side of adaptation.  Right, yeah, just relaying from the online audience. We had a question of who is the best audience for your book? Who do you wish you could give your book to and who would then change their behavior because of what you say in the book? Good question. Oh, sorry. No, I will repeat it. It is such a good, the question is who's the audience for the book and what do we hope they do as a result of reading it? It's a wide range. I think our audience includes practitioners, deep expert practitioners across finance, policy, and business, but it is also, I think, a real resource for students of climate action in the world over, whether you're literally a student in these seats or just a lifelong learner. And I think our hope, and I'll let Tom get a word in here too, is that people really embrace the complexity of these issues. There's so much of the climate narrative that focuses on heroes and villains and sort of oversimplifies these stories in search of Hollywood endings and it's really a much more complicated picture and understanding that complexity is really key to being an effective driver on the net zero road. Tom, did you wanna add anything to that? Yeah, I'll just say, when one talks about carbon budgets and colleagues at Stanford have done brilliant work on the science of the atmospheric and oceanic and terrestrial capacity to absorb without substantial damage the quantities of carbon dioxide and it's equivalent gases. When you focus on carbon budgets, really there is not that much time left before you begin to break through to rates of change that are truly consequential. I think in that sense, we have to use the time as efficiently as possible. And one of my fears for all of the credit that we wanna give to net zero and all of the reinforcement we want to give to the privatization and the mainstreaming of climate action, there is a substantial chance that if we spend the next five or six years figuring out the kinks in the net zero system we will absorb about half the time we had to really put this under control. So the book has both a laudatory and let's go forward to try and do the best job we can with net zero, but let's not forget that there are a whole series of collective problems that really do fall into the realm of diplomacy and state behavior and not give those, deny the proper emphasis to those other issues because we won't be able to recover from their, from not focusing on them at the same time as we develop further the net zero accounting. So I had one perhaps on behalf of the audience. So you guys are kind of at this point in time heading for Glasgow and I have the feeling that you're kind of like on the biggest wave ever seen by mankind together and you've done a bunch of turns, it tricks on the wave and you are going in and needing to do an area or two to actually get where you wanna go. So the question though is more, are you optimistic or pessimistic this week about what's gonna happen next week in general and in reaction to your book? Sure, can the audience hear that question? Okay, so the question more artfully phrased than I will paraphrase is how are we feeling going into Glasgow and how does that feeling relate to the book or its ability to affect that feeling. Tom, you are on the precipice of Glasgow, you wanna take that? Yeah, I think the feeling is one of great challenge without any doubt, but with renewed energy in the sense that I started this, my own work in this area all the way back in 1991 before the Rio Earth Summit. And ever since people have said, well, what I just said a few minutes ago, we have very limited time. And what we need to do is we'll wait and the nature of the crisis will make itself felt. And as that crisis makes itself felt, people will stop giving excuses and stop delaying. The feeling going into Glasgow is we've run out of time to delay, the time is now, but it's going to be a very, very difficult negotiation because these past 25 years, past 30 years, while they've increased the sense of crisis, have also left a lot of scars on actors and people have accounts to settle, not our accounts, other accounts to settle, often in geopolitical terms. And with neither the economy nor the world geopolitical system, having a very clear shape at the present time, the burden falls on the negotiators and everyone who's involved with climate action to really take stock of the matter. So tremendous challenge, but also tremendous obligation, I think. And a lot of faith, very much fortified, I find at Stanford that we really are on the edge of technological breakthroughs. But just to repeat a point I made earlier, breakthroughs on technology, and there are lots of them out there, whether they're hydrogen or EVs or various forms of data computation that lets us know a lot more about what people are doing, but those technological breakthroughs have to be embedded and diffused through policy and business models. And I think that's going to be the job of those view who I can't see, who are sitting in the room, but that's going to be the legacy that we turn over to you, I'm afraid, real practice and less cheerleading. Well, on that note, I think we do have some social and institutional entrepreneurs here in this very audience, so we're looking forward to great things from you, but I'd actually like to send our best wishes and hopes with Alicia and Tom to Glasgow next week. And I truly hope that this book will, indeed, turn out to be something new under the sun that'll break some of these deadlocks that have hammered us, as Tom says. I think I go back almost as far as Tom. Hammered some of us, those of us who have accumulated mostly scars so far in this fight, so I'm Godspeed, and we'll all be there with you. Thanks again for a great talk.


the next speaker is Anna. You can come over here. Anna is going to tell us about the NS hour, that's the NSA parliamentary committee that started in March 2014. And since then it was supposed to look into the activities of the German secret services. And you will look into this whole thing and you will look into the future as well. Among other things, you are participating in a podcast, you're writing about this for the website, netspoliti.org. And I would ask you to give a hand of applause to Anna. Okay. Well, okay. Can you hear me? Great. So I'm Anna or A dot B dot. And for the next minute you will hear some things about the NSA parliamentary committee. And part of it will be about my own impressions. I usually sit in there and I'm writing a live blog about this since I was on holidays. And because of that I was also asking, I have somehow, I have a very limited view so I asked what people are, what you guys are interested in. So there were a lot of answers to that. Many, many questions. For example, what's the atmosphere like? That was asked a lot. How much do these people actually want to clear up things? How did it work with the stateless satellites? How is this related to the Illuminati? So let's start with a question, what this parliamentary committee is actually supposed to do? Because that's what we need to know to see and understand what the problems are. Well, so this parliamentary committee was instituted in March 2014 after the first snow revelations. So it took a while for the government, it took a while for this committee to be instituted and to decide what it was actually supposed to do. And initially the general focus was on the activities of the Five Eyes in Germany. That's an organization or basically an institution where these five big secret services work together. And the question was what are these Five Eyes doing in Germany? Are there any things they're doing that are illegal? And how were German institutions involved in that and how much did they know about that? And to what extent did they maybe profit from that by drawing on this illegally obtained knowledge and some institutes we're talking about is the German signal service. And some things they were talking about, well, they are spying on EU institutions, how does that work, stuff like that. Another question is how much is Germany involved in this secret war?  And so the question was, was there information that came from Germany that was used for illegal murders? They were also talking to people who were seeking asylum and how was this knowledge used? So these people were interviewed in Germany. And because there needs to be some kind of result, what do we have to change in order for this spying by other secret services in Germany to stop? And how do we maybe control our own secret services? So the parliamentary consists of eight members and eight substitutes. There's always one from the opposition, from the Greens, two from the Social Democrats and three from the Christian Democratic Union. And on the picture you can see there's like a back row. And there you see people who are from the foreign servers, from the different ministries, from the secret servers. And they're kind of paying attention. Somehow they get sometimes they get a bit nervous and they're kind of watching all of this. So this parliamentary committee meets every Thursday. And when there are weeks where the Bundestag, the parliament meets, and sometimes there are extra meetings. And the crazy thing is that it actually lasts until midnight sometimes. At midnight they actually have to stop because the stenographers have to stop working as opposed to us. Well, and we're sitting there, we write live blogs, we have 41 of those by now. The reason we're doing this is that the public can come to these meetings but there are no official protocols that you can access. So you either go, which is a bit difficult if you have, for example, a nine to five job, especially if you don't live in Berlin, or you can't go. And the only thing you could then read is what is being reported in the press. So we wanted to give people the opportunity to inform themselves. So we thought it was really important to have these live blogs. So by now we've written something like more than three million characters. I counter that at some point. And what we think is really an honor for us is that apparently the secret, the German secret service is actually reading these blogs as well. Well, apparently some people don't really like that we're doing this, but we think that everyone should have the right to know what's happening there. People who are actually putting much more work into this and who are actually dealing with this 24-7 are basically the members of the parliament, especially people who are working for them, who sometimes do amazing work in the background. And I actually asked one of the secretariat and they say they now have 2,319 folders. There are more than one million pieces of paper. And that's that they wrote about or that they compiled for certain questions where they said are we interested in this and then they compiled background information. And one of these 2,319 folders, 520 folders are rated top secret or secret. There's something that's top secret, there's something that's less secret. And that's a huge problem of this parliamentary committee because of course it makes the work much more difficult as well because somehow they have to deal with these secret folders. Suddenly people who work for members of the parliament need to get a background check. Some of these folders they can only read in certain places. Well, it probably looks a bit like you have a folder that's not secret and then suddenly it says oh, this part we were taken out and then you go to a specific place, you can look into it, but you can't take any notes, you can't take any photos and can just hope that you don't forget anything about it. So this is actually making the work that the people in the committee are doing much more difficult as well. Another problem, even if you have the folders, well, sometimes you see who is being greeted and that somebody said well, greetings, but you often don't see much else. And then we also have another problem that a lot of documents are missing. We had one meeting in October 2014 that was interrupted right away when they found out that one of the people who were supposed to testify had documents that the committee themselves didn't have. So it's really difficult to find all these documents to compile them in one place to give them to the people who are actually supposed to do this work. And often information is being kept back and people hope that this is not coming out. So also we don't know what is missing because we don't have an overview of the documents that we're supposed to have. Another problem of the Parliamentary Committee is this is a citation from a former president of the Federal Intelligence Service of Germany who said the US are the elephant, we are the pony. What they mean is that we're dependent on the US and apparently, according to the opinion of our secret services, we're dependent on the information they give us, dependent on the technology they can give us, on stuff that the Federal Secret Service doesn't have. So basically they say, well, we can't change anything about this, we just have to give them information because otherwise they don't want to play with us anymore and they won't give us any more that we actually need. That's basically what they're, also what they're the attitude that we have towards the Brits, where basically the Brits just tell us, well, if there are more documents that come to the public and to light, then we'll just won't give you any information anymore. We don't really believe that, but, well, that's an attitude that's preventing people from clearing this up. Another problem that we have is that obviously this committee is under intense scrutiny from external secret services where we had several nurses that there were weird things happening on mobile phones that members, for example, to the 15, something weird was going on. There was the famous Marcus R. who was spying for the USA and also told them information about this inquiry committee. Well, we have to ask ourselves to what extent is this, was this committee being put under pressure and to what extent are the witnesses being pressured and how does it work if even the people members of the, if the people making the inquiries are not sure if they're being surveilled themselves. A further problem we have is not just Mr. Wolf from the presidential committee, but also the general attitude towards affirmations by the witnesses. Continuously they say, well, you can't say this openly. For example, when it's open to talk about methods or details, for example, their view of what is a detail is not always our view of the detail, what is a detail. The problem is with this non-public statement, they don't always name just things that are, shouldn't be, but they also include things that are just not very convenient or comfortable. Well, we believe that just because it's embarrassing, it should still be brought to the public and just because it's not open, or we don't have a possibility as the public to learn about these sessions that are being called non-public, we don't know what really is being said under exclusion of the public. It's secret, there's no protocols, we don't have any information and therefore it's very difficult to realize if it's really being done properly. A further problem is, apart from non-public is not part of the investigation, which this committee should investigate anything since 2001. Everything that's before is very difficult and the exclusion of anything that isn't part of the investigation is often the hands of Mr. Wolf, who is part of the government. And this federal secret agency overview is always behind him and who always very nervously speaks into the microphone when he thinks something isn't part of the investigation. But there have been witnesses who, in an incredible sense of arrogance, who said, no, well, this isn't part of the investigation. They came to an absurd scene when a witness was asked, well, this branch where you're working, were the U.S. Americans there? Well, he said, well, that's not part of the inquiry. And that's before the inquiry. So he was asked, well, you can say that. It says in the Wikipedia. Just because it's like that, I don't have to say that in front of this committee. These are scenes that we can witness which are very frustrating. A further problem is, especially witnesses from the Secret Service have a very limited freedom to say things. Even the president of Schindler was interrupted by Mr. Wolf when he was asked if the Mr. Wolf said, well, to this, you're not allowed to speak to this. This is really absurd sometimes. A further problem that we have is a lawyer, Mr. Eisenberg, who represents the Secret Service, who isn't always ranting and talking, but he's also causing problems because he represents many witnesses. And we have to assume that he influences and puts witnesses under pressure with things that they really shouldn't know. For example, we often had cases where the witnesses somehow all used the same example, or the witnesses had knowledge that they really shouldn't have, and often you can agree between witnesses what they should say and shouldn't say. Another problem is amnesia.  They don't know on what legal basis they've been doing things where we can assume, well, maybe they really didn't know. Well, it's a big problem anyway. But the problem is the Berlin hour, that is the division of talking time. And since the conservatives have four people, they have a lot of time to talk, about 45%, that's 27 minutes. In contrast, the Greens and the left party only each have eight minutes. Well, you can think, you can imagine how that works. They're not very long. And often from the conservatives, they're very meaningless questions. But to really corner a witness, there's very little time. Due to the limited time that the committee has, it's very difficult. Right. Well, now you've heard a bit about the problems. Well, now let's hear what has it cleared up? What has it discovered? For example, we discovered that the D6 in Frankfurt has, for the secret service, is filters off, siphons off the transfer, since 2008. From there, it's transferred to Pulach. And then it was sent to Bad Eibling. And from there, there are, there are, there's data that the NSA somehow gets, and the BND, in exchange of BND, the secret service gets some equipment. This was ordered via G10 order. So, in order to cover the traffic of, transfer of traffic from Germany, Germans inside and outside, in order to do this is, what we simply did, we said, well, we just simply get everything from the, from that node. Well, there'll be traffic from both people from, there'll be both traffic from Germans, and also other traffic that we would like to come divide with, with the NSA. The whole thing, was forbid by, was being kept secret, but not even the G10 commission was informed in the way that it should have been. And the committee was, was told a witness, by a witness, well, they drove us to Frankfurt. There were a lot of, lots of shiny lights and lots of cables. And they told us, well, this, this, this and this.  And, and the people in the G10 commission were, were, got very angry about this. The former president of the commission who later on came out and said, well, they've, they basically tricked us. And the former secret, president said, well, I have no idea if they were informed or not.  Well, the other thing that gave us food for thought is, even the telecom was, was skeptical and said, well, we're not really sure if that's, if that's say, if that's legal or not. Well, there was some kind of dinner between the former secret service president, Hanning and the head of telecom Hanning. Hanning didn't fond, remember very fondly or the big secret service president said, oh, it was all fine. And then there was a letter from the government that said, who told the telecom, oh, it's all fine. Just keep doing it. It's all fine. Well, then since 2014, 255 cables or lines from various countries was redirected. And for that, the telecom received 6,000 euros a month in exchange. And there was a, they just rented a room in that same building just to directly grab the optical fiber. Well, how, let's think about how the secret service thought about it. There was a great quote, in my opinion, from a former, former member who was asked, it was a trick. I mean, is there, is there, is this order, is there the order to grab the external traffic legal and you can take everything and said, it's not no trick. That's the use of legal means with desired side effects. And these desired legal side effects seems to be somewhat, seems to be somewhat of a theme. So the next thing we discovered was that the, the capturing of satellite data and the filtering with the, with the famous NSA selectors with which the data for the data from Germany was selected for the NSA, which wasn't always completely legal. For example, EU politicians, for example, Germans, for example, companies like Eurocopter. Even though since 2005 we knew they were surveilling the EU company, we didn't, they didn't think of using that as a reason to check this more thoroughly. They only did that after the commission was formed in 2014. It was told that there were 40,000 selectors which were against EU or German interests, obviously. The, the select the total number of selectors is much greater. We don't know exactly, but the Zürich estimated about 10 million or we don't know how many of these are the ones in 10 million which are not legal because we don't, we're not allowed to see it. The ones that the secret agent wanted to, in order to prevent it, they created a filter called DAFIS, which is the filter for the data collection system and to filter those people who are covered by basic law. They had a three layer filtering system. The first level was filtering prefixes, people with the German prefixes or German domains. The fact that people from Germany use org addresses or etc. What they didn't care about. The second level was to filter out, filter out companies like Siemens.com which they certainly knew were part of Germany even if they have some of the domains outside of Germany. And the third layer was things that were German from context for example if people were talking about a German company abroad they knew they would took out. We also know that the layers 2 and 3 weren't really effective until 2003 and also obviously that the system can only filter that which it knows and if it's not being maintained it actually doesn't filter anything. And obviously only on the filter active. A further problem is that the NSA was providing so-called equations. Many witnesses said that they couldn't really read these so-called equations. There are some weird cryptic formulas but they couldn't really understand them. The practice in the Secret Service was to just use the ones they didn't understand then. We have this famous sentence Chancellor since from the beginning when they were still hoping that this whole thing wouldn't be discovered that not just EU companies like Eurocopter but friendly embassies and French Exterior Ministry etc etc being under surveillance but also the NSA not just NSA but also the Secret Service because BND has their Secret Service Bill and some of these Selectors were taken open by the NSA so they were all right. We'll use the ones that the Secret Service has already put in place. We'll ask ourselves how does this kind of check for the Selectors work? Well I've tried to create a diagram out of these protocols to figure out what the hell went wrong and here you can see it. Well then I decided I will I'm not going to explain in detail I'm just going to say what the problem was so the first problem was in 2005-2006 where there was a problem we noticed there was Eurocopter they didn't use that as an excuse to check if there were other things well because we know we're all trustworthy friends so we don't there's no reason to doubt anyone so in 2013 we started checking from two directions so the one side told the other you check this and at the same time there was another check in a different place so the person who was in charge of the filtering system who was in charge of putting things in the filter wasn't told until 2015 so somehow there was a problem with the communication channels and several people told us to confirm this view we didn't tell anyone else for example we didn't think it was important we didn't know how important it was so no one was meant to know etc etc these kind of excuses so for the government even apparently only was informed officially in 2015 that there was a problem so the people who were in charge the watchdogs failed because they apparently weren't told about it then you can sort of you can think about well it would be interesting to look at this list but the government said no you're not allowed to see it because the USA told us told us they don't like it then the USA said well we didn't say that I don't know what kind of problem you have then it became a bit unbelievable and there were some creative ideas for why solutions for why you couldn't see it oh well it's because of copyright now because the USA has a copyright on it yep indeed instead we had a a guy in charge of the selectors who was supposed to look at the selectors and was supposed to tell the investigation committee we had a little problem with that and this NSA special detective Graulich was sent by the government who said in interviews that he'd be loyal towards his employer and yeah this employer who tried to hinder any discoveries and that's not really a compromise and the opposition sued against it and the declaration of Graulich was pretty limited and he just he just had to make a little overview and he did it in Berlin and BND employees helped him in the beginning of November he put down his review he made a selection and wrote three little things one for the committee one for the chancellery and that's an inherent problem because there's a fall of information where the committee has info the chancellery has not the info the chancellery has and the more infos he has he doesn't give us some corporations get to know if they have been surveilled illegally it's a farce and we can't really know what went wrong and we don't he finds the and that the NSA is a bit evil and tricked the BND which is a bit bullshit which one had to somehow trusted their American friends so much one didn't take a look and Mr. Graulich had an interesting look on for example privacy or privacy laws causes all went automatically through a machine nobody looked at it and there's no problem with the laws because we didn't then he wrote off from the BND and little errors like took wrong abbreviations that are not used normally where he didn't use the normal abbreviation VGL but used VGL GL which is exactly the lingo of the BND and took the look at law from the BND and said this is my look at law and further problem is that we don't really know what technical expertise he has he has pretty nice article about but he on the other hand he couldn't to things and chat and to numbers and defend it himself that we ask to heart and we went to heart on him for his technical errors and knows but this just what's written there that means just to sum up this Mr. Garlisch is not really a technical expert he's definitely a law person a legally trained person maybe not even a bad person but basically the Federal Intelligence Service the BND explained to him what happened and of course that the view we got from him was theirs so I think it's really interesting there are a lot of other interesting understandings of the law that the Federal Intelligence Service has for example when it comes to data retention in that Eibling that is definitely in Germany but because that's a broad it doesn't really count and so the German law is not applicable there so the question is well how do you come to this understanding well you come to an interesting understand like that if you're trying to evade certain laws and basically what they say well what's happening in Germany so German laws don't apply there were several people who testified that that is definitely not a majority opinion which they take over anyway because someone has to fit and somehow the law has to fit what's happening in but Eibling and then even in the BND you have people who are responsible for privacy and data protection and there was Mrs. F who also said she doesn't share this opinion and she has massive concerns but in the end she doesn't have anything to say despite her not having one superior which is the president of the intelligence service so basically she told him that he's a bit concerned and she's a bit concerned about this and she don't think what's happening is okay and the president just says well we don't really care and we just do it anyway and that's also what the president told in this house and that's why we hired her we were very thankful for her having her own opinion but we decided it differently anyways then we also have virtual foreign countries or virtual foreign ground virtual foreign ground always happens when you take some data in Frankfurt and this data this data is not German because it's in Frankfurt but it's coming from abroad so it's basically foreign and well if we can't really sort out the German traffic that's going through Frankfurt well that's a shame but we are trying at least then we have the theory of people who have important positions the idea is that if there is a German person abroad who's working for an foreign company then this person is not really protected by the German basic law because for them we can just simply spy on this person of course this looks different if this person is abroad and is calling their family back in Germany because then this person is only acting as a German person and not as a person in an important position we can all think about how realistic it is to kind of like separate these things because basically how you separate because you have to look at what's being said so you're already spying on these people that way you could also say that he's commissioner at the European Union he's also in important position we can also spy on him we can spy on development aid workers on the German Red Cross everyone you can kind of find abroad another interesting understanding of the law that apparently a lot of people seem to share is that there is no mass surveillance this is actually a direct citation from a parliament member of parliament of the conservative party if you have a hundred cookies and you only eat one is that mass is that a mass well basically the same we have so much data every day so many messages and only 1% of these messages are actually looked at so that's not really mass surveillance and mass retention and that's also where we need to be aware of this absurdity where people tell us there is no mass surveillance it's all targeted then they tell us well we're saving telephone numbers we're saving metadata this is not related to people especially if it's abroad we don't even have the data we can't look up who these numbers belong to this is also something that Mr. Gallich who was supposed to look into these things for the government took over and basically we're going back to what Mr. Pofala member of the German Chancellor early in the affairs side who said well we declared this affair to be over another interesting part that the committee is looking at is the secret war and another question in this question about the secret war is Rammstein this is a US air force base in Germany which plays a central role in this secret war and there they look at definitions again and again in details because the US Americans often say well there's nothing being steered from Rammstein and these drones are not being controlled from Rammstein what they overlooked specifically is that Rammstein may not be a place where these things are being controlled but it's a relay station where so these signals are being are going by Rammstein and are being sent basically to the regions where the drones are then flying but basically they say well we're not controlling anything there we're just conveying the signals that it wouldn't work without Rammstein it's not something they would talk about we don't know any of any other bases that could take the role of there's one being built in Italy but so far it all goes via Germany we know one guy who was a drone pilot who also said that data and information from Germany telephone numbers geo coordinates these things were being given to the United States and based on this information drone strikes were actually being done and people were killed based on this information and where is this stuff coming from we don't know all of this we know that some of this is actually coming from the interviews with asylum seekers in Germany a while ago we actually got a catalog of we actually published a catalog of criteria for asylum seekers so they would know which asylum seekers the federal intelligence servers is actually interested in but the comic sense MS font is original but this is not the original document we basically but so far I've never I've never seen a catalog like this about criteria regarding people that's more disgusting that's disrespecting people even more and then it's also written in comic sense so this institution that we're talking about is actually a part of the German transfer that's hidden within the German transfer but that's actually part of the federal intelligence service not only the German secret service that actually interviewed these asylum seekers but there were also people from the US secret services who by themselves interviewed these asylum seekers the woman who was responsible for this institution said well we didn't have any other way we didn't have enough people so sometimes they just put interns in the corner next to the US secret service members so this institution for interviewing asylum seekers was then disbanded but we know that it's probably still there and it maybe just has a different name but likely still operates and interviews asylum seekers without telling these asylum seekers that are actually talking to a member of the secret service right now and there's so many other topics and I'm sure it's going to continue this parliamentary committee is going to go on until the end of this legislative period and also aside from the parliamentary committee there were a lot of things that were happening for example a few years ago the first trial is the opposition suing the government in front of the German constitutional court where they're trying to make the government show them the NSA selector is because the argument is that the United States don't have the right to prevent the government from giving information to the opposition because there's no harm to the good of Germany and there's also no harm of this because this is being given to members of parliament especially members of the committee because if you consider these the most security risk then nothing can happen in this committee anyway on top of that because you think something might be embarrassing it's not a reason for keeping things secret and especially if you want to clear these things up and if you want to answer these questions and especially the way this was being done and handled by the government is not how you can find out how this actually worked but the opposition was not the only group who was angry there was also the G10 commission which was supposed to create 10 orders couldn't see these selectors what this NSA committee could now see were the BND selectors but they still haven't seen the NSA selectors all of these trials are going to take some time if you sue someone it takes a bit possibly years but we are still lucky and until then there are going to be some more interesting people who will testify for example Angela Merkel who were expecting in the committee at some point also among other people the minister of the interior and someone I'm really looking forward to I think he's really interesting figure in this because he was foreign minister and he was vice chancellor when this whole thing started basically after 2011 that is when cooperation between secret services in the U.S. and Germany really grew because at that point everyone was swearing a limitless solidarity everyone they kind of had to fulfill these promises and so at that point this cooperation actually really started I also think this Mr. Fisher is really interesting because at some point in an interview he said that we wouldn't be able without this cooperation in the area of security to survive it's essential for us so I think it's interesting to talk to someone who has this attitude about when how this whole thing started another person we're writing for is Edward Snowden we have all heard about this whole excitement about whether they should interview him whether he should come to Germany whether that would be safe for him and this whole thing developed into such a farce that Glenn Greenwell who's actually invited who said well if you this is such a ridiculous thing where you're only creating the illusion of actually bringing up results then I'm not going to come so he was invited but he declined so I think that's actually a really important thing to say it's a really important quote we need to be aware that this committee can actually end up being a mere theater a mere facade and that's something that's maybe less likely to happen thanks to the members of the committee but more from the government that is actually actively trying to prevent anything from coming out of this another question is should this committee actually have a bigger broader question should it have a bigger task so so far it just says it's got something to do with the five eyes which he's supposed to look into but the longer this whole thing takes the more they actually realize that it's not only the evil five eyes who are using us making us into means for their ends and are profiting from the deals with us but that actually our own federal intelligence service and the other secret service that we have in Germany actually using this for their own work and for getting information for themselves for example by looking at these BND the German Selections that was something that was very interesting or might be very interesting so there are arguments for that and some against it something I am skeptical about if you actually broaden the scope of the committee that the limited time that you already have in the committee if you add even more fields of interest of inquiry for this committee I'm not sure if you can actually get anywhere if you can actually interview everyone who should be interviewed especially considering that there's all this maneuvering where members of government are inviting people who don't really have anything to say they just sat at a desk and didn't really contribute and they're just being invited to kill time and then of course there's going to be even more paperwork the people who work for the members of parliament are limited, they don't have unlimited work they don't have unlimited time there's other stuff they have to do and another possibility would be instituting a different committee that is more looking at what happened inside the German secret service the German intelligence service interesting there is a minority quota where the opposition could decide by itself to institute this but again there's the problem of limited resources they're actually out there parliamentary committees already in the parliament the whole thing is really interesting and I'm very interested and excited to see how this is going to end up I think we shouldn't stick with the status quo that we have right now because it's not really enough something that has to come out of this committee are reforms at least that's what's becoming clear increasingly clear right now especially because the BND is not really controlled in any way we're a bit scared because other parliamentary committees that looked into it varies with the BND in the past we learned that every time something like this comes out then they just usually change the way they did this and it was made constitutional so basically what the BND was doing anyone was made legal that was really clear when for example the space theory came up that's when somebody said well then we just need to make sure that this is constitutional so basically we just write into the laws that we have that this is all legal and constitutional and this would basically lead into a situation where we just have exactly the same thing the same bullshit and we just legalized what the service can do with it once and it's basically out of control and if we stand in front of an apparatus like this we actually need to which whose task it is to work in secret whose task it is to cheat it's direct to peers who doesn't talk to the parliament how can an institution like this work within a democracy and isn't this something that we can't actually work with and so whoever paid attention knows that I'm almost done now there's one thing that I was still missing what do the Illuminati have to do with all of this so I researched this I didn't know anything about this and then I found this domain if you click on it you are directed to the website of the NSA and of course if you edit backwards then it says Illuminati I've also heard from people who actually thought about this and one of these people actually emailed the guy who owns this domain and asked who this is the guy who owns it is John Halley what do you want to put with this is there anything behind it and what's the plan for the new world order and the guy said he laughed his ass off and said well he couldn't keep himself from simply directing all traffic that came to this website and the Illuminati don't have that much to do with this after all so one last appeal go to the committee everything we do can't replace people and can't replace what's happening in the polar render committee it says I know of course not everyone lives in Berlin not everybody has time on a Thursday morning or a Thursday afternoon but if you have the time go at it look, experience the atmosphere at the demeanor of these people how they present themselves we have so many different characters some are so convinced of themselves and so sure of themselves and say well everything's okay they're people who suddenly become very very small and where you can see their bad conscience in their face and you should also watch what's happening in the macros I often don't see it because I'm typing but because for example when the chance to leave is becoming nervous and they're leaving then you know that something important is happening and when the guys in the back row are speaking then you know well this is not very exciting right now another thing that I think is really important is that important to signal that there's a lot of interest in the parliamentary committee from the public and that the public wants to know about this and I think the more interest there is the more they will realize that it's not something they can simply pull off without any actual results but that's actually something that reaches a lot of people in Germany so I was really really happy I saw a school class in this committee at some point where their politics teacher went there with them to tell them well this is something we need to know about and I think this is really a current history which is something you won't be able to see anywhere else popcorn sadly isn't allowed if you're a visitor and the best thing is that it's really easy to register you just send an email to it's on the slides you tell them which day you're going to want to come you tell them your name where you were born if you haven't done this yet and if you won't have the possibility to do this I have another recommendations I would I recommend the Podcast Technische Aufklärung it's a podcast in German which is always recorded after the meetings of the committee sometimes I'm there so there are other people who go to a lot of these meetings if you want to do this today and if you want to listen to one of these today we are going to do a live episode today at the Zendert Zentrum at 6.15 in the evening if you want some more entertainment and actually want to bring some popcorn you can come at 15 minutes past midnight to Hall 2 because there's going to be a reading of the latest and most absurd scenes from this committee and I hope that we will actually be able to talk about this a bit so none of these things are made up so all of these things are real we've witnessed all of them another thing do something, be active go to the streets to help the government that you're not satisfied with us you're not okay with us help people to leave secret services and if you know anyone here or if there's anyone here in the Secret Service who believe the Secret Service there's help if you're still kind of part of this and you want to relieve your conscience a bit there's a post service in Germany you can send us letters maybe that helps you and of course there aren't only post boxes there's also email addresses you can send all your documents there where you think that this is something there is something in these documents that shouldn't happen like that you can also contact me personally that's how this works and with that I'm done and I hope there's some time for questions please queue and then ask questions people who are leaving now please be quiet what microphone should we start with number three please have a short question also can the committee can the committee put people in people in prison if they don't want to say something well yes they are obliged to answer truthfully so they also actually have to say everything they can not what they want and the committee can technically also find people but no they can't put people in prison but so far no fines have been imposed even if sometimes I wouldn't have stayed so calm like members of the committee when you had people sitting there who were just like well what I'm saying is not part of the scope and just don't say anything and so also because we don't know what we don't know and what the whole truth is it's also extremely difficult to tell people you're not saying something alright we have a short queue question is a similar flavour what are these things that just came out about the problems what direct results can we expect how does the G10 commission say well why don't they just stand there and say we can't allow any more why isn't anyone being punished for saying the wrong things lying in the road or for other crimes as far as I know I don't think that's possible because we don't know if someone is lying we don't have the company picture yet and it's even more difficult to be coming even more difficult there even more testimonials and sometimes the things people say don't match up sometimes you also see like it seems like they're devising some responsible idea where they're saying well maybe this person is this person's fault and all the people who are more important then say well it's not really our fault it's this other person's fault and there was this testimonial about this one B&D person who said they're not going to be any disciplinary consequences so he's basically telling well say telling these people well even if you made mistakes and if you violated the rules at least from our side you don't have to fear anything that's why we want to know from a point of P in law what are there any any consequences I'm not legally trained so I can't give you a reliable answer there so I'm sorry number four please has anyone tried check what the legal fundaments are like in detail what the root sort of legal foundations are here for example like the international law there's one testimonial from this Mr. Kraldechüsse that based on public international law spying is allowed I think that's where you need to realize that this is about details choosing one word over another it's about choosing what to call something do we call this virtual foreign lands do we call this Germany and I think we need to realize that we don't really have illegal means to say that this is completely illegal this is a gray area that the B&D constructed for itself some of these things are definitely illegal for others it's much less clear and you have people who are experts some of these experts who then say I'm actually said that most of what the B&D says is illegal so in many cases it's actually clear but the question is that we need to decide what legal consequences it's going to have but as long as we have this big coalition social democrats and conservators it's not really going to happen that it's becoming clear that this is illegal yeah well I mean you could really dig a lot deeper there and look exactly on what basis on what basic law you mentioned earlier to what extent is it really valid really we should remember that the government also needs to follow this and that indeed the secret service also needs to follow this we also need to think about who these basic laws are valid for because it's completely bolstered and I assume that the basic laws is only there for people who are German and everyone else as well locked out and we need to get away from this attitude we need to get away from distinguishing between people based on them being Germans and not we can't simply destroy privacy of people but as long as the B&D has these interesting attitudes and understandings like people who are important positions don't have these basic rights that we actually grant all Germans then there you need the world to make clear statements decisions from courts but that's going to take a while Number two please you mentioned earlier that these people need to say the truth which is to say they are not under oath what is the situation there with with failures and what if someone says something untrue is someone someone have an eye on this check if there is any such a delimitation of these things again I don't know I didn't study at all sorry Number six please Daniel said refuse to come do you think it was a good idea or do you think it was a bad idea I thought it was a shame just personally from a personal point of view I think it's a loss at least for the public not knowing what you would have had to say about it you know saying that if you're just playing theater here if you're just pretending if you're just playing a charade then I'm not participating I think we need people who refuse to participate in this people in Germany can't really do that because they have to come they're legal obliged to go once they're invited but I think in the end this was a good decision the question is what the consequence are going to be of this if maybe they're actually going to interview we'll see Number five please long queue I like the lighting in the room well I have a lot of good sense of TV optics I wanted to ask I didn't I would like to ask if you can't even get the answer on who is the technician how can you make the promise I like to leave the intelligence what if someone says it comes to you and leaves I want to leave the secret service are they also left alone well those are two different our TV team is here they like to take questions these are the qualified people who you should ask thanks finally switching live on number two thanks for the amazing technology thank you very much for the amazing talk and the good work but I have a question as well the question is well we know how much, how often these interrogations of asylum seekers do we know if these asylum seekers the people who are being interviewed are they under pressure are they being do they think they had to do this do they think it was a normal part of the procedure if you're looking for asylum in Germany did they know who they were talking to I would like to know what do we actually know about this process quite a bit of information about this I think the exact number I don't know about it but I think there were about 300 interviews per year at least at the time where it was very rampant of course when there are more asylum seekers coming there small when there's less there's less they were kind of losing personnel because they were not being terribly efficient at parallel so at some point it got less regarding pressure that's a difficult question because everything that they're telling us and all those they're promising us where they're saying oh no they were told that it's voluntary that it's not going to have any influence on their claim to asylum but so this institution doesn't have anything to do with granting asylum so it doesn't have any power to give these things to asylum seekers we also know that there are cases where these asylum seekers were interesting for the BND and the BND intervened in these processes for their asylum process where they intervened and where they said this process is interesting for us and then they basically told the ministry that is responsible for this and told this ministry to stall the process for asylum and if this for the BND to say whether it's interesting or not and then they might say that there are extra reasons then for example once somebody finds out in their home country that they talked to the intelligence service then well then you can stay but what we don't know is how much did these asylum seekers who were being interviewed about the person who was interviewing them they presented themselves as not being part of the intelligence service they presented themselves as being part of security service but of course most people who are from outside Germany just as most people instead of Germany wouldn't know about this and also something you should wonder is don't these people talk about it it's probably going to be spread around people will know whose asylum claims were branded, whose weren't and of course they can say that it's not going to have any influence but how believable is that if somebody is in a situation where they're under a lot of pressure where they actually need this asylum where they can say well maybe it's all voluntary but it might not actually be unfortunately we are out of time and I thank you very much we'll hand your applause for you if you have further questions do you know what she looks like I don't think you have any against the people who talk to me, no I hear a couple more days good