 What kind of world do I want to live in? I think about this question a lot. For our generation and for specifically my group of people, which is refugees, the circumstances might dismantle any vision of the future that we have. You're trying to rebuild, you're trying to make a future for yourself, and then the climate-related disaster comes and you start again. It's not about how it's affecting you now, it's about how it's affecting you your entire life. The first step to understand is that we're all a part of it. None of us are going to be left out by the crisis. We're at a stage where if we don't act now, really there won't be very much left. There are generations that will never see certain things that we grew up seeing in real life. We have to start treating this like the emergency it is to achieve the 17 sustainable development goals. We have to go from an intention to a serious commitment. Business leaders really need to rethink how they conduct their business and invest in creating systems that are climate-friendly. The action I would like to see is accountability. Structures being put in place where countries aren't just asked to do something, but they're kept accountable to the decisions that they make. There has to be that strong collaboration between government, between corporations, between youth activists to drag change forward. The world I would want to live in is a world where imagining the future is not a privilege. I want to live in a world where people do not give up on hope. Hope that a positive change is possible. The fact that you're listening today means that you are willing to make a change. Hello and welcome everyone to today's session. Today's session is all about trying to answer a question of what does it take to scale innovations toward a circular carbon economy? And with my distinguished panelist this afternoon or morning, it depends on where you are. We are going to discuss why pioneering innovations and technology is a key solution to tackling climate change. One observation I'd like to make, because the title of this session is Meet the Pioneers. In my opinion, we're talking about action years. What's common between my panelists today is that they are both founders of businesses after spending sufficient amount of time pursuing an education or a doctorate degree in science and engineering. They were able to demonstrate how robust engineering and science can be translated into an innovative business that was able to scale and show results. So without further ado, perhaps we could start with Jennifer. Jennifer, can you please tell us why did you start your business and a little bit more about how you think your business has role in fighting climate change? Thank you, Ennis. We this company, what it does is it takes waste carbon emissions, hydrogen and CO2 and converts those to ethanol and then we use ethanol to make fibers, plastics, jet fuels, sustainable aviation, fuel, et cetera. So what we're trying to do is we're trying to show that you can make everything that we use in our economy today from conventional fossil carbon with waste carbon. That could be directly or captured CO2, like Jan will talk about later, or it could be plastic waste that's floating in the ocean. So we're trying to substitute for today's petroleum based economy. We started the company 16 years ago, have raised over $500 million. So the way to really think about it is that's actually what it takes to scale hard tech to commercial. Thank you, Jennifer. So Jan, same question with emphasis. Tell us what do you do to CO2? Sure. Yes. Welcome very much from my side. And it's Jan. Well, and what we did 12 years ago together with my co-founder, Christoph, I founded the company, Climeworks. And what are we doing at Climeworks? It's it's easy to explain in one sentence. We are building machines that captures CO2 out of ambient air. Now, while we've been doing this for for 12 years, our 150 people in the meantime have raised something like 150, 160 million US dollars over the past years based in Zurich in Switzerland. And well, why? Why are we doing this? Just very simply speaking, if we listen to climate science, what they tell us today is if we want to have a chance to reach the goals of the Paris Agreement, limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, it is not enough to only reduce emissions. We have to reduce a lot like the majority of the task is reduction. But on top of that, we need to remove something like 10 billions of tons of CO2 or even more than that from the atmosphere every year by mid of the century. So that's that's quite a big task. And that is where we are fully focusing on with our business model. And maybe that's best to explain with what we've just recently done in Iceland. Just two weeks ago was one of the most exciting days in the history of our company. We were in launching our plant called Orca in Iceland near near Reykjavik, which is the worldwide largest direct air capture plant combined with underground storage. So we take with this plant about 4,000 tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere every year. And this is then handed over to our Icelandic partners. They're called Carp Fix and they inject the CO2 underground where it is actually turned into stone. So within two years, the CO2 turns into carbonates in these basalt rocks. Many of you might have seen these lava rocks in Iceland. And that's a very nice way of easy to understand and safe and permanent way to store CO2 over millions of years, basically. So that's what we're doing there. And we are offering to our customers the service of removing CO2 for them from the air, mostly to corporate companies, but even to private people. So there's there's a subscription model. And well, very happy that many large corporates over the last year have started taking action. So you were mentioning the the topic of action. So two or three years ago, still a lot of hesitation. Is this really a business today? Big big corporates like Microsoft or Stripe, Shopify, just to name a few have decided. Well, we do have a net zero or even net negative agenda. And there are not many solutions around that. And this methodology of using technical solutions to take CO2 out of the air can be something really meaningful. So that's where we stand today. Still a huge scale up ahead of us, four thousand tons today, talking about billion billions of tons in the future. On the other hand, we started 12 years ago with milligrams. So we've done already quite a quite a number of step ups and scale, but but a couple of more to follow. So I'll leave it with that. Thank you very much for like, you know, telling us just a little bit about the journey for moving from capturing milligrams of CO2 to tons to the journey ahead, which is looking at the scale of billions. This is exactly the type of scale that we need to be working at to really tackle climate change. And what I can only imagine that this journey, and I'm sure it's for Jennifer as well, is is not an easy one. And there are so many challenging a along the way that could stack from technical risks, challenges to raise funding and and so on. We heard about why you started the business. My question is, and it's it's really for both of you, and it would be very good to share your perspective with our audience. Why there are not many others like you who are prepared to go through a journey like that. Of looking at starting a heart tech business and scaling it and do what it takes. Jennifer, would you like to start? I think you're on mute. Yeah, I have apologies for that. Yes. So, you know, I don't think it's that there aren't people that are willing to do it. There's so many people that are doing it. It's just that it's a long journey, right? And so it just requires a huge pipeline of people doing it so that you see the couple that have gone through the funnel like Jan, you know, Climberks and ourselves. What I think is truly encouraging is there's so much intensity now around this climate issue. And people are understanding that, as you call the tough tech is critical to solving this problem. And I'm seeing more investors, more entrepreneurs, more people who are really willing to do this. I think the only thing and the most important thing is we have to be super careful to remember that to get from zero to a million tons or whatever the right number is requires a lot of steps and a lot of care. And I think that's really important. I think we put a lot of pressure to skip steps. And when you start skipping steps, you fail. And so what we really need is the patient investors. We've had a tremendous number of patient investors who understand that before our first commercial, we needed 15 years, not five years. So I see the environment changing, but we still need more people willing to understand that it's a journey, not a very short. We're just going to get this done and then we're going to be done and everything will be fine. Jan, would you like to comment on this? Well, Jennifer, thanks a lot. I don't know how I could have explained it better than you did. So I'd like to echo everything you said, maybe to add a personal note to that that demonstrates quite nicely how things were back in the early days of Climeworks. When I started Climeworks and when we were thinking of the first financing rounds, there was really like we were looking at other startups, say startups from the rather tech business, which where I mean like rather the software tech business or like the typical that's that's called and the typical Silicon Valley startups. And it was all about, many people ask us, hey, there are these nice venture capital companies and you should really talk to them and that's how we did it. And those are really good partners and kind of we quite quickly established something like a rule, very simple oversimplified rule, but this rule was venture capital equals fund, equals fund lifetime of seven years, equals three times too short for what we are doing. So we can't do it, we need to go a different way. So this was really a formula which we applied during the first years of Climeworks. And I think in that time or like in the like five years, 10 years ago, when really a lot of ideas came up on like hardware ideas, if I can call them climate tech ideas, then the world on the investment side was rather characterized by the big boom that we had observed on the software side before. So many structures, processes, groups, vehicles were really designed around the timeline of software innovation and it's really just a factor of two, three, if not an order of magnitude difference in terms of timeline. So fully echo what you say, Jennifer and I believe, I see change now. I've been speaking to many institutional type of funding parties or our investors recently where they had a completely different view on timelines than what I would have observed five years ago. So that's very encouraging, but I think that's a vital element to get more ventures like ours on the ground and survive the first couple of years and really make it up until large scale. So are we saying here that there are no shortages of innovations, there are shortages of funders who would support scaling these innovations or the time has changed to a point where we will need to find mechanisms to fund more and more innovations to scale because we are motivated by one target and that is climate change in the pace that it's coming at us. What do you think, Jennifer, in terms of like, do we have enough innovations out there or we need more innovations? No, so actually you said it very well when you asked about funders. So let's talk about what it takes to scale and new technology of this type, right? You have to build your death. So you're building bigger and bigger facilities, each of which takes longer and more money. There's lots and lots of ideas, I believe, feeding the funnel. Okay, so at the very beginning, lots and lots of ideas. What we need funding for is getting the pilot scale, getting the demo scale, getting the first commercial because even the first commercial has a risk associated with it. And to do that, we need funding of that scale. Companies in general need funding of that scale. What is different today, I think you said it very well, is the urgency of climate change. We could have waited for these types of technologies to scale and diffuse, replicate, et cetera, 30 years before, right? The iPhone, it didn't really matter that we transitioned to a mobile phone in two years or 10 years. Now we need to compress the timeline because climate change is such a crisis. So what I really think needs to happen is we have lots of ideas in the pipeline. They can fund it. I think in the early days, you see a lot of funding for early stage ideas. But then it takes too long to build a pilot. It takes too long to build the demo. And that, I think, relates to financing, access to funding, especially by startup companies. Because by the time you add the risk factor, it's very hard to find people who will fund, 100 million dollar first commercial facility. And going to a bank, the risk adjustment means the loan rate is so high. That's why it's so wonderful now that you're seeing people realize that and seeing funding for later stages. And that's what we need to push. That's what we really need to push. So we compress the timeline from idea to success. And by the way, there's nothing wrong with failure either. You want to compress the timeline to failure as well so that these entrepreneurs and these people can then move on to the next one. Nothing wrong with that failure is just the time to success, the time to failure that matters. Absolutely. I totally agree with you on that point. And maybe just like a follow-on question to Yan, do you think that focusing on quick wins to nurture further progress is important or we should think about maybe a different strategy which is probably spray and pray to fund as many innovations hoping that a percentage of them will make it and that will be enough to address a big of a problem that we are facing. I would find a quick, but not the wind. Let's put it like that. So definitely quickly. I like the, let's fail quickly that I agree. So we need a certain volume of ideas and concepts and ventures and startups to come. So that's just, and that hasn't, like if I look at our domain specifically, capturing CO2 from the air for 10 years, there's been three companies around basically or say five companies around now. Suddenly new startups pop up on the horizon, which is cool, which is great. And certainly not all ideas will make it to the thousands or even millions of tons scale. So we need to be quick and we need a certain amount, but I don't think we can win quickly because it's just, it's hardware tech. So just like we win in the long-term, but we have to have many quick steps on the way there to understand what works and what doesn't work. That'll be my take. Yeah, I agree. And I think the fact that you have today or in the past two years, especially like since the start of the pandemic, funds that have launched to specifically focus on net zero technology or scaling net zero businesses, this is something that we haven't seen before. And it's quite impressive and encouraging to see. I mean, we usually talk about climate change in a very negative way, where we just talk about the threats, but also it's very important to highlight and say that actually if we look around, there is some progress that is being made. We need faster, we need more, but there are changes that we haven't seen, like that happened in the past two years, we haven't seen before and that's quite encouraging. Now on that point, climate change, our beast, the biggest challenge of our times, we've heard that I think about fifth of corporates have set net zero targets worldwide and a lot of governments have a net zero targets, but they're all talking about 2050. 2050 is way too far. And the challenge and the threat actually with putting target that is as far as 2050 is that if things did not work according to plan, they might not be like a process to correct on the way to 2050. And that's where we could fail and fail massively. Do you think that we should start thinking about a different mechanisms whereby we set a very rigid or a very defined set of metrics and say annually we would want to report on progress and see where we are from 2050. And if we think we can get to net zero or not by what time, what do you think about a mechanism like that or alternative mechanisms and where do you think your businesses could play a role in that? Jennifer. Yeah, so thank you for that. So first of all, I'm seeing tremendous progress away from just 2050. Used to be, I would say a year ago, two years ago, everybody was talking 2050. Now I'm seeing 2030 targets. I'm even seeing 2025 targets. So to your point, that is absolutely critical because you cannot measure how much progress you're making if the target is too far in the future. I think this is a good thing. I think the ability to make change happen both on scope one, scope two, scope three emissions is also really important. I think that's some of what Jen is talking about is the fact that corporates really are now talking not just about scope one emissions, direct emissions, but also scope three and their indirect and their supply chain and everything else. And so I believe that a basket of solutions that helps every type of emission reduction matters. How are we contributing to that? Well, we are allowing corporates. So for example, we have started to make fabric for companies like Lulemon. We have started to make perfume ingredients for companies like Cody. We have worked with Mabel actually in Switzerland and they sell a floor cleaner that uses our recycled carbon ethanol. We're also making aviation fuel from recycled carbon emissions. So we believe we're on a journey to enable supply chains to use the same products outside of the fossil carbon. And a fresh virgin fossil carbon, as far as I'm concerned, can no longer be the feedstock that we use every day. And so what we're allowing people to do is to see that you can make all the same stuff from recycled carbon. So I do believe we're part of that story. And more importantly, I am seeing tremendous interest in short-term targets. And you're right. Without short-term targets, we will absolutely fail. We'll never get this done. Thank you very much. Jan, where do you think your business could score high on metrics? And do you think we should really try and adopt a model that works for your company with others and see how we can implement it to a wider community of businesses? Yeah, well, speaking about metrics, maybe just to put a few numbers behind this timeframe of 2050 and then see where we can come into the game there. Just so in general, I think thinking on a 2050 timeframe is good because it's necessary and it's needed. So let's just think one second what... So we are speaking about... If we're speaking about carbon removal, and I speak in very general, not only climate works, not only direct air capture, but also other approaches and whole industry with a handful of technologies. So if we say by 2050, we need to be at a billion tons per year scale. So let's just, for simplicity's sake, a billion tons to take, to remove CO2, to remove from the air by 2050. And let's look at other industries. Let's look at solar, PV or wind industry. I think they have shown good scale-up curves we can use as comparables. Those technologies have scaled somewhere between 20, 25, 30% per year over longer times, over decades or a decade at least. If we take that as an average, say the average between wind and solar PV, we are at a 10x scale-up within a decade. So 10 times larger within a decade. And if we do a back calculation, and that's why I think it's needed. So we wanna be at a billion ton in 2050. So we need to be at 100 millions in 2040. So we need to be at 10 millions in 2030. And we should have been at 1 million in 2020. Maybe in the beginning, you can have a bit of different scaling loss. But that's really what we have. So we have to think that long-term, and actually even if we think that long-term, this imposes very stringent and quite challenging goals, not only for the next 10 years, but also for the next year and the second next year. And what I would wish to see is big corporates who have set their agendas, realizing that and translating that into action they need to do today, next year and two years and three years, and understand really this law of exponential development. And what I often observe today is that when eventually it comes to making economic decisions on where to invest and where not to invest today, many still apply metrics that are rather relevant for 2040 or 2050 to the situation today. So if we think of, if we apply new technologies like Jennifer or our company is developing, we shouldn't forget that we're still doing that at relatively low absolute numbers. So the metrics in terms of how much per ton CO2 avoided should a special solution cost that applies in 2040 at a global rollout scale is not necessarily the same that should apply in 2021. And I see some companies understanding that and saying, hey, it's really important to invest in solutions today where we would rather not look so much at relative numbers. So how many dollars per ton avoided, but rather in absolute numbers, how many millions or billions do we need to invest in the next say five to 10 years to scale these solutions or this industry by a factor of 10. So this is, so maybe if you ask me for metrics that I would like to be applied, I have very strong arguments for rather thinking of absolute figures in the next few years to apply to get to the next scaling level than too much thinking of relative figures which are rather relevant maybe in 10 or 20 years down the road. That's a very comprehensive answer. We have a question in the audience which I really think is a very topical one and it's really worth discussing or spending a few minutes on. So the question is we need to set a price tag on carbon. What is the best way to achieve this? To have it being adopted at scale. And if you think that carbon tax will play a major role to scale the sciences U.S. projects, what do you think, Jennifer? No question. We've got a surprising externalities. If we want to move quickly and we're not prepared to actually pay for what things cost and the impact they have on the environment, it's just going to take too long to get here, to get to where we need to go. There are two approaches, you know, tax or incentives. I think you can use both, right? But we absolutely have to think about incentives or approaches that really quantify the impact of the damage that we're causing the climate. Otherwise, we won't go fast enough. We won't go fast enough. Jan, do you think we need to set a price tag on carbon? Getting back to what I said before, I do think yes, we need, but we rather need that to the full extent in maybe 10 years down the road. Today, we'd rather need something else. Look, there's something tricky about a, let's assume a CO2 tax. And let's assume a CO2 tax that is like, it's discussed in many countries today. It's a low value today and rising, rising slowly over the years. And so, but it's always thought as something for the whole amount of CO2 emissions we have up there. So a tax, low value today, say $20 today, rising $200 or 200, whatever over the next 20 years. This is an applying to all CO2 emitted. That's a typical model that is being discussed today. On the other hand, we have technologies which today have a much higher cost of carbon avoidance, but addressing only a very small volume. So they have high cost, small volume. And then as volume goes up, they go down. But those two don't match, don't match all the time. And at some point that the curves might cross and then it doesn't match. So there's just one single moment in time where the two match and then before and thereafter they don't match. So there's a fundamental concept mismatch if a tax on carbon, as it is currently discussed, is used to think of is thought to be something to further scale technologies today. We need it in the long-term, very important, importantly because there needs to be a perspective, but it is not the instrument which will help scaling most of the concepts that are out there today over the next five years. That's the tricky part. And there we need additional concepts on top of the concept of such carbon project. Jennifer, I don't know what's your take on that, but that's- I don't know, you're right. Actually, it's interesting because I've seen people talk about tax the opposite of what you just described that initially they do have to be quite high and then they can go down. But I agree with you, Jan. What we need is every mechanism out, we need every technology out there. We need to try them so we need every mechanism. So we need grants at the beginning, we need loan guarantees, we need tax incentives and we also need carbon taxes. I know that seems like too much and the basket is too big, but it isn't. If we need to go fast, we need to incentivize early stage, middle stage, later stage and diffusion. That's a very good point to try and conclude the session with an action. So what do you think is the biggest takeaway action that you'd like to, in a limited number of words, you'd like to leave the audience with? Jennifer, here you go. Oh, gosh, I was hoping you'd go. I can as well, I see one. Yeah, come here. Well, very simply, from my end, call for action to all the experts out there, but also private people. Think of, what's your favorite climate solution you wanna invest in today at a small or large level? Don't look so much at the price tag, rather look at the impact that could have for yourself and for others in five years down the road or 10 years down the road. That's the filter I would apply. And you say something I would second, so I agree, thank you, Jen. The only other comment that would make is, we have to disrupt our fossil fuel economy. We really do, we have it everywhere, right? I don't think people realize it's not just power, it's not just fuels, it's also everything we wear, everything we use, everything we do. And until we choose a different way, this impact that we're having in our climate will not end. And we just have to rethink our carbon economy. I'll leave it. Thank you very much for your appreciated thoughts, ideas and sharing your journey. And I really hope that the audience enjoyed listening to how the action years of the carbon, circular carbon economy can look like and how hopefully we can see more and more of these in the short term. Thank you very much for attending the session. Thank you very much for our panelists and I hope you have a good day. Thank you.