 This morning's panel will be moderated by Krista Anderson, who is a research fellow at the World Wildlife Fund. The plan is for Krista to start with a few questions for the panel, and then we will take some questions from the audience. We'll use a similar format as for the presentations. Please submit your questions via the Q&A function. I will now hand it over to Krista Anderson and the panel. Thank you, Sarah. As Sarah mentioned, we've heard already today from Sally, Chris, Rob, and Paul, and we're joined by Jeremy now. Our objective in this workshop is to discuss research opportunities, and in particular today, of course, research opportunities around the global carbon cycle and natural climate solutions. Jeremy, as you're just joining us now, I'd love to turn the first question to you. Given your role as a scientist in oil and gas, what do oil and gas company investments look like in natural climate solutions today, and what is your involvement been in this topic? Yeah, thanks, Krista. Thanks for allowing me to tear this one off. I mean, going back to first principles, I think it's fair to say that society is powered by energy, and Sally very eloquently explained the benefits of energy in helping to societies to develop. But of course, society is changing, the population is increasing, emissions are increasing, and the society needs to decrease its emissions. So I think as a world, and as a shell scientist, we are part of the global community that is trying to tackle the climate change issue. As a world, we need more energy, but it has to be has to be cleaner. And there are a number of levers that you can play to decarbonise. And I think as a society, we're going to pull all those levers. I think for Shell, it's about the first lever we have is to sell more natural gas, which has a lower carbon footprint, lower emissions than other energy sources. It's about electrification, it's about generating more electricity, particularly from wind and solar. And it's about providing lower carbon fuel, so be there biofuels or hydrogen, or for people with electric cars, the ability to charge those cars. So that's a way of reducing the carbon emissions. But that's not going to be enough, we're going to need some other things. So we're going to need some negative emissions technologies. Briefly mentioned was carbon capture and storage. And the other one is what we call nature-based solutions, so natural carbon offsets. So Shell is investing heavily in projects to decarbonise it in this way. And this allows us, for example, to offer our customers products, be they gasoline at the pump in the Netherlands and the UK, or purchases of natural gas as a way of offsetting the carbon associated with that. So it's practical stuff that you can do here and now by investing in natural and nature-based solutions projects. Great, thanks. And could you just spend me one more minute talking a little bit about what some of those nature-based solutions projects have been for you? Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, this year and next year, as a company, we're investing around $200 million in these projects. And they cover the whole spectrum. Naturally, in the early stages, this is a lot about reforestation or avoiding deforestation. But we also get increasingly involved in other natural ecosystems that I think also have great potential. So this is about providing products to our customers, but it's also providing the underpinning research and development to understand the potential, the pitfalls, the measurements need to be involved. So that's where Shell's investing at the moment. Great, thanks. And I think, Jeremy, given that you'd mentioned carbon capture and storage, I wanted to turn back to an earlier comment where we heard about BEX and I think maybe Sally, if you wanted to take a first cut at this one, what about the role of BEX in fulfilling our energy demand and what are the research needs there? What is the potential? This is an option that has been sometimes contrasted with natural climate solutions in terms of costs and other opportunities. What would you say to bring that into the conversation? Yeah, so I think BEX, like all the solutions, it can be part of a solution and where you have ag wastes and you have forest residues, particularly associated with forest management to keep healthy forests. I think that there's a important potential there. Of course, it creates negative emissions, which are really useful. We've done detailed studies of the US potential and also global potential. And in the US, by mid-century, with a significant amount of effort devoted to actually dedicated forest crops, you might get between half and a million... No, no, I'm not saying that right. It could be on the sort of level of 10 to 20% of the US energy supply. So it's not huge, but it's not insignificant. In terms of research needs, there's a lot of devils in the details, running power generation facilities with biofuels, which are pretty dirty feedstock. They're all kinds of inefficiencies. There are lots of issues with the efficiency of residue collection. If you're going to be transporting these materials over long distances, a lot of the benefits can be offset by those transportation. So doing really good life cycle assessment is going to be really important. I think that there's an interesting potential of DAC with BEX. So we get the double bang for the buck because direct air capture does need a significant amount of energy. And if you could provide that with biofuels and sequester all those emissions, you could even get a bigger benefit. So just to put that into a finer conscious, if you're using natural gas to capture CO2 as your heat source for every million tons of CO2 that you're taking out of the atmosphere, you have another half a million tons of CO2 from the natural gas that you've used to heat up the solvent to regenerate it. So that's very significant. But if you're doing that with BEX, you basically get two times as many emissions reductions as you would if you took the alternative pathway. So yeah, I think it's important. I think that the integrated assessment models have been extremely optimistic in terms of the potential of BEX, but it's still important. And in certain locations could be extremely important. Thank you. And Chris, I see you have your microphone off mute. Did you want to add something to that? I was just turning my microphone off mute in order to be polite and ready to answer. Good, because I have a next question. Zooming out a little bit as we talked about those research opportunities, I would love to ask you first and the other panelists as well, what might be your sort of top two research questions related to the global carbon cycle and natural climate solutions? So what research do you see really being needed to achieve this 100 to 200 billion tons that you cited as potential? I think we've talked today mainly about the technology and the economic incentives that might be most important. I think where the big unknowns are more in the political and cultural and the social enablers and in the kinds of incentives that actually work in real societies, questions of how things like land tenure get addressed, how you deal with issues of protecting areas from deforestation, where you have weak states and incomplete governance. And I think it's easy to be too optimistic about the potential of natural climate solutions in places that don't have strong institutions and the biggest opportunities for figuring out how to make progress I think are more in the social sciences at this point than they are in the natural sciences. Others on the panel, would you care to offer your two thoughts? Rob, go ahead. I can weigh in briefly. I first of all agree with Chris in that the behavioral side of the ledger incentives, decision making really is an important area that we haven't at least in our world, we focus on this technology side and the economics. But it isn't just about what's possible from a technology standpoint and what's possible economically, people have to decide to do these things. And so I think that's an important area. I'll leave that as Chris said it. I think the other area that I think about a lot with natural carbon solutions and especially negative solutions is scaling. It's one thing to make something work on a project scale. You do it. You make money at the hectare scale or the tens or hundreds of hectares of scale. It's quite different entirely to think about scaling something to the billion ton scale. And if it isn't the billion ton scale, it's really not worth talking about in this context at least. So I think we haven't talked about soils much. Soils are a good example or tremendous benefits for restoring carbon into soil organic matter. We've lost billions of tons of soil organic carbon from soils due to plowing and other activities. So we could put some of that back that would be a benefit for carbon, for water holding, for fertility. But if we take something like a biochar application that's one thing to do it on a project basis, one thing to do it perhaps on a farmer's field, another thing entirely to think about how we would do that across a national forest or on private land or all kinds of other things. So I really think about scaling quite a bit. Scaling to the billion ton scale is very different than making money at the project scale. Perhaps I can ship in on going back to the science, some of the R&D challenges I see there. I think in the short term it's around measurement, particularly measurement of such carbon flux measurements, but also biomass measurements perhaps by remote sensing earth observation. These are all possible, but they're quite expensive at the moment. So lower cost ways of quantifying carbon uptake I think is going to be really important. Next to that models, so development of robust models that have suitable and sufficient data input into them from these measurement techniques, so that's short term. Longer term, I really hope over the next couple of days we're going to be able to think about some fundamental questions whether we can actually store more carbon than is the perceived carbon saturation limit of soils or whatever ecosystem it happens to be, be that biochar or something else. Biochar was just mentioned, but there are many other potential opportunities there. And then really science based, so looking out, well looking into the real detail to understand what those biophysical mechanisms are of carbon cycling and other nutrients cycling, let's not forget the other nutrients, particularly nitrogen in soils and ecosystems. So this is down to the level of the plant root air to the fungi, the bacteria in the soil. So those are real R&D challenges. Maybe I'll add some thoughts in here. It seems to me that the key to making this work is to identify holistic solutions that are win-win-win. They need to win for the people, it has to provide jobs, it needs to be win for the climate and it needs to be win for the ecosystem. And the timeframe that we need to think about is a multi-generational time frame because these are century scale problems and anything that we do that's shorter time frame than multiple generations, the land use will be likely converted back to some other thing that will release all the carbon. So I think that's sort of an unusual sort of framing for R&D and even thinking about experiments, working with communities. And at the end of the day, it's got to make economic sense. And so I really think you need interdisciplinary teams of ecosystem scientists, economists, social scientists, economists who could really figure out, because it's often easy to start something, what's really hard is to sustain things because at the end of the day, it's like who's paying? And the sort of the burn rate to sustain infrastructure and one could think about this as natural infrastructure is very significant. And so projects that are framed potentially around particular solutions, BEX being an example, ecosystem restoration for, for example, restoring watersheds that provide big benefits to water supply. I think that those would be completely different kind of research programs, but something very valuable. Great, thank you. Actually, building off of that, both a timescale question and the sort of question about effort needed, I wanted to ask one more perhaps before we turn to the audience. And this I would start with perhaps Chris or Rob. I think that Rob had raised initially at least this question about permanence and longevity for natural climate solutions. One of the challenges can be that we're not, we don't, we don't know how long carbon can be stored or will be stored in terrestrial sink. How do we deal with this challenge and what are the still important research questions to resolve around permanence? You want to start, Rob? Sure, I'll start briefly. I want to make sure we bring Paul into some of these discussions too. So the solutions for land, most land-based, land-based solutions are not permanent, but they are important in sort of a decade to a century timescale. You know, eventually much of the carbon that we place back on land will return to the atmosphere, but even in a sort of forestry management situation, there are things we can dilute to do to lengthen that time frame. And I think it's the lengthening the time frame that's worth thinking about as well as viewing the world as sort of a spreadsheet of where trees could be and aren't. You know, I think that, that kind of approach is a concern for me about permanence. And a good example of this is, is China has the world's largest tree planting endeavor that's been going on for decades to sort of as a barrier between the Gobi Desert. And in some places, this has worked pretty well in other places that hasn't worked well at all. And it's a lot easier to plant trees than it is to grow trees. So I think concerns of permanence are front and center. And there's, you know, I guess a ton of carbon dioxide avoided as an emission is more reliable than a ton of carbon dioxide planted. But as we said before, we need everything. I might just provide three takes on this question of permanence. The first is that when we think about the long-term consequences of any natural climate solutions, there's potential for different outcomes at the project scale and at the global scale. At the global scale, the objective should be to have any intervention result in a long-term change in the mix of ecosystems with different carbon contents. And that's always going to be some that are grading carbon and some that are losing. And it may be that on a particular project, the trees grow really fast and stay for a long time, but that results in additional harvesting in a nearby area called leakage that doesn't result in a net increase. And so we probably have the potential and this silo model kind of highlights why there may be the potential to have a kind of a steady state carbon balance that's got more carbon in ecosystems than now by how much is uncertain. But there is the potential for shifting the world from a carbon-poperate state to a somewhat more carbon-rich state, recognizing that everywhere ecosystems experience cycles of carbon increases and carbon loss. The second theme that's really important that Rob highlighted a little when he talked about the new paper by Bill and Reg, if you're an author on, is that many aspects of climate change are pushing us in the direction of decreasing the permanence of storage. And as we increase forces that lead to premortality, especially high temperatures, extended droughts, risks of insect outbreak, not to mention the risks of increasing harvesting, we're actually attacking the roots of our ability to increase the carbon interest real ecosystems. And so there are lots of reasons to think that from increasing risks of wildfire to increasing risks of mortality from high temperature, that the prospects for storey large amounts of carbon in the in the terrestrial biosphere are going away. And the third point that's worth keeping in mind is that in solving this problem, there's some benefits in increase in the carbon stock in ecosystems, land and carbon in the ocean over decades to century, even if it's not truly permanent, humans are really creative. And I think if we can make what you could think of as a big down payment on removing carbon from the atmosphere, I'm not too uncomfortable with the risk that some generations down the road are grandchildren or their grandchildren are going to have to deal with the fact that that wasn't permanent. Thanks. And make sure we don't miss out on the ocean perspective. Paul, you did a really nice job of highlighting the role of the oceans in the global carbon cycle and the potential harmful effects of monkeying with the biological cycle, as you noted. What do you see as sort of the, are there any uncertainties related to the future of the oceans in the global carbon cycle? And is there any interaction with natural climate solutions? Oh, I think one of the biggest uncertainties that I've had for many years is why is the ocean nitrogen limited? So terrestrial ecosystems are hardly ever nitrogen limited. You have natural terrestrial ecosystems. North American actually virtually all lakes in the northern hemisphere are phosphorus limited. So the idea of nitrogen limitation in the ocean is almost certainly due to iron limitation of nitrogen fixers. And one way we could monkey with the ocean, which would not lead to the massive change in oxygen and gases on geologic time scales, or at least on time scales of centuries, would be to see if the ocean could be fertilized in the tropics to enhance nitrogen fixation. Now I tried this proposal several times to the Department of Energy and to NSF. The experiment is on order about $25 million, which to them was a choke point. But you know, when I think about physicists that think about machines that cost billions of dollars, $25 million should not be a big choke point for the conceptual understanding as to whether or not we could naturally change the carbon cycle in the ocean by stimulating nitrogen fixation, which would be, I think, a relatively gentle way of pulling carbon out of the atmosphere. Now I haven't done a cost-benefit analysis in terms of how much that would be per ton, but that would be a relatively simple thing to do, depending on the amount of iron that's needed and the amount of nitrogen fixation that would occur with it. So that's one area where you can monkey with the ecosystem in the ocean and probably not have a terribly bad effect actually, might be a beneficial effect. One of the things that we see in terms of what we don't have, I'm just going to back up one second, we do not have a total earth system model that of the natural ecosystem that we can really rely on. And to Chris's point, for example, of social issues, one of the major issues we see when we increase food production around the world in China, in the United States, in many parts of the world is we dump huge amounts of nutrients into estuaries. And those nutrients are going into the ocean and they cause anoxia. And so this is a consequence of human population and the way we administer nutrients to agriculture. So this is a social issue, this is not just a technical issue. And we see this all over the world, we see this in the Gulf of Mexico, we see this in the western China Sea, the sea between Japan and China and Korea, we see it in the South China Sea, we see it in the Baltic, we see it all over the world. So it's one of these things where we need a much better integrated system in terms of science and social aspects than we have now. So I would say those two aspects of things, one is technical, iron fertilization, the other is more of a I guess a computer model. Great, thank you. I don't want to take away time now from some audience questions. So let me turn it over to any questions that we've received in the question and answer box for the panelists. Thank you, Krista. So some of the questions asked by audience members have been touched on by the panel, but Shafiq has a number of questions that tie these things together and drill down a little bit. So I'd like to go to Shafiq. Shafiq, would you like to unmute yourself and ask your questions? Sure, I think Chris and Rob, I think you started to address this point a little bit. I think this question of the rates, when you start pushing carbon onto the terrestrial ecosystem for one, you know, as you try to do it at the early stages, it's relatively easy to push carbon. But as you start to kind of build with time, that becomes more difficult. And potentially then you are just kicking the can down the road where you potentially have suddenly now all this carbon ready to degrade that you can't stop, that you can't slow down. There was a paper maybe about eight, nine years ago, maybe 10 years ago in science on the amount of undecomposed carbon in the northern forests, right, Siberian forests and things that if it kicks off with temperature. So are we potentially creating another major catastrophe down the road if we don't understand this kind of rate question well? Go ahead, Chris. I was just going to say the important thing to recognize is that with the full portfolio of things we're calling natural climate solutions, there's a biochemical, biophysical, biogeochemical link between the inputs and the outputs. And as you think about stuffing more and more carbon into whether it's trees or soils or roots or any part of an ecosystem in the ocean, there's a stability that's associated with that and a risk of later releases. And the thing that we haven't really touched on that's an important you need to remember about these natural climate solutions is that you're essentially taking on the responsibility to steward them into the indefinite future. And that it's not just a question of, oh, I didn't cut down the tropical forest last year. So I'm done that not a deforestation asset depends on not deforestation this year, next year, and every year into the future. And that's actually a significant burden that's associated with the long-term management of any of these. I agree with that. Maybe just a couple of short follow-ups and we'll get to another question, but it's an interesting point. And I think we do look at the examples that we have today for not just natural carbon solutions, but many other technologies too. But I think it's especially relevant for land-based solutions. And the examples we have today start in the best places and that's where that's where projects should start. But as we again push the system as you suggested through the question, we push the system into needing to do these activities on lands that are less productive, more marginal. And so I maybe to reiterate one of the points from my presentation, I really hope that we think about the other ecosystem interactions that will go along with that sort of that wave of land-based activities into more marginal lands and such. I think we have the potential to store a lot of carbon and do good. I think we have the potential to cause some harm if we aren't careful. So I think that's one aspect that's important to me. And a second point about permanence, it doesn't just apply to to land-based solutions. It's also an aspect of CCS and carbon capture and storage underground. And California, I think the rule is that we have to, our project has to guarantee permanence underground for a century or more. And that guarantee over geologic time, it seems pretty natural. Natural gas stays underground for millions of years, for example. But that guarantee on a project basis of having to keep it there for decades to a century is a break on projects that might otherwise be developed. So I think this issue of permanence is a really important one. Thanks. And if I could just build on that, perhaps, because it's tempting to think in any NBS project. You initiate the project and then you walk away. And of course there's nothing could be further from the truth. Keeping the carbon locked up requires continued and sustained activity. So then the question becomes, how do you incentivize that? How do you get landowners, farmers, forest owners, whoever it is to continue to manage the land and ensure the carbon remains intact? So there have to be these incentives, and those have to be developed. They could be financial incentives or they could be non-financial incentives. But they need to take place over years. And the second question I had that I felt we kind of have a little gap in the discussion was this kind of interplay between the ocean and the land at the coastal ecosystems in there. Some of the ancillary benefits could be quite significant there to really drive not specifically for NBS or NCS solutions, but the other benefits and it may make it much more economic to drive. Are there any thoughts on that? Kind of how we think about this kind of interface between land and ocean and how to go after that? Yeah, perhaps I could say something about it. I think your point about the interface between land and sea oceans is a specific point, but there is a general one here as well in that when one is developing an NBS project, it's not just about the carbon capture and the credits associated with that. It's really important that the project has other wider societal or environmental impacts. And in the case of the littoral environment between oceans and land, potentially around mangroves for example, you could there think about increasing productivity from the marine environment, shrimps, fish etc. that has been seen in certain projects. So it is about other benefits in addition to the carbon storage benefit that's so important. You know the land-ocean interface is really rich with co-benefits. It also is a relatively small area and one of the challenges with all of these natural climate solutions is that they tend to result in low fluxes of carbon per unit area and a big limiting factor on how much we can scale up. Coastal type solutions is just the limited area of the coasts. Back to you, Jenny. Other questions from the audience? Yeah, lovely. Thank you. That was pretty comprehensive. So a little while ago we touched on some, an audience member touched on CCS and there was also a discussion about the permanence in that there. So George, if you're still there, would you like to ask your question and maybe the answers could also speak to the permanence of CCS? Yeah, so my question I think is really probably Sally. It really is regards to non-natural carbon capture and sort of what is the best approach in terms of what a modeling or a research has been done. You know, more centralized capture. You know, geographically, you know, all of its captures going on in the Arctic, you know, first day versus a decentralized capture mechanism across the globe. You know, when you think about ultimately the capture, then you got to think about the transportation and handling and logistics to be able to sequester it or actually use it for applications. You know, that's when the sort of the midstream and handling and the transportation and all those things would certainly suggest different outcomes for cost and economics. Yeah, that's actually a really great question. I mean, in my opinion, to first order, you know, we should go after point sources that would otherwise be admitting in the atmosphere. So the location of those will be, you know, optimized for sites that are, you know, reasonably co-located with geological storage resources. The broader question you asked, though, which I really like is that, you know, if you decided, for example, to use direct air capture and you wanted to optimize where that's located, you'd want to find, you know, sinks for the CO2 that were going to be relatively easy to build the infrastructure, which will of course require energy infrastructure. You know, it's a very energy intensive activity. I think we saw a number that 124 exajoles of power would be required to use direct air capture on, I don't know, was it 10 million tons a year, or 10 billion tons a year of CO2. So that's at the scale of a quarter of the global energy system today. So the question then is, you know, do you want to do that in a very distributed way? Do you want to do that in a centralized way? I think it's a great optimization problem. And I think as a research idea, it's a really fantastic thing to pursue trying to come up with an answer to that question, what would be the optimal strategy for massive direct air capture or DAC plus BEX or something? I suspect it also depends what you want to use a CO2 for. So if you want to put it down a geological structure, yes, you need to be close to the geological structure. But of course, if you're going to the expense of direct air capture of CO2, probably in the first instance, you want to use that as a feedstock for other industrial processes, perhaps combining it with green hydrogen to make chemicals, rather than simply making it inaccessible. So all sorts of options that are out there. And yeah, you just need to compare one against another. Yeah, but again, I think it goes back to your objective. If your objective is to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, you know, you have to put it somewhere just making a carbon neutral, you know, eventually having a carbon neutral cycle, you know, is what we're going to be needing. But on the pathway to recovering from, you know, the buildup of atmospheric CO2, we're going to need to be taking it out of the atmosphere. And we either have to take it out and put it underground, or we have to take it out and put it in ecosystems, or put it in, you could put it in structural materials, we can imagine a world where we have massive amounts of carbon fiber that substitute for other structural materials. But given the scale of carbon dioxide removal we need, I think that that I think that's unrealistic to think we can do that at such a massive scale in the timeframe that we need to start doing this. I have a couple of additional questions. I'd like to go to Ajay. Ajay, would you like to ask your question? Yeah, thanks, Jenny. It was a question to all the panelists that, you know, when we take a look at all of the options available under the NCS umbrella and the breakdown that's there in the Griscum paper, are there any particular ones that leap out for each one of you as either being particularly exciting or particularly challenging? Because as Sally just pointed out that like, you know, when people talk about direct air captured and there is, of course, the size of the energy input that is required, but in all of these potential solutions, we're not talking about putting all the eggs in just one basket. It's kind of all of these different potential opportunities have, you know, a role to play. So I'd be curious to hear about what ones do you all see as particularly exciting and the ones that you consider to be extremely challenging? Want me to start? You know, my sense is that each of them comes into particular focus and is the most exciting opportunity in a few places. And one of the things I think we almost have this tyranny of the gigaton hanging over us and the idea that it's not worth looking at any technology or any approach unless we get a gigaton out of it. But I think we need to be more broad-minded about the way we're going to stitch together contributions to solutions from a whole bunch of different components. And, you know, Griscombe and all look at 20 potential pathways. I think there are actually more than that that can be utilized. And I think that in many ways, the both the opportunity and the challenge is figuring out where each of these opportunities comes into its own, where the co-benefits are really meaningful, where the where the liabilities associated with it are manageable and how to stitch things together. And I wouldn't push any of the candidate solutions off the table as being irrelevant. If we go that direction, what we need to think about is how to provide an R&D and an accounting and a co-benefit and accounting environment that allows each of those technology pathways to come to fruition at whatever scale it makes sense. Nice. Thank you, Gris. Maybe a thought from me on that one. So, yeah, I mean, Adja, I think we are going to need all those different ecosystem solutions. But there's one that intrigues me and a molecule that's hardly been mentioned today. It's been mentioned once or twice, which is methane or methane. I think there's some great some very exciting prospects around particularly around avoided methane emissions from things like peat bogs and other anoxic environments, including in agriculture, for example, in rice growth. I think that that has potential to be to be very scalable, but also potentially asks, addresses the question about longevity against climate change, because when the climate does change, methane emissions will become increasingly significant. Great. And if there's no further comments from the panel on that question, I think we have time for one more question from Brian Bartholomews. Would you like to unmute yourself when you're able and ask your question? Thank you, Jenny. We're introducing significant amounts of plastics and microplastics into the ocean. And I'm directing this question at Paul. Are there or could there be any impacts of these on the cycles and the mechanisms that you previously described? I didn't see it in the macro maps that you put up. You don't really see the Pacific garbage patch, or I didn't see it. But I was wondering if this is a man, it's a human introduced element into this sensitive ecosystem. And I was wondering if there's any any comments or thoughts that you have regarding this? Yeah, sure. So plastic is obviously a huge, huge problem in many parts of the world, not just the oceans, but in particular in the Pacific Ocean, Central North Pacific Ocean, the amount of plastic is huge. And ultimately, it's converted down to nanoscale particles. And those nanoscale particles are assimilated into every organism. They're found, obviously, in fish, but amazingly to me, they're found in benthic organisms in the middle of the Mariana trench, which is the deepest part of the ocean, the challenge of trench, actually. It's at 10,000 meters. So you have plastics that are sinking, and they're found in food webs all over the ocean, the extent to which these affect the organisms, we don't know. But certainly, they are going to be something that is going to be a huge problem for decades, if not centuries. And it's really totally avoidable. We know how to make biodegradable plastics that can be consumed to CO2, ultimately, by microbes. But this is a huge problem, especially. I hate to say it, but many ships, commercial ships will just dump their garbage over the side. And that is unacceptable. When I go on a ship, for example, to the Antarctic, we have incinerators, we just burn the garbage, which is not great, but at least it's much better than dumping it over the side. And plastics are not allowed on the ship. So that's another social issue that can be can be remediated in a very short period of time, if other countries especially were cooperative. So as far as what the effects are, I don't think we know. We just know that we got the plastics, too, when we eat the fish. And it's amazing to me to see this. We have a person who was studying plastic at Rutgers who worked in Mongolia of all places. And lakes in Mongolia are filled with plastics. So I mean, it's a worldwide phenomenon. It doesn't matter whether you're a rich country or a poor country. Plastics are everywhere because they're so cheap.