 Welcome everybody. This has been talked about for some time. This is the great ESG debate. I wanted to call this ESG is the most important topic in mining or ESG is the least important topic in mining and I can swing either way on that. So when I have problems, I call people who are much smarter than I am and who know the region much better than I do. For this we're talking to Mel and Chris. Now for those of you who don't know that's Dr. Mel, but for this we'll leave it at just Mel. And everybody in mining knows Chris Eccleston. Unless there's money going into the company and showing some kind of return for shareholders, Chris is against the idea. So this is going to be socialism versus capitalism. So let's start. I'm the capitalist. I don't know about that, but we're going to find out. Remember you're supposed to talk socialist act capitalist. And on that note, off we go. ESG has entered the corporate world and it's here in the mining industry. It's a buzzword that means many different things to many different people. It has long definitions and short definitions. So today we're going to talk about ESG. Those of you on the call know that I generally like snappy interviews. Today's not going to be that format. This is not an easy topic. So you will get to wax poetic, at least for the first half hour, and then things will snap up in the second half hour. Because I'm not Chris Wallace, there will be no interrupting allowed. That's an American politics joke for those of you in Melbourne. So in 30 words or less, Chris will start with you. What qualifies you to have an opinion on this topic? Well, as an investor in mining, rather than as an analyst, one should have an opinion because companies that one invests in, if they fully ascribe to ESG worship, they may be detracting from your investment return. Mel, over to you please. What qualifies you to have an opinion on this topic? Well, as a practitioner of it in the industry for 15 years and a semi-practitioner of it in the U.S. government for a further five before that, I think I can say that I've seen some aspects of it both from the regulatory confusion side and the pragmatic implementation side. So for that reason. Little longer than 30 words, but still excellent. So then let's start with you. Mel, how do you define ESG? I define ESG as a fundamental set of activities which companies can take across three or more parameter areas. The core three being environmental, social, and governance. And by taking these sets of actions in a cohesive, coherent, and well thought out way, they can minimize risk and help in attracting investment and permitting, which of course is necessary for sustainability. Can you expand upon the S, please? I read it as more than just social. The S is the most complicated because it deals with people and people are always complicated. And until fairly recently, the S would have been more narrowly defined as communities and stakeholders. Stakeholders including investors and interested parties such as NGOs. It has now become much broader. It includes average individuals who may be rioting in the streets or cutting off roads, even though they're not residents of communities nearby mines, even though they're not obviously investors in mines. And because of that broadening, we have also found that a couple of other initials have crept in under the S rubric. And those, of course, are the politically sensitive ones of diversity, equity, and inclusivity. We're going to come back to DEI later as a subset of ESG. Chris, over to you. What's your definition of ESG and keep it polite. Old wine in new bottles. The E and the S and the G have been around for a long time. Some companies have been doing these things. Good corporate governance can go back 100 years or 200 years. But when there were robber barons around, there were some people who ran their companies ethically. As for the social aspect, you need to go no further than the chocolate barons in the UK who used to like Cadbury, for instance, who would build whole villages and towns that they would be actually model communities surrounding their factories. And there's no reason why mining companies should not be doing that now. And there's mining companies have done this for a long time. They've created communities around their mines. And they've interacted with local communities, building schools, hospitals, whatever. And environmental, environmental is probably the one that I think is the most important because it's the one that some companies seem to think they do the minimum. They create a tailings dam and they just hope that it's still going to be standing up in 30 years, 20 years after they've departed into the sunset. But these things are things that are mandated by law in terms of environmental bonding or whatever. And the other things are things that are just sort of like corporate practice. So I'm not seeing anything new in ESG, except the aspect that it's been sort of mythologized and turned into an object of worship with a priesthood of ESG around it who are a sort of hardcore black road people who, you know, they profess the liturgy of ESG. I've heard you describe it before as the cult of the consultancy. Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Any opportunity to breed further consulting opportunities is rapidly seized by the nomenklatura of consultancy world. So what's wrong with ESG? So a couple of guys in the company have to work on it, got to go out in the community. What's wrong with ESG, Chris? It's more what the practitioners do with it than anything being wrong with it. You know, websites of companies used to say community relations. And, you know, what we're doing with the local community, we're planting trees, we're buying the goats, we're building a water source, so drilling more wells, things like that. That used to be on the websites. Now it all has to be on an ESG tab on the website. Well, why? Why? It's not mandated that you have to call ESG, ESG, you can call it whatever you want. But suddenly the investors get all sort of worried that you're not concerned about ESG, unless you're turning the phone lock to the three letters of doom. So, Mel, there's a cost to carrying out an ESG mandate to any company, but here we're talking about mining companies. The cost to a junior explorer could be horrific. What would be the cost to a junior mining company carrying out an ESG mandate? I think that the cost to a junior mining company would be horrific if they were trying to be a Rio Tinto or if they were trying to be a BHP. But in point of fact, junior miners have an outstanding opportunity to prove that small is also excellent, by which I mean forward planning and integration of ESG should be part of a vibrant growth plan. I would hesitate to think that there are any junior miners or even exploration companies who don't harbor visions of growth, who don't have plans to become larger and perhaps market dominating. So, there are some very pragmatic fundamental steps that junior miners can take that don't cost a fortune. One of those is do some stakeholder mapping, really sit down and think about who has eyes on you and be able to speak to the fundamentals of an ESG plan. You know, I sit on the board of some junior mining companies and this is the strategy that we're following. By the way, Christopher, no black robes here, I'm wearing green for my environmental concerns. So, be able to speak to that, be able to show it on your website and be realistic. Nobody expects a junior miner to be a Rio Tinto. But the public, Christopher, is who's driving the change. Better informed citizenry, not just institutional investors. And that's what's driving companies to have ESG tabs on their websites so that the average Joe who clicks on company X can see, oh, okay, they have the fundamentals of an ESG plan. They're already talking about we know who our stakeholders are. We know what their concerns are. We have a vision for addressing those in an appropriate timeframe. We are prepared to commit the human capital, which is what we are able to commit at this time to our vision and be able to articulate that to investors. In this case, being institutional investors, when I say investors. So, when we junior miners go out to collect money, we're able to say what we plan. I thought you said no interruptions were allowed. No, no, by Chris, I get to interrupt. But you just migrated from average Joe to institutional investor. Those are two different targets. Because both classes matter. And for the average Joe, being able to put something up on your website that is realistic for where you are, but aspirational for where you want to be, and speaks clearly to your thought process and plan for getting there. That's for the average Joe investor, who's going to go and plump their money down in an ETF. But as a company, when we go out to the institutional investors, whether that's Fidelity or JP Morgan or whoever, we also need to be able to articulate that vision and a high interruption and be able to do so in the convincing articulate manner. Chris, over to you. No, I'm very much agreeing with that. You know, why would a junior try and imitate what RTZ have to do to provide ESG coverage? But what in the case of most juniors is just a few toolpaths. When it comes down to it, out in the universe of hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of junior miners out there, most of them aren't doing all that much, as we know. And most don't have aspirations to do all that much, except to sell themselves for a large amount of money at some point. And that doesn't involve in virtually any case, a shovel actually going into the ground and moving a blade of grass or a sage grass or a cacti or whatever. You know, they'll put their jump heads in, they'll drive over a few of the local species in their big four by fours. And then they'll do their drawing, they'll come up with their 43101s, and then they'll be flocking around the blocks of House Street, hoping someone will buy them out. We need to look at the dichotomy between a retail that. Okay, that's actually, that's my next point I'm getting to. ESG as institutional is. The Toronto Stock Exchange, the TMX is one of the leading sources of raising capital around the world. And it's getting into ESG as a mandate. Not as a nice to have, but a half to have. They're promoting diversity on boards. Why is the regulator getting involved in this? Virtue signaling. Let me give you a different, let me give you a different answer to that. They're getting involved in it in part because the industry is crying out for a standard that it can adhere to, because there are plenty of them floating around in various iterations, whether you want to talk about the copper mark, whether you want to talk about the guidance from the International Council of Mining and Metals, or perhaps, you know, you want to look at what the National Mining Association in the United States is offering is guidance. Then there's the United Nations. The list is virtually endless and it justifiably creates confusion, not just for juniors, for majors too. And therefore, you know, Securities and Exchange Commission, the European Union, the Toronto Stock Exchange are looking at providing a regulatory framework that would go to Chris's earlier point about sort of endless reporting rubrics, and we've already been doing it, but now we have to do it differently, to save companies money and to clarify for those two categories of investors what they can legitimately be judging companies on in terms of are you an ESG performer or not? Chris's answer was short and sweet. Yours was a lot of milk and motherhood. No, it's very pragmatic, Peter, because, you know, as I told you, I worked in this area. You have to know what to report. You have to know when to report it. And right now, we don't have that clarity in the industry. Why do we need it? The priesthood of the ESG requires acolytes. And the priests have to be kept busy. And the TMX is obviously looking to keep the priests busy, keep the priests occupied. You know, when you talk about diversity, people talk about ethnic diversity or gender diversity. I'd like to see diversity on Canadian boards. I'd like to see less geologists, more real people and less geologists. I gave a speech a few years ago where I said that no geologist could be a CEO unless he had at least two years experience on a board. And I got booed out of the room. There you go. All right. That would not happen industry. So we also have ISS and Glass-Lewis issuing their recommendations and their voting guidelines, saying that their guidelines will look to ESG and diversification when making voting recommendations. So, Jack, this brings out the neocon in me. Doesn't the company's obligation to its shareholders trump its obligations to feeling good about itself? Do you think shareholders are not part of the real people that are invested in the company, Peter? Because coming back to your earlier question, why is guidance even needed? It's because the world has changed and it's not going to change back. Climate change is here. Companies are dealing with it. Governments are dealing with it. Militaries are dealing with it. And ordinary people are dealing with it, particularly during COVID. Societies changed and people have become more aggressively assertive about what they rightly or wrongly perceived to be their rights and entitlements. And because those factors are not going to change and because shareholders are not some amorphous class, they are honest to God real people with real expectations. Companies need to respond to that in order to thrive. Of course, can always exit. They don't like what they see. And that's what's happened. When you look at ESG funds around the world and the exponential growth that has happened in those ESG ETFs over the last few years, explosively in the US, a growth of over 300% from 2020 to today, it says that people are voting with their wallets. They're leaving companies that they perceive again, they perceive rightly or wrongly because we don't have an objective standard to not be meeting their ESG expectations and they're moving their wallets, the companies that they think are or at least are trying to. It's very interesting you should mention that because of the 10 largest ESG funds by assets have posted double digit losses this year, so greater than the loss in the S&P 500. BlackRock's $20 billion ESG aware ETF is down 19% and Vanguard's $5.8 billion US stock ETF is down 22%. In the same time, ExxonMobil is up 69.8%. I am long ExxonMobil. I am not a participant in those other ones and I am a happy camper I've got to say. Yeah, I think we all have Mr. Putin to thank for a temporary blip but let's look at some countervailing realities. They're already the writing was on the wall that the chickens would come home to roost to mix the metaphors in the oil and gas space. We're in the middle of a recession or we're starting one three quarters of the way through and it's easy in a company to cut the fat first. ESG is soft. You're not going to cut your geologist, you're going to cut the soft parts. So Mel, when you say the world is changing and we'll never change back, how's the recession affecting that? The same way that recessions always affect every market and every company behavior. I don't disagree with you that in far too many companies the ESG stuff is regarded as the soft stuff but let me tell you what it's the soft stuff that cuts straight to the underbelly when things go wrong. When protesters shut down the road to the port and you can't export your product you begin to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars a day. When governments decide to pass laws that say that unless you comply with their expectations you will pay either a much higher tax or you will be legally not allowed to export your product. You start to lose millions of dollars a day. The soft stuff kills you in the end and companies that cut it just for the sake of expediency are not only short-sighted but stupid. Gris? I'm not seeing a dichotomy here between producers and explorers and there's a big dichotomy between them. Explorers are drilling. Largely they cannot expect local communities I mean that a company that's coming and doing a couple of drill holes for a week or two is going to build a new wing on the town's local town's hospital whereas they can't expect that if you've got one of the world's largest copper mines being built on their doorstep. It's a totally different equation between the two. I mean that junior explorer going in and drilling a few holes has to ensure in my version of ESG that one they're not displacing or dirty the local inhabitants water that they're providing jobs locally so you know I'm a big critic of fly and fly out which I regard as a particularly noxious way of not giving jobs to locals and you know there's the different criteria I mean if you're a large major building a large mine on the verge of some Peruvian town you know you've got to interact with the locals you've got to give them something because you know one of the common complaints in Peru is that there are royalties raised at both the provincial and the national level and they never come back to the local community so the mining companies then say well we pay we paid our royalty and then you look at the local town and you see not a dime it's coming back from the the potentates in the capital back to the improving the lives and you know conditions of the locals. So that's an excellent place to move to a real life example. I read Glenn Kors' 2021 annual report anybody else read it Chris? Yeah I'm a shareholder for that. So Glenn Kors is a good example because as we all know it's carried on business in some interesting jurisdictions and it's had its risk slapped a few times. So in Glenn Kors' 2021 report Mel care to guess how many times it mentioned ESG? Hell if it's Glenn Kors one. Chris? Oh I don't know the name of the venture yes. 27. 27. 37. High to compensation, RSUs, bonuses, there's a there's a ESG committee and a committee member sits on other committees. Yeah and they get paid more for doing it. 27 times. Then I pulled out its third quarter report unaudited. Care to guess how many times ESG was mentioned in that report? None. None. So what happened between the audit and the annual report for the full year and the third quarter where it didn't care about ESG anymore? Well clearly the auditors care about ESG but the great court doesn't. Reality check perhaps. Oh yeah and I'm actually seeing the comment that's very relevant to that that in that intervening time Glenn Kors got publicly slammed with a very large fine for its behavior in the DRC which would of course make it look immensely hypocritical to be touting all of its wonderfully ESG credentials. But you know I want to come I want to really quickly touch on something that Christopher has now said twice. Is there somehow you know companies that are in exploratory phase don't need to be concerned about these things. It's all a game for giants. Well in fairness he didn't say that. He said there were different criteria. Exactly. Levels of ESG for different companies and different levels. Which I agree with but the implication which is present there is that the companies that are drilling need to be less concerned about that and I would say that that's not true for two reasons. If those drilling companies are looking to sell to a major majors are increasingly scrutinizing the viability of the companies even at exploratory level in the properties that they're developing. So concrete case in point I'm aware of a company that's interested in doing a lithium project and is having trouble with indigenous people around that project. And step three is having a lot of trouble being able to market the project. So I just wanted to come back to that there is a connectivity there that says that while the scale is obviously different and the monetary commitment likewise the level of concern needs to be present. And as for Glencore. Glencore is frequently accused of so-called greenwashing. Yes. And I would say that perhaps 27 examples is a wonderful instance of greenwashing. But what happened? Like 27 comments on it in the annual report and then nada in the third quarter where they just kept dancing with the regulators. But then again you know quarterly results you don't have to reiterate you know things that you've said before. I mean it's basically you know what did we do in the border and just financially principle that's the main thing. I didn't check. How's Glencore stock done in the past year? It was down and now it's on the rise. Positively. Well the fine probably had something to do with its negativity. No fine. Do you think that's always been writing for a fall in terms of fines. So it's a surprise it's taken so long for the fines to actually sort of stick. You know look this company has not just suddenly fallen off the wagon. It's been off the wagon for a long long time and now it's trying to get back off the wagon. You know pay a few fines whatever. You know if you're looking for the great saint and the mighty and the trading space I'm definitely uh Glencore is a good candidate. Do you find Mel do you find it hypocritical from the annual report to the third quarter? I find it yes I find it hypocritical. I find it you know expedient and I find it typical of Glencore. They operate globally in exactly this way. And yet it seems nobody cares. Oh I wouldn't say nobody cares. I would not say that at all. A lot of countries care that are looking for alternatives to a Glencore and a lot of investors care. All right so let's go to ESG's love child then being EID. Equity inclusion and diversity. It was explained to me that ESG is being invited to the party but EID is being asked to dance. One is external to the company the other is internal. So Chris assuming you're not choking over there and you need a Heimlich what are your thoughts on the matter? You know the boards of companies should be composed of the best people that the company has access to to put on those boards. I had a situation many years ago when I was the CEO of a mining company in Turkey and I approached a whole bunch of very high-profile Turkish women to get them onto the board of the company and they would not in any way get onto the board of the company. I was enormously frustrated by this because you know from what I can see they were the most suitable people the most competent people the most dynamic people except they didn't have yes in their vocab when it came to stepping up to the play. So I was very disappointed by that. Mel what do you see as the relationship between ESG and EID? Am I right that one is a subset of the other or are they two separate issues? Why is the subset of the G not not this sort of the other? It's not a subset of the E. Are you having a gender confusion issue Chris? I think he just said Mel. Environmental, social, and governance these things are part of the G they're not part of the E and the S. I actually think that they're part of both the S and the G because Peter you're right in the sense that it's both internal and external because let's take a look at the industry as a whole. Historically and actually the mining industry has a terrifically hard time attracting women in the first place to work inside of the companies and the ones that they have attracted they frequently have trouble retaining. What this means is when you start to look at the pipeline for senior managers and or board candidates it's a pretty tiny pipeline and there certainly are calls to have quotas imposed. Let me say right off the bat I'm adamantly opposed to quotas in any way shape or form. They have no basis in reality they impose an unreasonable burden on companies in any industry but particularly its mining industry but what it does say to me is that as an industry and that goes across the scope of juniors all the way to the biggest majors. Collectively we need to do a better job of attracting women we need to combat this image of you know the old styled miner with his pick and shovel heading out to the mine and no women are allowed kind of thing but companies also need to be careful because the women that they have historically attracted tend to be in in those soft side areas and those soft side areas historically have not led to the top which is one reason why companies have had a lot of trouble retaining women. Even worse when the story comes to minorities the statistics that that I was able to find for instance on indigenous inclusion in in companies are so small as to be insignificant not worth mentioning. Other minorities such as blacks or orientals the statistics are a bit better particularly when it's recruitment of men and me personally I say great let's recruit more diverse men as well because diversity isn't just about gender it's about points of view and it's about being able to speak with credibility to that broader environment of stakeholders. Okay so then let's move along to the third rail of this conversation I hope everybody's wearing rubber shoes and you're grounded because we're going to dive into climate change. The TMX has mandated that the TMX companies must talk about climate change and what it's doing to reduce its carbon footprint and to get the conversation properly footed when they talk about climate change they mean anthropomorphic climate change. Now where I'm sitting 30 000 years ago was under 100 feet of ice that will happen again right now we're talking about human influenced climate change. Should anthropomorphic climate change actually be part of ESG like the stock exchange is trying to make it? Are they trying to make it part of ESG or are they just requiring that you put it in your risk factors in your annual report that's a different manner for being ESG. You're right it's the CSA not the TMX the TMX has guidelines but the CSA is mandating it be part and disclosed as a risk you also have to disclose what you're doing to reduce your carbon footprint. I think it's the carbon footprint of a mining executive flying down to the BMO conference in Florida so they can knock a golf ball around and suffer the you know the the the snow of Toronto. Can't see that going into it. We have a special clause in there our CEO actually sinned by going to this event and in a private jet moreover oh no. I'm all for zooms myself but what I would say to that is I think that it comes back to a comment that I made earlier about industry tends to like clarity around regulation rather than having someone whether it's a government or an NGO or an indigenous group come to them and say you're you're you're contributing to climate change you're not doing anything so having a rubric can be helpful it's part of the broader rubric around climate change in many countries we're already seeing the water crisis my principal residence is in Arizona and the United States but as it impacts mining now like not the broader context as it impacts mining this is exactly what i'm talking about mines are being forced to look at ways to reduce water usage because concrete example here in Arizona the Colorado River is in a tier one crisis what that means is a 10 across the board cut to industry including agriculture but also mining mines are being forced to look at ways to use water more frugally while maintaining production they are being forced again here in Arizona mining friendly jurisdiction to provide statistics on the pollution from the smelters and what scrubbers are being put in place to reduce that and also the cost of doing so so climate change as I said early on in this discussion is is a reality that it's not going to go away and the nice thing for the mining industry is as Chris said earlier it's a very pragmatic group and you know when you're sitting in the Altiplana in Chile and you know that there's a water crisis you build a desalination plant you don't mind about it you just do it and the whining so often comes from politicians it's ironic the company is just doing what it needs to do to survive there seems to be some contradiction in what you're saying though on the one hand you're talking about regulation and reporting and industry and standards but you're also saying the people want it well if the people want it let the market dictate who's going to comply how but keep in mind Peter that I very clearly said that regulations in particularly in this context are friendly to business because it tells business what is at the very least the de minimis expectation of activity on their part that can be a protection against much broader societal expectations that of course ultimately end up with not in my backyard there'll never be another new mind built so the regulations can serve to bridge that extreme gap and give companies a safe zone in which to operate they can also choke the life out of a company I would say that that's probably not the case I haven't seen a lot of companies falling by the wayside only and specifically due to complying with climate regulation Chris can you name one no I'd agree with now I mean really if you've got a mind that is going to have a large water requirement you don't have much water around you've got to be pretty creative in coming up with some water you can't steal from the local community so what you really need to do is you need to build dams catch snow melt or something in the time of the year when that happens or work out solutions because otherwise you're not going to have any water no water no mine it's not going to work I think a lot I once you were the tungsten by in Peru it was listed on the TSX and it quite curiously had a gigantic dam that he built um with uh with hydro power and everything um to power this tungsten mine the tungsten mine was turned 12 and went bust uh but the dam was still there um with the hydro component which now solves the locals I presume um but uh now miners need to think of more things than just moving mountains of dirt from here to there um you know I'm a big critic of uh high strip ratios uh I have companies that say 40 to 1 strip ratios and I say what um and I think we we're now at the cusp of a moment in which there's going to be big pushback against um open pits that uh move too much earth because the earth is never ultimately taken back and put in the hole um and that needs to be um ultimately you know the remediation of uh that's because there's no value in it to a shareholder we moved the stuff we got the materials where's the value to a shareholder in moving the stuff back well that's part of the but maybe the environmental bond needs to be so big that it pays for moving it back so um you know I mean coming coming to to uh to your question because there's increasing scrutiny on company mine closure plans as well and the remediation aspects of those mine closure plans and of course some of that is a lot of that right now is government driven because as Chris rightly said earlier I think that most investors haven't yet reached a stage of sophistication where they considered that an element of their ESG concern but I think it's a legitimate concern because you know drive around in in the western united states you can tell exactly where the old pit mines were well it wasn't so much the pit mine is they were burning the the logs and they blew off into the air and killed all the vegetation but there's a cost to complying with the ESG whether you're bob's mining company or Rio Tinto I guess what peter it's built into the price of the commodity because I can tell you for a fact that when when when companies sit down of any size when producing companies sit down to decide what they're going to price their commodity at they have factored in their so called soft side costs as well and so it's it's market is absorbing a lot of those costs which is why companies aren't dropping by the wayside because of conforming to regulation producers sure but what about the juniors to shoot the moon types they can't they have no commodity to build into because they don't know what they have in the ground yet most of those guys are just fakers they're just drilling to you know find a greater fool we'll take them out okay you're not talking about juniors you're you're using that phrase very loosely peter you're talking about exploration companies only yeah for this port a ml yeah and and that's a very narrow spectrum of an already narrow segment of an industry but what I would say is recall what I said earlier that's like 1400 to 1600 companies on tfxv yeah that's what I'm saying small but keep in mind what I said earlier too is that those companies largely are trying to sell themselves to larger companies and those larger companies are placing increasing expectations on what they want from particularly the e in esg from an exploration company in order to consider purchasing it but harking back to the example I gave you earlier it touched on the s as well so we have bob's mining company that has made a miraculous find let's say in newfoundland a real tento shows up part of due diligence will absolutely be the environmental does real tento in this example really care about the social and the governance they don't sure better because they better look at neighboring greenland and say to themselves do I want that to happen or ironically that you picked real tento in Serbia they've just a few days ago the prime minister of Serbia came out and said that she right now sees absolutely no chance whatsoever for real to get its lithium license renewed in that country so yeah they better care is that because she wasn't bribed enough no it's because the license was yanked when people took to the streets rioting over it and you know the government offices were physically attacked for having issued the license so the license was revoked and now she's calling for a large national dialogue because she states rightly that lithium is a vital commodity for Serbia's economic growth but she's an issue though she added the caveat that we must have a national dialogue on how we wish to move forward so she's trying to set the stage but at the moment she's nationalization oh that happened in Serbia they've got a long Russian heritage yeah the Mexicans nationalized the most doggy lithium mine if it was and now the Mexicans are the lucky owners of Sonora good luck to them yeah Amlos Maniac but but you know the Soviets are doing the same thing I mean there was I've never heard that there was an environmental problem with the JD mine but what's happened is that we are Tinto said we're out of here and they've gone to Argentina they've spent 800 million tons buying recon and they're happy his pigs in mud um Serbia's loss because Serbia ultimately wiped into the mine itself or perish the thought sell out to the Chinese who will then come in and develop the JD mine and if the locals don't like it you know a couple of stray bullets might unstraighten them out from a representative guiding the mind how can we do the Ian environmental if China's not going to play along here we are in our own little world I know we can do that we can do that the Chinese are now running to a problem because you know while in their own sand pit they can be as destructive as they like when say once they go outside and they want to project in Canada Australia they just can't play by China's rules they have to play by the environmental rules in the other country unless they're in some sort of country where they can bribe people but you know essentially large sections of Latin America I shut off to China because the locals don't like them um the locals don't like them anymore um so Africa you can still bribe someone and get away but even in Africa the Chinese are having to play play ball now um it's just it's just normal just to your question Peter as I understand it um I think that and I'm going to say as rather than if because I'm an optimist as we get more rare earth lithium graphite etc mines permitted around the world outside of China I think that we'll the Chinese are going to be forced to change their thinking because we're already seeing this tendency where for the offtake agreements the largest companies are looking for the environmentally sensitive producers to to be in their supply chain because they as end users the apples and the Teslas and the so forth are subject to such intense scrutiny in terms of where they're sourcing and how they're sourcing and with whom they're sourcing that they're desperate to see more of these mines permitted and operating and that effectively will either drive China to change or wow here's the thought drive China out of its market dominance that's the one I'm rooting for go guys go but with respect to apple and tesla aren't the only doing it to protect their share price why does the motivation matter Peter everyone doesn't have to be an idealist money matters money talks money will always talk I'm perfectly fine if someone is motivated to do good by money because one of the things I firmly believe is a company can do well and do good and that perfectly epitomizes it why not make money for doing the right things then you're not making as much money as you could and you're hurting your shareholders how do you know that that's a hypothetical statement because remember your priciness costs into your commodity price everything of s and g is hypothetical environmental we can track but a lot of s and g governance we can track to all all those companies like the glenn core is have found out that g can be tracked pretty darned well so I'm imagining in this crowd somebody has a question or a comment to share we have 10 minutes left I'm seeing 25 things in the chat a lot of them have looked interesting as they float through Tracy what's happening in the chat okay so we have all kinds of questions here let's throw Jeff a swinger swinger under the bus first Jeff Brent willis do you want to unmute yourself you guys want to come you know thank you everybody Hugh Sherman was talking here uh Finland's okay guys who wants to talk jack it's Brent willis here how are you Tracy uh so my name is Brent willis I run a pharmaceutical company uh we we are a mining company that transformed into a pharmaceutical company and the long story short is the technology is now out there where you can capture your CO2 off of exhaust streams coming off of a diesel generator or what not and we're moving forward with our company we're going to be 100% carbon neutral and hang on a second here I'm going to put my video on so we're moving forward with a carbon neutral strategy that allows us to extract some take the CO2 out of exhaust stream it creates a unique carbon aletro called fullerane which we are actually going to use to develop new drugs with and that carbon is being sold into the market it is it creates carbon credits which we can sell into the market because we are we are directly extracting CO2 and preventing it from going in the atmosphere and so the industry is changing the technology is changing and so from from the environmental side we're looking at not using any water at our quarry site we're using dry separation technology we have very small footprints it's very environmentally sound and from the social side we've always been engaged with First Nations for I've been involved in mining for 30 years and that's a big part of it sorry to interrupt but it sounds like ESG is your business model and you're in favor of it because it's making you money it is it it became a part of our business model because absolutely it is making us money and it's allowing us to be to conform to the ESG guidelines and to become to reduce our carbon footprint to zero and it's it's because of the technology so and the technology is is just it's just starting to be deployed it's it's been tested it works I've seen it running and it's very interesting stuff but that it's going to change the landscape over the next you know we'll start the company's called Raincage I'll start deploying this technology here in the in Q3 probably Q2 to Q3 okay and it's it's very interesting stuff that's going on out there in the in the carbon capture industry yes Hugh Charman says Brent what minerals are you extracting I have huge difficulty in believing you it's barium sulfate we have it's a project called the Francis Creek project it's one of the highest grade barium sulfate deposits in the world and because of that we use it in pharmaceuticals and that's how we transitioned into a pharmaceutical company is because we're selling it as rate for radiology drugs barium contrast for radiology for CT scans and x-rays okay and but what great there I'm off but we're today talking about whether or not ESG has any merit in the mining industry that's your business plans you're embracing it as a way to make money you're in favor yes but with the technology any exploration company can become carbon neutral by running their drilling programs utilizing carbon capture okay we'll come back to you chris what else do we have we always have jack jack hi jack we always have jack okay jack is i'm speechless here uh i'm i think i'm older than all of you and i'm wondering did any of you study science or the scientific method or thermodynamics or economics because to me economics this is this is quite frankly nonsense because this is not about the real world it's about the world as you'd like it to be it's like you you think united nations love the sea treaty somehow governs the oceans you know it it's amazing to me that i have nothing to ask you i'm just amazed at how much all of you think that this little bit of organic slime on this gigantic ball of magma and metal somehow dictates how the ball operates and and i'm just saying in my lifetime i've never seen such arrogance by people thinking they can control the environment and that the climate doesn't change every five minutes and always has thank you jack can i respond to that for a second yeah so jack just uh you know and i and i i agree with your sentiment in a lot of ways but what changed my mind was looking at a rain cage unit that is going to be designed to kick out 30 000 tons a year of carbon that would otherwise go into the atmosphere and whether you believe it has an effect on climate or not i don't think it matters anymore it's more about the fact that you're preventing something that was originally not in the atmosphere and you're preventing that from going in how that affects the climate maybe it has no effect maybe it has effect we don't know but the simple fact is is once once our company gets into production we're going to be putting out you know three football fields a year of super sacks of carbon it's equivalent to a graphite so it's significant and that's just off a two megawatt generator so we have to really understand that uh when you can physically see black carbon coming out of an exhaust stream that would otherwise be in a gaseous state going into the atmosphere there's there's an impact there there must be i don't know i'm not an expert on it aren't you just drop in the ocean bret would you just drop in the ocean co2 yeah what you're doing you you feel oh it's dropping the ocean absolutely a drop in the ocean but it's the beginning a drop that will grow into a bucket and hopefully a bathtub and then a swimming pool and then hopefully a lake and then keep going yeah right this technology this technology is going to keep expanding and and there's going to be a whole new carbon market developed out of this there's going to be carbon trading there's probably going to be a carbon currency that gets born out of this there's going to be all sorts of carbon and and and the technology with fullerine from batteries to uh um strengths of materials it's uh one of the you know people talk about the fourth industrial revolution fullerine is what's going to create the fourth industrial revolution not uh academics it's entrepreneurs and uh a new commodity that costs right now two million dollars a ton and it's going to come out as a waste product so it's going to be transformational on a technology side in globally out of respect for the english language i did not bring up the carbon credit market or the carbon credit trading platforms because this is still a family friendly environment and i don't know if i could get through that conversation and keep it family friendly it's bizarro i don't understand carbon credit trading yet i've tried anybody else question we had ian london a second ago and he's all over the headlines with the critical minerals alliance and the government so ian did you have a question i don't want to know that some of these conversations i'm sitting here aghast only in terms of if you don't believe in climate jack that's fine you don't believe in it i'm looking at tomorrow i'm looking at grandchildren i'm committed to the thing and it can only and it's good for business even for the exploration companies because you got to think about tomorrow and where you're evolving to it does change behaviors by monitoring any numbers you collect you're an engineer you start collecting data you see trends and changes mel you carry the debate brilliantly thank you and then just one other note the chinese there are the international standards organization on critical materials the chinese are at the table we've actually negotiated standards on traceability trend policies on provenance you're right this is not an easy world but down the road the battery new battery guys the new magnet folks on recycling etc are making those a requirement those are market realities if you want to make a money if you want to make a dollar set meet customer needs those customers the apples the teslas etc why have a why have electric vehicles we could have just run cars look what's come out of a space program new technologies which are now keeping us healthy so i look towards tomorrow uh toronto's cleaner when we got rid of the coal plants i don't see yellow hues over the city so and i'm not an environmental i'm not one of these tree huggers you know we just do it at the end of the day you block a road you don't get anywhere you don't have water you don't have a mind so what is this junior pitching i have the largest resource that's dirt in the ground my friend if we don't transit we don't get products in line and the new technologies etc the future doesn't look bright mel again thumbs up no disrespect chris but i know you were given the the wrong side of the debate oh well so it is now where i'm sitting it's noon right now no ian the eccleston's the one that told me esg was bullshit he's the one that got me to go get mel yeah no esg is not bullshit um actually we've always believed in it all we're now doing is mechanize in some cases mechanizing it and trying to get some balance avoid things like greenwashing i have the biggest resource i'm the cleanest right you've cleaned out uh the last tribe who had uh you know rights over the lands don't just report the good report the bad and you want nothing once you report some of the difficult challenges you actually solve them and i have a lot of confidence in the junior marketing junior markets that they do and have evolved in that direction companies like avalan one of your your members on investor intel started 10 years ago their business models uh have changed and they're practicing how they're designing their facilities have changed and we'll make a dollar like our our friend from i think it's voyageur because i'm missing a letter behind your head voyageur right guys we have to wrap up yeah thank you in the blue corner from london england chris eccleston and in the green corner from arizona dr mel i appreciate your input i appreciate your candor we normally take a vote on who won but i'm a little biased on this i'm calling it a tie anybody who wants to carry on the conversation in person uh please contact chris or trace your dr mel or myself this is an ongoing evolving topic over to you trace i'd like to thank everybody for joining us uh if you have any further questions just send it to me and uh this is the first we're going to do these monthly thank you everybody thanks thanks all bye