Dan Barclay & Hiro Mizuno Discuss the Green Revolution

I'm a genuine believer of the free economy of free markets, but when it comes to climate crisis, we just cannot let the market solve it because it might take time and it may come up with the other wrong solutions because as you look back, the capital market for a long term, they are usually correct, but the short term, they make a lot of mistakes. So when it comes to the climate change, I've been calling for the government intervention, particularly setting the rulebook so that the private business is a private investor can really invest in a direction of the net zero goals. Welcome to Sustainability Leaders. I'm Michael Torrance, Chief Sustainability Officer with BMO Financial Group. On this show, we will talk with leading sustainability practitioners from the corporate, investor, academic, and NGO communities to explore how this rapidly evolving field of sustainability is impacting global investment, business practices, and our world. The views expressed here are those of the participants and not those of Bank of Montreal, its affiliates, or subsidiaries. Welcome to our Sustainability Leaders podcast. I'm Dan Barclay, CEO of BMO Capital Markets, and today I welcome Hero Mizuno, Special Envoy of the UN Secretary General on Innovation, Finance, and Sustainable Investments. I have the pleasure of meeting Hero at the Global Milicon Conference in October, where we both spoke on a panel about investing in a sustainable business transition. It's truly an honor to be speaking with you again today, and I'm looking forward to what I'm sure will be a fascinating conversation. Coming on the heels of the COP26 Global Climate Conference in Glasgow, the roles of government, non-government, and private sector actors have never been so in the spotlight as they are today, and they will be going forward. I'm hoping today we can speak frankly about climate change, net zero, and what role different sectors will have to play to successfully guide us to a more sustainable world. Hero, welcome. It's great to have you today. Thanks, Dan. It's my pleasure to join this podcast, and it's also my honor to have a discussion again with you on this Sustainable Finance topic. That's great. Well, why don't we dive into the conversation? For the benefit of listening to Hero, why don't we get an introduction for you and about your role at the UN and how it fits in with the global fight against climate change and a push for more sustainable planet? Sure. My role as a special envoy is to help the Secretary-General to promote the sustainable development goals, but by, you know, the mobilizing more finance. And particularly, there is a noition at the Secretary-General that the financial industry has to be a little more innovative to provide a more capital to the sustainable development goals. And also, we have been talking about the importance of ESG in the investment and in the financing operation of private, you know, the financial institutions. Again, that the UN has been aware that the, you know, just mobilizing the public sector money is not going to be good enough. So we need a private capital to really accelerate the transformations to sustainable society and sustainable world. So the my role is helping the Secretary-General by involving the financial sector leaders and, you know, encouraging them to come up with some more innovative, you know, financial scheme to mobilize capital more quickly and more widely to finance sustainable development goals. And do you see anything at COP? Did you feel like it was a success? What were your big takeaways? Well, that's the difficult question to answer in one way, because it was obviously a success in terms of the ambitions. You know, we heard a lot of like a global leaders came up as the new NDCs, nationally, determined contributions. Also, some people call it the this COP26 was the private sector COP, because we saw so many CEOs including yourself came to Glasgow and made a, you know, the commitment to the zero transition. So in terms of ambition and commitment, you know, the I should call it, it's a great success, particularly as I attended the last two cops, where, you know, we had big players were totally absent. I mean, America was absent and the China was not really there. So, and also, there is still a lot of skepticism among the private sector leaders, whether, you know, net zero is something they should be using for their business planning, or, you know, maybe, you know, 2.0. So this time, I must call it a success, because there's a more widely agreed pathway we need to work for is 1.5, not 2.0. So I must say, you know, the COP25, there's a very, very strongly skepticism among the private sector leaders, you know, about the 1.5 degree scenarios. So it was a success from that perspective, and, but I can feel also sympathetic to the young people for step protesting outside calling it the failure, because, you know, there's some area that we couldn't even deliver a long, you know, long-term, long-time promise, like, you know, the climate financing from developed countries to developing countries, you know, we agreed six years ago, actually 10 years ago, to deliver 100 billion dollar annual climate finance for developed countries. And, 2021, we still have like a 20 billion shortfall, which was, you know, I mean, embarrassing to the honest, and then it will, didn't help to create the trust or mutual trust between the the North and the South. So we failed on that. And the other, you know, the milestone, we, you know, that we, you know, we agreed to, to deliver a long time ago, we still haven't been able to deliver. So, you know, I think it's fair to call it the failure from that perspective, but at the end of the day, my answer to your question is, I don't know yet, because if the ambition is not backed by the real actions, we probably should call it the real failure. So I think, you know, it's been less than the, you know, the month since the COP26. And so many, like, I, you know, the government leader now agreed that they have to strengthen or, you know, the improve their NDCs not every five years, but annually, right? So the other, we, we have one at 12 months to work on it, each country, sorry, each, each government. And when it comes to the private sectors, we made a big announcement, like including G-Fans, I'm sure the, the BM was a part of it, a Glasgow financial alliance called Zero, and more than 450 financial institutions ranging from the banks to asset owner, asset managers, and, you know, the consultant service providers, they are now saying we committed to zero. And the Marconi says, like, you know, 130 trillion dollar is now ready to invest in a climate finance, but we really don't have an actual plan how to do it. I think the, probably, it's too early for anybody to call it the success of failure. There's a possibility to fall into both. So, and it's really up to us whether we can actually just come up with actual action to make it success. Yeah, I think you covered off a very wide list of great topics here. I mean, my observation was it felt very practical, right? And that people were actually talking about the how to get it done, where in the past it felt like we were talking about the theory. And I very much appreciated that, including some real conversation on the barriers to actually make change happen. You know, inside a big bank, data issues, scope three, how do we actually change the portfolio and invest in what I'll call better outcomes. Has been the real dynamic over the last little while. And, you know, what I had in the meetings that I was in and cop were, you know, I would call them realistic conversations about how to move those barriers and then where to go. You and I spoke about this when we were at milk and it feels like the world's a very different place now than it was 18 months ago, right? Very, very different. We have real, real momentum. The email put up a commitment for 300 billion in sustainable finance over five years. We're way through two thirds of that now. And, you know, accelerating. And so when I think about the dynamic and the conversations, having internally, when I think about the goals we've set as a net zero company, you know, in some ways that those goals were, as you said, not definable when we set it, other than we knew we had to find a way to get there. But now that we've set it, things are in motion here. You're probably aware we have a climate institute we set up inside BMO, which was really to have a good set of conversations and data around what does it mean and how does it mean? And when you take a look at your various pathways, what changes do you have to have overall in terms of your business while still supporting the economy to go forward? So I'm actually quite encouraged with the amount of progress we're making, but like you, I can understand how big chunks of those that are looking for climate change say, even without a amount of changes, not enough. Absolutely. And let me add one more thing, or the big change I observed, app to COP 25, every time we listen to the development of the countries, they are almost like, you know, saying like, oh, it's not our fault, right? We need to really know our economy and there are millions of people who has no access to the internet or no access to energy. So we cannot, you know, the shift to the sustainable infrastructure, but it's actually helped actually the some of the, you know, the country or the companies who are willing to sell more obsolete or like a non-sustainable, you know, the technology infrastructure to those developed countries saying like, oh, they cannot afford it and they want that. But this time, I was surprised to see, as you probably found, you noticed that several countries like in the Southeast Asia and also the South Africa, they are now saying, although look at the South Africa, they still depend on the coal. I think 80 or 85 percent of their energy come from the coal, but they commit to net zero. And they, you know, they said, we are willing to change, but you guys have a responsibility to help us to do that. So yeah, it totally changed the dynamics. And I heard a lot of like from the Vietnam committed to they can, you know, call phase out. You know, there's a lot of things which, you know, the country, if we used to be on the other side and just asking for the help and insisting like they need to focus on the domestic growth opportunities, but this time they actually putting a pressure on the developed countries side. And the the other change in the dynamics I noticed was until like COP 25, political leaders always use the private sector as their excuse not so that they're not making ambitious commitments. Saying like, oh, industry, you know, leader doesn't agree that we can do that. But this time it's totally opposite, you know, as you know, the down you just pointed out, you know, there are hundreds of the private sector leaders calling for government leadership to set the rule of the game so that the, you know, the private sector can really focus on the transition and the transition to the sustainable, you know, society. So I think those changing the dynamics and the two of them really, you know, created the momentum and it made me most hopeful when I started feeling that the does changing the dynamics is now setting the stage for COP 27 and COP 28. Yeah, I would, I would make the same observation on the private sector three years ago, two years ago, I had lots of conversations where people would say the science isn't there or we're not going to do it or I've got, you know, it's not a priority for me. I've got other priorities. Today, when I tour particularly North America now, I can't think of a meeting in the last 18 months with a senior company official where this wasn't in their top three priorities. And you and I talked about incentive versus penalty when we were together last. And the dynamic that I'm watching now is removing from, you know, put a set of rules in place and I'll try to meet the rules to I'm actually going to change my business. I'm going to change the way my fleet works, you know, instead of having a fossil fuel fired forklifts in my factory, I'm going to change that into EV forklifts and I found out I can actually run them cheaper than I could before. And therefore, I'm actually making money by doing the right thing. And when you start to have that, those types of incentives in someone running their business whether they're small enterprises or large enterprises, they will make change happen even faster. And it's that I call it a flywheel. And once the flywheel starts to spin and things are going well and you're improving and you don't view it as a cost to you, but you view it as a benefit, then things really move. Yeah, it's just from the people's perception on the climate change, you know, relative to their business strategy, change from the cost to investment, risk to opportunities. And that really drive the change. And that's how our capital, you know, the capital market and the capitalism really, you know, designed for. So the ones that people agree on the the risk and opportunities, you know, the people, you know, the system starts spinning very quickly. And that's the another, you know, the positive aspect of the outcome of this course. We I really started seeing that. But as you've done just mentioned, over the last two years, every meeting I have with the corporate executive to some extent, you're reflecting my point, my background and my specialties, but the, it's just impossible to have any conversation without talking about a ESG. That's right. I really don't see them anymore. And, you know, I was going to reflect back on your opportunity for a company. One of the things for BMO is we've taken a hard look at climate. And we started the journey like most people, right? What are the risks? How do we expose what do we think about? Then you've got a different pillar, which is who are we as a corporate citizen? You know, we've been carbon neutral since 2010. We started funding all of our power last year with renewables. But as we went through a strategic planning process this summer, climate change, climate transition really came up as the number one revenue opportunity for the bank. And when you start to say, okay, that's our best opportunity in the next five years. Let's get our resources mobilized. Let's chase it. Let's help our clients. And again, we're in a client business. You know, often people think about banks as the floodgate on this, but we're really just an intermediary between our clients and capital. And, you know, once you get to a place where you're starting to put your resources in your thought process around how big that opportunity can be, then magic starts to happen. One of the things that I'd like to get your perspective on is based on your background, you were the CIO or the government pension funded to PAN. So you managed, I think it was at the time, and maybe still is the largest sovereign wealth fund, or at least the top five at best, you probably have a better knowledge than I do. And you start to think about how banks sit into a low carbon of the transition economy. How do you think about that? What's your perspectives from where you are and ways that we can do? And, you know, a lot of people will be listening to this podcast or are the employees at BMO. You know, how do we think about that? Yeah, sure. I used to manage $1.7 trillion, probably at the time, probably now still the lot, well, the largest pension fund. But I grew up in the actually commercial banking when I was young and moved into the asset management. So I have a strong view on the importance of the bank in this sustainability transition of the world. You probably know that the, when I started this, my advocacy for ESG almost five years ago, the discussion is about the, it's just all about divesting. You know, we had a huge pressure from the people who were more sort of like aggressive in ESG saying like a GFBI, which is my, you know, pension fund, should divest from fossil fuel and the some other, you know, the socially problematic industry like tobacco. And then I always say like, you know, for us, it's easy because it's just a click away or phone call away to divest because institutional investor, we can actually sell or buy stock on the bond just by clicking or picking up a phone call to the broker. But when it comes to the bank, you know, the, you're financing relationship is quite often bilateral. And you really involve the real relationship, human relationship. And also you carry the relationship with the community, their business is operating. And also in many cases, you are sort of a rust result for the, the SME, a smaller business enterprise because they have no access to the capital market, right? So I think the, and also, let me just tell you one thing, I always, you know, they have an opinion against a divestment because divestment doesn't really make any difference because when we sell it, somebody will buy it. So even the bond as well, when we sell the bond, somebody will buy it and they actually hold it for the better dividend or higher, you know, higher return. So just a their change of ownership. But bank relationship, bank loans, most of the cases, particularly when it's a bilateral, you know, financial relationship, when you cut the, the finance, you actually possibly give them a death sentence. So I think the bank have to deal with more human, human way to just make sure that the, you know, what's the consequences of each of your financial decision. But at the same time, the, the bank has more direct responsibility to make sure the society or the industry they are operating in will survive, right? So I always see like, you know, tells that the people working for me, like, you know, your job is much, much less painful, much easier than the, the, the bank because bank, they really have to deal with individual relationship. I know they have to make sure that the particularly they are the only one financial resource for that they borrow are, you know, the bank have to make sure how to, you know, when to stop the financing or how to educate them. So, bank has, you know, the handful of the job to do. So, you know, I must say, like, you know, I sometimes feel very sorry and I always feel like instant investor job is much easier. But at the same time, you know, bank is very, very important. And we're probably going to talk about, you know, the later that the, the, what I call it, the green revolution and sustainable revolution. When we look back, what kind of the play, responsibility, what kind of role the bankers are, bankers played during industrial revolutions. They are the ones who really took the risk and drive the change. So, I think the, you know, I always say like a banker should be very proud of being in that position. But I can really sympathize. It's going to be very hard and painful role to play. But it's very important role. - Yeah, I look at, you know, someone looks at like a BIMO in Canada, right? We're actually just a slice of the entire economy, right? Our retail bank, our wealth management franchise, our commercial franchise with SMEs, my franchise, which is large borrowers. And really what we are is a slice of all of Canada. And so when you think about the economic growth, the economic policy, your policies really reflect that entire economy. And I think that's the fundamental challenge we have. Like BIMO thinks of itself as a community-based bank, right? We invest in the communities we live and work in. We're fundamental to a prosperous economy. You can't have a prosperous economy that prosperous banks. And at the same time, I'm with you. We carry a responsibility to make sure that we invest our shareholders capital and for the benefit of the country and the shareholders. You know, we've got a purpose at BIMO called the bold to grow the good in business and life. And that purpose is really meant to underpin the way we approach these types of decisions and having the responsibility to make the right choice. And at the same time, when you use a word of investment, we get lots of pressure on divestment. I'm not sure that that's actually a smart economic strategy. And also, I don't think that it's a very responsible strategy for the banks in many situations. Well, especially in countries that have a large percentage of GDP comes from natural resources to just pretend that they're going to get turned off. I don't think it's responsible to the community that you live and work in. I really don't. One of the things that comes into this, so you've got the private capital, you've got banks, we've got governments. How are you feeling about government policy these days that are actually helping and accelerating the transition? You know, I think of them as going together, right? They're not separate business commitment policy commitment. You know, as we did our focus on our targets to meet our commitments on our net zero, what you find very quickly is your targets will be highly dependent on public policy. And if the policy is, you know, in some part of the world benign and not willing to make change happen, it's very hard for a bank to meet its targets. And conversely, if the public policy is very aggressive, you can actually meet your targets. And so, anyway, you thought process today around where governments are, how they're thinking, whether that's in developed or less developed. - Yeah, well, I think the, you know, first of all, I'm a genuine believer of the free economy of free markets. And I also believe in the market force, usually lead us to the rise, you know, the rise solution in the end. But when it comes to climate crisis, we just cannot let the market solve it because it might take time. And it may come up with the other wrong solutions because as you look back, the capital market for a long term, they are usually correct. But the short term, they make a lot of mistakes. So when it comes to the climate change, I really don't think like we just cannot afford, you know, to just simply depend on the market force or like, you know, the perfect market hypothesis to solve it. So from that perspective, I've been calling for the government intervention, particularly setting the rule book so that the private business is a private investor can really invest in a direction of the zero goals. And then I think the, some governments like EU has been, you know, the ahead of us. And I just came up with a lot of new guidelines so that the, you know, the, it makes the private sector I think both feeling comfortable to play and also feeling arched to, you know, play the, you know, the play differently. So I think the compare to EU, Asian countries including Japan and United, you know, the North America has been a little bit slow. But as I touched upon earlier, at this COP26, there's a very clear message which, you know, from private sector, we want the government intervention, particularly coordinated one. You know, then you and myself grew up in the financial industry and it's very rare for the financial industry to crying for the government intervention. So I think the government harder. So I think they probably just feel more encouraged to come up with the regulation or like, you know, the guidelines. And then the other thing which I think is very important is they got, you know, like NGOs and the financial industry, NGO and a board of them never been disclosed. You know, we actually, you know, just for the, you know, when I was running a GPIF, we used several like, you know, the ESG indices and some of them actually get the information for them to, you know, the create the index or construct the index from the NGOs. I think now NGOs becoming a very critical player for us to the shift are, you know, the financial ecosystem. And then also sometimes they play the role of this time, I don't know how many exactly. But if you listen to the world leaders speech, many of them mentioned about the young people protesting and the young people very frustrated about progress. You know, they all not only like a showing political well to listen to them, but I think they used it to actually push the agenda. So I think the government and the private sector and even NGO or civil society never been disclosed trying to push the agenda in the direction. So I think the government will continue to play big role, at least, you know, the out of like all the SDGs, at least the climate crisis or climate change is concerned. There is a very, very clear consensus. We want the government to coordinate and the government to take a leadership. - Yeah, and I think about the practical applicability of that, there's lots of different places. So one is around carbon accounting, which, you know, you know, I've seen in some good conversations around trying to get some global standards on that, or at least even North American standards. European and Asian, if you got to even three different, but similar, you'd be a far away ahead. The other one is the price of carbon. And I think that's probably one of the thorniest issues out there, which is, you know, different models, whether it's cap and trade or set price or whatever, but even in Canada, I think we've got 12 or 13 different ways to think about it across the country, where, you know, the price of carbon set, provincially, not federally, and the US, it's not set. I think other than maybe what, two markets or three markets, you know, whereas in Europe, I think you're trying to harmonize that. And it's that harmonization role, which I think is going to be the toughest for government, because they typically get into a room and go to the lowest common denominator as opposed to the most aggressive. And that one, for me, when I watched, you know, there's some disappointing things at the end of the cop, where they couldn't get consensus. And yet we need governments to drive some consensus and some transparency and transferability amongst markets. - Yeah, well, but I'm not that pessimistic about the carbon pricing. I mean, I've never been hopeful about the global carbon taxation. I mean, we never agreed on any global universal taxation system, right? So how could we just all of a sudden succeed on this one? But when it comes to carbon pricing, I agree with you, Dan, that they're different, you know, country or different market, they are trying to come up with their own pricing or the own trading mechanism. And like, you know, I saw on the board of Tesla and you know, people know that the Tesla received quite significant amount of money from the other automaker as the carbon, sort of carbon tax credit. Because in Europe, like they just need, you know, if they cannot sell enough the zero-initio vehicle, they need to buy it from the somebody who has more capability or room for the decarbonization. So there's a, you know, sold a lot of the carbon credit to the other automakers. And that's effectively carbon pricing within the industry, right? - Correct. - I think there will be a lot of carbon pricing within the industry, within the country or within the, you know, very different ones. But here, I don't underestimate the power of the world street or power of the financial, you know, institutions. We've always come up with a way to arbitrage. So when you call it create change, we could call it create change. You call it arbitrage, yeah? - Exactly. - So, you know, I mean, even just a crude oil, we have a several market, a several different pricing, but we have a lot of thousands of people trying to make money by, you know, they're creating arbitrage. So I think the carbon pricing, I'm actually don't underestimate the, the probably private, you know, the financial market will start pricing carbon. And it will be traded or priced, you know, the accordingly, you know, the global financial system. So I think the, the carbon pricing is going to happen. And it's, once again, it's very important because financial leaders raise the voice in a glass goal. We want carbon pricing. - Right. - Well, I think there's no reason, you know, the any stock exchange to start it. And I met with several of the CEO of the stock exchange in the Tokyo and the other places. And they were all talking about the, how to, you know, listed the carbon. So I think the, you know, the, this is where I can, you know, I can count on the market force. - Yes. Great. I think your oil example is a very good one, right? Which is we have two or three big benchmarks around the world. And then everything else that's not the benchmark is priced relative to that. But you actually have-- enormous liquidity, both financial and physical because of that. So, yeah, I think that's a great, great parallel to how you can see the market evolving. I want to go back to something you mentioned earlier, which is your sustainability revolution or your green revolution. Why don't you take us through your thesis there and what you've been observing in the last few while? Well, I heard that from the Vice-President Al Gore about the five years ago at the Milking Global Conference, and my first reaction is, well, I understand why he wanted to talk about the climate change, but is it worse, you know, the cold revolution? That's my first reaction. And then, because my sort of definition of revolution is, it should really change our lifestyle. It should change every aspect of our society and our businesses. And at that time, I, you know, didn't feel like a climate change is going to be that significant or that impactful, but I had to change my opinion just one year later when I attended the Milking Global Conference. I sat down several of the panel discussions starting from like, you know, the education to bioscience and then like a national security and etc. And then probably five or six panels. And I just noticed there's at least one panelist mentioned sustainability in their panel discussion across the different topics. And then just started feeling like, oh, revolution is happening because sustainability is really affecting every different type of business. And then I started thinking about it because the when the industrial revolution, you know, the finished people's lifestyles totally changed. And I started like, you know, the picturing like, you know, once we now, we, you know, we get all the new energy to power our lives. And we, you know, we recycle more and everybody just managed to find a way not to exploit the resource. And we stopped the frustration and etc. And I just felt like, oh, actually, our life will be very, very different. And then, you know, I started saying like, oh, actually, we are now getting into the green or sustainable revolution. And then the reason why I recently started emphasizing that was, again, I just want to, you know, the stress, the importance of or important role the financial industry can play. Right? I mean, I, unfortunately, we grew up when, you know, there's not the big like, you know, industry change, right? Because it's been, it's about 100 years ago. So the, I grew up in the asset management industry, like my job is to sit on the fence and a pick the good one, a dump the bad one, right? That kind of, he was more responsibility in what's going on on the ground. But I think this is the green revolution and sustainability revolution. I think the financial sector has to play more practical role like we, you know, our predecessors have played during the industrial revolution. That's the reason I started using this revolution as to describe, you know, we have to wake up, you know, the look at the what the other financial, you know, the professional played to accelerate the, you know, the industry revolution. They took a lot of risk. They really accelerated a change. And that's what I think we need to, you know, the take as our responsibility as the, as an industry. Yeah, and I agree with that. I think we've seen a lot of it this year in terms of, you know, pushing the industry to think about new things. I had a lot of really interesting conversations that caught 26 on the demand side as opposed to supply side. And supply beating, you know, we can try and get them to stop producing fossil fuels. But in the world where you have that influence, public companies, Western economies that works, but in places where you have no influence, you know, whether it's in the Middle East or other places, you know, if you're not stopping the consumption of oil and gas, you're not changing the problem, right? You're just bringing it from a different place. And so the whole dynamic around how do we create? And I like your word revolution because it's probably the right thesis is actually a change in the way we think and operate, right? I don't know what the right definition of revolution is, but it's got to be close to that. So BMO has an impact investment fund hero that we've set up. And the goal was to deepen our knowledge. That was the fundamental goal. It's meant to be venture capital. It's meant to be early stage. It's focused on ESG. So definitely some climate in there. As we've been talking about, we're focused on new technologies in lots of ways. We're trying to find things that have a good chance of commercialization. I wouldn't say it's true science, but working for while on commercial. I've been struck with so many conversations in lots of a while about when we think about energy transition, there has to be new things. And whether the new business models, new operating models, or they might be new technologies, I'm curious in some of the things you've seen in the last while that got you really excited about investing in innovation, investing in change around the energy transition. I always feel like throughout our history, humanity solved the most of the social program with innovation. And that's how we managed to keep the economy growing while the improving quality of our life. Now, we are talking about that. We just need to solve this climate crisis to, first of all, maintain our quality of life because it's going to be threatened by a lot of natural disasters. But if we manage to really put things together to achieve sustainable development goals, our quality of life will be better. And then to achieve that, I think innovation will be a key driver, but one thing I just wanted to say is, given the urgency of the climate change, we just cannot invest in innovation hoping some innovation will solve the problem. We just need to get our hands dirty and try to change the existing system. And we probably need to make the painful transition of the infrastructure we have been depending on. But I'm very hopeful that the throughout the human history, we always come up with an innovation to solve it. So I think what we should hope for is even without innovation, we should be able to draw our trajectory to net zero. And if the innovation really happens, it will happen quicker or less painfully. Right? So I think that's what I'm expecting from the innovation. The area of innovation, I'm very interested in it. I'm very excited. Obviously, there are a lot of innovation in sustainable energy and sustainable transportation. And the Tesla is leading even transformation of the auto industry. And now, all the other kamikas following the aparsoot to achieve the transportation to electrified one. And then I also serve on the emission board of Danone, which is the French food conglomerates. And we talk about that. We hear a lot about the the bio science trying to make the agriculture farming less polluting. So I think the innovation is that you know, you know, the ranging from the biochemical to like actual physical science. So there are a lot of different ways that the innovation can surprise us and really, you know, the reduce our pain in our transition to sustainable sustainable society. But as it's innovation, it's harder for me to say this is the area we will get the really big innovation. But so I think the your approach of like creating a venture capital and the putting hands in a several different area is going to be only way for us to really get the better sense of where we can, you know, they get the innovation to really save us. Well, like you here, I'm an optimist. I also believe in innovation. We'll find the right answer. And I also believe as you just said that the pace isn't fast enough. And so how do we spur more innovation? How do we take more risk? I you know, in addition to the things you talked about, I've been spending some time in the construction industry, things like putting more carbon density in the concrete, which when you think about how much concrete we use every year, you know, it has a magical ability to capture things like that. And so, you know, the net extraction we actually need eventually. And so, you know, for me, that's one I've been focused on a fair bit. Let me wrap up with a big thank you. I think it's been great to hear your thoughts. Great to see you again. I love that we closed our call on innovation and the need to change pace. It's been great to have you. It's great to see your leadership. Thank you for what you've been doing. Please keep doing it. And it's been great to have you on our podcast and I look forward to seeing you again somewhere somehow in the race to a net zero world. Thank you very much. Looking forward to continued discussion with you and I'm really looking forward to seeing like a BMO's leadership in the sustainable finance. That's great. Thank you. Thanks for listening to Sustainability Leaders. This podcast is presented by BMO Financial Group. To access all the resources we discussed in today's episode and to see our other podcasts, Visit us at BMO.com/SUS. sustainability leaders. You can listen and subscribe free to our show on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast provider and we'll greatly appreciate a rating and review in any feedback that you might have. Our show and resources are produced with support from BMOS marketing team and puddle creative. Until next time, I'm Michael Torrance. Have a great week. This is not intended to serve as a complete analysis of every material fact regarding any company, industry, strategy, or security. This presentation may contain four looking statements. Investors are cautioned not to place undue reliance on such statements as actual results could vary. This presentation is for general information purposes only and does not constitute investment, legal, or tax advice and is not intended as an endorsement of any specific investment product or service. Individual investors should consult with an investment, tax, and/or legal professional about their personal situation. Past performance is not indicative of future results.