8 astronauts Christmas Eve 1968 this is
the first time that people had left
Earth orbit and seeing the Earth from
afar see the earth just hanging there in
space and as they came around the moon
the earth rose just like we see the moon
rise or the Sun rise and I remember
watching it I was 8 years old
vacation Miami Beach were at the hotel
black-and-white TV and watching the
earth rise over the moon this photograph
is called the Blue Marble it was taken
by the Apollo 17 astronauts in 1972 and
the Sun happened to be placed just right
when they were between the earth and the
moon to take a picture of the entire
sphere of the earth without any shadow
this is the first time that humans saw
the entire earth and in 1972 around that
time was also when the environmental
movement really got started President
Nixon started the Environmental
Protection Agency he had organizations
like Greenpeace there was environmental
activism because people could see this
is all we got and we got to take care of
it and now when I grew up you know maps
were just illustrations globes or just
illustrations but after we’ve had these
photographs and satellites we’re
actually able to create maps that are
created from many many photographs these
are satellite photographs in this this
is not an illustration and satellites by
the way are also used with climate
change because we can measure the ice
melt we can measure the temperature in
the oceans how much co2 there is so we
use actually space is very important for
looking back at Earth so there’s too
much carbon dioxide too much co2 in the
ambient air in the air around us and
actually also in the oceans and the
problem with when you burn co2 is where
you create co2 you can’t see it it’s
invisible this camera was developed by a
company called FLIR they’re in
Sweden and this this prototype here is
almost 10 years old they recently
started putting these into production
and basically it lets you see co2 so
here you have a car exhaust and then
through the camera that’s co2 a car
exhaust and co2 and so if you want to do
something about a problem it’s really
great to be able to visualize it so now
we’re actually able to visualize this in
other words right now you’re seeing this
and perhaps for the first time you’re
seeing what co2 looks like at least if
you look through this camera now I used
to work for a Danish oil and gas company
they had a carbon and climate department
and it was in 2008-2009 in the lead-up
to the much-anticipated and much more
disappointing United Nations climate
conference cop15 that was held in
Copenhagen and one of the very first
things I did was with a colleague we
went to the East Coast and West Coast
the United States because we want to do
examine carbon capture technology and
biofuel technology and that’s where I
met Klaus Lackner at Columbia University
and Klaus has been trying to examine how
you can take co2 out of the ambient air
and actually this material here is a
resin that when it’s dry it’s capturing
co2 and when you make it wet if you put
in a glass of water or something it
releases the co2 it’s one little problem
with it it smells like rotten fish but
I’ll hand out some samples you can pass
it around and please give them back to
me afterwards but here you go and you
can specimen round Thanks so this
actually gives the possibility of taking
the co2 out of the air around us in
other words the co2 that we’ve already
released not what’s going to be coming
out of smokestacks later but but
basically what we what we have and this
is an example of the same material but
where they try different configurations
to get as much surface area and this is
sort of the chemical reaction between
the dry and wet state of this this shows
sure showed how it actually works
and this is Klaus Lackner with his
colleague Alan right and they created
this little greenhouse their plants in
there and they took some of this
material and it’s those little round
circles sort of in the back in the
middle there and they were laden with
co2 because they’d just been standing
out in the lab and they put them in
there and actually in this instance they
didn’t even put them in water first
because the air was quite damp in the
greenhouse with the plants and the water
that was already there and they hooked
it up to a computer and the red line you
can see down there it was about a 360
parts per million that’s how you sort of
measure co2 in the air and that’s was
about what it was in in the lab and
after half an hour it had risen to about
five hundred and twenty parts per
million in other words you can actually
see the co2 rising and a little bit
later it started going down because
plants they like co2 they started
sucking up the co2 so this this works
now in twenty twelve I’m part of the
climate reality project so I’m trained
by Al Gore along with thousands of other
people around the world to give these
climate presentations and the
association of Swedish engineers asked
if I would give a presentation to about
seventy-five engineers and others in
Stockholm was of the Hilton in Stockholm
August of 2012 and I remember telling
them that the ice is melting in green
and the ice is melting in the Antarctic
and sea level is rising and if you just
have a very little bit amount of sea
level rise if you have a storm that’s
pushing the water you’ll have much much
more flooding when it finally reaches
land I remember telling them that cities
like New York or London will get flooded
not this year but in ten years or twenty
years or thirty years
I also remember telling them that the
droughts that had been taking place in
Texas for the past the previous three
years would within four years reach the
Midwest of the United States but
actually at that point only taken four
months so in other words that was a
climate prediction by scientists where
it happened a bit faster so this was
August of 2012 and then I was on
vacation in London in the end of October
2012 two months later and I remember
watching the TV watching CNN and
watching the reporter at the battery at
the southern tip of Manhattan
water coming up to her knees it was
superstorm sandy and cars were floating
in the streets of Manhattan who would
have thought and that was just two
months later when I made my statement to
those engineers in Stockholm so
basically I started thinking you know we
talked about reducing our emissions you
know driving the cars less taking the
train getting away from oil using wind
turbines and solar panels that’s all for
our future emissions you know we’re
using it now but it’ll be cutting our
future emissions but all the problems
that we’re seeing today they’re caused
by what’s already up there and therefore
we have to start taking it out of the
atmosphere taken out of the ambient air
taking it out of the air around us so I
went back to Klaus Lackner I said Klaus
you should really build a prototype of
this and put this in production and
build many many of these and he said to
me well you know David people don’t like
geoengineering now geoengineering is
when you start doing things for instance
if you take iron iron ore and you put it
into the ocean you can make the oceans
less acidic or if you take particles and
put them up into the air you can start
blocking the sunlight and cool down the
planet but I said to him Klaus
we’ve been geoengineering the planet
since 1750 when we started digging up
coal and burning it and then later on
oil and gas and burning it and heating
up the planet that’s geoengineering this
is reverse geoengineering this is to
solve that problem so Klaus is now matic
he’s on Columbia University a couple
years ago he went over to Arizona State
University and set up a whole department
for to this to investigate this this is
one of the prototypes for a specific
application and I’m thinking you know if
you’re going to want to do this at large
scale because we’re talking about if
each unit of these can capture one ton
of co2 a day you’d need 150 million
units to really make a dent if we figure
that you can capture 60% of co2 in the
future from smokestacks like factories
and power plants there’ll be another 40%
from lawnmowers and air
planes that will still have to be
captured by this type of technology and
on top of that we want to remove a lot
of the legacy co2 the co2 that’s already
up there that we’ve already emitted
that’s causing the problems that we have
today and I started thinking about
shipping containers because we have an
entire infrastructure around the world
on with shipping containers you know you
can move them around you could stack
them and if you sort of took this
technology open up the sides put this
material in there and some carousels
capture a panel at a time make it moist
capture the co2 and let it spin around
then this is one way to do it this might
be a practical way to do it now a figure
you’re not going to build 150 million in
one year but you could build 15 million
in one year and after ten years you’d
have a hundred and fifty million and
then maybe you could start switching out
the old models with the newer ones we
build about 80 million cars passenger
vehicles a year in the United States the
EU and China and there are all different
models and they have a lot of Technology
crammed in and this is basically
building 15 million units using sort of
the same template just using the same
technology across the board but the
thing is if you did this because the
what are you going to do you know who’s
going to pay for it basically and that’s
part of the problem because we have so
off to think about what to do with the
co2 some people talk about pumping it
underground in saline aquifers some deep
underwater lakes but I’m not quite sure
that’s a good idea
because we could see from fracking them
if you put a lot of pressure underground
and cause earthquakes and there could be
fractures as well where the co2 comes
out of the ground again but you could
mineralize the co2 turn it into a
carbonate basically turn the co2 into a
stone now that can all be done in the
lab but it takes a lot of energy so if
we can figure out a way in energy
efficient way to capture the co2 what we
captured here and then to turn into a
mineral to turn it to a stone then it’s
out of the system then it becomes sort
of a carbon negative situation
so we could build these units here but
you don’t start a company to build them
because basically the co2 is worthless
so companies or venture capitalists and
others are not really going to invest in
this because what are you gonna do with
that co2 and if we’re if you say that
each unit costs twenty-five thousand
dollars apiece
you’re talking about you know somewhere
close to half a trillion dollars five
hundred billion dollars a year that you
don’t have to spend on this and that
could be government’s doing that because
obviously if you stop the effects of
climate change and you don’t have to
move cities like New York City inland or
something like that in the future that’s
going to cost a lot more than five
hundred billion dollars by the way you
could actually end up creating a lot of
jobs because if the EU is paying for
this what you could say is we want to
build this at a shipyard in Greece
because we need to create jobs in Greece
because the economy in Greece is really
bad it’s a drag on the European economy
it’s a drag on the world economy and you
can sort of decide we’re going to find a
shipyard there and we can create 10,000
or 100,000 jobs you can place jobs in
Italy or Portugal or Spain places where
you can actually improve the economy and
we’re talking about like three million
jobs here that you’d be permanent jobs
the United States could do it in places
like Detroit or Flint where they have
car factories and they have a lot of
unemployed workers and it may not be
Washington paying for it it could be the
state of Michigan because I think these
days Washington is not going to pay for
much and it can be places like West
Virginia or Kentucky where you have coal
miners and you put them to work building
this instead of digging up coal so
there’s a whole economic aspect to this
not just saving the world but there’s a
whole economic aspect another thing
about this is is that if you start
taking co2 out of the air you reduce the
relative pressure of co2 on the oceans
because the oceans have too much co2 the
oceans are acidic and marine life is
suffering as a result so if you take it
out of the air the oceans will start
releasing their excess co2 into the air
which will have to take out so actually
you might first see really a reduction
of co2 in the oceans
before you finally see the reduction in
in the air we’re at about 400 parts per
million co2 right now we have to bring
it down to 350 parts per million that’s
sort of the technical part of it but
basically we have to get to something
lower otherwise we’re going to start
seeing what we’re already seeing weird
weather patterns and things but storms
and floods and droughts and cities that
get that get flooded now there are other
companies working on this there’s carbon
engineering in Canada there’s global
thermostat in the u.s. there’s climb
works in Switzerland now they’re
technologies also use a lot more energy
this is a very passive technology
however some of the processes are very
efficient so could end up being that we
figure out a way to do this kind of
combining some of the technologies to
get the best solution
now one thing you could do before we
figure out about how to efficiently
mineralize or turn into stone the co2 is
that you could use it for greenhouses
this photo is actually taken from a
greenhouse right outside of Odense and
some plants and some vegetables like
more co2 they grow faster and I have a
feeling that we’re going to have to be
using a lot more greenhouses because we
have a lot of drought around the world
and we have to start growing food so in
other words we have to be careful about
moisture and things like that so this
could be one of the applications it’s a
carbon-neutral application because you
take the co2 out of the air you put it
in the greenhouse and goes back into the
air but at least you’re not creating the
co2 by taking fossil fuel and adding to
the system so basically if we have a
sort of understanding of the real
problem that it’s not just reducing our
future emissions but it’s also that we
absolutely have to remove co2 from the
ambient air and also the oceans in other
in order to solve the climate crisis
that’s that’s one thing that we have to
understand the other thing we have to
understand is the economics about it and
that may be spending hundreds of
billions of dollars ends up being
cheaper certainly in terms of the damage
coming from climate change but also that
we can create some economic
opportunities and and help some areas
regions that need that help you know
going to the moon is really hard my dad
was a rocket engineer in the in the
early 60s it
is really really difficult this can all
be done in the lab you just have to sort
of focus of putting it into production
and looking at the economic aspects of
it and getting governments to agree that
Thanks [Music]