Twelve years to avoid catastrophe. That’s
the UN’s grim warning on climate change.
We’re already pretty fucked. I like to say
we’re in deep shit and we need to dig ourselves
out.
Governments are failing to cut emissions,
but could new technology be the shovel to
save us.
We could basically find the thermostat of
the planet and say what would you like it
to be placed at?
Tonight, we’re travelling the world to see
technology to change the climate. In Switzerland,
giant fans that suck carbon from thin air.
It is that simple.
So this is a big vacuum tank.
And at Harvard, a sulphur seeding project
to literally lower the entire earth’s temperature.
Do you ever worry that this is playing God?
It may sound like science fiction to talk
about techno fixes to climate, but we have
to get really smart as a species and stop
doing things that are risking our future.
So will brave new technology save the world?
Or could it just be an excuse to keep burning
the planet.
Few places are as eager as Copenhagen to get
power from wind, and even in this weather,
from sun. Nowhere has been keener to ditch
cars for bikes. Klaus Bondam is Director of
the Danish Cyclists Federation and a former
mayor of this city. He’s leading its push
to be the first carbon neutral capital by
2025.
I feel the need that there is a strong political
consensus in Denmark that we need to act.
It’s pretty cold right now, but we had an
extremely hot summer. It didn’t rain for
two and a half months here. But it made us
think is this right? Is there something going
on? And I think we have to realise that something
is going on.
Copenhagen has been breaking all records in
traditional ways to clean the air.
Now according to this metre, sixteen hundred
and thirty-one bikes have crossed this bridge
this morning alone. In the past year, it’s
been three million, five hundred and nineteen
thousand and sixty-two. It’s extraordinary.
But the problem is no matter how much we ride,
no matter how much we recycle, no matter how
fast communities transition to renewables,
it’s probably not going to be fast enough
because governments aren’t meeting the commitments
they made at the Paris Climate Change Conference
to cut emissions. The politics are failing.
Which is why there’s now such an urgent
push to try new technology, to experiment
with things that sounds like science fiction
but could be the only way to ensure a secure
future is a fact.
The warning was sounded in October by the
IPCC, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate change. Leading scientists said carbon
needed to be almost halved from 2010 levels
to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees. Otherwise
runaway temperatures would destroy the Great
Barrier Reef, droughts and hurricanes would
become the norm. Melting ice sheets would
flood major cities.
But ice climatologist Jason Box, a former
lead author to the IPCC, says even that won’t
be enough.
It’s frightening and I’m sorry to say
this, but at one and a half degrees of global
warming, we still have like two and a half
degrees of summer Arctic warming and that
pushes Greenland beyond its threshold of viability,
so we still lose Greenland but at a slower
rate.
Based in Copenhagen, he measures ice retreat
for the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland.
When we lose the reflective cover of the Artic
sea ice, when we lose the Greenland ice sheet,
the climate system globally unravels and it’s
going to create the kind of problems that
will make it pretty hard to govern society.
The migrations, the droughts, those destabilise
our societies and our economies in ways that
we lose control. So what’s at risk here
is practically civilisation.
Professor Box shares the frustration of all
scientists contributing to the IPCC. Evidence
gathered through years of painstaking fieldwork
is often just ignored by politicians.
Politicians and governments that dismiss IPCC
reports, that’s not conservative, it’s
not progressive - certainly it is insanity.
He fears the world will need massive technological
fixes called geoengineering, literally re-engineering
the earth to hold back what’s coming.
For example we can slow down melting of the
Antarctic ice sheet by piling up the sand
on the sea floor simply to block warm currents
that are already destabilising the whole west
Antarctic ice sheet.
Other ideas include covering oceans with iron
filings to encourage carbon-eating plankton.
Or sending ships round the world to pump sea
water mist into the sky to diffuse the sun’s
rays.
We don’t yet know which they will be, but
we have some ideas and we need to try several
technologies and evaluate them and figure
out which are the least risky etcetera to
get the carbon curve which is like this now
to get it negative and that all needs to happen
in the next 10-20 years to start down that
path. It’s extremely ambitious.
The idea of geoengineering has excited both
scientists and industry. On the other side
of Copenhagen, I’ve come to meet a prominent
political scientist, Dr Bjorn Lomborg. He’s
a favoured commentator in conservative media
for arguing against major cuts to fossil fuels.
Look if you say to people there’s another
solution, yes, it is going to take the attention
somewhat away from the original solution.
But we should also be honest and say we’ve
tried the first solution namely ask people
could you please use the car less? Could you
please use less energy? Could you please turn
off your lights and all that and it’s not
worked for 30 years and actually there’s
about half a planet who’s waiting to get
more energy availability.
Dr Lomborg says he accepts that fossil fuel
emissions are warming the planet. He just
thinks geoengineering will cool it much faster
than switching to renewals.
Because it’s so cheap it’s very likely
to happen sooner or later. Some Indian billionaire
or some Saudi billionaire is going to do it
all by himself. Just turn it down a little
bit to pre-industrial temperatures or wherever
we decide to have it and that would be essentially
avoiding a large part – not all – but
a large part of the global warming problem.
So, what are the most likely fixes and would
they really work?
Most of these globally ambitious projects
are still on the drawing board, but one surprising
new technology is up and running in a place
generally seen as neutral territory.
It’s long been a home of precision innovation
– from Swiss watches that never lose time,
to Swiss army knives in a country permanently
at peace.
Switzerland hasn’t really been part of the
climate change wars or any other war for that
matter. It’s always been happy to sit back
and make money while everyone else is fighting.
Now a small company here in Zurich believes
it’s found what could be a big part of the
solution to climate change.
Christoph Gebald and Jan Wurzbacher were PhD
students when they decided to form a world-changing
company. Tonight, they’re celebrating Climework’s
ninth anniversary.
] So we’re still not making money, so of
course money’s not the motivation, the motivation
is solving a big challenge and there is probably
as little as challenging as climate change.
Their solution is building giant fans that
draw in air and bind carbon molecules onto
filters. The carbon free air is released back
into the atmosphere. The CO2 is super-heated
and collected as gas.
I like to call it low tech, not high tech.
It is actually very simple. The challenging
part is making it work and making it cheap.
In just two years they’ve opened plants
in Switzerland, Iceland and Italy. They believe
they could remove ten per cent of the carbon
the IPCC wants cut. Their first target is
one per cent by 2025.
It’s like 300 million tonnes of CO2 and
that would require a quarter of a million
machines.
But in this developmental stage, removing
just one tonne of carbon costs an uneconomical
600 US dollars.
We are confident that in the next two to three
years we will have our cost in the range of
two to three hundred dollars per tonne and
in the mid to long term, and that’s for
us 2025 to 2030 we see costs at one hundred
dollars as feasible.
So the big question is what do you do with
all this captured CO2? Well fortunately in
this case there’s a greenhouse just three
hundred metres away, so after the carbon’s
sucked into the fans, it’s piped underground
to the greenhouse and turned into veggies.
Plants absorb carbon so the greenhouse buys
the gas as fertiliser. Since it started spraying,
crop production has increased by ten per cent.
Climeworks is also selling carbon for soda
drinks and partnering with Aldi to recycle
it into fuel.
What was your first thought when you saw the
plant?
It’s a very simple process.
The quicker the process can turn a profit,
the more likely it is to spread around the
world. Even in frosty Switzerland, there’s
a real sense of urgency about limiting global
warming.
I am German by origin and I came here for
the mountains, to climb, to ski and in the
Alps you could see very early signs of climate
change, like of course glaciers are disappearing
like we won’t stop that, if with and without
climate change, but the speed of disappearance
is shocking.
Patrick Hofstetter from the World Wildlife
Fund took us out to see the disappearing glaciers.
The Alps are warming more than twice as fast
as the rest of Europe. Over summer there was
unprecedented drought.
Yes that’s really special for us. The farmers
don’t know the situation yet. The grass
stopped growing, so there is a shortage in
feed so they actually started to slaughter
their cows much earlier. After this really
dry summer I can feel a renewed sense of urgency,
especially also because the farmers now really
accept that they are directly affected by
it and the farmers being part of the conservative
population that’s a very important group
also in terms of politics.
Three hours from Zurich we come to what used
to be the start of the giant Morterartsch
glacier.
So this all used to be solid ice, this track?
Actually 160 years ago the glacier came up
to here so.
Al the way to the town?
All the way to the station down here, yes.
Since then it’s retreated by three kilometres
and six hundred meters of that in just the
past decade.
This is 1940. 1970.
This ancient glacier is expected to disappear
entirely within a lifetime.
So are all the glaciers in Switzerland receding?
The predictions show that by the end of the
century, most of them will disappear completely
only a few will remain in the very top mountains.
The changing climate is already hurting the
economy. Many ski fields are now bare until
after Christmas.
This is a new situation we face in the last
ten years it got later and later. So you to
do a lot of the snow machine here, prepare
all the downhill slopes.
Even at higher altitudes, ski resorts are
laying giant insulation sheets over glaciers
to preserve snow.
From May to October, more or less they cover
it like that, then they remove it in October
and start to ski again.
They’re covering glaciers with blankets
to try to stop the melting?
Well it’s actually just slowing down the
process so it’s not a solution, it’s just
to fight the symptoms of climate change. We
have been doing geoengineering now for many,
many decades in actually burning so much fossil
fuel and altering the climate by humankind,
that we have to look now in a similar scale
into solutions to that problem.
And as high as we are here, some believe the
real antidote to climate change is twenty
kilometres up there. At our next stop we’re
meeting scientists who don’t want to put
blankets on glaciers, they want to blanket
the atmosphere.
If climate change is the biggest problem in
the world then at least some of the smartest
people on the planet are trying to deal with
it.
In the hallowed halls of Harvard University,
researchers are looking at just how practical
and dangerous geoengineering might be.
So in here we have one of the big pieces of
test equipment that we use in preparation
for putting instruments into the stratosphere.
Engineering Professor Frank Keutsch is preparing
for the first test mission later this year.
Open it up and so we can put instruments into
the vacuum tank and then we can simulate the
stratospheric pressure you have at twenty
kilometres.
They’ll use a high-altitude balloon to scatter
sun reflecting aerosols across the upper atmosphere.
Right now, they’re fine tuning equipment
to measure the effect.
It feels a bit like the space race.
In a way it does, on a much smaller scale.
[drawing on a white board] They fly up into
the stratosphere high above us.
The white board theory is that tonnes of tiny
sulphur particles delivered by specially modified
planes would lower the earth’s temperature.
Would result in cooling the planet.
It’s what happened naturally in 1991 after
the Philippine’s Mount Pinatubo volcano
erupted.
And this gas then reacts in the stratosphere
with occident’s and turns into sulphuric
acid. For the few years after Mount Pinatubo,
the temperature was noticeably lower and it
cooled down the planet. That was one effect
that you got from this.
By what degree?
It was probably in the range of about half
a degree Celsius.
Trouble is a quick fix like that could have
nasty side effects.
And what was also apparent after Mount Pinatubo
and other volcanic eruptions is that these
particles in the end reduce the amount of
ozone in the stratosphere. So you know we’ve
been trying to do a lot to actually fix the
ozone layer and here you now have the idea
of introducing something that could destroy
it again.
And it’s not just those risks that make
this project controversial, it’s the fear
held by many of the scientists themselves
that just the suggestion of a magic bullet
gives governments an excuse to keep pumping
up emissions.
So Gernot, you’ve been running the numbers
on this, is it economically feasible?
Part of the problem is just how much cheaper
this geoengineering would be than switching
to renewables.
If anything it is too cheap.
Economist Gernot Wagner is the project’s
executive director.
It’s so cheap that we are talking about
single digit billions of dollars to potentially
influence the entire planet’s climate.
Now if I was running a fossil fuel corporation,
I’d be thinking great, this can solve the
problem and we can keep digging up coal.
And frankly that’s the problem, right? So,
you might consider that a vested interest
would in fact be very interested in something
like this as yet another excuse not to cut
CO2 emissions.
I very often compare stratospheric geoengineering
to painkillers. This does not fix the problem,
right? It has nothing about CO2, the first
order. We’re just reducing symptoms and
then human nature can kick in and say, well
you know it’s hard to deal with changing
the energy infrastructure – which is very
true, it’s a huge problem – so we’re
not there yet. Let’s wait with that.
The irony is that for all the work this team
is doing, they hope this geoengineering will
never have to be used. They just want to make
sure the real benefits and hazards are known
before governments or corporations try it.
But what we can do is provide as many facts
as possible that can inform us about the risks,
that can find ways that perhaps have less
risks, but in the end, any decision will always
have to be based on imperfect knowledge.
Do you ever feel like this is playing god?
It is. There’s a huge amount of hubris in
this idea of saying, well oh we’ve caused
the problem, let’s fix the problem and I
know how to do this. We’re going to do this
and we know exactly what’s going to happen
to the whole planet. Yes, it has a lot of
that. It’s actually quite unsettling and
quite frankly makes me quite anxious.
Whatever geoengineering can achieve the IPCC
says the most carbon intense fuel should still
be phased out by 2050. At our next stop we’ll
see how the industry is fighting back.
And it can now reduce its emissions by up
to 40 per cent. It’s coal. Isn’t it amazing
what this little black rock can do?
Houston is a city built on carbon. Mining
fossil fuels is as much a part of Texan culture
as raising cattle or boot-scooting. But these
days big energy is trying to sidestep demands
to cut production. Its response is a much-touted
technology to cut the carbon footprint.
Well today we’re heading out to Texas’
biggest power plant. It’s a pioneer of what
the industry likes to call ‘clean coal’.
This is Petra Nova. It’s a coal fired generator
with a billion dollar absorption tower. After
the coal is burned, the emissions are pumped
through it and solvent collects much of the
CO2 before it hits the atmosphere.
Hi, I’m here with David, the vice president
of NRG, the owner of….
In 2017 Josh Frydenberg, then Australia’s
Energy and Environment Minister, took to Facebook
to extol it.
What’s so exciting about this project and
this facility is its inclusion of carbon capture
and storage. Helping to reduce the carbon
footprint by some 40 per cent but also including
enhanced oil recovery.
But it’s early days to get excited. The
tower captures carbon from just one of the
complex’s ten generator units. What’s
more it doesn’t actually reduce emissions
overall. The captured carbon is pumped in
liquid form into an oil field.
So you put CO2 in an oil field and you get
more oil out?
Right.
As company spokesman David Knox explains,
it breaks up stubborn deposits so they can
extract more oil.
The CO2 has a tendency, it bonds with oil
and when it bonds it makes it slipperier.
And when it’s slipperier, it comes off of
the rock, that last bit of oil in there.
But if you’re capturing CO2, but to get
more oil out, aren’t you actually increasing
the amount of CO2 overall?
It would if we were increasing the amount
of oil that’s being used, but we don’t
actually have any impact on the amount of
oil that’s being used. The oil is the same
amount being used, we’re just increasing
the domestic production and we don’t have
to import as much oil from foreign countries.
The industry is looking at other options like
super heating coal, but that still produces
high emissions without cost offsets. This
unit and a smaller one in Canada, are the
only ones at coal fired plants using carbon
capture commercially.
There is such a thing as clean coal but it
is only at these two units. The economics
are very challenging. When will there be another
one built? I’m not good at predicting the
future, but we now know that we can build
one on time, on budget.
The uncertainty hasn’t stopped politicians
insisting the industry is saved.
We have ended the war on beautiful clean coal.
Even Bjorn Lomborg, a sometime consultant
to big energy, is sceptical.
Well clean coal has been a mirage for very
many years. It would be wonderful if you could
actually have all the benefits of the cheapest
fossil fuel and cut the carbon emissions.
But it turns out, it’s fairly expensive
to do on the coal fired power plant. That
is, it actually takes out some of the energy
that you would otherwise have produced. So
it has real costs and of course you also have
to store it securely, and there’s been lots
of conversations about that. We’ve not really
seen it running and we certainly haven’t
seen it running cheaply. So again, it’s
one of the things that we should investigate
but we’re not ready to do it any time soon.
Back in Copenhagen, ordinary citizens continue
to do their bit for the environment. Dr Lomborg
doubts his compatriots would ever accept the
real cost of abandoning fossil fuels.
Most people are not content to only be able
to charge their phones or have their TVs running
or indeed their operating theatres in hospitals
running when the sun is shining and when the
sun is not shining, the cost from solar panels
is infinite and likewise with wind turbines
and when the wind is not blowing.
It’s not true this idea that when the sun’s
not shining, the wind’s not blowing that
we’re not getting energy. Because when the
sun is shining and the wind is blow, you can
charge batteries and so the frontier is battery
technology.
No matter how fast the world switches to renewable
energy, the age of untested, high risk geoengineering
could soon be upon us.
We don’t get there by going neutral. For
better or for worse, geoengineering is part
of the mix going forward. Because we cannot
get to where we need to be by conservation
alone.
It could be the last throw of the dice to
save the planet. After decades of governments
ignoring dire warnings, simply going green
may not be going far enough
