Instant Genius - How science is helping us restore the Earth’s atmosphere

Episode Date: September 1, 2024

In his book, Into The Clear Blue Sky, Rob Jackson asks an important question, can we really restore the Earth’s atmosphere within our lifetime? He talks us through how this could be possible through technology and genuine effort from civilisation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. Hello, I'm Alex Hughes and this is the Instant Genius podcast, a bite-sized masterclass from the BBC Science Focus magazine. Climate change has long been a concern, and while there has been attempts to slow or stop it entirely, it continues to pose a real threat to our future.

However, not all hope is gone. Rob Jackson, author of the new book, Into the Clear Blue Sky, talks us through the potential technologies and advancements that can help us restore our atmosphere and create a better world going forward. But the journey won't be easy. So in your book, Into the Clear Blue Sky, you talk us through what is arguably a pretty lofty question. Can we really restore the earth's atmosphere within our lifetime? But to start with, how do we get here? How have we reached what feels like such an extreme situation? We've reached an extreme situation by inaction and a lack of concern.

There have been warnings, even by fossil fuel companies, dating back to the 1960s, and scientists as far back as the 1800s who predicted that the Earth would heat up if we continue to burn fossil fuels and release carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. So we've known about this. We just haven't been willing to act upon it to change our ways of producing food and generating our energy. We prefer the status quo to solving the climate crisis and improving air quality and saving lives if we did it. So the question is arising now because we've hit a point where it's almost, it has to happen now. Well, unfortunately, it doesn't have to happen.

A decade or two ago, I would have said that it has to happen that we would keep temperature. increases below 1.5 degrees C. But we haven't. We've sprinted right to that precipice, and we're here now, and we're going to blast past it. That's clear. So the question is, will we stop before it's 2 degrees C or 2.5 degrees C or 3 degrees C? And that whole narrative is one of the reasons I wrote this book. I don't think most people understand why those temperature thresholds are important. And I don't think they understand what they mean through deep paleo time, the ice melt and sea level rise. and other things. They're abstract numbers. And I believe we have to restore the atmosphere as a narrative, as a more powerful narrative, if you will. You talk about these numbers and, you know,

these figures that are often quite hard to understand. Could you paint us, I guess, a clearer picture of what we're talking about when we talk about these issues? Well, people often talk about climate change as if it's some distant thing for our grandchildren to worry about. But it isn't. Climate change is happening today. We all know that the weather's weird. here in the United States, we just had the year with the most billion-dollar disasters. We shattered the record for most disasters ever. You know, Canada burned like it has never burned before. Five percent of all of Canada's forests burned last year.

We had record fires in Mahena. We had flooding in Fort Lauderdale, New York, California. We had hail all over the country. And these disasters are costing people today. Here in America, we're paying $50 to $100 billion a year. more for them right now, not what our grandchildren were experienced, but today. And of course, the weather's weird elsewhere, too. In Britain, you're already paying 30 or 40 billion pounds a year for weather disasters and climate change. And the Amazon just saw the worst drought in a century

where river dolphins cooked when surface waters topped 105 degrees F. You know, we're seeing wildfires with smoke choking people all over the world. And we're paying for climate change now. So I think of climate action is not something for our grandchildren. I think about it for us today, ways to make us healthier and to have a livable planet. And where do we start when it comes to fixing the Earth's atmosphere? I mean, it's such a big task. Do we start with a reduction of our own emissions, or does it call for something much bigger than that? There are things we can do individually, but what we can do individually won't be enough. I think about transportation and our homes and buildings as the things that we can change individually the quickest. I can choose to not just buy an electric vehicle,

which helps, but I can walk, I can bike, I can take public transit. And if I have to drive and buy a car, then by all means, please do buy an EV instead of a gasoline-powered car. You should never buy another gasoline-powered again. You should never buy another gas stove again. I study pollution from gas stoves. And we have shown how not only do gas stoves emit carbon dioxide when their gases burn, they leak methane into the air in our homes, they leak benzene and produce nitrogen dioxide or NOx gases in our homes. These are pollutants that cause asthma and can cause cancer.

You would never willingly stand over the tailpipe of a car breathing in the pollution, but we willingly stand over our gas stoves breathing the same pollutants day after day, meal after meal. and there's no reason now for us to have to do that. Those are things we can do individually. We can change what kind of transport we take. We can switch from gas to cleaner electricity at home. But there are industries that we can't fix individually.

One example I chronicle in the book is steel production. Industries like steel and cement and aluminum smelting take industrial scale changes that an individual can't do. So companies have to have incentives and ideally a price for greenhouse gas pollution to make these changes. changes. One of the most exciting visits I had while writing this book was to a steel plant in Sweden that is producing the world's first fossil-free steel. They're using clean hydropower to generate hydrogen on site, and they're using hydrogen to replace all of the coal that goes into that steel. One of the most exciting moments I had was holding steel that had been made this clean way. It's like holding a one-tenth solution to climate change in your hand. It was truly

inspiring. And this is something that we're seeing in other industries as well. I mean, farming, for instance, tends to have quite a high carbon footprint, but there are ways that are coming about that could fix that, or you talk a lot about hydrogen-powered ships in your book. Is there, I guess, a possibility that every industry has this solution available to them? Many industries have solutions available to them. Some don't. We're still learning how to make cement without releasing carbon dioxide, for example. And we're still learning to retool, steel, and aluminum production. Industries that require very high temperatures, thousands of degrees, are difficult to do with technologies today. But those changes are coming, and that's

exciting. But for almost everything else, there is a technology available today that's just as good, will help the climate, and will make us healthier through air quality and water quality improvements. You mentioned agriculture. Food production produces a third of all greenhouse gas emissions around the world, and methane contributes a third of those. I focus a lot of my research on methane because it has some strong advantages. So we have to rethink how we produce our food, as well as how we produce our goods and industries. I guess there's an argument about the idea that the individual effect isn't really the problem, but it's these larger corporations or businesses that produce a lot of these emissions, what is the incentive for them to change or, I guess,

to even invest in these new kind of technologies that we're talking about? Great question and probably the most difficult question, I think. And here in the United States, most pollution is free. And as long as the polluter doesn't pay, then any climate solution is going to be more expensive than free. In Europe, you have a stronger network of polluter paying. So you can't just dump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere like carbon dioxide. There's a fee to do that.

That fee made green steel possible. Without that fee, there's no incentive for companies to retool their manufacturing. I think we have to have a price on greenhouse gas pollution, and that price has to be worldwide or at least implemented in the most polluting countries, like in Europe here in the United States, China and India and elsewhere, recognizing that each country is different. and India has its own issues of energy poverty and other things that they also need to address. So do you think a tax on these kind of things could be one of the biggest changes that makes a difference?

I don't like to use the T word. I prefer to use the word a fee. But some price for pollution, yes, I think that's very important. It's also exceedingly unlikely right now in the United States. We have to get a bill like that through a Congress that, frankly, isn't amenable to it. Will it happen nationally here in the U.S.? Not anytime soon. It is happening at the state level, and that's a good thing. There are states experimenting, trying different ways of pricing greenhouse gas pollution. And some of those state laws are making a difference and gradually get adopted by other states and ultimately by the federal government. So I believe a carbon price is coming. It's not coming fast enough in countries like the United States. We desperately need it or many of the climate solutions I talk about in the book simply aren't feasible because people and companies won't pay for them if they don't need to. I mean, mentioned a little bit there, but a lot of these sort of changes do happen quite slowly.

They start a small scale. They build up. They start in one country. It takes a while for it to branch out to others. If we think about this across industries, across different levels of politics and different levels of country margins, is this going to be quick enough if we're going to be quick enough, if we can't make these changes or does this all happen almost too slowly? It's definitely too slowly. It's already been too slow. We've marched right to the 1.5C threshold. We're going to cross that in the next five years if we haven't crossed it already.

And one thing that I learned while writing this book and talking to people in different industries, I was reminded how long it takes to change infrastructure over. If you're building a steel plant, you have a plant on the ground that plant has been paid for or is being paid for over several decades, we don't want to rip a perfectly good piece of infrastructure or a perfectly good car or appliance and throw it away, where we want to stage things gradually and cost effectively. That means once a technology succeeds and is better than a previous technology, it can take decades to make its way across the market, even when people want to use it. The gas appliances in our home even are an example. If a homeowner buys a new gas furnace, it's expensive or a new gas stove,

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A lot of what we've been speaking about so far has been about the introduction of new technologies or changing in rules and regulations, these sort of areas that do tend to get a lot of focus in this conversation. Is there things that we could be doing from, I guess, a more natural aspect in your book you talk about rewilding peatlands or finding new ways to travel? Is that an area that people don't address as much as they maybe should? I think it is. We have a tremendous opportunity to restore our forests, to restore our soils. We've lost billions of tons of carbon from our soils through agriculture because of plowing in different practices. Just by restoring natural systems, we could save a great deal of warming. Those natural systems have other advantages. If we

fix our soils, we reduce erosion. We hold on to water better. We produce crops more efficiently. If we restore our forests, we're helping biodiversity and we're cleaning our water at the same time. So I do believe that natural systems have a very strong role to play in climate solutions, particularly in the short term over the next few decades. That's because they're the cheapest set of solutions. And if you can take a ton of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and put it into trees, that's a good thing in most cases. It isn't the same, though.

A ton of carbon in a tree is not the same as a ton of carbon in coal that's been underground for millions of years, that tree can burn. It can die from insects. It can die in droughts. So it's not a perfect solution, but it's a good solution. And right now in climate, we need every solution we can get, not just the perfect ones. And I guess through a level of combination, that is what we're looking for, that we can push on all fronts, you know, these new developments, but also that kind of technique together can give us some push in an area that hasn't really seen much. over the years. It's true. And I think we in the environmental community are very good at saying no to things. Each of us has a favorite solution or a favorite technology. And for some people,

it's no nuclear. For other people, it's no carbon capture and storage. For still other people, it might be no new transmission lines. We have to get better at saying yes. In my opinion, we'll all have to accept some technologies that aren't our favorites to see success in climate. Is there, I guess, a way for us to, let's say we are able to stop this damage, slow it down, do any of these kind of things that we're aiming to do? Is there a way to do that and then go the step further and even revert the problems to get our atmosphere back to what was a healthier stage? There is.

I talk in my book about restoring the atmosphere. I believe in this concept. I believe in this as an idea and as a narrative. And as an example, the Endangered Species Act doesn't stop it. saving plants and animals from extinction, it mandates their recovery. So when we see whales breaching on the way to Alaska or grizzly bears in Yellowstone or bald eagles and peregrine falcons, we're celebrating life and a planet and species restored. And I think our goal for the atmosphere should be the same. We want to put it back to pre-industrial levels and celebrate that success

as part of our climate journey. That's why I talk about or emphasize methane in my book so much. Methane is the second most important greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide. It's responsible for about two-thirds as much warming as CO2 in the recent decades. It's a dragon. It's the climate dragon we should slay. It's fiery, pound for pound. It's 90 times more potent than carbon dioxide at warming. Its levels have also risen a lot faster than CO2s. And they're rising faster today than at any time since record-keeping began for reasons that we don't fully understand. And methane's mysterious. We're still trying to figure out, is it going up because tropical wetlands in the Congo and Amazon

are warming and accelerating their emissions? Or is it because there's more methane belching from cows and oil and gas wells, landfills, or even thawing Arctic permafrost? Methane's been neglected. The first major methane agreement, the global methane pledge, was only signed two years ago. Now more than 150 nations have pledged to cut methane by one-third. in year 2030? And finally, the most important reason is that methane's, what I call malleable, it leaves the atmosphere in only a decade. So that short lifetime means that if we could eliminate

all methane emissions from human activities, a big if, we could restore methane's concentration to pre-industrial levels in only a decade or two. That would be truly restoring the atmosphere for methane. Doing so would save us half a degree C of warming and could happen in my lifetime and yours. Nothing else gives us that much power to slow global warming over the next decade or two. It's my dream. You mentioned there a little bit about methane being mysterious and this thing that we're still trying to understand. Do we have plans in place or ideas that are possible for reaching that goal with methane? I think we know how to reach that goal. The energy industry is the most obvious source of methane to the atmosphere. But many people don't realize that food production or

agriculture emits more methane around the world than the oil and gas and fossil fuel industry does. So methane emissions are intimately tied to food production, including rice and especially cattle production. Cows emit more methane than the entire oil and gas industry. Then to address those emissions, we can do one of two things. We can change our diets, eating less beef and less dairy. And here in my country, in the United States, we eat four times more beef than the global average. so we can clearly cut back even if a person isn't ready to be a vegan or a vegetarian. So reducing our beef consumption helps, reducing our dairy consumption helps too. If we then change our diets, we reduce the demand for beef and dairy.

We reduce the number of cows on the earth, which are a billion and a half right now. So that will cut emissions. But there will always be some cows to meet the industry and demand. And we also need to reduce emissions from the cows. There are exciting companies and research groups looking at how to do that through feed additives and vaccines, and they're finding some success through algal species and other additives that they can feed the cattle at very low amounts, can reduce methane emissions by 80 or 90%. Fortunately, some of those technologies help the cows grow a little faster or produce a little more beef or milk.

So there are additional reasons that ranchers might adopt them. We need to reduce demand for beef and we need to reduce emissions for cows just in the same way where you need to reduce emissions for power plants and pipelines and fossil fuel infrastructure. One of the topics that often comes up in this sort of area is this idea of net zero and something that's garnered a lot of interest recently is, I guess, a net zero city. Many countries are aiming for this, but is that a realistic goal to have a net zero city? Well, I think it is, and it's an important goal. It gets tricky. As a scientist, it's always tricky to understand what net zero means. A particularly difficult thing is where people draw a box around the city. Is the power plant that's producing the electricity for the city in the box or is it outside the box? Are the goods and services being used by people in the city included in the net zero pledge? So if I buy a computer from China, am I including the emissions associated with that computer if I use it inside the city? So there are a lot of details in what's truly net zero. Those details are important to understand, but there are also details.

And it's important not to lose sight of the overarching goal, which is to make our cities cleaner, healthier, and less polluting. There's obviously, as we talk about net zero cities, there's this conversation around, and balancing economic growth with environmental protection, a lot of countries have achieved mass growth at the expense of climate change. Do countries that are expanding now have to make sacrifices compared to those countries that did develop during an age where they could do, I guess, a little bit more work at the expense of climate change?

Fantastic question. It's important to start by acknowledging things. have gone well. When I teach a class, my first homework assignment in every class is for students to go home and find things that are better today than they were 50 years ago or a century ago. And that list is long, life expectancy and childhood mortality, water and air quality, the decline of global poverty, despite the injustices that remain. It's important to celebrate those successes. But we want to acknowledge the countries that have succeeded in reducing their emissions while their economies have grown. And there are dozens of countries over the last decade or so that have accomplished

that goal. Climate solutions have not reduced their economic growth. Climate solutions have improved their economic growth. So they've been able to grow their economy and help the climate and make their populations healthier. So those successes are important to acknowledge. But there is an underlying inequity around the world. I'm a science nerd. In class, I sometimes call our era the Miocene. That's the MI-Myasine. The Miocene is the era in which the top 1% of the world's population contributes more fossil carbon emissions than half the people on Earth.

And that means resource use and energy use around the world is deeply unfair right now. So the first leg of the stool, in my view, to climate solutions is that wealthy nations need to use less to reduce demand for things that emit greenhouse gas pollution. That's not a popular message for politicians, but I think it's a true and honest message. And to reduce demand and consumption, that's something that we can do individually in countries like the United States and the UK and wealthy nations. Our behavior and individual choices drive this solution. We can choose to use less, and when we do consume, we can choose to pick zero-emitting

technologies for transportation and for heating and powering our homes using clean electricity. After reducing demand, we can eliminate a little bit of energy. emissions from whatever polluting industries are left, and here new technologies rather than individual behavior play the key role. So I met many inspiring people while I wrote this book. CEOs using clean energy to make the world's first green steel near the Arctic Circle. Duce's a scientist CEO magically turning carbon dioxide pollution into stone. Leaders transforming how we travel and eat. I met people restoring landscapes, saving forests, Amazon to Arctic. People turning ravaged peatlands back into resilient systems. One interviewee,

who I loved, called fierce, stout, and excited to be alive. And then lastly, because we've waited so long to act on climate, we need to hack the atmosphere. And this for me is the most controversial idea and the thing that it took me the longest to come around to. To hack the atmosphere, we need to remove or destroy greenhouse gases already in our air. I used to think that talk was a distraction. The most important thing for us is to cut emissions today. But the enaction of the 2010s and other decades convinced me that to maintain a livable climate, we need to develop and deploy technologies to remove carbon dioxide, methane, and other gases directly from the air using microbes and trees and factory arrays. We'll need to do it at industrial scales like running the coal

industry in reverse. I wish we didn't need to. Hacking the atmosphere is risky and expensive. But I think we do. And, you know, we've spoken about a lot of good, a lot of bad, a lot of everything here. If we do all of this right, what does the future look like in terms of the Earth's atmosphere? If we do everything right, the future in the next couple of decades sees methane concentrations start to come down. There is no greenhouse gas for which the concentrations in our air have started to decrease yet, not a single one, not CO2, not methane, not nitrous oxide. Methane can, and I think will be the first gas where we start to see an actual drop in levels. We want to see that drop in the next decade or two. We want to see methane levels get back to concentrations

where they were 200 years ago. We could see that in just a decade or two. For carbon dioxide, it will take centuries to see progress. There is a trillion tons of extra carbon dioxide floating around the air that we've released. It's not going anywhere for thousands of years. So we'll need to remove some of that. We'll need to stop emitting new pollution today. And it will stay in the atmosphere for a long time. We will see some warming for centuries now, not just for a couple of generations, but for many, many generations. This is why even if we pass the 1.5 C threshold, it's so important to keep the warming to the lowest level possible. Every 10th of a degree matters. So we'll see an atmosphere that stays elevated in carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide levels for a long term to come. We'll see

long-term consequences for sea level rise from ice melt. We'll see coral reefs die over large areas of the earth, unfortunately. That's already starting to happen. But let's stop talking about the bad things for a minute. Let's talk about the benefits what we'll see by deploying climate solutions. We'll save money. We already know that the world's weather's gone weird. We have more climate level disasters than ever. Last year here in the U.S., we shattered the record for billion-dollar weather disasters, and the rest of the world is seeing the same thing. We're already paying for climate change in terms of pollution today. One in five deaths of all people in the world, that's 10 million deaths a year, comes from people breathing fossil fuel pollution. Those deaths are

senseless and completely unnecessary today because we already have cleaner technologies. So when we think about climate solutions, I don't want the listeners to think of it as a grandchildren issue. It's an issue for our health and our livelihoods today. And yes, we will leave our children and our grandchildren a better place and a more sustainable place if we make these changes. But we'll make ourselves healthier today and we'll save money doing it, I believe, long term. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius. That was Rob Jackson talking about climate change solutions. The Instant Genius podcast is brought to you by the team behind BBC Science Focus magazine,

which you can find on sale now in supermarkets and news agents, as well as on your preferred app store. Alternatively, you can come and find us online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist focal, Name creates high-end audio systems, combining innovation with craftsmanship,

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