The Jordan Harbinger Show - 348: Thomas Kostigen | Hacking Planet Earth

Episode Date: May 7, 2020

Thomas Kostigen (@kostigen) is a New York Times bestselling author and journalist. His latest book is Hacking Planet Earth: How Geoengineering Can Help Us Reimagine the Future. What We Discuss with Thomas Kostigen: What is geoengineering, how is it being used today, and what forms will it take with rapidly developing technology? Why those who stand to be the first victims of climate disenfranchisement certainly won't be the last. How soon we need to act, and to what degree, if we want to avoid the worst effects of climate change. How we can use geoengineering to catalyze a solutions-based society that will reduce and eliminate these effects. In what ways have we geoengineered the world in the past, and what does this tell us about the transformative power of industry and the role Thomas believes it should play in current and future geoengineering efforts? And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://jordanharbinger.com/348 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with my producer, Jason DeFilippo. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most brilliant people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. We want to help you see the Matrix when it comes to how these amazing people think and behave. We want you to become a better thinker. If you're new to the show, we've got episodes with spies and CEOs, athletes and authors, thinkers and performers, as well as toolboxes for skills like negotiation, body language, persuasion, and more. So if you're smart and you like to learn and improve, you'll be right at home here with us.

Today on the show, climate change is a major threat to the planet, no surprise there. But while most solutions revolve around recycling or government action, Thomas Costigan has some different ideas. Just as we changed our entire planet and infrastructure to accommodate the automobile, and our lives have been taken over by the internet and mobile phones, our generation and those coming after us can take the reins in partnership with big business to geoengineer our way to a safer world. Today, we'll address some of the admittedly wackier but still scientifically sound ideas

in geoengineering, from lasers that blast clouds to create rainfall, to floating cloud machines over the ocean, to artificial trees that actually suck carbon out of the atmosphere at a million times the rate of natural trees. This episode almost sounds like science fiction, only some of these ideas could actually make a huge difference in the planet we leave to our children, or potentially have devastating consequences that leave us wishing we'd never messed with Mother Nature in the first place. If you want to know why my network includes mad science-type people like Thomas Costigan, well, it's all about systems and tiny habits.

Check out our six-minute networking course, which is free over at Jordan Harbinger.com. slash course. And by the way, most of the guests on the show subscribe to the course and the newsletter. So come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. Now, here's Thomas Costigan. Thomas, thank you for coming on the show. Thanks so much for having me, Jordan. This book is interesting. I've read it and I thought, okay, maybe there's some kind of quackery in here. I don't know. It's a little, it's different than what you normally hear when it comes to changing the climate. Geoengineering, for me, is pretty much brand new. Is there any kind of geoengineering that we do now that we just don't

think of as geoengineering that maybe makes this less scary? Yeah, and that's a good point. We've started geoengineering the planet, which I define as us doing nature's job for her. You know, we as a human species intervening in the climate, intervening in the environment. And so if you think about agriculture, that's geoengineering. We've changed the land so we don't have to move about to get our food or irrigation. That's geoengineering. We've changed things, rivers, streams, what have you, so we can have sources of water. We're already doing it in a very small scale. And then this book gets into what I think are fascinating technologies and innovations of science that will allow us to do even more than that.

So is geoengineering just changing the earth so that it does what we want? Like how do we define this? Because otherwise, you know, mining, is that geoengineering? Or is it just when we divert a river? Yeah. Well, both, really. But if you want to get into the technical definition, it's the deliberate large scale. manipulation of an environmental process that affects the Earth's climate in order to counteract

the effects of global warming. So in other words, us as human beings intervening decidedly in nature in order to make the climate more amenable to us living on this planet. Very selfish stuff. But that's what we've done. And so geoengineering is a way for us, in my mind, to try and undo a lot of the damage that's been done by pollution, by environmental degradation, by a lot of the things that we've already done without understanding fully what those consequences are and using technologies and innovations to shift things in a more positive direction. Are there downsides to that? Sure. Are there other sides to that? Sure. Can it get scary? Absolutely. But that's what we're here to talk about.

And why does this start to become more important as time goes on? You mentioned the concept of climate disenfranchisement. So that's new for me. What is climate disenfranchisement? Well, there's a couple different aspects to that. One is, you know, if you're a vulnerable community, then you are very much on the front lines of climate change and being subject to a lot of the, let's call it, the catastrophic effects that have to do with climate. And then a lot of us just have a disassociation with climate where we're not really feeling the effects of it so much. Because climate's about 40 years out, right? So when you start to see a lot of the effects of these carbon storage or what have you, it takes that amount of time, decades, to bring carbon out of the atmosphere to cool it. So when we talk about, you know, carbon disenfranchisement or climate disenfranchisement, we're really talking about communities in our relationship with the Earth. And when you have statistics such as, what we need to do is reduce the amount of carbon emissions in the atmosphere by about 45% within a decade in order to prevent really baked in long-term climate change

because climate, again, carbon and those things add up to what affects our climate, and climate's a long-term proposition. So even if we stopped everything today, we would still have a lot of problems that we would have to deal with over decades. And that's why it's so important to act now, while we still have a chance to lower global temperature rise, because the amount of pollution in the atmosphere, and the amount of degradation that's been done, is already there. And it's going to be there for decades. So how can we possibly catch up to these types of obstacles if we don't start right now? So that's why there's such urgency around this. If we don't, according to most scientists, if we don't reduce our carbon emissions by about 50%, that 45% number I just threw out there,

then we're going to have at least a 1.5 to 2 degree temperature rise. And when you have that, you start to have effects like Saharan-like heat waves, a drying out of the Amazon forest. Right, the lungs of the earth, as they say, right? Correct, correct. So all these follow-on effects are happening all around us. And until we start to really feel it like we're feeling with the current pandemic and realizing, oh, my God, these types of invisible threats are there and they do really exist in science is right. Until we start to feel those effects and do something about it, we're in trouble. So we need solutions.

And the book is really a solutions-based book and really calls for a solutions-based society. So it almost sounds like with climate disenfranchisement, why is it the people who are impoverished are the most vulnerable to this? Is it because they have to move? What's going on here? Well, most people who are impoverished live on land that doesn't have proper infrastructure that's built in places that is much more subject to weather that might come in, you know, land that is not so desirable to build a multi-million dollar house on, but other people may squat on it closer to the shore. You know, they're more subject to flooding, those types of things. So, you know, obviously less land values and less desirable places for a reason. And usually it does not come along with the same type of infrastructure and a lot of the services that are needed as well. So education's lacking. Awareness is lacking. So there's a lot that gets baked into this. So in the developing world, for example, you have a lot of people that just have the facilities to look at clean water, clean air, and have the luxury of worrying about climate change quite yet. You know, trying to put food on your table. You may want to use coal or just firewood indoors in some places. And obviously that's not good for breathing. It's not good for a long-term health possibilities. You have, you know, a lower birth rate, which means

people are dying more at birth. And then you have obviously a corruption of the family unit. You have less of an ability to participate in the local economy. You're not going to be as educated. And what are your chances of participating in the world economy and having that prosperity for yourselves and then building things up again? So it's a really, you know, intricately woven system that is to the detriment of people who live in these areas because they just don't have the same facilities available to them as people like myself who live in the developed world in a nice neighborhood, where I get fresh water, where I have energy that can be clean or I have the ability to put solar panels on my house so I can have an alternative source. And I happen to have the ability

to become more aware of these things. I live on solid ground in short. So those of us who have more means we're on, we're more fortunate, we're on more solid ground when it comes to this. If we need to change the entire world in order to save the planet, so to speak, doesn't that seem like insurmountable odds? Does it seem possible? How can we just retool the whole world? That's what we've been trying to do for decades. And if you look at the environmental movement, which has largely been based on mitigation efforts, mitigation efforts, meaning let's lower our environmental footprint by, taking canvas bags to the grocery store so we're not using paper bags and therefore enhancing the possibilities or likelihood for deforestation by turning down thermostats in our homes so we're not

using as much gas or other types of fossil fuels or turning off the lights when we leave a room so the electricity is not relying so much on fossil fuel energy there. All of those things are mitigation efforts, framing it much like the public health crisis facing us today, washing our hands, social distancing, all mitigation prevention efforts. But the same type of thinking holds true with climate as it does with the public health crisis. Now we're looking for treatments. Now we're looking for cures. And as you rightly said, how can we do this at scale? I mean, if you're looking at the health crisis facing us today, people are still going out of their homes and they are abrogating a lot of the rules and social norms by not wearing masks. A lot of people are getting together. You have a

proposition of death, quick death, by public health standards, and yet still people aren't willing to do the right thing altogether. A lot of us do, but not everybody's doing it. Take that to climate, where it's not as such an immediate threat. How are we possibly going to continue to get people to wake up and continue to do preventative methods that will make a difference at scale? Very difficult. My thinking is, sure, we have to do all of that, of course, but we also need to have a plan B. And that plan B is technologies that can change things at scale, much like solar engineering, reflecting the sun

so that the Earth's temperature goes down all around the world by using certain technologies or carbon engineering, by artificially sucking carbon out of the atmosphere. You know, we talk about carbon emissions, and it's worth just describing why that's so important. carbon is dark material. When you put more of it into the atmosphere that stays there, going back to the first point of decadal change, that stays there for decades, that dark material holds in heat for a really long period of time. So the objective is to keep less dark material floating

out there in the atmosphere that holds in heat, and thereby if we lower the amount of dark material, will in turn lower global temperature rise. So if we start to do things, like solar engineering, carbon engineering, and I would even argue soil engineering and ocean engineering, we can then affect things at scale to come back to your original point. I want to get into how those each work in a minute here, but have we ever retooled the whole world before? Because it sort of sounds impossible. Once again, I know that you're saying we've been trying to do it for decades, but if we haven't done it before, what makes us think we can do it now?

Of course we've done it before. The internet's done it. Cars have done it. Before a car as everybody who's riding around in horses, imagine the possibility or the, imagine the pitch, right? You go into a business and you say, look, I have this idea for a car. Now, there aren't any streets, but we'll build those. And there aren't any factories, and we'll build that. And we don't really have a fuel source that's sustainable right now. So we're going to go and extract that from the earth. And then we're going to have this automobile industry that's going to change transportation and trade in everything as we know it. If you're a venture capitalist, you're probably looking at that person like, wow, that's crazy. Yeah. I know we're going to change all of those things just for

this vehicle. But we did it. And, you know, we can make the same argument with airlines, et cetera, et cetera. So we have done it before. And that's why industry is so important in this space. You know, the governments haven't done what they needed to do to create policies to facilitate these abilities or to subsidize the abilities to affect climate change. So when you bring the private sector together with the science community, which is what my book proposes, then I think we have a game changer. Then we have capital. We have resources. We can build a market for the technologies that are being built today and that I travel to all around the world to go and investigate. So your argument is that we need geoengineering now. And some of the ideas from the book are

no less than fascinating. First, let's start with the most sci-fi. Or arguably, I mean, I don't even know if this is the most sci-fi. Seriously, these are all kind of crazy-sounding, and that's what makes this so interesting. What are these lasers that can manipulate the weather? Tell me about those, because that, to me, looks like something I would see in James Bond, and it falls into the wrong hands. Absolutely, and there's been a lot of discussion about this, and you know, the tinfoil hat crowd believes that weather modification is a way that the military industrial complex has for decades, been trying to manipulate populations and change the way that we go about getting our food and our water and where we live and all these crazy conspiracy theories. But we have been manipulating

the weather for some time. We've even used it in war. We've used it in the Vietnam War. The UK used it in the British government, used it in World War II. So there are precedents for changing the weather. Today, we're using lasers in order to do that. So I went to and visited with the scientist, fascinating guy, Jean-Pier Wolf, in Geneva. And he is a laser scientist, and he took me down to the basement of his laboratory, in this, just like you would picture it, in a dark, dark area, and showed me how these lasers work. And lasers are phenomenally powerful. I mean, the laser that I was exposed to was more powerful than all the atomic bombs on Earth. It could recreate lightning, which is a phenomenal, phenomenal thing to think about.

And he created a cloud right there before my eyes in the lab, which for me was incredible to see that we are reinventing, we are taking the place of what Mother Nature can do, that we are able to do and create the same things that Mother Nature has done allows us to go in and manipulate it. So think about this. He's a molecular scientist, so he's taken lasers that can blast through water molecules. And what that does is allowed a better likelihood of precipitation, or, conversely, allowing water molecules to cluster and therefore increasing the amount of likelihood for precipitation. So on either side, you have these manipulations going on, and that can be a game-churchase. change you for really arid countries, for countries that experience extreme weather, being able

to douse super storms before they hit major centers of population. So a real, real interesting possibility using technology that we've only created today. You know, a lot of cloud seeding and things that we've heard about in the past, you know, and wine country in southern France, for example, they used to shoot cannons into clouds thinking that they could shake them up and then have rain come down. Obviously, you know, nutty just didn't happen. Or, you know, people used to do rain dances and things like that. But now we actually have the ability to look at this and say, wow, we can change things. But what's the flip side of that? You know, if we make it rain, you know, if just the law of physics is, you know, if you change something somewhere, it's going to change something somewhere else

to create that equalness there. And so if it rains somewhere, that means you're taking it away that precipitation away from precipitation somewhere else. So how do we govern this? And that's a big, big thing that we have to think about. Right, of course, because if all the rain clouds fly over Portugal to get to Spain and the rest of Europe, and Portugal's busy blasting all of them with lasers and taking all the rain, it's kind of like if a river runs through my country and then down into yours, and I'm just like, nah, I'm going to take all this water and you don't have a river anymore. You know, your argument is that that's your water too. But we can say, well, it's on our land right now, so it's ours. And I think this is a problem they're having in the Middle East,

right? It's like whoever controls the water is going to control the well-being of the country. You can't just desalinate enough water for the whole place. So there are going to be conflicts over this. How does the laser cloud burst work, though? You say it imitates lightning or it replicates lightning. What do you do? You just aim this laser cannon up into a cloud, and what does it do? It sort of microwaves all the water until it agitates enough to rain. How does it work? I mean, that's a fair description. Really? Yeah.

You take it and you bring one of these things. It looks like a shipping container, and I sat in it. And there are certain crystals that move the laser to increase its strength. And then you aim it, just like you might have gun, into a cloud. And it blasts into that cloud. It either breaks apart those clusters of water molecules, the laser, and therefore decreasing the likelihood that it will rain. Or it does the opposite. and you can then create these clusters of water molecules.

And then there's a better chance that it will rain in those cases. And, you know, the scientist actually brought it here to Arizona, shot it up into a cloud and created a lightning bolt within one of the clouds. And that's, you know, detailed in a lot of science journals. And that's a phenomenal possibility. You know, lightning is as hot as the sun. So how do you create these types of elements of nature to better our existence? on the planet, because this is a very selfish, you know, proposition. We're talking about the

human species here. We're talking about how can we make life better for us? You know, if we don't do anything and climate change goes, you know, out of control and all of a sudden, you know, we have another ice age. We have heat that just comes and burns us all up. You know, the planet's still going to be here. We're going to be gone. So everything we're talking about is for our own self-interest. A lot of people take issue with that, but that's a whole other discussion. Right, that's a whole discussion that I think is, you and I talked about this before the show, where people are sliding into your DMs and being like, you're a crazy person, you're going to nuke the whole planet, and I think your appropriate rebuttal is, we're doing that already.

You know, we're already destroying the planet. This is the chance to fight in the opposite direction that's not just like, hey, make sure you recycle your food containers. Exactly my point. And, you know, we've already screwed up the planet artificially. now we have to use artificial means to unscrew it and put it in the right direction. And I really want to emphasize that while I talk about some far-fetched ideas like sunshades and things like that that admittedly are way out there, most of the book, the majority of the book, is about technologies

that are based in rigorous science. Legitimate scientists at innovations, at recognized universities who are modeling things out, not doing anything recklessly, not doing anything without having a lot of peer review, and not doing anything at a scale that is going to change things. The vast majority of the technologies that are talked about in the book can be made to scale today. And, you know, we have to start to look at them like cool roofs and cool roads and cool alleys, you know, somewhat analog in how they're actually put into practice, but could make a big, big, difference all around the world if we just embraced reflecting the sun more, creating lighter surfaces, or if we looked at things like that that we know can make a difference. And that's what the book

tries to explain is that no one's talking about just going out and trying stuff like in a James Bond movie, right? For nefarious purposes, we're talking about doing things in a virtual world. You know, we can create things with 3D printers now. We have entire lives that exist online, most of what we're talking about can be looked at with artificial intelligence and algorithms and played out under, you know, so many scenarios in a millisecond. It's mind-blowing. So we have the ability to see how these things play out virtually before we put him to practice practically here in the physical world. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show. We'll be right back. Thanks for listening and supporting the show. And to learn more and get links to

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It just means that you get all of the latest episodes downloaded automatically to your podcast player so you don't miss a single thing. And now, back to the show. So with that, we're not doing a whole lot for like these, Alex Jones types where they're saying the weather modification is here. What is that project harp or something like that that everyone thinks is for weather modification and it just totally isn't. Yeah, that was a project by the government in Alaska and it was a facility that was just

examining the ionosphere, you know, how ions, you know, around the world connect. And sure, they were looking at that, but a lot of people looked at that and like contrails you'll see from the back of planes, you know, and just a lot of the moisture that comes out of planes, and you'll see those trails in the sky. A lot of people think that's evidence of weather manipulation, and it's all been proved to be completely false. That's just conspiracy theory nuts. Right.

The chem trails, man. Yeah, exactly. They're trying to control our, what is it? The explanation for those varies, and if you're not, if you don't know what chem trails are, well, they don't exist. But if you're never heard the word chem trails, it's these people that think that the contrail that comes out of an airliner is like, a chemical that's either going to make us sick so that we can be controlled. It's nanoparticles

that change the weather. They're nanomachines that allow people to control our health or that they cause COVID-19 or whatever other scourge happens to be like de rigour that year whenever the people who are the crazies who are talking about it are going after it. So HARP is this project, is it a military project or is it just a science project? Yeah, it was a military project. They ended it a while ago, but it was a military project. So all these people, these conspiracy, tinfoil hat crew, think that it's for weather modification. But you're talking about real weather modification. You're saying, hey, man, this might not be such a bad idea. Exactly. Done correctly. You know, you have 37,000 scientists in China right now working for the weather modification agency.

So people are doing this. People are looking at it. And, you know, can we do it in order to create more food. And that's another thing that's just a big issue that we have to start to look at. We're using about 50% of our land on earth right now in order to grow food up from about 10% decades ago. So as populations grow all around the world, how are we going to feed everybody and what land are we going to feed people on? And that's why weather becomes so important because we do need weather. You know, we forget about it today, but way back way. when people counted on the rain, right? You know, you look at all these movies and you read these books about people just counting on the weather. We don't think about it so much today because of irrigation,

and, you know, we can move things around and get our food from other places. But when you're just relying on your local farms for your food, weather was really important. And it's starting to become really, really important as we start to cluster together because of population growth. So all of these things are coming back into our consciousness as we become a global community. There's no escaping that. And again, we're seeing that play out in front of our eyes today. So China's already doing this, what, to turn their desert into agricultural land? Is that the idea? 100%. Yeah. So redirecting rivers, as you alluded to before, and then trying to manipulate the weather so that there'll be more precipitation in a lot of their deserts, turning that into farmland for their increasingly large

population and then obviously trying to make it a little bit more amenable for things like events that they might have or centers of population so they don't have flooding or more susceptible to the negative sides of these things as well. And that's what we have to look at. You know, if you just unleash weather modification, say, great, let's just, you know, make it rain. What happens when it starts to flood? Because you don't have the infrastructure and goes back to a lot of the things we were talking about before of thinking through vulnerable populations who may be subject to flooding like they are in Bangladesh serially. So we have to really think this through and start to have a oversight committee, which they

have at the United Nations, and even at a local level, you're starting to see geoengineering oversight committees being put into place because a lot of these technologies are starting to be embraced and a lot of people are starting to use them. So we need to look at the effects of not just one, but all of them in case we start to experiment with the number of these types of manipulations like marine cloud brightening that could, you know, lower the temperatures of the ocean. What does that mean for marine clouds and in turn clouds on land? And so, you know, we have to look at how we're manipulating all of these things together. And that's a big job. And we need to start to look at some of these things and put them into practice if we're going to have any chance

of changing the climate for the better in the near future. Tell us about these sunshades. These are like giant parasols. How does this work? Because this also sounds crazy. And I'm not trying to make you sound crazy? I just think these are the most wild ideas. And we've all heard of things like reduce, reuse, recycle, you know, alternative fuels, solar power. So I'm sticking with the stuff that you wrote about that's a little off the wall. So in case people think this guy's just a quack, that's kind of my fault because I've selected out the most wacky stuff from your book deliberately. Oh, no problem. I mean, you know, I look at a lot of these far out possibilities because I wanted to go to the extreme. I wanted to go to the right wall. I wanted to really look at

what's the ultimate possibility out there that we possibly, possibly, possibly could do if we wanted to invest trillions of dollars and just get some mad geniuses to put their brains around this. And then I bring it back home, obviously, to things that you can use in your home in order to, you know, be a little bit more climate friendly and we can get into that. The actual, you know, and just as a quick note. You're not bringing up anything that I haven't thought of before in terms of defining this as crazy. The original title for the book was Franken Planet. So I wanted to look at, you know, that side of what happens if we do this, you know, this Franken Planet would evolve. But then I realize not if we do it measure. If we hack the planet, hence the new title hacking planet Earth,

in the right way, we can do things more measured. And the sunshade, you come back to, explain what that is this has been talked about by several different scientists at several different universities and it is blasting nanoparticles out into space which are reflective materials and would act like satellites clustering together and reflecting the sun's energy before it even got to earth. So, you know, redirecting that energy before it even got to us in order to obviously cool the temperatures here. And there are several ways to do that one would be to create a manufacturing facility here and then using rockets to get this nanomaterial out into space or colonizing the moon. And now we're in crazy land, right? Yeah, yeah. Get up those tinfoil hats.

Colonizing the moon, creating manufacturing facilities on the moon, and then blasting those out to the Lagrange point, which is kind of a steady point between the Earth and the Sun. and having these clusters exist there so they would reflect the sun's energy there. So that's far out there would cost several trillion dollars in order to affect this. But if you look at the cost of climate change over time, which is about 10% of GDP, and if that's the case by 2050, we're into the trillions of dollars anyway. So, you know, a lot of these things have to be looked at at a compounded rate. So how do we pay for a lot of these technologies and how much would they cost that comes into play?

But sunshade is certainly probably the most out there, literally, and figuratively when we're talking about geoengineering. So these are like giant parasols or clusters of particles that float in space. They deflect the sun's rays. And we'd have to make them essentially on the moon so we don't have to blast them off the Earth's atmosphere the entire time, thereby using so much carbon fuel that we heat ourselves right back up. Would that change the distribution of sunlight around the earth? What would that do for agriculture? What would be the consequences of this? You know, in some places, yes, for the worse, and some places, yes, for the better. And that's what climate change does. You know, a lot of people talk about climate change and they say, well, you know, global temperature rise is actually good. If you're in,

you know, northern Canada, now we can start to grow our food there. And we're just not set up for that. And, you know, they don't talk about the baking of, you know, people in the desert communities and things like that. So when you talk about solar radiation, which is the sun's energy that creates temperature rise to try to keep it at some type of, you know, normality, and it sets about 59 degrees today all around the planet, that's why temperature rise is so important to keep in check. You know, the sun's radiation needs to bounce back out. Once it comes to Earth, it needs to bounce back out from white surfaces, that be the poles or that be the deserts, into space. So there's not enough of it left here that will cause immediate temperature rise or temperature rise to a high degree. And that's

what's happening today. So if you can mitigate the amount that's coming in before it even gets here, before it has to bounce back out in certain amounts to keep that kind of balance, then you can do it that way. Very difficult to do, expensive, logistically. a bit nightmarish. And as you pointed out, how do you get those rockets into outer space to begin with? And how much fuel does that require? And over what period of time do you have to do this? So there's just a lot involved with that type of space engineering. There are much more easily accomplished missions that we can do within the Earth's atmosphere before we get to that. So this is decidedly less practical than solar power, decarbonization, which we'll talk about in a minute here. I just wanted to get that out there because that's a, I mean, it's something that people have spent time trying to design and in theory would work. I just think it's wild that our minds even go there. So I think it's worth discussing.

You mentioned earlier in the show that cities expand, of course, and they make darker colors on the ground, which heats things up. Is this as simple as asphalt roads, roofs? Are these things that are heating up the planet at a certain scale? I mean, I guess, a few extra subdivisions here and there probably don't do much, but if you're talking about megacities that then reach across space to other cities and then just blend together because you have huge metropoli at that point, are you then heating up the earth in some significant way due to the changing of the color of the surface itself? Absolutely. And it's not just the, you know, that's called the urban heat island effect. And kind of a fun exercise for listeners is to look at what the major cities are going to be, the metropolis, as you say, by 2050.

And it will be a very interesting, eye-opening thing to look at and where those cities are and how many people live in these mega-cities by mid-century. But when you look at that urban sprawl, we are talking about black tops and surfaces that do change temperatures. If you look at Chicago, which has more alleys than any other city on the planet, which I found was an interesting factoid, and that dark surface changes the temperature of inner city Chicago versus the suburbs by many, many, many degrees, sometimes as much as 10 degrees on certain days. So, when you look at this, not just at Chicago, but New York and Los Angeles, and all of these major cities that we have not only in North America, but all around the world, You look at population growth, sure. That's one dark patch that just keeps like a big blob growing and growing around our urban centers. Now combine that with deforestation because we need more, as we go back to talk about, you know, earlier in our discussion, we talked about more land that's needed to feed people. And when you chop down trees, that was nice light green trees and expose darker surfaces, that again exposes more dark. surface to hold in heat. And then you have glacial melt. Again, white surfaces melting away,

exposing more dark land and water underneath more and more. Dark surfaces exposed to trap in heat. So when you look at it like that, yes, it's about how do we mitigate this effect of just darkness? Oversshadowing, sorry for the pun there, all of the lighter surfaces there that do just naturally reflect heat up into space. and trap it here and add to global temperature rise. So what can we do about that? Yeah, can we just paint our roofs with reflective paint? Problem solved. Sure.

Oh, you can? Wow. Sure. You're welcome. Yeah. You're welcome, world. Yeah, if you look at what they've done for millennia in Mediterranean countries or places in the Caribbean and places where it's naturally heat, you don't go there

and you don't see a lot of really dark buildings, right? you go and you see these really white stucco type of homes or businesses, and that's why. You know, it just makes sense. It cools the entire building. Well, I suppose that makes sense. I guess I can't take, I guess I can't take credit for that one. You think about like Greek buildings or any sort of Mediterranean or Middle Eastern building. It's usually going to be all white, really thick walls made out of, I don't know, stucco. Is that sort of some kind of stucco situation? And that, I guess, keeps in, reflects heat and keeps in cool air from the evening. I'm not totally sure.

Yeah, and that's exactly right. I mean, I live in Los Angeles where you have a lot of Mexican architecture that we call it anyway and or Spanish architecture. And that has idea behind it. And I visited a city of the future built by Norman Foster, famous architect. And this is in Abu Dhabi in the UAE. And what he has done is he's stolen from history a lot because you have buildings that are clustered closer together, thereby you don't have as much sunlight blasting into those areas. They're darker alleyways and therefore keeping them cooler, but they're clustered enough closer together so the sun doesn't have enough chance to come down and stay there, and then uses a lot of natural materials that are lighter for the surfaces of not only the roofs,

but the facades of buildings themselves, and then redirects a lot of the way they are shaped or situated or sited in areas to allow for wind, natural wind currents to come through and, you know, turn away from where the sun actually shines. So when we start to think about siding, just siding alone, you know, as opposed to east-west where the sun rises and sets, doing it north-south. So you have less windows, you know, in areas where the sun's going to shine. Really fascinating just to think through and super logical. But that's, you know, very analog combined with a lot of the technology, like you said, solar panels and, you know, there's nanoparticles that can be used on these surfaces to really hyper-cool things as well. So there's a lot of possibilities that we can do just by thinking things through,

more so than just plopping down a development and saying, great, go live there. You know, let's, let's think about things a little bit before we have people, you know, start to inhabit. you know, more and more of our urban centers and other places that we're building on. What about artificial trees? You write about artificial trees that can suck vast amounts of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. So one tree can take carbon out of the atmosphere at a million times the rate of a natural tree, which a lot of us probably already know that natural trees do take carbon out. And that's one of the reasons the rainforest is considered the lungs of the earth. So there's a lot of devices now that draw carbon. Why is the fake tree more

promising. And also, how does this work? How can something just vacuum? Is it like actually vacuuming carbon out of the air? How does it work? Yeah. So if we all start to, you know, rattle our brains and move the cobwebs out from elementary school and high school, we realize, oh yeah, trees, you know, bring carbon out of the atmosphere and they actually transpire things and we get oxygen from them. And as you said, you know, the Amazon's the biggest evidence of that, the lungs of the planet, even though the oceans vacuum out a lot more, for lack of a more scientific term there, more carbon out of the atmosphere than anything else. So if you take an artificial tree, which uses materials, much like a fish net or something

like that to capture carbon as opposed to fish. Think about it that way. And it captures the carbon that's automatically flowing through air, through air circulation, and then it traps that carbon. And this is a big business now, Jordan. It's actually a fascinating economy that sprung up here called carbon technology, and it traps that carbon, and then that solid material is then stored. And people are making pens, they're making bricks, they're using it for all sorts of materials that can be put to use back into society. So you basically

trap it like you would any other type of filter, and then you use that carbon for other material. and you can use fuel from this. And that's the game changer here. And this is what to me is very, very exciting. Because, you know, one tree does this, as you pointed out, at an exponent of a natural tree. You start to create a forest of these artificial trees. And then you have a game changer. People say, well, why don't we just plant more trees? Well, you would need a forest the size of India, really, to make any day. difference or dent in, you know, taking carbon out of the atmosphere. And again, that's going to take decades by the time these trees become mature enough to store enough carbon. Artificial trees can be built much more quickly and can pretty much create an equal amount of bringing out of the atmosphere as much as we put into it today if we did this as just, you know, a manufacturing

exercise. So if we just concentrated on that, we could kind of balance out the carbon budget, as they like to say. With these artificial mechanisms, there are even portable devices. All sorts of entrepreneurs have come up with ideas to create portable devices beyond just the artificial tree that you can move around like a giant air conditioner, put them over a freeway, put them next to a coal plant, things like that where there's an awful lot of carbon being manufactured through artificial means and then take that carbon and sequester it into places where we've already mined, for example, or into greenhouses to increase the possibility for growth there, plant growth. Well, no, we need carbon for plant growth. And so things like that are being

experimented with. And I have to say, I have one of the most fascinating conversations with the guy who invented this artificial tree, Klaus Lochner. He's in Scottsdale, Arizona, and he's just one of these guys that just is one of these mad scientists. That's a mad scientist name also, Klaus Lachner. Yeah. Okay. Come on. Come on, Klaus. Right. I'm a little on the nose, Klaus. And I was like, Klaus, how did you come up with this idea? Like, what was your light bow moment to say, hmm, what if we created an artificial tree to suck things out of the atmosphere? And he said, well, I was looking at, what do you say, robotic simulation and robotics? How can robots, basically make other robots and take over the earth.

Yeah, that's some mad scientist ish right there, for sure. So it's like, how can robots just basically procreate, you know, make each other? And, you know, therefore, there wouldn't be a need for human beings. But it turns out that energy, you know, energy extraction still needs a human touch. And he started to go down this path of extracting energy. And then he looked at the flip side of that, which is all the carbon emissions that are coming out of it. And ergo, he eventually followed that bouncing ball to how can we create a more balanced carbon budget in the world.

And that's how he came up with it. But just a fascinating dude. So interesting discussion there. Fascinating, but should probably keep an eye on that guy, given his first question was, how can robots make each other without humans at all? You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger Show. We'll be right back after this. Thank you for listening and supporting the show.

Your support of our advertisers keeps us on the air. learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard. So you can check out those amazing sponsors. Visit jordanharbinger.com slash deals. And don't forget the worksheet for today's episode. That link is in the show notes at Jordanharbinger.com slash podcast. If you're listening to us on the Overcast player, please click that little star next to the episode. We really appreciate it. And now back to the show. So these trees are amazing. They obviously require electricity to run, their machinery, right? They don't have some sort of natural physical property that just happens to vacuum up carbon and use it as fuel, correct? No, because a lot of it's based on kinetics. So you have wind

that kind of goes through it. Some require some degree of energy, but, you know, not a lot. And that's kind of the balance there. But a lot of this is just how much air circulation is flowing through these, let's just call them nets to picture that. How come much air circulation is flowing through these nets? And where can they be placed so you can get the vast amount of that? And I mean, obviously you can use solar energy for a lot of this. So between the two of them, how much energy you're using, it's very, very minuscule. Oh, interesting. And how much of these cost? You know, each unit, I think, is about the cost of entry-level car.

So as we build more of them, the cost will come down. So what's that, $20,000, $30,000, you know, in that range? And obviously, you'll build economies of scale, the more these come into practice and get used. How many do we need to recapture all the fossil fuels that we're dumping in the air right now? Do we know? Do we know how much it would take to balance the carbon budget, so to speak? Yeah, about $100 million. So, yeah, that's a pretty big forest.

It's a pretty big forest. I actually have no idea how much space that would take up. Do you? It would take a big chunk of the forests here. It depends how close you would put them together. You know, I talked to Klaus about this. You don't want to put them all together in one place, by the way. Right.

That makes sense. You want to have it spread out all around the planet. So when you look at how many trees are basically in the Boreal forest in Russia, you're probably about the same amount. So something like that, it's scale, but again, you wouldn't want to put it all together. But if you look at the amount of cars, you know, he said a more correct analogy is how many cars get built in a year and can we ship them? And you're talking about the same, you know, similar amount of things.

So we do have the ability to manufacture them and obviously you want to spread them all around the planet as much as we can. and so it's not so crazy when you start to think about it that way. No, it's not. I mean, it's actually quite fascinating. Do they make noise? No. Really?

No. Saw one, you know, it's very, very silent. That's great. This sounds like something you'd get in the, this is like the earth-saving addition of the sharper image catalog. Like, get this fake tree. It'll purify all the air in your house and it doesn't make any noise. And they actually are coming out with things like that.

When I was in Mazder, I don't want to name the brand, but there is a major brand that has something that you could put into your house that much like, you know, those kind of ion machines, you know, to go back to that again. But those ion machines you could put in your house to make the air cleaner and more, you know, makes you more mellow or whatever, to balance that out. They have the same thing to change the air molecules to make it much cleaner and, you know, have a lot of filters for your home as well. So, yeah, you'll start to see them in a lot of these catalogs, you know, like that. Yeah, you do have home devices, you know, water out of air, you know, there's a for that. So you're starting to see this on the personal level. Of course, we want to see this at the

industrial level to make a big shift for climate impact. Yeah, and just remember, if you put one of these in your house, you're letting Klaus Lochner into your living room. He's your service repairman, yeah. Exactly. What about these certain types of rock? This blew my mind, that there's a type of rock that just naturally, when exposed to the air, sucks carbon out of the atmosphere. What is this? And can we manufacture this rock somehow, or is it just it happens to come out of the earth and that's kind of it? Comes out of the earth and that's kind of it. Ah, so not really a solution then. Right now we're talking about the rocks of Oman.

In Oman, they've discovered that the rocks that they have in certain areas there capture carbon at an exponential rate, like crazy amount, and actually can make a difference if you crumble them up and put them over, let's say, you know, farmland, they will make a difference. There's a similar type of rock in Northern California and, you know, in different places and what happens is they've come up from basically Middle Earth, let's call it, over time with, you know, volcanic eruptions and just, you know, titanic plate movement. And, you know, have come up through that means to rise to the surface, but that takes a really long time. So, you know, you can't, they've been figured out a way to manufacture them. There's some people at Columbia University looking at how they can replicate those. But they haven't come up with anything that I've seen to be able to artificially replicate it to any means or any degree, but they are looking at them as natural solutions that can be crumbled up and put in different places to actually store carbon. So, you know, we look at that along the same lines, I would say is regenerative farming, regenerative soil production, that type of thing.

Now, marine cloud brightening is something that you discussed earlier in the show and in the book. So I've heard of this before. This is where we're essentially blasting water into the air, seawater into the air, and it turns into clouds or goes into existing clouds and brightens them and deflects the sun and cools the ocean area beneath. So this kind of technology could potentially save the Great Barrier Reef. It can stop hurricanes because, as I learned, also through reading your book, hurricanes are caused by warm water on the surface. So this is actually quite a useful solution given how destructive hurricanes are and other sea-based storms. Yeah, ocean water temperature rise is really, really significant. And it's, you know, the marine

environment is very, very sensitive to temperature rise. So to take it back into, you know, our James Bond discussion, you know, they've just devised these autopileted ships or yachts, as they call them, that will traverse the oceans and be dispersed to certain areas where they're starting to see the ocean temperature rise and have them do exactly what you say, which is to have these spouts put on top of these catamaran-like vehicles, marine vehicles, and then shoot ocean water up into the clouds. Marine clouds lie a lot lower in the sky than clouds over land. So they have a higher degree of preponderancy for that water to get captured, as you described, into those clouds and therefore reflect the sun. And if you put them in a place like the Great Barrier Reef and there was just a

report out this week about how bleaching is now kicking off again and, you know, being much more severe than what they had thought. They thought they had, you know, slowed bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef, and bleaching just means those organisms. The Great Barrier Reef's an organism. It's coral. It's the largest living organism on Earth. And when that starts to die off, all of the marine life around it starts to die off to. So just a few degrees temperature difference of run. suffocates a lot of the, like the phytoplankton there and zooplankton there so that they don't have anything to feed on. And then the fish don't have anything to feed on and so on and so forth as we have, you know, kind of the pyramid of life, right? So what they're looking at is how can we

cool these temperatures in these sea temperatures? And if you spray water up into the atmosphere and have the clouds above them kind of cool things, then the area below obviously gets cool. pooled. There are other means of ocean thermal means where it's taking cool water from the lower parts of the depths of the ocean, of course, where, you know, the sun doesn't make it as far down there. The sun's energy, so it gets cooler. If you dives into the bottom of a pool or swim out farther off the beach and, you know, gone deeper into the waters that you realize it's cooler, right? You start to bring that cooler water closer to the surface, and that's what ocean thermal means do. And as you pointed out, yeah, you need a certain amount of temperature at the surface to fuel

hurricanes. And so if we can cool the surface of areas, then we can kill those hurricanes in their tracks and stop them from hitting land. That could be a big, big savior for a lot of centers of population that are close to, you know, the shores. You know, you have, you know, I think a billion people that live within 50 feet of seashore. So that's very, very vulnerable population right there that we can then do something about through technology. How do these boats, are they just solar-powered boats and they just, they're huge platforms that just skim around for a long time or stay in place and just blast water up in the air 24-7? Yeah, they have GPS systems. They're autopiloted so they can be controlled by remote captain, let's call him or her. And then they can be dispatched

to an area where, you know, people may not realize, but all around the globe, we have different buoys that take temperature rises of the sea. So we know when things are starting to, you know, bubble up as it were and get warmer so that way we could predict hurricanes. And so when you start to use those in combination with weather satellites that are much more exact, we can start to see when things are going to be, you know, starting to have the right recipes starting to form for superstorms. And if we can then dispatch things like these or, you know, Bill Gates has a similar vehicle, but it's like an octopus that it looks like and that actually just sucks water from the depths of the ocean and brings it to the top in order to cool the

top of the sea surface temperatures there. So, you know, if we could dispatch them at the right time, then we have a better chance of maybe mitigating a lot of the extreme weather that we're we're seeing, you know, derived from climate change. I know we only have you for a limited time, but I'm curious about geoengineering that slows down the polar ice melts, because this is a topic that everyone's talking about lately as well. I didn't realize that the water from the melting glaciers

was actually causing these same glaciers to melt even faster. How does this work and what are people doing about this? You actually made a trip out there from what I understand. This was probably my most fascinating journey, Aesthetically, I mean, I went to Arctic, Norway, and physically very, very challenging, and then really eye-opening to see what scientists or the lengths that scientists are going to. I should say depths, because I'll get into this in a minute where scientists going into

subglacial tunnels and staying for months in order to investigate the depths of ice in these land glaciers and how to stop them from melting. It's really important for people to understand that sea glaciers, the type you see floating around in the oceans already, those don't add to ocean volumes. You know, that's already baked in. But when you start to, you know, it's like melting an ice cube in a glass that's already there. It's not going to add to the volume of that glass. But if you take water or from another source and put it in, then all of a sudden you have a different volume. So land glaciers, land-based glaciers, add to sea level rise. And that's why we're very keen on looking at like the Greenland glaciers or these glaciers in Norway or places where it's a land-based glacier like in Antarctica. That's why those are so important to keep an eye on and mindful of because that is when an unnatural amount of water starts to flow from these glaciers as they melt into the seas. That adds artificially to existing sea.

volumes and temperatures start to rise. So I went to Arctic Norway and hiked up this glacier and, you know, the weather started to come in and I got stuck on the glacier for hours and, you know, I couldn't meet up with my team who was also stuck on a different part of the glacier but had to top rope down to get off the glacier as the weather started to get really gnarly up there. And, you know, what I was looking at are these scientists who have created these stanchions to slow. the melt when you look at how much, you know, water, flowing water is a force. And what it does, it starts to break up ice faster and faster, the more that, the faster that water flows. You know, when you, when you use a hose, for example, in your garden, and you put your thumb on it,

and you increase the amount of, you know, the rate that water's coming out, you can blast, you know, suds off your car, or you can blast, you know, dirt off your driveway. Think about it that way. Take your thumb off it again and it slows. It doesn't do. is an effective job, right, of moving things around. Now, take that same analogy with ice or snow, and if you can slow that rate of water of melt, you have the better chance of that ice staying on the surface longer. It slows the melt on the top that way, and it allows the thickness of the ice to remain. So I went up to see what they were doing there. It was fascinating to see the physical environment that they were in. I had a little difficult time getting back down, so

thankfully it stayed light when I was there well into the evening hours and I was able to safely make my way back to base camp. But you know, you get stuck in these circumstances and it reminds you just how human we are in the face of nature, especially when faced with the extremes in these circumstances. And then you look around at the beauty. I mean, just the awesome earth beauty that you're exposed to there along the, you know, the Arctic seas that you're looking out. and some of the coastlines there, which are spectacular, and you realize, wow, we are part of nature. How can we start to work with nature? What can we do to use our faculties and our minds to take innovation, to take technology, to take what we do, which is to stretch the human mind, to think of

things that can make life for the better for all of us for society? How can we work with nature in order to do that. And that's what geoengineering really is at the end of the day. It's about saying, how can we take some of the burden away from Mother Nature who has been straddled with our existence in the detritus of our existence for so long? How can we take an artificially help and assist Mother Nature to do that? What are those means? Solar engineering, carbon engineering, ocean engineering. You know, what can we do in order to make the land, a better place to feed off of, to live upon, and have just, you know, a better environment for us all. And if we look at it from that perspective, I think we have a chance of really attacking climate with the right attitude. And now that we have the means available to us, we can engender,

hopefully the private sector, the venture capital community, the business community, to get together with the science community to get these technologies. at scale. Governments traditionally do this. They're the protectors of society, but we haven't seen the policies go in this direction. In fact, we've seen them go backwards of late. So what can we do? What can we do as individuals? What can we do for businesses? How can we create a market? How can we create demand? And what type of innovations are going to work at scale in order to roll back the damage we've done to the climate. And that's what I write about in the book, and that's what geoengineering in my mind is all about. And do you think that this is a government project or, you know, like a UN thing,

or is this private sector? Because I think a lot of people are going to be pretty surprised if governments can get off their, you know what, and get this done, because it seems highly unlikely. You think the private sector can play a role here? It seems like all these inventions have come from private sector companies. I don't hear anything about government scientists inventing, you know, carbon trapping trees. Yeah, you know, look, we've had a lot of faith and hope in governments, obviously, since the Kyoto Protocol. We had a big wake-up call after an inconvenient truth came out in 2007, and everybody said, oh my God, now we have to start being environmentally friendly, and an entire business rose up, and consciousness did rise up about that. But carbon emissions have

still continued to rise, and governments still haven't been able to do anything about it. it. So we have to turn to the private sector that can actually work quickly. You know, if you look at the smartphones that we have in our hands, almost all of us today, and all of the things that we can do with it, we could shop with it, we can get a car with it, we can, you know, figure out where people are with it, we could communicate, we could browse the internet. It's an amazing device that didn't exist 15 years ago, even a decade ago. That's a quick change. That's the type of change that we need for the climate. And that's why the private sector's involvement is so, so important. So I'm laying down my bet, and I'm hoping that we get people like Larry Fink

at BlackRock, the largest money manager in the world, to continue to talk to businesses and really encourage them to get more climate friendly and to look to solutions, not just mitigation and prevention efforts, but to technologies that we can all embrace and get behind that will make a difference at scale. Thomas, thank you so much. It's amazing that some of this stuff is real. We really do need to bridge the gap between investment community, big business, and science to develop climate solutions that can repair the climate today, not 40 years from now, but now, now. Thanks to Thomas for coming on the show. The book is called Hacking Planet Earth, how geoengineering can help us reimagine the future. Links to Thomas and his books will be on the website in the show

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