A Pyrotechnic History of Humanity: The future
The Documentary Podcast
BBC
4.3 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 1 January 2022
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
ustin Rowlatt looks at the monumental challenge of weaning ourselves off fossil fuels. Solar and wind could meet all of humanity’s energy needs, but can we switch over before climate disaster strikes?
According to clean-tech enthusiast and investor Ramez Naam, we have the means at our disposal. Our fossil-fuelled global economy has enabled a rapid collapse in the cost of renewable energy and electric vehicles. And now we are seeing a snowballing of government action to decarbonise our economies, according to UN climate negotiator Christiana Figueres. But many problems remain. Energy historian Vaclav Smil points out that we still have no easy way to store renewable energy, or use it to make billions of tonnes of cement and steel. Sheffield-based ITM Power hope that their green hydrogen could solve many of these problems. Plus, electricity historian Julie Cohn says another option might be to build a global electricity grid.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm walking up the stairs at Holbenvierduck. Today this is just another busy road in Central |
| 0:08.6 | London, but it was once the scene of a landmark moment in energy history. That of course is |
| 0:18.2 | the sound of fossil fuels burning. And if we're to have any hope of avoiding catastrophic |
| 0:23.4 | climate change, then all that has to end soon. But bear in mind that energy is the biggest |
| 0:30.5 | industry in the world, a five trillion dollar giant that drives every aspect of the global |
| 0:36.7 | economy and 85% of it runs on fossil fuels. It is a truly monumental challenge. So how |
| 0:46.2 | will we do it and can we do it without sacrificing the high living standards that fossil fuels |
| 0:51.3 | have brought us? Right, well, here we are. And if we're going to succeed, it will be thanks |
| 0:59.2 | to a form of energy pioneered right here. There's nothing left of it now, but it was here |
| 1:04.8 | at number 57 Holbenvierduck. That in 1882, a certain American inventor opened the first |
| 1:12.6 | ever coal fired electricity power station swiftly followed by another in New York. It began |
| 1:22.8 | in the late 19th century, famously Thomas Edison, of course, introduced a network of |
| 1:29.3 | light bulbs, power lines and generators in New York City. And it was transformative in |
| 1:35.2 | almost every sector of public and private life. That's Julie Cohn, a historian of the |
| 1:41.7 | US electricity grid at the Baker Institute for Public Policy in America. I'm Justin |
| 1:47.6 | Rolert and this is the concluding episode of my pyrotechnic history of humanity here |
| 1:54.0 | on the BBC World Service. Today I'll be looking at an ongoing energy revolution that began |
| 2:01.2 | with electricity. Street lighting advanced quickly, people who adopted electrification in |
| 2:08.1 | their homes were able to hold activities at night. But as they did, I think it allowed |
| 2:14.3 | people to forget that the light in their home or the heat that cooked their food actually |
| 2:21.8 | relied on the burning of coal in order to generate electricity, which was pretty dirty in |
| 2:26.9 | the earliest days. It was not a clean and invisible process until it hit the wires and found |
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