Hey, I'm Elise Hugh. Thanks for listening to TED Talks Daily. Today we're going to hear about something you probably don't consider very often, seaweed. In his archive talk from TED Summit 2019, the environmentalist Tim Flannery makes the case for how this humble weed could play a huge role in bringing down our greenhouse gases.

Halfway through, he shares a pretty astonishing stat for just how effective seaweed farming can be

in addressing climate change. It sounds geeky, but we'll make for excellent cocktail party

conversation.

This is seaweed.

It's pretty humble stuff, but it does have some remarkable qualities.

For one, it grows really fast.

So the carbon that is part of that seaweed just a few weeks ago

was floating in the atmosphere as atmospheric CO2,

driving all the adverse consequences of climate change.

For the moment, it's locked safely away in the seaweed,

but when that seaweed rots, and by the smell of it, it's not far away,

when it rots, that CO2 will be released back to the atmosphere.

Wouldn't it be fantastic if we could find a way of keeping that CO2 locked up long-term

and thereby significantly contributing to the climate,

to solving the climate problem.

What I'm talking about here is drawdown. It's now become the other half of the climate

challenge, and that's because we have delayed so long in terms of addressing climate change

that we now have to do two very big and very difficult

things at once. We have to cut our emissions and clean our energy supply at the same time that

we draw significant volumes of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. If we don't do that, about 25%

of the CO2 we put in the air will remain there by human standards forever.

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