This TED Talk features geoengineering researcher Tim Kruger, recorded live at TED 2017.

To avoid dangerous climate change, we're going to need to cut emissions rapidly. That should be a pretty uncontentious statement, certainly with this audience.

But here's something that's slightly more contentious.

It's not going to be enough. We will munch our way through our remaining carbon budget for

one and a half degrees in a few short years. And the two-degree budget in about two decades.

We need to not only cut emissions extremely rapidly,. We need to not only cut emissions extremely rapidly, we also need to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

Thank you.

I work assessing a whole range of these proposed techniques

to see if they can work.

We could use plants to take CO2 out

and then store it in trees, in the soil, deep underground, or in the oceans.

We could build large machines, so-called artificial trees

that will scrub CO2 from the air. For these

ideas to be feasible, we need to understand whether they can be applied at a vast scale in a way

that is safe, economic and socially acceptable. All of these ideas come with trade-offs. None of them

are perfect, but many have potential.

It's unlikely that any one of them will solve it on its own.

There is no silver bullet,

but potentially together they may form the silver buckshot

that we need to stop climate change in its tracks.

I'm working independently on one particular idea which uses natural gas to generate electricity

in a way that takes carbon dioxide out of the air.

...