Decarbonising the Atmosphere
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 15 January 2019
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is becoming technologically feasible, but will it ever be commercially viable at the scale needed to halt climate change?
Ed Butler speaks to Louise Charles of Swiss-based Climeworks - one of the companies that claims it is already turning a profit from the direct capture of carbon from the air. They're selling the CO2 to greenhouses. But what the world really needs to do to stop global warming is bury the stuff in the ground, and who is willing to pay money for that? Ed asks Princeton ecology professor Stephen Pacala, and Gideon Henderson, professor of earth sciences at Oxford University.
Producer: Laurence Knight
(Picture: A Reykjavik Energy employee stands next to a carbon capture unit designed by the Swiss company Climeworks; Credit: Melanie Stetson Freeman/The Christian Science Monitor via Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Ed Butler and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:05.3 | Today on our second program looking at climate change and tech, |
| 0:09.1 | we hear from firms extracting carbon straight from the atmosphere. |
| 0:13.4 | What are they doing with it? |
| 0:14.9 | For example, using carbon dioxide to produce synthetic fuels |
| 0:17.9 | that would replace than fossil fuels and also taking carbon |
| 0:21.1 | exit from the air and either putting it underground or in some sort of a solid form. |
| 0:25.1 | Can such bold new technology deliver us from global warming or are the efforts of private |
| 0:30.1 | enterprise just a drop in the bucket? No big industry is going to spring up to do this just on a |
| 0:35.8 | voluntary basis or out of the goodness of their heart. |
| 0:38.5 | There will have to be government action to incentivise the removal of CO2 for going to do it at large scale. |
| 0:44.4 | The economics of carbon removal, business daily from the BBC. |
| 0:50.4 | In yesterday's programme, you may recall we heard how a variety of new companies are out there launching a type of agriculture, growing saltwater plants known as halophytes in the desert. |
| 1:03.0 | NASA's chief scientist Dennis Bushnell told us this could provide a fix not just for our squeezed land and water resources worldwide, but could also absorb vast amounts of atmospheric |
| 1:12.6 | carbon dioxide. They could mitigate the biggest challenge of all, global warming. |
| 1:18.5 | The Halifite salv land, they solve water, they solve food. You can grow massive amounts of |
| 1:24.8 | food with that. I mean, this completely revolutionizes agriculture and much else. |
| 1:31.7 | You can end up producing all of the petrochemical feedstock you need so you don't need petroleum. |
| 1:38.3 | Because you have the carbon locked up in plants that you're growing. |
| 1:41.5 | It's just a little hydrocarbon. |
| 1:43.3 | That's all you need for |
| 1:44.3 | petrochemical feedstock. This is a solution to the major really existential human issues. |
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