How we can curb climate change by spending two percent more on everything | Jens Burchardt

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 8 April 2021

⏱️ 11 minutes

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Summary

Would you pay two percent more for the carbon-neutral version of the products you buy and use every day? In this innovative talk, climate pathfinder Jens Burchardt walks us through the costs and considerations of producing planet-friendly products -- from creation to purchase -- and explains why curbing climate change doesn’t have to break the bank. It’s an inspiring demonstration of how the barriers to a greener world may not be as insurmountable as we think.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	It's TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hume. Here's a wild tidbit.
0:07.6	Six supply chains are responsible for almost half of all global carbon emissions.
0:13.0	That means climate action could take a huge step forward if we helped lower emissions by tweaking the price we pay for products.
0:19.5	And it may not be as expensive as we think.
0:22.3	In his 2021 talk from TED at BCG, climate impact advocate, hence Boisot, starts out by talking
0:28.6	about steel and shows how we could save the planet without breaking the bank.
0:35.0	By the end of this talk, I want to have convinced you that we can make a huge step forward
0:40.0	in the great fight against climate change by just spending one to two percent more on things
0:45.7	that we buy.
0:47.0	What you have to know about steelmaking is that it's a humblingly brutal process.
0:50.9	We have these huge furnaces that tear apart and recombine elements in
0:55.4	materials that have literally been around for millions of years, at temperatures of up to more than
1:01.5	2,000 degrees Celsius. It's a triumph of industrialization, but it's terrible for the climate.
1:08.2	More than 5% of all man-made emissions currently come from
1:11.9	making steel. And of all the many challenges we face to save the climate, this one's
1:16.5	particularly hard to solve. Now why is that? The first reason is technical. There are technologies
1:22.2	to produce low carbon steel. We can, for example, capture the CO2 and pump it back under the earth
1:27.3	that's called carbon capture and storage. Or we can move to entirely new processes can, for example, capture the CO2 and pump it back under the earth. It's called
1:27.7	carbon capture and storage. Or we can move to entirely new processes that, for example, run on low
1:32.5	carbon hydrogen instead of coal. But all of these are currently only at a piloting stage.
1:37.6	The second reason is economical. This is likely going to be expensive. And to illustrate
1:43.0	that, let's compare the steel challenge to that of companies and other sectors.
	...

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