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Hello, this is 6 Minute English from BBC Learning English. I'm Neil.

And I'm Sam. These days our lives are filled with devices that were unimaginable only a few years ago.

The sorts of things you read about in science fiction novels that never thought you'd own.

Yes, like those robots that vacuum your floor or voice-activated lights. We call many of these things

smart tech. But while they can help with the little tasks at home, some people are wondering whether

they can help fight climate change. Yes, smart homes, regulating things like the temperature,

are a step in the right direction. Using AI to learn when the house is occupied and the

optimal time to fire up the heating is one way to limit wasteful use of resources.

The problem comes from the origin of the energy which powers these home systems.

If it's fossil fuels then digging them up an informal way of saying removing something from the

earth and burning them creates carbon emissions. I suppose that's why many people are trying to find

more renewable forms of energy to reduce their carbon footprint.

Well, it's interesting that you mentioned carbon footprint because my question is about that

today. How many tons of carbon dioxide are humans responsible for emitting into the atmosphere

every year? Is it more than a 30 billion, b 40 billion or c 50 billion?

Well, Neil that all sounds like a lot to me but I'll go straight down the middle and say b

40 billion tons. Okay, Sam will find out the correct answer at the end of the program.

So you mentioned earlier that people are looking into ways to use more renewable energy but they're

also some problems with that form of energy production. Yes, for example many of these technologies

rely on certain weather conditions which affect the levels of energy production.

Dr. NS Abu Hamid, CEO of H2Go, is working on a project in Orkney, an island off the coast of

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