Hi, it's Pierce Brosnan here, guest hosting today on TED Talks Daily.

Here's a talk from a TED fellow given by geothermal entrepreneur Kathy Hanoon.

Kathy is a social impact entrepreneur, working on sustainable and distributed consumer systems for combating climate change.

One of the hallmarks of living in a technologically advanced society is even the little details of life that seem mundane end up being astonishing.

Like the fact that it takes five gallons of water to produce a

walnut or that half the plastic that's ever been made has been made in the past 15 years. My favorite

of these examples is what it takes to keep a room room temperature. Allow me to explain. Heating is

generally done by combusting a fossil fuel. So first, we have to find the

fuel. Unfortunately, it tends to be buried more than a kilometer under the Earth's surface,

and all too often in inconvenient places like the Arctic Circle, nations in conflict,

or under the bottom of the ocean. And then there's the fact that the substance takes 60 to 600

million years to form from dead plankton.

So there's that issue.

We drill these incredibly deep holes to get it.

Then we pipe it, truck it, and ship it in tankers across the world to refineries,

which are these incredibly expensive industrial facilities that take in crude oil and gas,

which are just a bunch of different

hydrocarbon molecules, in order to sort those molecules into refined products. Refined natural gas is then

delivered to homes and businesses via an invisible interstate highway system millions of miles long.

It's invisible because it's underground. There is so much pipeline

in this system that entire steel mills have been built only to produce pipeline for this system.

And because there are millions of miles of gas getting pumped beneath us at high pressure

...