Woolly pigs, high tech and other ingenious ways to take carbon out of the air | Gabrielle Walker

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 20 January 2022

⏱️ 12 minutes

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Summary

What do Woolly pigs have to do with climate change? They’re part of a vital, ingenious and evolving strategy to take carbon out of the sky and store it safely -- in trees, soils, the ocean, buildings, rocks and deep underground. Every carbon removal approach takes some combination of natural resources, human ingenuity and technology, says climate thinker Gabrielle Walker. If we get the mix right, we can clean up the environmental mess we’ve made, reverse the processes behind climate change and give nature a chance to heal. “What goes up must now come down,” she says.

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0:00.0	You're listening to TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hugh.
0:07.0	Obviously, we should stop putting carbon into the atmosphere in the first place if we want to stop climate change from getting worse.
0:14.0	But it's already too late to do it fast enough to keep the planet's temperature from rising to catastrophic levels.
0:26.2	In her talk at the 2021 countdown summit, climate strategist Gabrielle Walker makes the case for why carbon removal gives us the only chance to not just clean up the mess we've made, but give the
0:31.4	planet a chance to heal.
0:35.6	So I'm going to talk to you about carbon removals, and I'm going to start with this.
0:41.2	This is a woolly pig.
0:43.8	And she's also one part in a whole new set of approaches for dealing with climate change.
0:49.2	They are all called carbon removals.
0:52.7	And they all involve taking CO2 out of the sky and storing it somewhere
0:57.5	safe. I'll come back to the Willy Pig later. But first, why do we need carbon removals? Because I know
1:05.9	what you're thinking. Isn't it easier to stop putting the carbon in the atmosphere in the first place?
1:11.7	And the answer is, yes, of course, it is.
1:14.4	We have to do everything we can, as fast as we can,
1:17.2	to stop carbon getting into the sky
1:19.4	and stop climate change getting worse.
1:22.6	But the problem is, we've left it too late.
1:28.1	We can't now do it fast enough.
1:32.6	I've been working on climate change for more than 20 years,
1:35.7	and I've talked about it in boardrooms and classrooms and everywhere in between,
1:39.8	and I was shocked when I found this out,
1:43.1	but the science is utterly, utterly clear.
	...

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