All language subtitles for S01E03 Whats Next

It's kind of this crazy thing
that there's this energy source

that's wildly cheap, you know,
that has powered our society.

Our society is based on hydrocarbons.

Gasoline, natural gas, and coal.

At the same time, the phenomena
of energy release is going to CO2,

then the CO2 is like a mirror
that's reflecting the heat back in,

which has
all these traumatic weather effects.

Total emissions
is over 50 billion tons a year.

You know, it's just a mind-blowing number.

We know for sure
that if you keep using hydrocarbons,

then things get very bad.

So, we have to give up hydrocarbons

almost entirely.

Well, it's official.

This year is now tied for the most days
over 110 degrees recorded.

You believe this is the toughest challenge
humanity has ever faced?

Absolutely.

There's no reason
to let it happen.

We have solutions.

Practically every activity
that we engage in

involves fossil fuels in some way.

Looking at our phones,
charging our phones, you know,

to, uh, going to the ice skating rink,
going to the swimming pool, you know.

All these things
are being heated and cooled.

So, the scale of the solution
has to match the scale of the problem,

and that's very hard to even imagine.

We are addicted to fossil fuels, right?

And going cold turkey... wouldn't work.

The electricity system would fail.
You wouldn't be able to drive to work.

Farmers wouldn't have any fertilizers.

You couldn't build
new buildings and roads.

People would be freezing to death.

You know, there's almost nothing
that doesn't draw

on a massive amount of hydrocarbons.

Particularly because of my travel,

my carbon footprint
would be one of the highest.

But I can afford to buy technologies
that zero out my emissions.

I also buy carbon credits.

Obviously, you know,
I can afford to do that,

so that's not really being
part of the solution.

Bill Gates, welcome back.

Now you're talking about climate change.

In your new book, you talk about
how to avoid a climate disaster.

We all need
to get rid of our footprint

by driving innovation faster
than it would normally take place.

You know, I... I have a life
of seeing human innovation at work.

You know, the digital revolution
that I was lucky enough to be part of

took people very much by surprise.

What is the essence of Microsoft?

Well, a computer on every desk
and in every home.

- I don't have one at home or my desk.
- We're working on that.

I remember when I read the book.

You could tell his approach
was a systems approach.

I always tell people
about that book. I go,

"That book is just a pie chart, okay?"

It's the world's best pie chart book.

It tells you the pie chart
of all the causes.

You're not a worthy cocktail party
contestant unless you know the pie chart.

So, emissions come
from many sectors of the economy.

The manufacturing or industrial piece,

making steel,
making cement, making chemicals.

That is so hidden to people.

They're surprised that, globally,
it's bigger than any of the others.

Then there's producing electricity,
burning coal, natural gas,

and then you have agriculture,
where you have use of fertilizers,

and you have the fact
that cows generate natural gas.

Then there's transportation.

Passenger cars, trucks,
buses, trains, planes, boats.

And then finally, you have buildings,
where we heat and cool the buildings.

To get to zero emissions,

you literally have to zero out
all the emissions in those five categories

in every single country,

and so it's...

You know, it's very daunting.

I do have the great fortune
of growing up in Montana.

There's a river that runs
right through town right by my house.

We spend all of our time outside.

The impacts are visible everywhere,

but they're much more obvious

when you're constantly interacting
with the outdoors.

Wildfire smoke settles
into the valley where I live,

and it's hard to breathe.

I also saw the glaciers
in Glacier National Park melting.

Yeah, pretty much doomed
if we don't make any changes soon.

People are dying.
People are being affected, and I...

It's getting closer and closer to us
in Western societies.

Climate change growing up
is... is just something that was there.

I... I have known no world
before climate change.

Even if we want to do something
around the climate crisis,

it's not clear
what we could even do to address it.

That's crazy.

Yes.

Wait, so it should be
part of college orientation.

Well, the climate cause
benefits immensely

by having lots of young activists.

You know, they're a super important part
of the movement.

- Hi.
- Hello.

- Hello.
- Nice to meet you.

- Isaac.
- Hi, Isaac.

- Grace. Nice to meet you.
- Hey.

- I'm Jamie.
- Hi, Jamie.

I learn from them

just like I do from the scientists
coming up with the breakthroughs.

The highest temperature ever,
they almost broke it.

They were hoping they would break it,

so a bunch of people wanted to be
in Death Valley when it broke the record.

That's like the dinosaurs wanting
to pose with the asteroids.

Like...

I don't consider myself
a climate optimist,

but at the same time,
I don't consider myself a pessimist.

I don't think that's helpful.

We need a diversity of tactics
to face, you know, this climate crisis.

The crisis doesn't care
if we're not ready for it.

You can't disengage
from the knowledge that, as we are now,

it's not looking so great in the future.

Um...

They have a more bleak view of the world
and the difficulties of getting there

than I do
or that I expected they would have.

I want to make sure they get exposed
to some of these innovations.

You know,
gasoline costs less than bottled water,

and so people are kind of spoiled.

Hydrocarbons, except for the fact
they emit CO2, they are miraculous.

We're trying to make a battery that's
a tenth as energy-dense as gasoline,

but there's so much we have to do
in the next ten years.

Across every area of emission, you know,

"zero" is this demanding number
that doesn't let you pick,

"Okay, let's do this one
but not... not this one."

The climate issue is
a classic stakeholder problem.

The people who will be
most affected by climate change

are our unborn children,

and it's very hard
to get a generation living today

to make major sacrifices
for a generation yet to be born,

and that's why
you also need the profit motive.

Hi. Welcome.

We'll do some Q and A
and have some discussion from there.

Thank you. Take it away.

Breakthrough Energy Ventures is
an investment firm led by Bill Gates,

designed to tackle
the production of greenhouse gases.

Strategic investments can show the world
that there's a better way to do this,

and then I can go to you and say,

"It doesn't matter
what your politics are."

"It doesn't matter what you think
about any of it."

"This is objectively
a better way of doing it, so let's do it."

If you look at steel,
grey hydrogen, and chemical,

which are the three targeted industries
we look at.

Right now, fossil ethylene is produced
in a very carbon-intensive way.

We need business-as-usual solutions
to making things, getting electricity,

driving around, flying around, you know,
our buildings, our homes.

Where... What do we eat?

So we wanna replace those things

at the same standard,
at least, with no emissions, all right?

So the only way you can do that is if
you're coming up with new technologies.

Dioxycle is
a carbon emissions recycling company.

Climate change
is a scale problem.

If you don't have scale,

there's no way you can change the climate.

I would not try
to change the climate as a hobby,

and therefore,
you need a solution that offers scale.

And there's only one thing
as big as Mother Nature,

and that's Father Greed, the marketplace.

We are getting ready to move on
to our one-ton-per-day pilot.

I'm showing you really
just the shell here.

I think it's commendable
he's putting his money where his mouth is.

Most of us don't have the capital

to invest in, you know,
multi-million dollar startups,

most of which will not pan out,
but some of which may.

...require clean hydrogen
going into the future...

You end up funding
a lot of things that are a dead end,

but the few that become the equivalent
of Apple or Microsoft or Google

in this clean-tech area,

there will be many companies
that achieve that type of impact.

Climate is, in many ways,
a systems problem.

We think software has an interesting role
to potentially help solve that.

You have amazing entrepreneurs
with all sorts of ideas coming at you.

So, we're super over-minded
in terms of thinking about what could be.

We've really been able to explore
this new cement production process.

Now, you may think
what you're doing at that moment

is investing in a thing
that's not the thing,

but in fact, a thing that's not the thing
can quickly become the thing.

As long as we can hit
a certain current density,

the capital cost could
be comparable to a kiln.

And the heat you're getting
from natural gas or electricity...

Now, Breakthrough Energy
has over a hundred companies.

You've got agriculture.
You've got buildings.

Cement is one
where we have some great companies.

Someone from Bill Gates's fund,
Breakthrough Energy Ventures,

came to Caltech and gave a talk.
He said, "Look,

there's all these huge climate problems
that no one's working on."

"There's no money going into them."

"That's a huge problem
because they're as important as cars."

Concrete's the most consumed
human-made material on the planet.

We use more concrete
than anything except for water.

It's almost magic, right?
It's... It's liquid rock.

A few minutes to a few hours
to a few days, it becomes hard.

It becomes a structure.

It's this incredible thing
that has allowed us

to build everything
from skyscrapers to bridges to dams.

Spreading the concrete
as it comes from the pipes

is a job called "punning."

The same thing has been done
in the cement industry

for a hundred-plus years.

Some people know for a very long time
that cement is a huge polluter,

and no one's been doing anything about it.

Concrete is a mixture of cement,
sand, gravel, and water.

The CO2 emissions associated
with producing cement

is a chemistry problem.

We need to make
the exact same material.

And the reason we need to make
the exact same material

is because there is so much risk
associated with building a building

and so much money
that no one wants to specify a material

that's never been used
to build a building before.

The way to make cement today
is the process

where you use limestone,
which has carbon in it.

So, when you burn it, you release the CO2.

But at Brimstone,

we use calcium silicate rocks
that don't contain CO2.

Cement is
a calcium-based material.

You need to get calcium out of the rock
in order to make cement.

So, I'll pour in the liquid
that we usually use as our leaching agent.

We'll pour in this first.

That leaching agent
will react with the rock

and remove the calcium from the rock.

We then take that calcium,
and we put that rock into a kiln,

which produces cement.

In our facility, we send it over
to our concrete lab for testing.

We then basically take that cube,
put that into a press, crush the cube,

and measure how much force
we needed to apply to that cube

in order to get it to crack,

and that tells us
how strong the cement is.

General-use cement would be like 4,000
to 5,000 pounds per square inch.

Large skyscrapers, right, you may need
to use very, very high-strength cements

and get to, you know, 10,000,
even 20,000 pounds per square inch.

Ooh.

That's sick.

There's a lot of cement factories
in this world,

so this is not going to be, you know,
like making a faster computer chip.

If you say to India,
"Okay, make your cement a new way,"

there are thousands
of concrete plants in India alone.

It's a long distance between
inventing a new way to make cement

and getting every cement kiln
in all of India

to no longer have huge CO2 emissions.

There's still some big things
on the to-do list.

So, we have to build a plant.

Then we have to build 3,000 more plants.

Then we have to decarbonize
the entire industry.

There's big, big to-do list items.

There's no question, right?
Anyway, awesome job, everyone.

Great work, team.

The first big published paper
on the greenhouse gas issue

was published in the 1800s.

So, we've had a sense of the fact

that greenhouse gases could trap heat
in the atmosphere for quite some time.

Why don't you try a tankful?
Try it and let me know.

Okay, fill it up.

It was really in
the post-war era, after World War II,

that emissions just started
to increase dramatically.

By the 1960s, President Johnson
had a paper on his desk that said,

"This is a big issue
that you need to be concerned about

from a national security perspective."

The fossil fuel industry did have a sense
of what their product was causing.

They conducted a lot of research
looking at the effects of their product

on the global climate.

The biggest emitters are
the Gulf countries that produce the stuff,

but then after that
are countries like the U.S.

In the West,
we have really high-carbon lifestyles.

Hey, it's Criss Angel.

I wanna welcome you
to my 22,000-square-foot estate

known as Serenity.

So, everything that we think about
in terms of a modern economy

is intertwined with fossil fuels,
and you can look at that

if you're thinking about, you know,
our... our electricity system.

The electric grid

is not only a source
of about a third of the emissions,

it's also the only source of energy
that we know how to make clean.

Solar and wind, you know,
the prices come down dramatically.

The problem with it
is they're intermittent.

The sun doesn't always shine,
the wind doesn't always blow,

but you always wanna be able
to plug in your phone.

We don't yet have a way to store
the energy they create inexpensively

to have it available whenever we need it,

but also, demand for electricity

will only get higher
as we move into the future.

In the future, we need to use electricity
to now power cars, to power our buildings.

And so, weirdly,

not only do we have
to make the grid green,

we also have to make it
2.5 times as large.

In my view, the most promising solution
is nuclear energy.

Either nuclear fusion or nuclear fission.

Fusion, we don't have
an economic fusion plant,

and even some of the science
is a bit uncertain.

So, I think it's very important
that we keep working on fission.

I'm a huge investor
in a company called TerraPower

that's trying to do
a next-generation reactor.

The reactors that we use today
cool things off by using water.

Water can't hold much heat,

so as it heats up,
it gets to be very high pressure.

For many decades, they've talked about
switching away from water

to use liquid metal like sodium,

and that's the approach
TerraPower's taken.

There's no pressure inside the reactor.

Also, all the issues of afterheat,

you know, which caused
both Fukushima and Chernobyl,

those are gone.

So, TerraPower's nuclear power plants
will be far safer,

but, you know,
you actually have to build a demo plant,

get the U.S. regulator to look hard
at how you've done the designs.

TerraPower has picked this
as the place to build

the first of the next-generation reactors.

The current biggest employer here,
which is this coal plant,

that will be shut down
for environmental reasons.

The skills of the workers there match
what we needed at the new plant.

So, it's kind of a textbook example
of what you'd like,

which is the clean economy to go
to wherever the jobs are being lost,

uh, as the dirty economy is phased out.

J.C. Penney's home is behind us.

Uh, that's the Victory Theater.
It opens three nights a week.

And they're redoing this to become
the new law office and the, um, bakery.

- Wow.
- Isn't that great?

- Nice.
- Okay.

Is the bakery yours,
or they'll be a tenant of yours?

So, it'll be ours.
We have a bakery in the back right now.

Okay, and the law office?

Well, I have two law firms.

Oh, you're kidding.

- So we're expanding here.
- That's eclectic.

It's very synergistic.

You can eat cupcakes,
drink coffee, and sue people.

I mean, it's a law firm.

Well, it's my first time here,
and I was looking forward

to coming and seeing where we're building
this first-of-a-kind plant.

You know, we were just out on the site.
It's just a bunch of land.

I mean, all the billions
I'm putting into TerraPower will be lost

if it doesn't work,

but the breakthrough would really

make a huge difference
in helping us solve climate.

A fusion reactor
potentially could be

a very cheap source of electricity

with almost no environmental problems.

You know, today, the science,
we don't even know how to make one,

and, you know, could it come in time?

If you think of
our addiction to fossil fuels

and the way that we're going about

attempting to wean off of it,
we're losing.

The fossil fuel industry
is making record profits.

Emissions are going up.

People are right to be
incredibly skeptical and disillusioned.

There's part of the movement
that I don't fully agree with,

which is that you denigrate
the current way of doing things

before we have a replacement.

I wish there was as much emphasis
on the new thing.

But, you know,
I'm... I'm an optimist, and I...

You know, I think
we will limit temperature increase.

I feel like optimism has to come
from realistic action.

Like, if we just sit here and are like,
"Wow, I'm optimistic,"

then that does a counter service.

There are certain levels of blind optimism
that can be a form of climate denial.

The Paris Agreement set the goal

of holding temperatures
well below two degrees Celsius,

cut emissions in half
between 2015 and 2030,

and then by 2050, have net-zero emissions.

How are we doing?

Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
hit record levels in the spring,

the highest
in more than four million years.

Bad.
Bad. We're doing very badly.

The long-term trend is that
we are not seeing a decline in emissions.

We may miss the two-degree goal,

and so the amount of damage
is going to be very substantial.

You know,
two degrees seemed like a long way off.

Now here we basically are at 1.5.

This past summer was a taste
of how destructive that is.

Two degrees, there are projections
of parts of the world

that are gonna become unlivable.

Whole cities with millions of people
will become very difficult to live in.

It's beyond depressing, yeah.

It's a continuum, right?

So, is there a single tipping point?
No, there is not a single tipping point.

The last time the surface of the planet
was as warm as it is today,

it was 120,000 years ago,

and sea level was 25 feet higher
than it is today.

Average elevation above sea level
in New York City?

Thirty-three feet.

Average elevation above sea level
of Miami?

Six feet.

When is Miami not gonna be inhabitable?

Uh, you know, decades?

So, there's a bunch of stuff
that's kind of baked-in right now.

The biggest problem is

if you're near the equator
and you work outdoors,

so, particularly farmers in Africa,

this can be horrific for them.

Well, agriculture's, you know,
a pretty basic human activity.

Most of us used to be farmers, uh,
'cause we had to be,

and it is a significant source
of greenhouse gases.

20%, or somewhere around there,
of our emissions are agriculture-related.

Those are really hard to get rid of.

Cows burping methane.

You know, tilling the soil
can mobilize carbon that was in the soil.

Nitrogen fertilizer is made
with natural gas.

And all the ways that we farm.

When you pull that combine over the field,
that's using a lot of fossil fuels.

So, there's all sorts of ways
in which agriculture

is contributing to climate change.

It takes a lot of energy,
land, water to grow our food.

We have to fertilize the crops. We have
to get the crops to our grocery stores.

And then it goes
from our grocery stores to our homes.

And then we have to refrigerate it
in our homes, only to throw out 40% of it.

What a lot of people don't know is
that food waste is a huge methane emitter.

There's a lot of food waste,
especially in landfills.

It gets compressed between other trash,

and that means that it can't decompose
as it would just in the soil or something.

That means that methane
is being released from that food waste.

Methane is a much more potent
greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide,

so it has much more warming potential.

If food waste was a country, it'd be
the third-largest country by emissions.

China, U.S., food waste.

But at Mill, we've created a new system

that is the easiest way
to get food back to farms.

Now that the enclosure is a lot tighter
and cinched on the device,

it actually acts as
a nice little coarsening effect,

so that you're, like, able to kind of,
like, keep everything together,

and you don't have
a bunch of parts shifting.

That's something I think
is a user-experience win

if we can solve that.

It feels like a trash bin,
and everyone knows how to use it.

You step on the pedal, and it opens up.

And you scrape your dinner scraps in.

That's really where your job ends.

On the inside
is where all the magic happens.

Overnight and automatically,
we dry and grind all the food you put in.

Food is 80% water.

And what's cool is when you take
the water out, it gets very small.

It becomes pretty much odorless,

but it locks in the nutrients.

After the bin fills up,
which takes weeks,

you leave it on your doorstep,
and we pick it up

to then get it back to our facilities.

You know, think like Uber
but for... for waste.

- Okay. We're opening the box.
- Let's open it up.

Take the bag out.

We load them up into our machine,

which sifts and sorts them
and can pull out any contaminants

like fruit stickers
that sometimes get in there.

It does a heat treatment step
for food safety reasons.

Then we then bag up that material,

and then we send it back to farms
as food for our livestock.

For a poultry farmer,
60% of their emissions

is the feed they buy.

So, if you're growing chickens,

Mill is creating
a carbon-reduced feed ingredient.

It was food we were gonna throw out.

What I'm beginning to appreciate
about innovation is

that it's a very hopeful side of things.

But I'm noticing just how much
systemic resistance there is still.

Waiting for people
who have grown up with this

as part of their goals
and as part... part of their moral compass

to be in those positions of power,

I don't see as a feasible way forward.

I don't fully understand people
who are against this issue,

but it's easier to ignore than most.

People do respond to activism.

The status quo is so powerful.

I don't know how to think about

the benefit of keeping climate in mind
as an emergency

versus angering people.

- Whoa!
- Whoa!

What is worth more?

Art or life?

How hardcore should the activism become,
and who is it aimed at?

You know,
I hope the dialogue between activists

and hands-on people doing the work
stays constructive.

I'm trying
to put my beak on and get it...

We're sounding the alarm
as canaries.

There was a group in the UK
called Extinction Rebellion,

and, you know,
I was driving to go to an appointment,

and they blocked the road.

Extinction!

Rebellion!

You know,
they certainly created awareness.

It is a political world.

The problem is and, sadly,
it's the case for all these things,

if the clean way is super expensive,

then who's gonna pay for that?

We can't expect other countries
to get to zero if we don't do it first,

but then it goes way beyond that too.

It's also that we have a lot more money
than other countries do,

and we cannot expect Brazil,
India, Indonesia,

these major emerging economies
to decarbonize

by spending a lot more money
on clean solutions.

We really actually do need
to make fossil fuels more expensive,

but every time we get
any kind of rise in the price of gas,

it's a huge political crisis.

And the word "tax" is, uh,
an anathema in this country.

You know,
it doesn't even get talked about, really.

You know,
government plays a huge role

because it's their regulations,
their tax incentives

who accelerate these things into the lab,
out of the lab, into the big scale-up.

Eventually, the clean technology
is as cheap or cheaper.

We have a moral obligation,
and we have the economic resources

to make those investments

that will create
the technological breakthroughs,

and then drive them down
the cost-volume curve

so those solutions will be available
to everyone on the planet.

The solar power
and wind power achieved that,

and that's why you see,
even in parts of the country

where the legislatures
are not very climate-oriented,

you know, for example, in Texas,

they're benefiting incredibly
by doing wind and solar.

It's a huge part of their energy mix.

You couldn't have done that
without tax incentives

that were put in place for solar and wind.

So the policy helped drive that,

but you couldn't have
those incentives in place

if you didn't have the technology
at a place where it was ready.

There are technologies
on the shelf right now.

We need those to get into communities
today, right now, and move fast.

Flying accounts
for over 3% of all emissions,

but a solution that works today

is to take fuels
that were made from plants

and making what we call biofuels.

Unfortunately, today,

the fuel you make costs over double
what normal aviation fuel costs.

You know, as I'm buying that
for my air travel, it creates demand.

And as that volume of demand goes up,

there's new ideas
to get the cost of that fuel

to be very close to the cost
of current jet fuel.

The extra cost of an electric car
is going down over time.

Passenger cars are only 8%
of all emissions,

but if you can get everybody
to buy these new passenger cars,

then you've got 8% solved.

We need hydrogen
to be in a high-density state

so that you can economically deliver it
from where it's produced

to where it's used.

We've got our first-ever vehicle
powered by Verne cryo-compression.

Our beachhead market is
in Class 8 trucking, heavy-duty trucking.

That's because that's where we're getting
the most, uh, commercial interest.

Battery electric trucks today
can go about 250 miles or so,

and a truck with our storage
could go a thousand.

Which is
what diesel trucks can travel today.

Do you have IP involved in this?

There's not a lot of materials

that can do both the cryogenic
and the high pressure,

so the heat exchanger's a creep part.
That's where we have IP.

Well,
we're moving as fast as we can

to get emissions
from all the five categories down to zero,

but before we get there,

we will have released a lot more CO2.

Very good to see you.
Thank you again for doing this.

- You bet.
- We're thrilled.

Yeah, no, it should be fun.

If you actually believe
we need to limit warming to 1.5 Celsius,

then you have to be in favor
of carbon removal technology,

where you suck carbon out of the air,
put it under the ground,

and do that for about ten gigatons a year
for 50 years to 2100.

That's mind-boggling.

Nobody's actually thinking about that
or talking about that.

- There we go. Here we go.
- Gentlemen.

How do you think
about carbon capture and its role?

If in the Breakthrough Energy portfolio,
we have a number of companies

that are trying
to bring the cost of carbon capture down.

Today, I'm the biggest individual customer
in Climeworks,

which does carbon capture
at over 300 dollars a ton.

What does it mean
that you're the single biggest customer?

What does that look like? What kind...

- I write them a check. Uh...
- Yeah?

But... But are you offsetting
your own personal emissions with that?

Yeah.

I'm working for a company
that actually addresses climate change.

For me, at the root cause,

the CO2 that is already
in the atmosphere, right?

That is... That is heating up the planet.

What Climeworks is doing is removing CO2
from the atmosphere.

To filter that out,
it's actually quite challenging

because it's the most diluted source
of CO2 that is available.

We are pulling an enormous amount of air
through a... a filter.

If the air passes this material,

the CO2 molecules react
and stay inside the filter material.

We close it off...

...and we heat that chamber up,

which then reverses the chemical reaction...

and then we suck that CO2 to our plant.

We also... We link ourselves
to only sustainable energy sources,

like geothermal energy here in Iceland.

Overall, the process
is actually not that complex,

but to technologically execute
and do it efficiently

is, of course, a challenge.

They really are removing carbon.

Not only do they pull it out,
but it gets mineralized

in that Iceland plant.

Here, I'm actually sitting
next to an injection well.

So, this is one of our injection wells
where we are actually injecting the CO2,

and this is actually the world's
first injection well for this process.

So,
we inject water and CO2,

and at a certain depth,
we release the CO2 into the water stream.

And at this depth,

the pressure is high enough
for this SodaStream effect to take place.

We are pushing the CO2 into the water,

and then the CO2 gets carried
into the bedrock, turning CO2 to stone.

This essentially doesn't
require much energy.

We make use of the water
that is already in the ground

to put pressure on the CO2.

A four-kiloton plant divided by
the 40 gigatons that we emit in a year,

you get to zero point,
and then ten zeros,

one percent of the total emission annually
that we are removing at the moment.

That's why it's so essential
that we scale up this technology.

Of course, we want to be
almost like a utility company.

Instead of collecting the garbage
every week from your home,

we are cleaning up the atmosphere.

But direct air capture is not here
to solve current emissions.

It's really here to clean up
the historical emissions

that are already out there.

Right now,

the biggest capture plants in the world
are below 100,000 tons a year.

There are some being built
that are in the millions,

but unless you get it up
into the billions,

it's kind of a rounding error.

It doesn't really have an impact.

It's kind of an insane idea
to take CO2 out of the air

that you've put up there
by generating energy.

You should just generate your energy
in a different way.

The fact that very serious people
are talking about this is, like, you know,

suggests how desperate we are
to keep doing what we're doing

and find some workaround, you know,
that's going to make it all go away.

A lot of these conversations,
they're completely human-centric.

The other species
that we share the planet with

are really victimized by climate change.

Will the ocean become a place
where we can basically dump our carbon?

You know, are forests places we can store
as much carbon as possible?

Can we genetically modify trees?

Well, that's exciting.
There's all this potential there.

And another way
to look at it would be, well,

the tree that's there now
is probably important

to a lot of species that are living in it.

So, there's no free lunch here.

There is no magic bullet.

If that's all done with electrolysis,
we may need as many as 140 factories,

all making the core technology,
the stacks.

Each of them five times the size

of the largest factory
we have in existence today

in order to support
that kind of production.

I... I would say that absolutely the thing
that's come home to me in a very real way

is the challenge of scale in this space,

of how hard it is
to deploy these innovations at scale.

To run into it and understand viscerally

just how hard it is
to build these things out.

We have to go fast
because it's gonna take a long time.

This is gonna be an arduous,
bumpy, dirty, messy journey,

and it's gonna have times
where it's precarious

and looks like
things are gonna go off a cliff.

So I'm already predisposed
to understand this is crazy.

We're going down a crazy path.

I mean, I want to be optimistic.

I don't like being a doomsday prophecist

or... or trying to be contrarian
for the sake of it.

It's more of just looking at
where we're at.

We're literally on a five,
ten-year timeline here

for getting to zero.

I won't say I'm not an optimist.

I think there's a solid chance
we figure this out.

And you've brought up great examples,
but I won't say that I operate from hope.

I think I operate from love of my home,

and the people,
and everyone involved in this,

and a healthy dose of fear.

God, I cry every time
I talk about this.

You know, when I hear your passion,
I think, "Wow,

we are not going
as fast as you want us to."

It's not easy.

This is
the entire physical infrastructure.

The scale of... of building that new way is...
It's gonna take time,

but it pushes me to... to think harder
about how we can move faster.

So, thank you.

So, we've got a lot of work to do,

and the sooner, the better.