FastTracking Climate Progress With New Science and Technology
Transcriber: Amanda Zhu
Reviewer: Peter Van de Ven
Hello everyone.
Thank you very much for tuning in
to our TEDx Countdown event.
I’m Marc Schaus.
And I’m taking part in Countdown
because while you’ve probably heard
a lot about climate change
by now
and all the trouble that we’re in
trying to deal with it at this point,
there’s a solid chance
that you haven’t yet heard
about another side
of the climate conversation
that is equally crucial in trying
to get more people to talk about,
and that’s the side of the conversation
in which we actually talk about
what we’re going to do here
to solve the climate crisis.
So, my daily work involves
combing through new academic publications
coming in from all around the world
in about a dozen different
scientific fields,
literally every day,
every month of the year.
And what the bird’s eye view of all that
new incoming scientific data looks like,
especially pertinent to climate change,
is, yeah, there’s a lot of bad news
that we could be talking about here,
but there’s also a lot of good news
that we could be talking about
in terms of human progress
towards various climate solutions;
moreover, that that progress
has actually been picking up pace,
over the last several years especially.
Because as more nations
have come to recognize climate change
as the existential threat that it is
and more scientists
have dedicated themselves
to the various tasks we need
to overcome to solve this problem,
the trickle pace
of new scientific innovations
that we’ve been seeing
for clean energy over the years
has picked up pace considerably now,
leading into the present.
And what that looks like, that progress,
is in new scientific innovations,
new technological upgrades,
that are allowing us to transition
away from fossil fuel energy sources,
more towards clean energy sources
to cut our carbon emissions.
And so while cleaning up our energy sector
is not everything with this problem,
it is a huge part of it;
and the good news is
that new progress has been coming in
for all of our clean energy options
all across the board,
anywhere from the staples of clean energy,
like solar and wind,
to 24/7 continuous forms
of renewable energy
that fewer of us tend to talk about,
like geothermal energy and tidal energy,
and other clean energy sources,
like nuclear energy and hydrogen fuel,
and advancements in new biofuels as well.
There have been
so many dramatic new innovations
in clean energy technologies
over the last several years
that I can realistically only give you
a highlights montage
in the amount of time that I have here
to really try and do any of them justice.
So if you’re ready for that …
Consider solar energy specifically.
Solar cell technology
has been improved so dramatically
and fallen so steeply in cost
that some analysts expect humanity
to be producing tens of thousands
of new solar panels per hour
over at least the next half decade,
and that because scientists or engineers
have managed to improve everything
from solar cells being
more powerful, more efficient,
more durable, longer lasting,
and, especially, cheaper,
developing communities
all around the world
can much more readily
access this technology,
even in place of a new fossil fuel
energy plant driving the demand further.
So I mean, those kinds of things,
making technology better and cheaper,
is really what will spur more people
into wanting to use it
rather than just immoralizing
people into using it.
So I mean, even more recently,
scientists have managed
to create transparent solar cells
that could be placed
in glass greenhouse rooftops
and integrated into
the windows of your home
or all along the window sides
of skyscrapers in our cities,
or we even have some engineers
developing solar canopies
to line select highway roads.
And other new innovations -
we even have new solar panels now
that not only allow homeowners
to harvest renewable energy
for their homes off the grid,
but they also gather the moisture
in the surrounding air
to collect clean drinking water
for your home at the same time.
And the company developing those panels
has now even partnered
with remote communities
in water scarce parts of the world
to try and bring them more clean energy
and more clean drinking water
at the same time.
And those are exactly, again,
the kinds of innovations
that you would want to see
in terms of spurring
more use of this technology.
Or how about new indoor solar cells
that harvest lower levels
of indoor ambient light
to power microelectronics and, you know,
room sensors and thermostats
and even security systems.
Or how about whole new locations
for placing our solar cells,
like on floating, buoyant solar pads
that rest atop, you know,
bodies of water -
so-called “floatovoltaics” -
that can rest on lakes and reservoirs
or, you know, on top of running rivers,
that are also supplying
hydroelectric energy at the same time,
or, of course, all along shorelines
in parts of the world
where, you know, spare land
is in short supply,
where you get the added benefit
of cool operating temperatures -
you know, raising cell efficiency levels
and the massive added benefit
of not needing to go
and demo huge swaths of land first
to make way for
your massive new solar farm.
Or how about new
so-called anti-solar panels
that take advantage of the fact
that the sun’s rays
hit the Earth’s surfaces
and a sizable portion of that energy
just gets absorbed as thermal energy -
hot sunny day, hot surfaces -
and that slowly, over time,
it dissipates back into space.
Anti-solar panels
capture some of that heat energy
on its reverse passage
back out into space.
Now, obviously,
it’s not a monumental amount
of energy at that point,
but a new study cites
getting about 25 percent
of what you would get
from your traditional solar cell,
which, I mean, is a marked improvement
over the zero percent of energy
we’re harvesting overnight
from our rooftop panels right now.
Now, obviously,
we could do more with sunlight
than just rooftop panels
and transparent energy harvesters.
We can also look to nature
and learn from plants and trees
and other photosynthetic organisms,
like algae,
and learn from photosynthesis
in either trying to get those organisms
to produce just a little bit more
of the energy that they produce
and maybe share some of it with us,
or mimic the process
with advanced new technology
in artificial photosynthesis.
Now, in terms of the former,
scientists have obviously long recognized
that plants and trees
and other photosynthetic organisms,
like algae,
they take in sunlight,
draw in CO2,
and use them to generate their own energy
while producing the biomass
that we see on the outside.
If we harvest the energy
that’s stored in that biomass -
burning it would be one way -
and then we capture the carbon
that’s also stored in there
at the same time,
we can find ourselves
in the admirable situation
of being able to generate energy
while lowering CO2 levels.
That is the immense promise
of new biofuels.
Now, obviously,
that’s been a tricky situation
to find ourselves
on the carbon negative side of,
or else we’d be doing it already.
And biofuels themselves
have gotten a lot of bad press recently
in some high-profile documentaries,
but those almost exclusively focus
on just the most poorly planned
biofuel facilities that we’ve ever had
and in no way showcase the real potential,
the best-case scenario,
with biofuel facilities.
I mean, algae-based and
cyanobacteria-based facilities especially,
they can exist anywhere in the world,
anywhere with access to sunlight,
and what’s different now
is that scientists have scoured the world
looking for unique genetic variants.
What they’ll do
is just a little bit better
in terms of being able to produce
the materials that we later use for fuel.
And thanks to new advancements
in gene editing technology,
scientists have begun to improve upon
those components further synthetically,
though, obviously, not to a level
of bringing us carbon-neutral biofuels
at the scales that we would like
for our societies,
but that’s exactly
where an emerging new field
of synthetic biology can come in
to try and tweak core biological processes
to improve upon them even further.
Because, I mean, photosynthesis,
as amazing as it is,
is still wildly inefficient
in doing what it does,
and new advancements like these
could forever change the way we think
about how we get energy
from sunlight on this planet.
Because if a novel cyanobacteria
just existing in a vat somewhere,
in a desert facility or anywhere else
with access to sunlight,
could just sit there in a tube tank
and take in sunlight,
draw down local CO2,
and produce more energy than we spend
trying to refine the process,
we will have solved a significant
component of the climate crisis.
And early research results
are already very promising,
and some labs around the world
are even experimenting
with additional avenues
of trying to get algae strains
to do additional things
besides just sitting there existing -
new things like remediating
the waste water.
They may happen to be
in cleansing out toxic materials
from the batch ponds;
they might be in something to offer
fuel producers another revenue stream
to potentially make it more viable
as something that we can do.
Now, obviously, aside from sunlight,
wind - wind energy as well -
has evolved considerably over time
to the point where a modern wind turbine,
for example, could generate
about 100 times more power
than models from the ‘80s did
while costing only a fraction
of what it used to cost to do so,
to the point now
where new research tells us
that if a country like America
just retrofitted all old turbines
with technology that we have now,
they could already reach
their 2030 energy goals.
And so when it comes
to something like that,
it’s thanks only to small
but incremental, persistent new progress
in new science and new technology
where an evolving science,
like nanotechnology, for example,
could contribute with, you know,
lighter but more durable materials -
a great combination for turbine blades.
It can then potentially spin
with less mechanical force
needed to make the move.
And in terms of talking about
some of the core criticisms
of, you know, renewable energies
like solar and wind -
their intermittency
in the sun not always being around
and the wind not always blowing -
advanced new science and technology
can help there as well.
We have a whole new suite of technologies
called P2X technologies,
and they all essentially
revolve around the idea
that we can take excess renewable energy
produced during times of plenty -
like when the sun is around -
and we can channel that extra energy
and put it to work,
and we can power up other equipment
to put it into a state of potential energy
that we can then cash in on
when we need more energy later,
when the sun goes down.
So, for example, we have
some engineers around the world
experimenting with, say,
taking a reservoir of water,
pumping it into a confined space
so it can then be released
to spring out and wash over
waiting turbines
to produce energy when we need it.
So much like we do right now
with pumped hydro,
where we have, you know, a running river
producing hydroelectric power,
we pump just a little bit of that uphill
and kind of keep it there
and then release it to flow over turbines
when we need extra energy,
but the new innovation here
is that you could do that
essentially anywhere in the world
without needing a large river
right next to your city to make it happen.
Or we have new engineers
exploring the concept
of using excess renewable energy
to pump compressed air
into confined spaces
and then venting it
to create kind of a mechanical force
to, again, work on the same principle
of moving turbine-like technology
and creating excess electricity
when we need it.
Or we have still other engineers
around the world
taking excess renewable energy
and using it to hoist heavy weights
up to high heights in a controlled chamber
where a system managed by AI
can detect even micro dips
in the grid’s energy supply
and engage to slowly lower those weights
to kind of pull on a pulley mechanism
to, again, create a mechanical force
that will spin turbine-like technology
and create electricity when we need it.
But, I mean, all of that is entirely aside
from continuous 24/7 forms
of renewable energy
that fewer of us tend to talk about,
like geothermal energy,
where new innovations are using
smaller, more scalable, modular designs
to take a little tank of water
and then tap the immense heat
that comes from deep inside the Earth
and use it to heat up that water,
turn it into a vapor,
where it then rises
and exerts a mechanical force
on another mechanism inside the chamber
to create electricity
and then, when the vapors
reach the other side of that barrier,
cool down, turn back into liquid form
and then rejoin the initial supply,
and then we can create
an essentially never-ending form
of continuous renewable energy
that exists for as long as we have
the geothermal heat there.
Tidal energy, likewise,
takes advantage of Earth’s
essentially never-ending tidal forces
to create a mechanical force on equipment
that we can try and use
to generate electricity
and augment our grid supply,
especially during times after hours
where the tides don’t stop,
when we might need
just a little bit of extra power.
And all of that
is aside from clean but not necessarily
renewable technologies
like nuclear energy,
where new innovations in nuclear energy
will use, say, molten salt technology
to lower the risk
of an explosive release of gases,
which, FYI, was already very low
to begin with, that risk.
Or we have other new innovations
with labs swapping out
potentially dangerous fuel sources
like uranium,
with far less dangerous fuel sources
like thorium;
or we have other new innovations
taking the heat that’s produced
during the fuel production process,
piping it out for district level heating
as free heat to all local communities
that exist around one of those facilities.
So all those kinds of innovations
are taking place.
And all of these new scientific
and technological innovations,
they all paint a slightly
less grim picture,
offer us a more nuanced narrative
than the all bad news model would suggest,
and they paint us a picture of a future
in which we are taking
cool new solar cell technology,
placing it in cool new places,
having it do cool new things
we never thought
that those panels could do before;
or a future in which, I don’t know,
where we’re lining
the undersides of our sidewalks
with compression-based,
energy-harvesting technology
from the power of human footfall
from pedestrian traffic
all around our cities;
or a future in which
we’re taking wireless charging pads
like we use for our phones now,
but bigger, more powerful ones,
and putting them in parking lots
so an electric vehicle
can just pull in overtop,
and placing wireless charge pads,
at, you know, highway rest stops
and loading zones and things like that;
a future in which we’re
pulling the hydrogen
out of our vast amounts of sea water
to power zero-emissions,
trans-continental passenger flights
with H2 fuel;
a future in which we want to try
and reverse climate change eventually
by pulling down some of the CO2
in our atmosphere
and trying to store it in our soils -
and we have genius-level bioengineers
empowering crops to do that naturally,
store more carbon in the soil
than they otherwise naturally would have,
crops that we’re going to plant
year after year anyway;
or a future in which we want to plant
a lot more trees on our planet,
but now we can much more readily
with advanced technology,
like aerial drones that can self-pilot
thanks to new innovations
in imaging software
coupled with satellite data
that allow them to fire
germinated seed pods into the ground
10 times faster than we human planters
can manage by hand
and far more cheaply,
to the point where we have
one company on paper now
telling us that they’re going to plant
billions of trees over the years to come
using precisely this kind of technology;
in short, a future
in which we rise to our moment,
solve the climate crisis
using new science and new technology
coupled with all of the wonderful
naturalistic options we already had
and where we don’t
let future generations down.
Okay, thank you.