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Sources and sinks aren’t bathroom fixtures, they’re our most powerful tools to turn up or dial down climate change, says Project Drawdown’s Executive Director, Jon Foley, on the Climate Curious podcast. The real solution starts with cutting the pollution at source, not trying to suck it up after the fact. As Jon puts it, “now is better than new”. Tune in to learn about his six main areas of focus that can help us reduce pollution and reverse climate change the fastest.
Created by TEDxLondon
Executive produced by Josie Colter
Produced by Ben Beheshty
Curated by Deesha Chandra
Hosted by Maryam Pasha and Ben Hurst
Communications by Tara Cooper and Issey Gladston
00:00 Introduction
01:03 Cutting emissions: the top priority
01:43 Six key sectors to focus on
03:10 Effective climate solutions
03:59 The role of carbon removal
05:29 Challenges with current technologies
07:25 Conclusion
Transcript
[00:00:00] Introduction
[00:00:00] Maryam Pasha: Welcome to Climate Curious Quickies, bite-size nuggets of Climate. Goodness. From our TEDx experts in under five minutes
[00:00:09] Ben Hurst: in this week’s climate, curious, we are asking what are sources and sinks? And yes, I did just get my bathroom redone, but no, we are not talking about barking fixtures. Sauce and sinks are actually our most powerful tool in turning up.
[00:00:25] Ben Hurst: Or dialing down. Climate change says this week’s guest, John [00:00:30] Foley, an environmental scientist and executive director at Project Drawdown, they can help us prioritize the most impactful climate actions that will either cut pollution at its source like decarbonizing buildings. Or support solutions that can absorb it like trees and oceans.
[00:00:47] Ben Hurst: Let’s head over to John now to hear about the six main solutions that can help us get real about making the biggest difference to reversing climate change in the fastest and most efficient way possible. Stay [00:01:00] curious.
[00:01:03] Cutting emissions: the top priority
[00:01:03] Jon Foley: We gotta cut the emissions, stop putting crap in the atmosphere that’s causing more climate change every day that goes by that we burn more stuff and throw it into the atmosphere, whether it’s carbon dioxide or methane.
[00:01:16] Jon Foley: Other funny gases like nitrous oxide, fluorinated gases. There’s a couple hundred greenhouse gases we actually track out there, but those are the big ones. The more we dump that stuff in the atmosphere, it builds up over time, warming the planet. We all [00:01:30] know that part from our Al Gore movies and our primary schools and all this kind of stuff.
[00:01:35] Jon Foley: Um, so we have to cut the emissions of those things. That’s jobs number one, two, and three. No question. There’s no other way around it.
[00:01:43] Six key sectors to focus on
[00:01:43] Jon Foley: And there are basically six areas we have to focus on. It turns out that all those emissions boiled into six major economic sectors. First is making electricity. So burning coal or natural gas, that’s the big problem there.
[00:01:58] Jon Foley: Second would be industry [00:02:00] making stuff like um, steel, concrete, glass, but also throwing away stuff and dealing with waste, landfills, wastewater treatment, those are surprisingly large emitters as well. So as electricity industry buildings. Transportation food, which a lot of people forget about, but it’s one of the biggest sectors.
[00:02:20] Jon Foley: About a quarter to a third of all the emissions are related to food. It turns out that’s burning down forest in the Amazon for more agricultural land. It’s all those belching [00:02:30] cows releasing methane into the world. It’s also stuff coming out of the soils from overusing fertilizers, and that’s a huge sector, and we’re not making real progress on that one yet.
[00:02:40] Jon Foley: And then the last is processing energy itself, like turning crude oil, we dig out of the ground and turning it into petrol or diesel fuel or aviation fuel or things that are more refined. There’s a lot of energy and emissions tied up in that. So if we fix electricity and industry and buildings, transport, food and energy [00:03:00] processing.
[00:03:00] Jon Foley: There’s a lot of different things in here, but we actually have on the order of about a hundred different solutions across those six big areas that can really solve the problem, and that’s remarkably good news.
[00:03:10] Effective climate solutions
[00:03:10] Jon Foley: It turns out at Project Drawdown, we analyze all the different things you could do to reduce emissions across all those different areas.
[00:03:17] Jon Foley: And you know what? We could do it. Turns out, the numbers add up. We’ve got enough solutions today that are practical, real scalable, and yes, affordable. In fact, we’re gonna make money in the [00:03:30] process for the most part. Uh, we could actually cut those emissions close to zero today without any new inventions at all.
[00:03:37] Jon Foley: Some of them would be a little bit inconvenient and expensive, but it is totally doable. So we don’t have to wait for new technologies. New technologies would be great. They might make it cheaper, faster, better. That’s awesome. Well, please come with your new technologies, but don’t wait for them. Get started now.
[00:03:54] Jon Foley: So that’s why we always talk about now is better than new and times more important than tech.
[00:03:59] The role of carbon removal
[00:03:59] Jon Foley: The [00:04:00] other big realm of climate solutions that gets a lot of attention is removing the pollution later. Like, we first wanna cut the pollution from ever going in the atmosphere, but then we talk about what’s called carbon removal, ways of removing carbon and other greenhouse gases, stuff like that into, uh, from the atmosphere and put it into something we can lock up away from the atmosphere where it’s doing harm.
[00:04:21] Jon Foley: Mm-hmm. And there are two big buckets of doing that. There’s kind of industrial approaches, kind of big machines that can do it, or nature that can pull carbon outta the [00:04:30] atmosphere because that’s how photosynthesis works. That’s how life works on this planet. Mm. Is starting with air and turning it into life.
[00:04:38] Jon Foley: Plants, basically doing that. So how do we do that? Um. The plant-based side is relatively straightforward, but we can grow more trees. We can not cut down the trees we already have. We can build up soils, build up more grasses and plants. The greener the stuff is on the planet and the richer the soils are on the planet means we’ve pulled carbon out of the atmosphere and put it back where it [00:05:00] used to be.
[00:05:01] Jon Foley: That’s great, but it may not be permanent. Because people are messy, we might come along and cut down those trees again, or they might burn down in a different climate where it’s hotter and drier all the time. So there’s a real question of permanence and whether or not, um, you know, if I paid somebody to plant a bunch of trees in the Amazon, did they really do it?
[00:05:18] Jon Foley: Or they just take my money and run? So it’s not verifiable sometimes and it may not be permanent. And so there are a lot of question marks about those biological approaches to carbon removal.
[00:05:29] Challenges with current technologies
[00:05:29] Jon Foley: That leads to the [00:05:30] machines, which sound great. Um, we’re throwing a lot of money at the uk, the us a lot of countries are spending tax dollars on this and some investors like Bill Gates and a whole bunch of others are throwing money at these technologies.
[00:05:42] Jon Foley: But bottom line, they don’t work very well. They’re itsy bitsy, uh, if we added all of them together in the world, we’ve removed about three seconds of the world’s climate pollution so far, and we’ve spent hundreds of billions of dollars trying to do it. It’s not very effective. And [00:06:00] second, if we use the same amount of money, certainly, or energy, ’cause these machines use a lot of energy somewhere else, like building solar panels or you know, bit and better batteries or energy conservation.
[00:06:11] Jon Foley: We would’ve had a much bigger impact on climate. We might have not just removed three seconds of emissions, but maybe prevented five minutes of the world’s emissions. Something much bigger. So it’s kind of a waste of money. It’s very small technologies and also it’s kind of been used by the oil and gas companies as a bit of a fig leaf to say, [00:06:30] don’t worry about my pollution.
[00:06:31] Jon Foley: I’ll remove it later. Like, really? Um, you know, if, if you’re in a pub and a bunch of people are smoking. And you’re coughing like, oh, you know, oh, don’t worry, I’ll just suck it out later. You know, I’m gonna just breathe it in and hold it. You know? Is that the approach? I mean, you know, no, just don’t smoke, stop.
[00:06:49] Jon Foley: Don’t do that. You know, like, or have a fan that kind of removes it, that doesn’t work very well. We all know that. So this is a bandaid solution at best. But, um, what I think is happening, and this, it is mainly used as an excuse to [00:07:00] kind of keep building fossil fuel projects. Like, don’t worry, we will clean it up later.
[00:07:04] Jon Foley: And we’ve been falling for that for decades in one form or another, whether it was clean coal in the 1980s or carbon capture, now it’s called direct air capture. Different technologies come and go. None of them have worked especially well, but the same idea of it’s a fig leaf for fossil fuels. So we’re, I’m not a big fan of that.
[00:07:22] Jon Foley: And the math just. Doesn’t add up.
[00:07:25] Conclusion
[00:07:25] Ben Hurst: Thanks for listening to this quickie.
[00:07:27] Maryam Pasha: This episode was created by our [00:07:30] superstar podcast team at TEDx London. Until next time,
[00:07:33] Ben Hurst: stay
[00:07:33] Maryam Pasha: curious.
