The Best (and Worst) Climate Intervention w/ Simon Clark

The effects of anthropogenic climate change are ramping. The record for hottest ever day in terms of global average air temperature has been broken three separate times during 2023 alone. As the scale of this problem has become clearer, more and more energy has been put into developing interventions, either to reduce fossil fuel emissions or in some cases remove them from the atmosphere.

But which of those interventions actually have the potential to turn the tide in our fight against global heating, and which are all talk and no subject? In order to put some of the more intriguing projects to the test, I called up science communicator and atmospheric physicist, Dr. Simon Clay.

Hello Simon Clark. Uh welcome to the show. How how are you today? I'm alright, thank you Tom. I I've got a day where I'm doing an awful lot of video editing. I'm doing a lot I'm spending a lot of my time in Blender today, so this is a lovely reprieve. sort of getting to talk to another human being is a good uh I feel a bit like Robin Williams and Jumanji, you know. Like I spent so long without human contact. Well I'll you know, I'll I'll try and re socialise you um as best I

as best I can. Um so I've I've invited you here today as one of YouTube's premier uh climate science community. And I think there is a certain uh hubris attached to being a guy with Um uh I think uh Lex Friedman recently announced he was gonna go to uh Palestine and Israel to kind of sort And so I decided I decided that what climate change needed was a good podcast.

Yeah. Two white dudes talking about climate change. We will get to the bottom of this. Yeah, I thought we sort of in a tidy hour we could probably just sort it. Yeah, how how can it be? So I have I have invented uh a sort of it's not quite a game. Although I did get creative and if anyone's just listening, I've I've got uh flashcards that I've made. Um and each of these has a uh climate intervention. that I'm hoping that you can use your expertise to uh kind of rate on a kind of

very useful to kind of white elephant sort of scale. I I Okay, right. I tried to come up with a fun name for this. Um and I sort of started with uh hot or not. And then I decided that because I was like, oh cli you know, global warming. Yeah. Um but then I realised that was going to be quite complicated because if the hotel ones are the ones that don't work.

Yeah, so I I was sort of unsure where where that went. So I if anyone peop people who are listening or watching, please uh write in with potential names for a uh climate intervention themed game. How dare you use out of ten, something like that. But um uh but yes, are you are are you ready for this, Simon? I'm sitting comfortable. Okay. So I have s I have six on me. Um uh all of which I believe you've talked about at least a little bit on your channel in

Yeah, some more than others. Some more than others. Um and I'm gonna start uh with social radiation. No, that's definitely solar radiation. Solar ra it's oh we're off to a brilliant start. This is this is a fantastic start to this episode. Um social radiation. I don't even know what that's that's that noise? Is that noise pollution? That sounds like a kind of pandemic.

I think social radiation. Like that would be a thing they're trying to we must stop the social radiation. Um uh that that's why you're here. is to tell me when it's to print. Okay. So our first intervention that I'd like to talk is uh solar radiation management. Right. So when we're talking about um the climate crisis and the fact that the earth is getting hotter, it comes down to an energy imbalance. So the reason that the earth is getting hotter is because there's more energy.

The reason there's less energy leaving is because there's more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. It traps long wavelength radiation, stops it from getting out of space. So there are different ways that you can approach that problem, one of which is to increase the amount of energy that's leaving the planet, which would be removing carbon from the atmosphere.

Some other kind of technology like that. The other half of the solution would be reduce the amount of energy that's coming in. And that's what solar solar radiation. You are blocking out portions of the sun. And if you are anything like me, you immediately think of the Simpsons episode, Who Shot Mr. Burns? Yes, okay, with the big the big uh Mankind's greatest enemy, the sun, the umbrella that covers

Um, which would be a local solution. Uh the kind of solutions that we typically talk about on a global level are a bit more grandiose. Uh some of them are truly bonkers, some of them that have been seriously looked at by engineers. Are genuinely mad. Like, for example, putting huge lenses between the earth and the sun to refract some of the sunlight away.

or putting giant mirrors in space to accomplish the same thing, which is a little bit more realistic, I think. Um but the most common way that people try to do this or talk about doing this is stratospheric aerosols. So to break that down The stratosphere is the best layer of the atmosphere, fight me. Uh it's uh what I did my PhD on. Uh and it basically is the layer between about ten and about fifty kilometers above the surface. Um and it's a layer that is defined by being quite

Static in a vertical sense. Like if you put something up in the stratosphere, it takes a long time for it to come out, basically. In the lower part of the atmosphere, there's lots of vertical motion. You see Um th the the actual definition between the two is to do with how stuff moves around vertically. So if you put something in the stratosphere, it stays there for a

The aerosols refers to any any small particle that gets suspended in the air. So the typical way we use it in, you know, modern English is referring to like spray cans. But in a scientific sense it can refer to pollen, such as uh titanium dioxide. That's a very common one that people talk about in this context, which is a very white reflective um powder. It's actually a food ad. Um it's E one seven one, I think. And it used to be the M on MMs was made out.

Titanium MMs. Yeah, but it it was it's been banned in the EU now because they couldn't prove it was safe, I think. And not that it wasn't safe, but they couldn't prove it. So whatever, EU things. And so that's like a mineral that the people propose to inject into the stratosphere to reflect some of the sunlight. Which is one of these solutions that is on the one hand Tempting and on the other hand kind of like horrifying because it would be very easy to do.

Like Elon Musk could just decide tomorrow, I'm gonna do this and I'm gonna construct a fleet of aircraft that are gonna spray titanium. Quite difficult to stop- And similarly for you know, a bunch of other Bond villains, you know, the bunch of the billionaire class could just decide to do Um Mr. Burns thing was was kind of again a billionaire villain. Um and the the thing is we know we can be very confident that it would

reduce global average temperatures. It would reduce the amount of energy that's coming in. But it's like kind of opening Pandora's box. Um I actually spoke to a uh the head of a geoengineering research charity And he said to me outright, No one in their right mind would want to do this. This is an insane technology. No one should do this. But and this is where it and I hadn't considered this before, he put it as a trolley.

It's not a question of you know, i if if if the climate was absolutely fine, why would you We know that the climate isn't fine, and we know that there are lots of impacts that are coming down our way, but how bad do those impacts have to be for the potential impacts of this technology to be worth? And depending on who you are and where you live and what you think is important, there are many different levels of where you think it's acceptable to start.

Personally, I think it's n I I think it would have to be almost apocalyptic for this to be the better. When I was preparing for this, I went to uh I w I was on a I think it was a sort of US government think tank. Um and I was, you know, trying to sort of keep an open mind about all these things, trying s kind of absorb the uh all the positives of ones that I felt maybe had

may maybe weren't quite there and the sort of you know, look at the sort of drawbacks of some of the ones that I was uh feeling more positive about. Um and uh the page that I found on solar radiation management, which uh was yeah, a sort of US government think tank began with Solar radiation management is an idea born of desperation. Exactly, yeah. Um and and to be clear, the r the reason why we they think the impacts might be terrible.

is because we simply don't know what some of the impacts would be. So there's large error bars and everything, which is scary enough. But we can be very confident that it would impact, for example, photosynthesis, because there are basically two kinds of sunlight. You've got direct light and scattering light.

kind of specular light. And um different species of plants photosynthesize those two kinds of light differently. And when you put a bunch of aerosols in the atmosphere, you're reducing the amount of direct light and increasing the amount And that's like fundamentally shifting the bedrock that the global ecosystem is based on. We don't know what the impact.

And we don't know what the i knock on effects would be on, for example, precipitation patterns, you know, changing where rainfall occurs or where regional temperature changes occur, or basically taking a huge complicated system and just shaking it really. It's kind of what SRM is. Like w you know, we know in in theory it works and there's a natural analogue to it, that you know that basically we're mimicking what happens after large volcanic eruptions.

In nineteen ninety one, Mount Pinatubo erupted and that injected a bunch of um sulphur dioxide, which is another And that cooled the planet by about half a degree Celsius for nearly two years. So, you know, top level it works, but it's then all of these knock-on effects that the the error bars are so large and on the upper end the potential damage is so horrific.

that you're looking at this trolley problem as, right, there's five people tied to the tracks down here and there's anything between four and twenty people on this other track. Do I pull the leader? And one w my understanding is that once you sort of start doing it, you might just be locked into just sort of doing that now forever. Yeah. So effectively what you're trying to do is change the radiative balance.

term of the earth. You're trying to change the net in-out energy balance. And over the course of a couple of centuries, we have changed it. And we've changed it, you know, the order of actually can't remember. Hang on, let me look that up. Net radiative imbalance. Uh sorry. I was going so well. Uh About half a what? Is that right? Yeah, okay. So our current net energy imbalance is about half a watt, and we've got to that half a watt per square meter uh over about 250 years.

By putting solar radiation out of it. You're lowering that number. Ideally you'd make it actually negative. So you'd start to cool the planet down. But if you stop doing it, yeah, the stuff stays around in the stratosphere for a couple of years, but you would then potentially have the same

change in net radiation that we experienced over centuries in decades. And the impact of that on the planet would be absolutely catastrophic. We I don't think I'm not sure how many studies have actually been done on what the I can tell you right now it would be bad. So because you're potentially still building up CO two in the atmosphere, you're not actually causing the

Uh pausing the the problem. So if you suddenly if if one day someone sleeps in and forgets to maybe not that s you know, if if something happens and the plate That was me today? But like if something happens and and the planes can't fly for, I don't know, six months or something, suddenly Yeah. And and so th that's what's called the termination shock problem.

Um, and you know, there are ways to mitigate that. You could gradually wind it down, it's not an insurmountable problem. But as you say, by doing it, you're also basically putting a sticking plaster over like a broken leg. Like you're dealing with the surface level damage, but you're not. fixing the main problem. And yeah, CO2 keeps building up in the atmosphere, which has all these other negative impacts on human health, on ocean that

Uh we can talk about this more with the the later solution, I'm sure. Um but the other problem that I think is most troubling is who gets to decide how much Aerosol goes into the stratosphere. Who gets to pick the number? Because you only get one number, which is the dial of how much cooling or warming you And if you asked, say, Russia, you know, they might prefer a bit of warming because it's gonna make some land more arable.

But if you ask, say, someone from Ghana, they would probably like it to be quite significantly lower. Um realistically, it would be determined by global politics, and so there would be different people fighting for control of that one diet. And that's a recipe for potential disaster. So in a way it's concentrating all of this power into literally one number which you have direct

Which to me is p potentially the largest reason to not do it. Hm. Because'cause I guess sort of other interventions there are Russia might be annoyed that we're not buying all their oil. Like there's that stuff. But I guess if you're if spraying stuff into the atmosphere and suddenly it all all the rain disappears from another country, that suddenly becomes a much more kind of direct

Yeah. Th the dynamics of it feel much more like this country has done something to that country. If if the Security Council, for example, votes that we're gonna put it at this number and it changes the precipitation patterns and suddenly all of China is in drought.

You know, what does China do? China of course has an obligation to its citizens. What's the correct way to resolve that? And you know, it is the it pretty much it's very difficult to imagine a scenario in which somebody significant, a significant group of people will not be Uh negatively impacted by a choice of how you

So it's it's and it's a very scary thing, you know, it's one of these technologies I say as I say that could just be used. Uh it's it wouldn't be terribly expensive. The engineering exists for it, the science is ongoing about its impact.

Um there are plenty of studies that have been done, for example, on how it would affect agricultural yields and the answer is as always, it's complicated. Um but it it's something that yeah, we could just do tomorrow and Personally, I find it one of the scariest, if not the scariest, way of combating climate change because because of that and because of the huge uncertainty. So our summary is that it works.

But Yeah, but in in bold like several ellipses afterwards. So we're we're putting this on our probably not pile. That's the that that of all the ones I think we're gonna talk today, uh is probably not. Simon is grounding the planes. Um turn around everyone. Take the little masks off. We're setting the baseline. That's what we're doing. We're you know we're setting the the bottom. Top gun three is not gonna be a

Tom G Cruz runs his way to fixing climate change. Okay, okay. Uh card number two, uh or sort of paper number two, um is heat Heat pumps. Okay. Which I feel like I've heard a lot more ab like it's one of those things I I maybe A year so eighteen months maybe a year ago I'd heard very little about and suddenly you know not every But I've heard a lot more conversation about heat pumps than I had previously.

And I think a lot of that has actually to do with geopolitics, to do with um to to break up in our previous point, because um as in the UK, we are I think it's eighty percent of our heating and cooling, like actual household heating, is is natural. Well it's just gas. Natural gas is like kind of a greenwashing campaign by oil producers, but that's a that's another

Um you know, it's it's supplied by gas. And so in the aftermath of the invasion from Russia, we really exposed just how vulnerable we were. in that sector. Yes, I th I think it's forty percent off the top of my head of UK gas comes from Russia, so it's not a total monopoly, but it exposed an insecurity. And the thing with heat pumps as a technology is

It doesn't really care where you get your electricity from. As long as you can supply a heat pump with electricity, it'll heat your house. And so that means that you actually improve your um energy security as a nation. So in the UK, for example, if you have extensive wind

You've got control over where your electricity comes from. Uh at the moment we're still very dependent on uh other places, especially France. We import a lot of energy from France. So as long as as long as England doesn't fall out with France, which has never happened before.

Uh there's been a big pause button on that one at least. I've been pause button. Ashencore was so long ago. Um but uh so so to explain what a heat pump is, basically um uh a gas boiler, which is what most people have in the UK to heat their houses, is you burn gas. Take the heat from that burning and use it to heat water, that goes. Whereas a heat pump is literally a free.

In reverse. Instead of taking heat out of a box and putting it into the environment, you are sort of sucking heat from your environment and putting That's a super simple version of it, and I'm not an engineer. This isn't my specialism. There are different ways of drawing that heat from the ground or from the air. But they are a very mature technology. They have been around for decades. They are just getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper.

Um and the reason that they're a fan th this is a fantastic one by the way. I'm gonna put my card on the table. This is a great week. We love heat pumps because in the Western world, if it I mean let me ask you, if I where do you think you use most of your energy? If we're talking about like transport, electricity, heating, you know, the the whole kit and caboodle, where does most of your

Oh, interesting. Um, I would say I I guess I work from home most of the time, so that and and cycle when I most of the time when I don't, that probably affects things. So uh I mean I would say electricity'cause I feel like I'm quite stingy with the heat. Well, I mean, for the average person, because you are probably right, it's gonna be different for everyone, but for the average person, 50% of the energy we use goes into heat.

So it's it's a colossal amount of our energy as individuals, if you want to look at it through that lens. And so the reason it's such a fantastic solution is because it's a big chunk of the personal pie that you can remove dependence on for There are a lot of problems with how you practically accomplish that because as with so many of the of of climate solutions, it's great on paper, but you've actually got to make

And that proves a bit more difficult. Um, in particular, the way that it works, as I said, is it's a fridge. You're converting electricity into Yeah. You can you can do it both ways. Um and uh this is another example of why electric that we need to decarbonize electricity supply, because yes we computers and everything like that, but also we can use it for these other

But that only works as decarbonisation if your electricity is low carbon. So that's the first kind of check, right? You go sure, you want to install a heat pump. Where does your electricity come from? Let's bring the carbon

The second thing is, um, in order for them to work, you have to use a refrigerant, like you do in a fridge. And I actually made a video about this quite recently, um, about how the there is an international collective called Project Drawdown, which we'll probably That ranks climate solutions in terms of the impact, how many tons of carbon dioxide. And they estimate that the number one way you can reduce emissions is by changing what refrigerator

Which is kind of insane. Um, but the the reason for that is even though there's not very much gas in a fridge or any heat. The global warming potential of the gases that we currently use, which are called HFCs, is tens of thousands of times greater than an equivalent amount of carbon. And so what we're currently using and and has actually now been phased out under uh an amendment to the Montreal.

um these these HFCs is being replaced by things like propane. There are other gases that you can sort of sub in for for these very polluted And just as a minor side note, it only works if we don't just throw away the old ones. You actually have to destroy them rather than just chucking your fridge.

Like, well, we replaced it. We've done our we've done our job. So the other check is if we're going to build uh a heat pump, you've got to use a refrigerant that's environmentally responsible, that it's got a low kind of global warmth.

So that's another stumbling block, but which is being overcome, and there are safety concerns with that, but that's that's again a whole other discussion. The biggest problem is that you've if you want to get the whole of the UK, for example, off of gas boilers and onto heat. You've got to source that electricity.

And i there's a there's a famous anecdote about how the national grid has to account for like in the I think it's the FA Cup final, in the halftime break, everyone puts the kettle on at once and there's an enormous spike in electricity. Imagine that but for these really electricity intense heat pump units everywhere when there's a a cold spell. And that is a a huge demand on the national grid. So if this only works as a solution if it's rolled out in conjunction with

Strengthening the stability of the national grid, which is something that has its own challenges when we're introducing lots of renewables, for example, into the grid. Um, but it's not insurmountable. It's something that can be overcome with. effective investments and especially connecting national grids together. So you

l draw on each other's supply. But that is a significant disadvantage to the technology. So it's not like all sunshine and rainbows, but this is up there. This this for me is one of the solutions I wish people would talk about more. It's just a question of Plotting the course for introducing it.

that that navigates all those significant pumps in the road. Yeah, my my understanding is also that that with having heat pumps, sort of insulation is is it more important that you've got a well insulated Or is it that it's it becomes just more worth doing if you make Yeah, I I think that's correct. Um again, not really my specialism, but I believe that

But because of the the the the nature of the technology, I think it I think this might be c it could be I'm probably am wrong. But it's um it is a little bit slower I think than gas fire. There's a huge asterisk on that. I'm in t I'm quite possibly wrong. I do know that that is a consideration.

That makes sense because so m my house isn't particularly well insulated and back in the winter where like uh heating got really, really expensive, there was a Martin Lewis kept talking about if you turn your um boiler down to Like fifty five degrees rather than sixty five degrees, it means that it uses the sort of condensing stuff much better and it will take us longer to warm up, but then

You know, it'll be all right after a while. Whereas our house is a bit too leaky for that to work. So that would that would uh make a lot of sense. I would like it if we all had fridge doors as front doors. That'd be funny. Oh, that'd be nice. Um with the little like the little like What you call it, the kind of soft bits around the end. Uh yeah, like the cushioning. It it would also mean that, you know, we could all pretend to be Indiana Jones surviving nuclear blasts.

Uh I feel like the I feel like the uh grid is something that's maybe gonna come up again in a second,'cause there's a there's a big push to like smarten the national grid as well, isn't there? So that it's better at knowing. It t I think th something that um comes up'cause obviously w when you talk about this stuff online, you do get a lot of people commenting uh with with various takes on it, some of which are helpful and some of which aren't.

I think a lot of people seem to assume that the the grid is like a very simple thing and it's like a single number. There's this much juice in the country and the number goes up or down. And um I've I've only spoken to a few professionals who work in sort of energy stability and energy grids. It's a hugely complex

And there are so many different aspects of energy storage, energy importing, you know, stu down to the level of something like frequency load matching. Like if you're trying to introduce solar power from different houses into the grid, you've got to match the your, you know, fifty Hertz has to be the same as our fifty hertz or or whatever it is. It's a vastly complicated um editing.

And there's a lot that we can do to improve its stability. And I think it's one of those rare cases where actually the machine learning hype might be onto something. Like that that's a significant tool that you can use to improve

how efficiently the the the grid works. But yeah, I'm sure this will we'll we'll talk about it more of uh with other solutions. One one of my favorite kind of engineering things, which is really impressive how for how I mean I'm sure it's not simple, but how simple the sort of theory And I think there's a Tom Scott video about that.

is the way they when they've got too much energy in the grid. I think there's a place in Scotland where they do it and they like pump up the water into a reservoir. Pumped hydro storage. And just use it as a massive battery. Um well that's the th that is the the the first form of storage that a grid would like to use. Everyone sort of seems to think that like if but if you install this many wind turbines you've got to have these warehouses full of like double A rechargeable batteries.

And like, no, they they use these enormous reservoirs. And and also I don't know if you saw there was I can't remember the name of this, there was a concept where these tech bros basically came up with like, why don't we store electricity in like concrete blocks? And like you winch them up to a higher level when you've got lots of electricity and then you release them when, you know, you uh when when you want to use the electricity. And it's like, my brother in Christ, you've invented a dam.

I did like the fact that that has an added level of kind of Looney Tunes uh kind of arrow to it. Yes. I mean, which I guess you could have with the dam, you could but like it just really feels like block falling from great height onto people. You want a sticker of wily coyote underneath each block. Okay, so heat pumps are on our sort of very good pile. Very good pile. Very happy. I'm doing this like I've got some incredible setup with like a top down camera.

But this is the crusty the clown. I heartily endorse this event or product.

Um okay, next up on my card uh is electric car. Okay. Electric cars are a really interesting one. Um because it's a very common talking point on both sides of the debate about Um and I'm gonna basically I'll put my cards on the table at the start and then I'm gonna take a dinner plate-sized asterisk and put it next to my hand of cards. Which is to say, I think they're not a great climate solution, but

So the reason that I actually tell you what, let's talk about the positives first. So transport is a huge part of emissions. I think it's one six And the largest part of that is road vehicles, meaning cars, but also trucks and everything like that. And so yeah, if you want to bring down emissions in every sector, you've got to tackle transport. And in a large number of cases, electrifying road vehicles makes perfect.

The angle that interestingly a lot of people have been sleeping on, I think, and don't seem to realise as significant as it is, is freight. So meaning freight being transported between cities via trucks, but also freight moving within a city. Um and actually if you read the International Transport Forum's latest analysis on how to decarbonize.

They make a really big deal about electric bikes and electric bike delivery for last mile, um, as well as lots of interesting things, because I I made a video about this as well um quite recently, uh about how you decarbonate. In order to make that video I had to take this two hundred fifty page documents. And like s wring it. Like again, this The Simpsons analogies. It's like taking all those oranges and getting a single drop of orange juice out of it's whisper quiet.

Um, but I couldn't put all these caveats in and one of the interesting things was like, yeah, you can use electric vehicles and electric bikes, but actually a significant saving is just making your systems more efficient and having unified drop-off points for different companies. So like it's not all about And vehicles. I was reading about that with food delivery. Um, so we get a uh veg box, not for all our veg.

th this company tries to be nice and environmentally friendly as possible and some of that comes the the sort of furthest away one of their farms is is in France Uh but they were talking about how even though that some of it comes from France and comes over, that ha bringing it over in a lorry the benefits from compared to freighting something from another country um by either ship or by plane

huge and actually they can save a huge amount by making sure that which thing is what you were just saying that the lorry is full when it goes the other way. Like you've instantly then you've halved the ev even if you're using um Ice vehicles that you're you've instantly sort of halved the carbon emissions if you just make sure there's never an empty one.

It's like how they used to say that logistics win wars. And I feel like it's also a huge part of of climate solutions that gets overlooked. Like yeah, it's all well and good and especially considering the society we live in, we focus on technological and this innovation or it could be solar panels or it could be fusion or whatever it is. And people ignore the fact that actually the systems that we use and food is actually the really big example

are just so they're efficient in the wrong metric. Like they're efficient in terms of getting food to us as quickly as possible, but they are horrifically inefficient when it comes to food waste. And that has an enormous In terms of just food degrading and emitting carbon into the atmosphere. That's actually to refer to Project Drawdown again as one or the other. I I think it might be the Two, number three. Um uh greatest way to reduce emissions is just make food

Which is again slightly mind but I'd highly recommend Project Drawdown. They they have a great website that anybody can can Google and they have all of these solutions ranked with all the all the information. But anyway, I I digress. Science tier list. I tried a tier list video once, you know, and it didn't I think but I I I I made a cloud tier list.

And people got really angry that I ranked Fog lowly. People were like Fog Gang were coming after me on on Twitter and and Discord and stuff like that. Sort of fog lovers. It's a shit cloud. I'm sorry, but it is. Maybe these are people that live somewhere that's really flat and so if you go on a walk you can see all the way and it makes it really boring. And so they want a bit of fog to sort of make the journey more interesting.

You can only see a certain distance around you. It's kind of weathering heights esque people. Anyway, I've digressed once again. Um so yeah the the the the thing with electric uh electrification of road vehicles. Yeah, so freight is actually very, very Electric cars will be very important in certain places. So the thing if if people don't want to watch my video, I can't blame you. Uh the big takeaway which I'll give you is if you want to electrify transport, you can't have a one-size

It has to be super granular in terms of geography, in terms of demographics of where you're looking at. And Electric cars will work very well in rural areas. When you have low population density, It's not sufficient to merit trains, for example. Um there are very few systems that are better than having a privately owned vehicle, and in that case, electrify it. Fantastic. For people who live in densely populated areas, like you know, within cities.

A lot of people don't need a car all the time. And I think this is why I'm saying it's a bad intervention with a big asterisk, because yes, they're important in some ways. But I think by focusing on just taking our existing transport And electrifying it, you are missing out on far more efficient and far lower carbon transport modalities. So you're missing out on investing. You know, you are missing out on investing in cycle.

Just because we do things with cars now doesn't mean that it's the best way to do it. It might have been the best way a couple of decades. But that's not necessarily gonna be true now. And I know you had not just bikes on as a previous guest. So you probably heard all of this before, but like

There's a certain amount of fetishization of private car ownership, and people get super defensive about it. And we're seeing it in the UK at the moment, actually. There's been like a big pushback from people like So I say people, uh like reptile corporations like the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph, who are pushing for like, you know, oh the public's not sure about net zero, we want to own our own.

Um and uh you know, some people do, some people are really passionate about it, but the fact is, private car ownership for a lot of people isn't necessary with a capital

It's nice with a lowercase n, but like there are car sharing opportunities. And yeah, sure. In that case, yeah, electrify your vehicles, great. Have a have a put a shared pool of But just taking our existing transport system and more so in places like America than the UK and electrifying it is not the right way to go about transforming

In my opinion. Every so often I think about I think about this with um uh sort of driverless cars as well as electric cars. The kind of Henry Ford thing about the The faster horse, where he sort of said, you know, if I ask people what they'd want But a bit different? Feel like because they're the they're they're they're someone looking at what you've already got and going, What's the next step of that? rather than going, How do you reinvent this in a way that is not just a step but

Better, I guess. A quote I heard years ago now that's really stuck with me is that we're all prisoners of our previous

And I and it's so true because like if you grow up in a city, like say if you grow up in um a incredibly urbanized place in in in America and there's no public transport available, you have to use a car. Like that's the only mode of transport that you know works. And so you have But if you grow up somewhere I mean I t I uh we give the the capital a a lot of crap, but like I actually think London's very good.

Like Londoners have fantastic options for, you know, the tube, for buses, for cycle lanes and everything like that. And um I just looked it up. Um fifty four percent of London households own a car or at least. So it's actually not a terribly high percentage compared to I'm sure if you ask people in American cities there'd be so much And it's only when you see that, yeah, this public transport thing actually works. I don't need to own a car that you would consider ever selling.

So it's like it's a bit of a positive feedback leap, I think. But like we get stuck in this is the way that we do things. We always had horses. I need an I need a bigger stable, I need a faster

Like, yeah, you've got to sh someone's gotta show you and someone's gotta be brave and take that first step. And actually, something that I learned in researching the um uh transport video is that actually places in South America and places in the global south have been really innovative when it comes to transport and and experimenting with different modes and doing hybrid types of transport when you can get off of one form and get onto another one to bridge

And actually those are the places where we can take a lot of lessons from. There is a real kind of uh locked in thing where it's sort of logistical but also kind of cultural. Yeah. I I don't know, I learned to drive when I was seventeen, but then didn't have a car of of my own. all kinds of reasons, we were sort of moving around, it didn't always make sense where we were. Cars are expensive. Um, and therefore na now we have one because my partner needs it for work, but it means that.

I is always an option rather than a the way I kind of view it is that oh oh yeah, I guess we could drive. Um, but would still get the bus or would still cycle um like these are options in front of me rather than, you know, I I I know friends and family members who who would just be like, Yeah, would drive. What are you talking like, would would not even there wouldn't even be a process of thought.

Well,'cause I'm I'm still in the the queue for getting a driving test post COVID. I've I've been on my provisional license for 16 years now. Uh and I I I bought an electric bike a couple of years ago. And that's my primary mode of transport now. And I think if I hadn't had this period of, you know, I if there's something that's within 10 or 20 kilometers of here, I'll As long as it's not absolutely hammering down.

But yeah, you're right. It presents it to yourself as an option in your brain. And I think if if I had the car now I'd be like, Well, you know, if it was terrible weather, sure I'd I'd drive.

Actually my default now, because it's what I have been doing, mm, is is is taking an electric vehicle uh taking an electric bike. There's a joke in there somewhere about Rydyn ni'n mynd, mae'n mynd, mae'n mynd, mae'n mynd, mae'n mynd, mae'n mynd, mae'n mynd, mae'n mynd, mae'n mynd, mae'n mynd, mae'n mynd, mae'n mynd, mae'n mynd, mae'n mynd, mae'n mynd, mae'n mynd.

So electric cars, where are these going? I've got heat bumps, I've got are they sort of going in the middle? They're in the middle. I d uh it's a complicated one. They're not blocking out the sun. They're not blocking out the sun. I'd say i they're slightly on the the bad end of the spectrum if I had to tweak them one way but not.

I've only got about thirty centimetres here to play with and and the the papers. All right, just don't need to show up. That was a differ different kind of podcast, suddenly. Um okay, next up on my list uh is Direct's air carbon cash.

Okay, so direct air carbon capture. This is um the other cause people group um solar radiation management and direct air carbon capture into geoengineering Of a big umbrella term. And this is to go back to what I was talking about with solar radiation management, this is the other side of the solution. Instead of reducing the amount of energy coming in, we're trying to increase the amount of energy leaving the planet. And the way we do that is by sucking carbon.

Um and this has been the darling of a lot of industries for quite a while. Um there are a lot of people and I've I have a friend actually who works for a very large bank How bad can it really be? Which th this carbon capture thing will just catch up and we'll be able to use it. And I I tell I told him what I'm probably gonna tell you now. Um, which is that

There are a lot of problems with this. Can we do it? Yes. Similar with SATA radiation management, this is technology that's been proven. There are various plants around the world that are capturing thousands of tons of carbon dioxide. It is important to remember, however, that thousands of tons is peanuts compared to the scale of the problem we're facing. Last year, emissions of carbon dioxide, and I think it's I think it's technically carbon dioxide equivalent, were 36.8 billion.

So we're looking at a problem that's millions of times bigger than the scale of the solution at present. Not to say that it couldn't be scaled up to the scale of, you know, sucking that much carbon out of the atmosphere, but at present we we we really shouldn't be getting carried away. The problem with that is that at the moment, I I looked up a figure before we we had this conversation, the current cheapest way to suck CO two at the atmosphere that I could find was thirty-nine dollars.

Which is significantly lower than it was in the past. I think I made a video about this like five years ago, and at that point it was over a hundred dollars. Um but if you do a quick bit of math. If you use that method of capture at that price, which obviously it would be cheaper at scale, sure, but let's just this is the figure we've got to work.

If you were to capture thirty-six point eight billion tons at thirty-nine dollars per ton, you're looking at a bill of one point four trillion dollars. Which is kind of an incomprehensible amount of money. So if you want to put that in perspective, the International Space Station cost one hundred and fifty billion dollars. So the cost.

So the cost of staying still, so just not adding anything extra to the atmosphere at this level, so not even accounting for the fact that the economy will grow and this is not the the peak of emission. It's the same as building a new international space station every thirty nine days for an entire year.

And that's the most expensive individual object ever created, just just to kind of hammer that home. So again, that's not a perfect like economic analysis, obviously. There's a whole bunch of assumptions that go. But the point is, it's uh incredibly expensive. That would be organized internationally. And internationally, of course, there's a huge history of people agreeing to spending lots of money on things for the environment.

Um and frankly, that money could be used better pretty much anywhere else. It makes when I was doing like a pros and cons list of of like heat pumps, I wrote down expensive up front, but cheaper in the long term. But that figure makes heat pumps sound mak makes the fact that heat pumps can sometimes be sort of

Fifteen un no, what uh fifteen grand makes that sound quite cheap suddenly, doesn't it? Yeah. Uh it's it's a very, very expensive solution. The reason that people like to put this forward and it's always uh very similar people who will always do this, it's always a very tech bro crowd.

this forward. A, it's a technological solution and it's this idea of we have the technology to fix this problem because we're we're humankind and we distinguish ourselves from nature by tech. And the better our tech, the more control we have. Talk to Abby Thorne about all of that. Um but this is basically a license to keep omitting and to keep doing things the way that

Because if you tell people, oh yeah, sure, we're burning, we're emitting all of this carbon into the atmosphere, but we'll capture it again, it won't be a problem. Like you're not actually fundamentally changing the problem. And similar to global solar radiation management, you are not addressing the Now I will say that people who advocate for this as a solution don't say do this in isolation. They will almost always say, Yeah, you need to do this and fix the problem.

Which I think they're right to if you if you if you're saying a priori we're going to use this technology so we can prop up the current way the economy works, sure, you do also need to do that. But I don't think that is the right way to fix the problem with the I think that's a um a kind of a white elephant. The other thing is that um by not addressing the root cause with this as a solution, with this use of the money, there are other um

Issues that you're not fixing. So, for example, climate change is also a health crisis. Like emissions from fossil fuel burning kill about 7 million. with air pollution. And so by not addressing the root cause of just stopping burning that stuff, you're not fixing that problem at its source. You're just sort of dealing with it further down the line after

You're not fixing the fact that we're adding a colossal amount of carbon to the world's oceans and the oceans are acidifying. One of the things that scares me most about the climate crisis when you're looking at the scale of a hundred or two hundred years is the fact It's entirely possible by the year say twenty two hundred that the global ecosystem could have collapsed because the ocean

And you're not changing the fact that you're putting this carbon up in the air and it is going to be absorbed into the oceans. Sure, you're absorbing some of the atmosphere, yeah, but you're way better off just not emitting it in the first place and spending your money doing Um and I suppose you could argue there's a political kind of socio sociological aspect of this, which is that

By propping up the way that industries are currently working and just giving them time to adapt and do things in a in a more low carbon way, you're missing out on an opportunity to redistribute power supply. And instead of focusing on, for example, distributed renewables, which takes the uh power literally the political power away from power generation companies and fossil fuel companies and in terms of

Do you mean like if I have solar panels on top of my house? Is that what you mean like that? Yeah, so distributed renewables means that, rather than like a big solar uh farm. But and and it's uh it's something that would become particularly relevant in the global south in in places that have not yet been electrified are almost certainly going to be

And doing so, you're giving those communities control over it. You're giving these communities some power over where they get elect whether they get their electricity from. And so by propping up the way that power is currently generated, in both senses, you're missing out on this on the climate crisis as being a kind of a social

Because there's so many things wrapped up in this. It's not just an environmental issue. It is and it's not just a health issue. It's a social issue. It's a it's the issue with how we as humans interact with each other, how we interact with the environment, and how we interact with the way Um and by using carbon capture as a lot of proponents want to use it, I think you're missing out on a huge

As a caveat, that well there's sort of two caveats. One is that I think a lot of people wouldn't say we're only going to use this. You know, the the a lot of people would say this needs to be used in conjunction with other technologies. If so, fine. I still don't think it's the best use for the money. I think you're better off spending it elsewhere. Um and actually a lot of the IPCCs.

They say this is how we can get to keep warming to a certain level, they assume negative emissions, which half of which is carbon. Um and so you know a lot of people do consider this as a fundamental technology. I just think it's very important to stress it's not the solution. This is like, you know, it's aftercare after surgery. This is paracetamol. It's not fixing your brain.

And the other thing is that there are certain industries where carbon capture is going to be important. Um this isn't direct air carbon capture, this is carbon capture at source. So industries like cement, for example, off the top of my head I think cement is something like

Six percent? Something of the it's up of the order of about five percent of global emissions of carbon dioxide come from just making cement. Because the chemical process that you use to make cement, it's a chemical process that has a CO2 term on the right. And so if you want to keep making cement, which we do, it's the second most traded commodity in the world after water, um, you've got to capture that carbon.

And I've I actually did a video last year um with a company called Lilac that have developed a technology that is basically you retrofit all these cement plants with a thing, it captures the carbon and you can pump it. That's a good use of carbon capture and I think that's that's something that maybe gets unfairly bundled in

There are other applications in places like steel. I think there are some areas of agriculture where possibly you could argue it. But direct air carbon capture is on the white elephant end of the scale for me. Is there is there any way you can y uh use that in certain places? So so often the examples I've seen,'cause I mean there's there's not very many facilities in the world doing it, I don't think, but the ones I've seen have always been quite rural.

They're not causing any problems. Ca can you Maybe I'm not sure. Some of my invention. Could you do a little one that goes on an exhaust pipe? Is that or d or does that not work? It does it just take love sp w with that when you just have a ma another car on the back of your car? I think the honest answer is I don't know.

Small ones do exist. For example, the Apollo craft had CO two scrubbers that would absorb CO two from the air. That was a chemical process and you had filters that you would change out. So small ones do exist. The kinds of ones that work with direct air capture use a lot of electricity.

And so th I the one that I'm thinking of, um, I can't remember the name of the project, but it's in Iceland. There's a there's a big one that they're building in Iceland. And I think that's using geothermal as like, look, you can do this with clean energy and'cause that's the other thing.

If you're gonna suck the stuff out of the air, you'd better not be putting more of it into the air by generating the electricity. Um But yeah, I think I think as my level of understanding of the technology, it has to be kind of on With with with the technology that's being developed.

Um as my my sort of dragon's den pitch. Okay, so we're g we're gonna we're gonna come back to distributed stuff. So uh direct air carbon capture, where's that going on our thing that no one can see? It's not it's not as bad as solar radiation. Of of geoengineering it's the better of the two, but it's still on that end. I mean I I no one c no one can see my little scale. I'll I'll Even I can't see it, dear dear reader. I'm I am on a call with Tom and I can't see it.

You you like usually there is things that people who are only listening cannot see and I describe them. This is something that even people who are watching also cannot see. Um maybe one day we'll have the budget for two cameras. Um

Professional stuff that would be, wouldn't it? Um, okay. Uh from from a few that maybe people don't know a huge amount, uh maybe one that people feel like they know something about um solar energy. Is my next my next one. So solar is I I don't know, depending on who you ask, Solar is either the poster child or kinda the white elephant of the climate movie.

Um I think certainly when I read my comments for my sins, there's a lot of stuff that talks about how renewables and solar in particular, they're too expensive, they are too intermittent, we can't rely on And um

There's a lot of stuff that people don't seem to understand about what's happening with solar now. This isn't like a future technology, it's stuff that's happening now. Like, I believe it was last year, it might have been this year, the International Energy Association announced that solar is now the cheapest.

Like it's it's cheaper to t to run than uh gas, than nuclear, than coal, anything. It's literally the cheapest. I think it Uh the there's obviously different ways you can account for this, but even accounting for the intermittency and the fact that obviously the sun's only there half the time, it works out at something like sixty dollars per megawatt hour, whereas gas is about eight.

So it is the cheapest way to generate electricity. And th if you look at the uh a hi a price history of how much it costs to generate a megawatt hour of electricity with solar, it's an exponential And a lot of people don't seem to realize um that was because of there was a key investment, there was like a key policy that Germany put in place a couple of decades ago. But it's mostly China. Like a lot of people uh say, well, why should I do something about climate change when China

They've been they're building two coal fired power stations a week. Yes, they are still building coal fired power stations. But they've also made solar power the cheapest way we could ever hope to generate electricity. Um and there I'll I'll circle back to China in in a second. But basically it is Incredibly cheap. Um the IEA also expects that it I think it's within five years it will become the dominant way that the world is generating.

At the moment, it's about 15% of all power capacity. By 2028, it's going to be about 25%, and it's going to be have be. And this is just based on like current rates of installations. This isn't based on, you know, people's pledges about anything. This is literally the current trajectory. So the people who are building grids are and the people who know frankly way more about it this than I do are incredibly confident that this is the way to go. Um and th you know, in case I need to say this, it

Incredibly low carbon. You're obviously not burning fossil fuels by by running the panels. Yes, it's energy intense to produce the panels, but a comparison of the life cycle. of it per kilowatt hour. It's minuscule. It's n you need a different scale to see it when compared It's a frequent talking point amongst people who are skeptical of of things like solar or electric vehicles, actually, is this idea of the life cycle and oh surely it's more energy intense to make

People have done that analysis and and and it's not. We wouldn't be doing this if it wasn't the case. Um but yeah, basically solar is kind of the way that we're gonna be powering the planet for the foreseeable future. Like in in my head, and I'm sure in engineers' heads, people will say that yeah, fusion is gonna take over eventually in fifty years' time. We've been saying that for the past fifty years.

Um but you know, for now the technology that's best suited to generating electricity is solar. Obviously, caveat on that. It's intermittent. The sun doesn't shine. Um you have to pair it with storage, you have to pair uh grids that have lots of solar built into them, uh you have to interconnect those grids with other sources.

And that's actually one of the uh a significant engineering roadblock, as I understand it, is actually building the grid interconnectors that can handle the level of power transfer that we're talking about when you're actually connecting up all of your Um and you have to pair it with what are called firm low carbon So you have to pair it with something that has

um inertia, something that is gonna generate electricity and you can change, but only slowly, so that you can keep the system stable. This I Again, not my specialism, but this concept of baseload, which people still seem to talk about, is a is apparently outdated. People seem to prefer this idea of firm generation. Um and that's the the most obvious example in the version that people on Reddit love to talk about is nuclear power.

N that's a a great example of firm low carbon power. It's not the only one. If you for some reason decide that you don't want to use nuclear power, geothermal exists. We have uh tidal barrages. There are other less um Certainly less well used at the moment forms of firm generation. I was gonna say If uh if this isn't too much of a kind of engineering uh question, is there anything in particular'cause I know in the UK we have a lot of wind, don't we? That's sort of but um but is

And and we have sort of some tidal stuff, I believe. Is there anything in particular that makes solar So much better than those other. Is it is it just that it's usable in more locations? Is it is it because I guess wind is good in the UK because. Yeah, the UK is like one of the global capitals for for wind, basically. It's actually like th I I can't I wish I had this figure to hand, but there is a figure that shows you sort of the potential for generating electricity from wind power. Over the

Um I think the honest answer is that the energy density is just higher for solar. Like the amount of energy that's coming in from the sun. is you know the order of a kilowatt per square meter. Like that's roughly, you know, give or take, different days, different clouds, whatever, is coming in from the sun. To generate that from the wind, you have to basically have a wind turbine of a certain And the the larger the radius of your wind turbine's blades, the more

And it just comes down to how how much sunlight is coming in versus how much kinetic energy air can have. Um and yeah, as you say, I think it is really an engineering question, but I think that's what it fundamentally comes down to. That feels I did say I wanted the last couple to be a bit more uh positive and that like hearing about the kind of trajectory of the cost of generating solar

It's good. So this is going very much on our good. It's very much on the high end. It's it's it's not flawless. Um I mentioned about China earlier. There is like there are concerns around how you source rare earth minerals like lipid. or or or you know, various minerals that go into solar panels. Lithium's normally for storage. Um China specifically controls something like Eighty percent, seventy, eighty percent of the world's production of um like

lithium-ion cells and various key components. They have really quite a significant monopoly on this technology, which makes sense because of the amount of money they have plowed into it and a colossal amount of storage that they're adding to the Chinese group. Um but that is like a worry, that this idea that there is one country that kind of has a monopoly on how we generate electricity. Um there are also concerns around how those minerals are extracted.

China actually only produces like ten, fifteen percent of the world's lithium. It's actually most mostly from other places. But the conditions that people uh suffer through in order to get the lithium can be absolutely horrific. And because they're in the global south, they don't really get very Attention. And so if we're going to base the global economy, which is based on energy, on this technology and so these minerals.

That's an issue that absolutely has to be dealt with. And as I said earlier, you know, the climate crisis isn't just one thing, it's kind of everything all at once. That's something that you So it's not uniformly positive, but it's way, way up on the it's the return of the king end of the the scale. Feels like one we sort of take take for granted a bit as well, maybe. Compared to some of the It's not sexy, is the thing. It's not like the drama of planes spraying stuff into the air.

No. Um, you know, the I I I think a lot of my job trying to get people to care about different systems in the Earth's atmosphere and about different parts of climate is that A lot of it isn't sexy. Like refrigerants aren't sexy. And it's trying to make them interesting and like actually make people realize that, you know, just because you haven't thought of this and it's not obvious.

Can be an enormous impact. And solar is just as a panel. It just sits there, you know? Like Yeah. Come on, do something interesting. And yeah, if if you're doing something interesting, it just doesn't But but still it you know, powering on in silence. Um okay, our very last our very last card is I don't even know if you can see these on the on the camera. Uh restore my my hammering's terrible, so probably not. Restoring tropical uh forest.

Plants. Not techie. This is this is the opposite. Yeah. Um perhaps an obvious thing to say, and maybe not something that everybody has thought about, I suppose, is that if you want to suck carbon dioxide out of the air, There's an amazing invention that already does that. It's called a tree. Um, and and other elements of the UK system that that photosynthesize and draw carbon out of the atmosphere.

Rewilding tropical rainforests is uh something that, again, to mention them, has been brought out by Project Drawdown. Um they've done analysis where I I brought up the figures earlier. Um if you reforested a about half of the land that is suitable to do so that has been deforested um previously. If you reforested about half of that, which is a hundred and sixty million

you'd sequester about fifty four gigatons of carbon dioxide by twenty fifty. So that is about not quite two years worth of current That is very cheap to do and has huge numbers of other benefits because you're restoring an ecosystem that has been absolutely mangled. Humanity. Once again, it's all of these problems all wrapped up together. And one of the what I think arguably the problem that worries me the most is biodiversity.

and the fact that we are not making enough of the fact that we are living through and causing the next mass extinction. Like the levels of species reduction that we are currently observing is the same level that we saw in like the Permean. But we're seeing it over a very compressed timeframe.

Which still biological's processes, evolutionary processes, operate on really long timescales, so it's not dramatic, but it's happening. And one of the main w reasons it's happening is because we're destroying habitats. And one of the major habitats that we are destroying is tropical rainforests. So By replanting You not only are sucking carbon out of the atmosphere.

you are repairing the life support system that the earth has in place. Because, you know, we think of ourselves as separate from nature. This especially in in the in urban areas in the West, like we both live in, um, we think of ourselves as just being in another world. And we're not. If nature goes down, it's bringing us with it. Not humans wouldn't go extinct, but the you know, the life as we know it would. Um, and I think we are way too insulated.

Um there's this concept in um science communication uh called science capital, which is like how into science. You know, the the idea of science communication is kind of to bring your science capital up and to make you feel more engaged with science. And I think there's a lot to be said for a similar idea called nature. Which is how engaged with nature do you feel? And i a lot of people are nature capital

are in nature capital poverty. Like they don't have any interactions with nature. They don't feel any kind of connection to it. And yet we are so dependent on the system of the global ecosystem. So by but yeah, by planting tropical forests, you have all of these benefits of making people feel more You're sucking carbon out of the atmosphere.

And you are restoring these habitats that will hopefully prevent, you know, a lot of biodiversity being lost. That is is is is a horrible thing, quite apart from, you know, the fact that it impacts us in terms of food. you are losing these species of kind of miraculous animals that you're never gonna see again. The idea of saying to your grandkids like, oh, we used to have tigers. There were these amazing big cats and you know, here are pictures of them, but they're all gone.

You know, and but that's happening every single day with thousands of species across the world. And you know, if we don't stop that, we're gonna be living on a very, very poor planet. And my like my understanding is that restoring it, the like the restoration process is actually relevant.

Quick. Like if if if Yeah. Like the tropical forests are quite um resilient and that if you start either you know saying that this bit of land which once was forest and has been cut down to make farms and just go stop using that for um agriculture now. Um and especially if you sort of intervene maybe and decide to um you know plant Trees there to give it a bit of a boost that actually it can be periods of sort of one or two deaths.

Sprung back to where it was before. There's the there's the danger of doing something as monoculture where you just plant this one type of tree and then suddenly it's like a plantation. Like it has to be done in a sensible way. But yeah, like reforesting efforts and rewilding efforts.

work. They're not complicated. They're not even that expensive really. It just requires you to actually do them and protect the land that they're on. And this is the other half of the the the CO2 sequestering, you know, we d the uh issue. And we're talking about direct air carbon.

Why not do it this way? And this is something that climate scientists have been saying for quite a while and a lots of analysis has been performed, you know, some fanciful stuff like we could we could fix climate change in quotation marks if we just you know rewilded the the Sahara If we just planted lots of trees in the Sahara and you know, that's that's not gonna happen. That's like a any

But this, just re restoring the stuff that we've already lost, is very, very much real. And it's something that like again, I'm I'm making reference to my comments, which I know I shouldn't be reading because it's terrible for my mental health, but I can only imagine how bad your YouTube comments are. I'd go through and like I have a very simple policy, which is that if you are spreading misinformation, you're shadow banned. I will you know, hide you

And recently I've had some shorts that have been kind of blowing up. It felt like that scene in uh Guardians of the Galaxy Two. Where Yondu just starts murdering everyone uh with rocket in the center of the ship. That's what it feels like going into my comment section at the moment. It's just like, cool, ban, ban, ban, ban, ban. Um, and like, but but what I do you do see in these things is like, oh why I haven't signed You know, why haven't scientists thought it could be the sun?

Or it might not be humans, or why did we just plant more trees? And it's like, we have been saying this for decades. The conversation around climate solutions has just been hijacked by different groups of people who want to do things in a very technologically centered way. And Just as a general PSA for people who if you uh if you think you've thought about something about you know climate, fantastic that you're thinking about.

But you do need to understand that this is a a a issue that has been anthropogenic climate change specifically, we've been thinking about for nearly two hundred. And if you want a level of detail that um that goes into how we think about this, there was a paper a couple of years ago where they had reconstructed how warm oceans uh historically by uh ships that would go uh and and take measurements every day of you know water depth, water temperature

And that was a dataset that people used to for for historical ocean temperatures. But they realized in this paper that actually if you the way that they did this was taking a bucket, lowering it off the side of the ship, dragging water up, hauling it up, and then taking it.

And by doing that, the temperature of the water is probably decreased by a few tenths of a degree. And so they went back and modified the dataset to account for the evaporation and the radiative cooling of water in a bucket traveling a couple of meters. And that's the level of precision that we're talking about when we're talking about how well we understand the climate system. And when we're talking about solutions.

We have been talking about this obvious stuff for a very long time. It's not the scientists. who haven't been talking about this or pushing for this. It's the way that the conversation has been framed by especially politicians and especially uh people who control large media.

It's something that's been bugging me a lot recently. I got on my high horse with this because it's um it's been getting me down seeing all of this in the comments. And I I I'm glad that we talked about uh afforestation in this because it's a simple technology. We've known about it for millennia, we know it works. Just fucking do it.

I think I went to and I I don't think I'm misremembering this, but ages ago I went to the science museum in London and they sort of very controversially had done a project with Shell, which uh

Which which I I only learnt about the facts and then sort of reflected on it and was like, Oh yeah, that was a bit odd. Um,'cause part of round you got through it and it was I think it was talking about direct air carbon cap Uh and it was describing it as kind of technological trees where you didn't just go We we have trees We've got trees at home. Trees. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We've got we've got trees at home. They the planet sort of came with

Um so restoring tropical forest is very much going on our our good end we would like that. It's the good end and I I don't wanna say it's an easy win, obviously there's complicated stuff to do there with indigenous populations and how you use the land and how you protect it. I think it's about as close to an easy win as you can get.

Thank you, Simon. This has been this has been uh very, very uh enlightening. Um Uh I'm sorry that I talked at you for so long. I I No, I thought I you know, I put in the work with the little cards I made, you brought um knowledge. You did you really did. You you brought being incredibly clever. Um If people want to go and check out your channel, I would I would particularly recommend your recent video about uh I mean, I enjoyed your electric bike trying to get from London.

you know, to sort of my misadventures enjoy the pain. But I think you're you're um yeah, we've talked a lot about transport over the last however long this episode ends up being, um, and the way you broke down at how to, you know, what what does the future of transport look like on a really local level but then on a national level and um I'd I'd particularly recommend that episode'cause I think it hooks on from from this. But if people want to find sort of you and your

output. Where would they where where can they find you on the on the Oh my primary output is on uh my YouTube channel, if you just search Simon Clark on YouTube because my username I made when I was eighteen and it's unpronounced. Uh Simon Oxperfizz. So I make I make videos that go on there. I also stream on Twitch at Dr. Simon Clark and I'm on Instagram and X.

uh i if that's still a thing by the time this episode comes out. And threads, uh as at Simonox for Fizz. Um and once again I do just wanna uh stress that if you want to learn more about climate solutions and compare Project Drawdown is the website that you you want to have a look at, which is I think just drawdown.org. And that's that's got far more information than we could possibly.

Excellent. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you so, so much once again for joining me, Simon. And thank you, everyone, for listening. Thank you for having me.