[dramatic music playing]
[Gates] It's kind of this crazy thing that there's this energy source
that's wildly cheap, you know, that has powered our society.
Our society is based on hydrocarbons.
Gasoline, natural gas, and coal.
[dramatic music continues]
[Gates] At the same time, the phenomena of energy release is going to CO2,
then the CO2 is like a mirror that's reflecting the heat back in,
which has all these traumatic weather effects.
[electronic zap]
[wind whooshing]
[Gates] Total emissions is over 50 billion tons a year.
You know, it's just a mind-blowing number.
[plane engine whirring]
[Gates] We know for sure that if you keep using hydrocarbons,
then things get very bad.
So, we have to give up hydrocarbons
almost entirely.
[reporter 1]
This year is now tied for the most days over 110 degrees recorded.
You believe this is the toughest challenge humanity has ever faced?
Absolutely.
[water whooshing]
[Gates] There's no reason to let it happen.
We have solutions.
[opening theme music playing]
[music fades]
[machinery clanking]
[woman 1] Practically every activity that we engage in
involves fossil fuels in some way.
Looking at our phones, charging our phones, you know,
to, uh, going to the ice skating rink, going to the swimming pool, you know.
All these things are being heated and cooled.
So, the scale of the solution has to match the scale of the problem,
and that's very hard to even imagine.
[inquisitive music playing]
We are addicted to fossil fuels, right?
And going cold turkey… wouldn't work.
[switches clicking]
[Gates] The electricity system would fail. You wouldn't be able to drive to work.
Farmers wouldn't have any fertilizers.
You couldn't build new buildings and roads.
People would be freezing to death.
You know, there's almost nothing that doesn't draw
on a massive amount of hydrocarbons.
[inquisitive music playing]
[Gates] Particularly because of my travel,
my carbon footprint would be one of the highest.
But I can afford to buy technologies that zero out my emissions.
I also buy carbon credits.
Obviously, you know, I can afford to do that,
so that's not really being part of the solution.
[music fades]
[man 1] Bill Gates, welcome back.
Now you're talking about climate change.
In your new book, you talk about how to avoid a climate disaster.
[Gates] We all need to get rid of our footprint
by driving innovation faster than it would normally take place.
You know, I… I have a life of seeing human innovation at work.
You know, the digital revolution that I was lucky enough to be part of
took people very much by surprise.
What is the essence of Microsoft?
Well, a computer on every desk and in every home.
-I don't have one at home or my desk. -We're working on that.
[camera shutter clicks]
[man 2] I remember when I read the book.
You could tell his approach was a systems approach.
I always tell people about that book. I go,
"That book is just a pie chart, okay?"
It's the world's best pie chart book.
It tells you the pie chart of all the causes.
You're not a worthy cocktail party contestant unless you know the pie chart.
[inquisitive music playing]
[Gates] So, emissions come from many sectors of the economy.
The manufacturing or industrial piece,
making steel, making cement, making chemicals.
That is so hidden to people.
They're surprised that, globally, it's bigger than any of the others.
Then there's producing electricity, burning coal, natural gas,
and then you have agriculture, where you have use of fertilizers,
and you have the fact that cows generate natural gas.
Then there's transportation.
Passenger cars, trucks, buses, trains, planes, boats.
And then finally, you have buildings, where we heat and cool the buildings.
To get to zero emissions,
you literally have to zero out all the emissions in those five categories
in every single country,
and so it's…
You know, it's very daunting.
[birds tweeting faintly]
[woman 2] I do have the great fortune of growing up in Montana.
There's a river that runs right through town right by my house.
We spend all of our time outside.
The impacts are visible everywhere,
but they're much more obvious
when you're constantly interacting with the outdoors.
[joyful music playing]
[Gibson-Snyder] Wildfire smoke settles into the valley where I live,
and it's hard to breathe.
I also saw the glaciers in Glacier National Park melting.
[wind whooshing]
[woman 3] Yeah, pretty much doomed if we don't make any changes soon.
People are dying. People are being affected, and I…
It's getting closer and closer to us in Western societies.
[clock ticking]
Climate change growing up is… is just something that was there.
I… I have known no world before climate change.
Even if we want to do something around the climate crisis,
it's not clear what we could even do to address it.
[machine whirring]
-[girl 1 chuckling] -[boy 1] That's crazy.
-[all chuckling] -Yes.
Wait, so it should be part of college orientation.
[Gates] Well, the climate cause benefits immensely
by having lots of young activists.
You know, they're a super important part of the movement.
-[Gates] Hi. -[Gibson-Snyder] Hello.
-[Goel] Hello. -[girl 2] Nice to meet you.
-Isaac. -[Gates] Hi, Isaac.
-Grace. Nice to meet you. -[Gates] Hey.
-I'm Jamie. -Hi, Jamie.
[Gates] I learn from them
just like I do from the scientists coming up with the breakthroughs.
The highest temperature ever, they almost broke it.
They were hoping they would break it,
so a bunch of people wanted to be in Death Valley when it broke the record.
That's like the dinosaurs wanting to pose with the asteroids.
[all laugh]
Like…
I don't consider myself a climate optimist,
but at the same time, I don't consider myself a pessimist.
I don't think that's helpful.
We need a diversity of tactics to face, you know, this climate crisis.
The crisis doesn't care if we're not ready for it.
You can't disengage from the knowledge that, as we are now,
it's not looking so great in the future.
Um…
They have a more bleak view of the world and the difficulties of getting there
than I do or that I expected they would have.
I want to make sure they get exposed to some of these innovations.
You know, gasoline costs less than bottled water,
and so people are kind of spoiled.
Hydrocarbons, except for the fact they emit CO2, they are miraculous.
We're trying to make a battery that's a tenth as energy-dense as gasoline,
but there's so much we have to do in the next ten years.
Across every area of emission, you know,
"zero" is this demanding number that doesn't let you pick,
"Okay, let's do this one but not… not this one."
[man 3] The climate issue is a classic stakeholder problem.
The people who will be most affected by climate change
are our unborn children,
and it's very hard to get a generation living today
to make major sacrifices for a generation yet to be born,
and that's why you also need the profit motive.
Hi. Welcome.
[woman 4] We'll do some Q and A and have some discussion from there.
Thank you. Take it away.
[man 4] Breakthrough Energy Ventures is an investment firm led by Bill Gates,
designed to tackle the production of greenhouse gases.
Strategic investments can show the world that there's a better way to do this,
and then I can go to you and say,
"It doesn't matter what your politics are."
"It doesn't matter what you think about any of it."
"This is objectively a better way of doing it, so let's do it."
[woman 5] If you look at steel, grey hydrogen, and chemical,
which are the three targeted industries we look at.
Right now, fossil ethylene is produced in a very carbon-intensive way.
We need business-as-usual solutions to making things, getting electricity,
driving around, flying around, you know, our buildings, our homes.
Where… What do we eat?
So we wanna replace those things
at the same standard, at least, with no emissions, all right?
So the only way you can do that is if you're coming up with new technologies.
Dioxycle is a carbon emissions recycling company.
[Friedman] Climate change is a scale problem.
If you don't have scale,
there's no way you can change the climate.
I would not try to change the climate as a hobby,
and therefore, you need a solution that offers scale.
And there's only one thing as big as Mother Nature,
and that's Father Greed, the marketplace.
We are getting ready to move on to our one-ton-per-day pilot.
I'm showing you really just the shell here.
[Kolbert] I think it's commendable he's putting his money where his mouth is.
Most of us don't have the capital
to invest in, you know, multi-million dollar startups,
most of which will not pan out, but some of which may.
[man 5] …require clean hydrogen going into the future…
[Gates] You end up funding a lot of things that are a dead end,
but the few that become the equivalent of Apple or Microsoft or Google
in this clean-tech area,
there will be many companies that achieve that type of impact.
[man 6] Climate is, in many ways, a systems problem.
We think software has an interesting role to potentially help solve that.
You have amazing entrepreneurs with all sorts of ideas coming at you.
So, we're super over-minded in terms of thinking about what could be.
[man 7] We've really been able to explore this new cement production process.
[Roberts] Now, you may think what you're doing at that moment
is investing in a thing that's not the thing,
but in fact, a thing that's not the thing can quickly become the thing. [laughs]
As long as we can hit a certain current density,
the capital cost could be comparable to a kiln.
And the heat you're getting from natural gas or electricity…
[Gates] Now, Breakthrough Energy has over a hundred companies.
You've got agriculture. You've got buildings.
Cement is one where we have some great companies.
[inspiring music playing]
[man 8] Someone from Bill Gates's fund, Breakthrough Energy Ventures,
came to Caltech and gave a talk. He said, "Look,
there's all these huge climate problems that no one's working on."
"There's no money going into them."
"That's a huge problem because they're as important as cars."
[machinery whirring]
[inquisitive music playing]
[Finke] Concrete's the most consumed human-made material on the planet.
We use more concrete than anything except for water.
[inquisitive music continues]
It's almost magic, right? It's… It's liquid rock.
A few minutes to a few hours to a few days, it becomes hard.
It becomes a structure.
It's this incredible thing that has allowed us
to build everything from skyscrapers to bridges to dams.
[reporter 2] as it comes from the pipes
is a job called "punning."
[Finke] The same thing has been done in the cement industry
for a hundred-plus years.
[inquisitive music playing]
Some people know for a very long time that cement is a huge polluter,
and no one's been doing anything about it.
[machinery whirring]
[Finke] Concrete is a mixture of cement, sand, gravel, and water.
The CO2 emissions associated with producing cement
is a chemistry problem.
[water dripping]
[Finke] We need to make the exact same material.
And the reason we need to make the exact same material
is because there is so much risk associated with building a building
and so much money that no one wants to specify a material
that's never been used to build a building before.
[Leandri] The way to make cement today is the process
where you use limestone, which has carbon in it.
So, when you burn it, you release the CO2.
But at Brimstone,
we use calcium silicate rocks that don't contain CO2.
[rocks clacking]
[Finke] Cement is a calcium-based material.
You need to get calcium out of the rock in order to make cement.
[inquisitive music playing]
[woman 6] So, I'll pour in the liquid that we usually use as our leaching agent.
We'll pour in this first.
[Finke] That leaching agent will react with the rock
and remove the calcium from the rock.
We then take that calcium, and we put that rock into a kiln,
which produces cement.
[inquisitive music continues]
[Finke] In our facility, we send it over to our concrete lab for testing.
We then basically take that cube, put that into a press, crush the cube,
and measure how much force we needed to apply to that cube
in order to get it to crack,
and that tells us how strong the cement is.
General-use cement would be like 4,000 to 5,000 pounds per square inch.
Large skyscrapers, right, you may need to use very, very high-strength cements
and get to, you know, 10,000, even 20,000 pounds per square inch.
[crackling]
[Leandri] Ooh.
That's sick.
[inquisitive music playing]
[Gates] There's a lot of cement factories in this world,
so this is not going to be, you know, like making a faster computer chip.
If you say to India, "Okay, make your cement a new way,"
there are thousands of concrete plants in India alone.
It's a long distance between inventing a new way to make cement
and getting every cement kiln in all of India
to no longer have huge CO2 emissions.
[Finke] There's still some big things on the to-do list.
So, we have to build a plant.
Then we have to build 3,000 more plants.
[all chuckle]
[Finke] Then we have to decarbonize the entire industry.
There's big, big to-do list items.
There's no question, right? [chuckles] Anyway, awesome job, everyone.
[all applauding]
[Finke] Great work, team.
[inquisitive music continues]
-[music halts] -[bubbling]
[soft music playing]
The first big published paper on the greenhouse gas issue
was published in the 1800s.
So, we've had a sense of the fact
that greenhouse gases could trap heat in the atmosphere for quite some time.
Why don't you try a tankful? Try it and let me know.
Okay, fill it up.
[Worland] It was really in the post-war era, after World War II,
that emissions just started to increase dramatically.
By the 1960s, President Johnson had a paper on his desk that said,
"This is a big issue that you need to be concerned about
from a national security perspective."
The fossil fuel industry did have a sense of what their product was causing.
They conducted a lot of research looking at the effects of their product
on the global climate.
The biggest emitters are the Gulf countries that produce the stuff,
but then after that are countries like the U.S.
In the West, we have really high-carbon lifestyles.
Hey, it's Criss Angel.
I wanna welcome you to my 22,000-square-foot estate
known as Serenity.
[birds tweeting]
So, everything that we think about in terms of a modern economy
is intertwined with fossil fuels, and you can look at that
if you're thinking about, you know, our… our electricity system.
[inquisitive music playing]
[Gates] The electric grid
is not only a source of about a third of the emissions,
it's also the only source of energy that we know how to make clean.
[inspiring music playing]
[Guidero] Solar and wind, you know, the prices come down dramatically.
The problem with it is they're intermittent.
The sun doesn't always shine, the wind doesn't always blow,
but you always wanna be able to plug in your phone.
[Gates] We don't yet have a way to store the energy they create inexpensively
to have it available whenever we need it,
but also, demand for electricity
will only get higher as we move into the future.
In the future, we need to use electricity to now power cars, to power our buildings.
[Gates] And so, weirdly,
not only do we have to make the grid green,
we also have to make it 2.5 times as large.
In my view, the most promising solution is nuclear energy.
Either nuclear fusion or nuclear fission.
Fusion, we don't have an economic fusion plant,
and even some of the science is a bit uncertain.
So, I think it's very important that we keep working on fission.
I'm a huge investor in a company called TerraPower
that's trying to do a next-generation reactor.
The reactors that we use today cool things off by using water.
Water can't hold much heat,
so as it heats up, it gets to be very high pressure.
For many decades, they've talked about switching away from water
to use liquid metal like sodium,
and that's the approach TerraPower's taken.
There's no pressure inside the reactor.
Also, all the issues of afterheat,
you know, which caused both Fukushima and Chernobyl,
those are gone.
So, TerraPower's nuclear power plants will be far safer,
but, you know, you actually have to build a demo plant,
get the U.S. regulator to look hard at how you've done the designs.
[airplane whirring]
[soft music playing]
[Gates] TerraPower has picked this as the place to build
the first of the next-generation reactors.
[soft music continues]
[Gates] The current biggest employer here, which is this coal plant,
that will be shut down for environmental reasons.
The skills of the workers there match what we needed at the new plant.
So, it's kind of a textbook example of what you'd like,
which is the clean economy to go to wherever the jobs are being lost,
uh, as the dirty economy is phased out.
[woman 7] J.C. Penney's home is behind us.
Uh, that's the Victory Theater. It opens three nights a week.
And they're redoing this to become the new law office and the, um, bakery.
-[Gates] Wow. -Isn't that great?
-[Gates] Nice. -[woman 7] Okay.
[indistinct chatter]
Is the bakery yours, or they'll be a tenant of yours?
So, it'll be ours. We have a bakery in the back right now.
[Gates] Okay, and the law office?
Well, I have two law firms.
Oh, you're kidding.
-[woman 8] So we're expanding here. -That's eclectic.
-[all chuckle] -[Gates] It's very synergistic.
You can eat cupcakes, drink coffee, and sue people.
[woman 8] I mean, it's a law firm.
[Gates] Well, it's my first time here, and I was looking forward
to coming and seeing where we're building this first-of-a-kind plant.
You know, we were just out on the site. It's just a bunch of land.
I mean, all the billions I'm putting into TerraPower will be lost
if it doesn't work,
but the breakthrough would really
make a huge difference in helping us solve climate.
[inquisitive music playing]
[Gates] A fusion reactor potentially could be
a very cheap source of electricity
with almost no environmental problems.
You know, today, the science, we don't even know how to make one,
and, you know, could it come in time?
[Jamie] If you think of our addiction to fossil fuels
and the way that we're going about
attempting to wean off of it, we're losing.
The fossil fuel industry is making record profits.
Emissions are going up.
People are right to be incredibly skeptical and disillusioned.
There's part of the movement that I don't fully agree with,
which is that you denigrate the current way of doing things
before we have a replacement.
I wish there was as much emphasis on the
But, you know, I'm… I'm an optimist, and I…
You know, I think we will limit temperature increase.
I feel like optimism has to come from realistic action.
Like, if we just sit here and are like, "Wow, I'm optimistic,"
then that does a counter service.
There are certain levels of blind optimism that can be a form of climate denial.
-[clock ticking] -[bell tolling]
[Worland] The Paris Agreement set the goal
of holding temperatures well below two degrees Celsius,
cut emissions in half between 2015 and 2030,
and then by 2050, have net-zero emissions.
How are we doing? [chuckles]
Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere hit record levels in the spring,
the highest in more than four million years.
Bad. [laughs] Bad. We're doing very badly.
[dramatic sting]
[Worland] The long-term trend is that we are not seeing a decline in emissions.
[soft music playing]
[Gates] We may miss the two-degree goal,
and so the amount of damage is going to be very substantial.
[glacier rumbling]
[Kolbert] You know, two degrees seemed like a long way off.
Now here we basically are at 1.5.
This past summer was a taste of how destructive that is.
Two degrees, there are projections of parts of the world
that are gonna become unlivable.
Whole cities with millions of people will become very difficult to live in.
It's beyond depressing, yeah.
[soft music continues]
[Toone] It's a continuum, right?
So, is there a single tipping point? No, there is not a single tipping point.
The last time the surface of the planet was as warm as it is today,
it was 120,000 years ago,
and sea level was 25 feet higher than it is today.
Average elevation above sea level in New York City?
Thirty-three feet.
Average elevation above sea level of Miami?
Six feet.
When is Miami not gonna be inhabitable?
Uh, you know, decades?
So, there's a bunch of stuff that's kind of baked-in right now.
-[thunder rumbles] -[dramatic music playing]
[wind whooshing]
The biggest problem is
if you're near the equator and you work outdoors,
so, particularly farmers in Africa,
this can be horrific for them.
Well, agriculture's, you know, a pretty basic human activity.
Most of us used to be farmers, uh, 'cause we had to be,
and it is a significant source of greenhouse gases.
[Kolbert] 20%, or somewhere around there, of our emissions are agriculture-related.
Those are really hard to get rid of.
Cows burping methane.
You know, tilling the soil can mobilize carbon that was in the soil.
Nitrogen fertilizer is made with natural gas.
And all the ways that we farm.
When you pull that combine over the field, that's using a lot of fossil fuels.
So, there's all sorts of ways in which agriculture
is contributing to climate change.
-[indistinct chatter] -[inquisitive music playing]
[man 9] It takes a lot of energy, land, water to grow our food.
We have to fertilize the crops. We have to get the crops to our grocery stores.
And then it goes from our grocery stores to our homes.
And then we have to refrigerate it in our homes, only to throw out 40% of it.
[Goel] What a lot of people don't know is that food waste is a huge methane emitter.
There's a lot of food waste, especially in landfills.
It gets compressed between other trash,
and that means that it can't decompose as it would just in the soil or something.
That means that methane is being released from that food waste.
Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide,
so it has much more warming potential.
If food waste was a country, it'd be the third-largest country by emissions.
China, U.S., food waste.
But at Mill, we've created a new system
that is the easiest way to get food back to farms.
Now that the enclosure is a lot tighter and cinched on the device,
it actually acts as a nice little coarsening effect,
so that you're, like, able to kind of, like, keep everything together,
and you don't have a bunch of parts shifting.
That's something I think is a user-experience win
if we can solve that.
[inquisitive music playing]
[Rogers] It feels like a trash bin, and everyone knows how to use it.
You step on the pedal, and it opens up.
And you scrape your dinner scraps in.
That's really where your job ends.
On the inside is where all the magic happens.
Overnight and automatically, we dry and grind all the food you put in.
Food is 80% water.
And what's cool is when you take the water out, it gets very small.
It becomes pretty much odorless,
but it locks in the nutrients.
[mechanical whirring]
[Rogers] After the bin fills up, which takes weeks,
you leave it on your doorstep, and we pick it up
to then get it back to our facilities.
You know, think like Uber but for… for waste.
-[woman 9] Okay. We're opening the box. -Let's open it up.
[woman 9] Take the bag out.
[Rogers] We load them up into our machine,
which sifts and sorts them and can pull out any contaminants
like fruit stickers that sometimes get in there.
It does a heat treatment step for food safety reasons.
Then we then bag up that material,
and then we send it back to farms as food for our livestock.
[chickens clucking]
[Rogers] For a poultry farmer, 60% of their emissions
is the feed they buy.
So, if you're growing chickens,
Mill is creating a carbon-reduced feed ingredient.
It was food we were gonna throw out.
[inquisitive music playing]
What I'm beginning to appreciate about innovation is
that it's a very hopeful side of things.
But I'm noticing just how much systemic resistance there is still.
Waiting for people who have grown up with this
as part of their goals and as part… part of their moral compass
to be in those positions of power,
I don't see as a feasible way forward.
[Gates] I don't fully understand people who are against this issue,
but it's easier to ignore than most.
People do respond to activism.
The status quo is so powerful.
I don't know how to think about
the benefit of keeping climate in mind as an emergency
versus angering people.
[dramatic music playing]
-[man 10] Whoa! -[woman 10] Whoa!
What is worth more?
Art or life?
How hardcore should the activism become, and who is it aimed at?
You know, I hope the dialogue between activists
and hands-on people doing the work stays constructive.
[woman 11] I'm trying to put my beak on and get it…
[woman 12 laughs]
[woman 11] We're sounding the alarm as canaries.
[indistinct chatter]
[Gates] There was a group in the UK called Extinction Rebellion,
and, you know, I was driving to go to an appointment,
and they blocked the road.
[women shout] Extinction!
[men shout] Rebellion!
You know, they certainly created awareness.
It is a political world.
The problem is and, sadly, it's the case for all these things,
if the clean way is super expensive,
then who's gonna pay for that?
We can't expect other countries to get to zero if we don't do it first,
but then it goes way beyond that too.
It's also that we have a lot more money than other countries do,
and we cannot expect Brazil, India, Indonesia,
these major emerging economies to decarbonize
by spending a lot more money on clean solutions.
[inquisitive music playing]
[Kolbert] We really actually do need to make fossil fuels more expensive,
but every time we get any kind of rise in the price of gas,
it's a huge political crisis.
And the word "tax" is, uh, an anathema in this country. [laughs]
You know, it doesn't even get talked about, really.
[inquisitive music continues]
[Gates] You know, government plays a huge role
because it's their regulations, their tax incentives
who accelerate these things into the lab, out of the lab, into the big scale-up.
Eventually, the clean technology is as cheap or cheaper.
We have a moral obligation, and we have the economic resources
to make those investments
that will create the technological breakthroughs,
and then drive them down the cost-volume curve
so those solutions will be available to everyone on the planet.
[Gates] The solar power and wind power achieved that,
and that's why you see, even in parts of the country
where the legislatures are not very climate-oriented,
you know, for example, in Texas,
they're benefiting incredibly by doing wind and solar.
It's a huge part of their energy mix.
[Haq] You couldn't have done that without tax incentives
that were put in place for solar and wind.
So the policy helped drive that,
but you couldn't have those incentives in place
if you didn't have the technology at a place where it was ready.
There are technologies on the shelf right now.
We need those to get into communities today, right now, and move fast.
[dramatic music playing]
[Gates] Flying accounts for over 3% of all emissions,
but a solution that works today
is to take fuels that were made from plants
and making what we call biofuels.
Unfortunately, today,
the fuel you make costs over double what normal aviation fuel costs.
You know, as I'm buying that for my air travel, it creates demand.
And as that volume of demand goes up,
there's new ideas to get the cost of that fuel
to be very close to the cost of current jet fuel.
The extra cost of an electric car is going down over time.
Passenger cars are only 8% of all emissions,
but if you can get everybody to buy these new passenger cars,
then you've got 8% solved.
[man 11] We need hydrogen to be in a high-density state
so that you can economically deliver it from where it's produced
to where it's used.
[man 12] We've got our first-ever vehicle powered by Verne cryo-compression.
Our beachhead market is in Class 8 trucking, heavy-duty trucking.
That's because that's where we're getting the most, uh, commercial interest.
[man 11] Battery electric trucks today can go about 250 miles or so,
and a truck with our storage could go a thousand.
Which is what diesel trucks can travel today.
Do you have IP involved in this?
There's not a lot of materials
that can do both the cryogenic and the high pressure,
so the heat exchanger's a creep part. That's where we have IP.
[inquisitive music playing]
[airplane engine whirring]
[Gates] Well, we're moving as fast as we can
to get emissions from all the five categories down to zero,
but before we get there,
we will have released a lot more CO2.
Very good to see you. Thank you again for doing this.
-[Gates] You bet. -We're thrilled.
Yeah, no, it should be fun.
[Haq] If you actually believe we need to limit warming to 1.5 Celsius,
then you have to be in favor of carbon removal technology,
where you suck carbon out of the air, put it under the ground,
and do that for about ten gigatons a year for 50 years to 2100.
That's mind-boggling.
Nobody's actually thinking about that or talking about that.
-There we go. Here we go. -Gentlemen.
[audience applauding]
[Gelles] How do you think about carbon capture and its role?
If in the Breakthrough Energy portfolio, we have a number of companies
that are trying to bring the cost of carbon capture down.
Today, I'm the biggest individual customer in Climeworks,
which does carbon capture at over 300 dollars a ton.
What does it mean that you're the single biggest customer?
What does that look like? What kind--
-I write them a check. Uh… -Yeah?
But… But are you offsetting your own personal emissions with that?
Yeah.
[soft music playing]
[sheep bleats]
[man 13] I'm working for a company that actually addresses climate change.
For me, at the root cause,
the CO2 that is already in the atmosphere, right?
That is… That is heating up the planet.
What Climeworks is doing is removing CO2 from the atmosphere.
To filter that out, it's actually quite challenging
because it's the most diluted source of CO2 that is available.
We are pulling an enormous amount of air through a… a filter.
If the air passes this material,
the CO2 molecules react and stay inside the filter material.
-We close it off… -[steam hisses]
[Willemse] …and we heat that chamber up,
which then reverses the chemical reaction…
and then we suck that CO2 to our plant.
We also… We link ourselves to only sustainable energy sources,
like geothermal energy here in Iceland.
[water bubbling]
[Willemse] Overall, the process is actually not that complex,
but to technologically execute and do it efficiently
is, of course, a challenge.
They really are removing carbon.
Not only do they pull it out, but it gets mineralized
in that Iceland plant.
Here, I'm actually sitting next to an injection well.
So, this is one of our injection wells where we are actually injecting the CO2,
and this is actually the world's first injection well for this process.
[inspiring music playing]
[Snæbjörnsdóttir] So, we inject water and CO2,
and at a certain depth, we release the CO2 into the water stream.
And at this depth,
the pressure is high enough for this SodaStream effect to take place.
We are pushing the CO2 into the water,
and then the CO2 gets carried into the bedrock, turning CO2 to stone.
This essentially doesn't require much energy.
We make use of the water that is already in the ground
to put pressure on the CO2.
[inspiring music continues]
[music fades]
A four-kiloton plant divided by the 40 gigatons that we emit in a year,
you get to zero point, and then ten zeros,
one percent of the total emission annually that we are removing at the moment.
That's why it's so essential that we scale up this technology.
Of course, we want to be almost like a utility company.
Instead of collecting the garbage every week from your home,
we are cleaning up the atmosphere.
But direct air capture is not here to solve current emissions.
It's really here to clean up the historical emissions
that are already out there.
[Gates] Right now,
the biggest capture plants in the world are below 100,000 tons a year.
There are some being built that are in the millions,
but unless you get it up into the billions,
it's kind of a rounding error.
It doesn't really have an impact.
[Kolbert] It's kind of an insane idea to take CO2 out of the air
that you've put up there by generating energy. [laughs]
You should just generate your energy in a different way.
The fact that very serious people are talking about this is, like, you know,
suggests how desperate we are to keep doing what we're doing
and find some workaround, you know, that's going to make it all go away.
[gentle music playing]
[Kolbert] A lot of these conversations, they're completely human-centric.
The other species that we share the planet with
are really victimized by climate change.
-[inquisitive music playing] -[crickets chirping]
[whale sings]
[Kolbert] Will the ocean become a place where we can basically dump our carbon?
You know, are forests places we can store as much carbon as possible?
Can we genetically modify trees?
Well, that's exciting. There's all this potential there.
And another way to look at it would be, well,
the tree that's there now is probably important
to a lot of species that are living in it.
So, there's no free lunch here.
There is no magic bullet.
If that's all done with electrolysis, we may need as many as 140 factories,
all making the core technology, the stacks.
Each of them five times the size
of the largest factory we have in existence today
in order to support that kind of production.
I… I would say that absolutely the thing that's come home to me in a very real way
is the challenge of scale in this space,
of how hard it is to deploy these innovations at scale.
To run into it and understand viscerally
just how hard it is to build these things out.
We have to go fast because it's gonna take a long time.
This is gonna be an arduous, bumpy, dirty, messy journey,
and it's gonna have times where it's precarious
and looks like things are gonna go off a cliff.
So I'm already predisposed to understand this is crazy.
We're going down a crazy path.
[inquisitive music playing]
I mean, I want to be optimistic.
I don't like being a doomsday prophecist
or… or trying to be contrarian for the sake of it.
It's more of just looking at where we're at.
We're literally on a five, ten-year timeline here
for getting to zero.
I won't say I'm not an optimist.
I think there's a solid chance we figure this out.
And you've brought up great examples, but I won't say that I operate from hope.
I think I operate from love of my home,
and the people, and everyone involved in this,
and a healthy dose of fear.
God, I cry every time I talk about this. [chuckles]
You know, when I hear your passion, I think, "Wow,
we are not going as fast as you want us to."
It's not easy.
This is the entire physical infrastructure.
The scale of… of building that new way is… It's gonna take time,
but it pushes me to… to think harder about how we can move faster.
So, thank you.
So, we've got a lot of work to do,
and the sooner, the better.
[clock ticking]
[inquisitive music playing]
[inquisitive music continues]
[music fades]