Show Notes
We can't avoid catastrophic warming without also capturing and storing carbon dioxide — both the carbon we've already emitted and the carbon we continue to emit through industries that are tough to decarbonize, like steel, petrochemicals, and cement.
Europe is a leader in Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), with a goal of storing at least 50 million tons of captured CO2 a year by the end of this decade.
So this episode, we team up with Germany-based reporter Sam Baker from the DW podcast “Living Planet.” We follow carbon dioxide from its source at a cement plant, all the way to its final resting place under the North Sea. And we look beyond the hype to see if Carbon Capture and Storage could be a real climate solution. Or just another way for the fossil fuel industry to keep on drilling.
More from How We Survive
From WBUR, here's a new kind of story, one that's all about the big questions and decisions we face. “The Midnight Rebellion” is a pick-your-own-path podcast set 100 years in the future, where the stakes are nothing less than the planet itself. It's fiction rooted in real science, built for the kids in your life (ages 7 and up) — and the whole family. You're listening to Chapter 1 of The Midnight Rebellion. Each chapter ends with a choice. YOU decide what’s next. Choose wisely. And if you liked what you heard, listen to the rest and follow The Midnight Rebellion wherever you get your podcasts.
This season, we explored large-scale climate interventions that could be our last hope. One intervention in particular, solar geoengineering, made a lot of listeners’ heads spin. (We’re right there with you.)
All season, we’ve been unpacking the controversial ways we’re messing with nature to save the planet. In this episode, we explore the wildest intervention to date: de-extinction. We take a tour of Colossal Labs, the $10 billion Dallas startup betting it can reverse-engineer extinction itself, to see how they plan to turn pigeons into dodos and Asian elephants into woolly mammoths.
Across the country, anti-geoengineering bills are being proposed in state legislatures. These bills would ban the intentional release of chemicals into the atmosphere for the purpose of affecting sunlight or weather, and could impact future research into stratospheric aerosol injection — or even cloud seeding.
Can a technology used for war help prevent an environmental catastrophe in the making?