How to Reduce Carbon Footprint and Save Earth, Air & Ocean.

Things to do to Reduce Your Carbon Footprint.

In 1st grade, above the cubbies where we kept our snow boots and mittens, big comic-sans letters spelled out ‘remember to recycle’ and ‘last one out turns off the light.” These are the kinds of things recommended by science textbooks, blogs, and even the US Environmental Protection Agency as ways to reduce your impact on the climate. And they’re pretty easy to do.

On average, in the US, turning off the lights when you aren't in the room can save about a third a kilogram of carbon dioxide per day.

Using a reusable shopping bag every time you go to the store saves 5 kg a year.

Drying clothes on a line instead of in a dryer saves around 200 kg per year.

But compare that to the average carbon footprint of a person in the US: 16 and a half tons a year–TONS.

So, what can you do to make a meaningful difference?

Living car-free keeps 2.4 tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere every year. But getting rid of your car maybe isn’t feasible. People in rural or suburban areas have to drive more, but that's a big part of why they produce double the per capita emissions compared to people in urban areas.

Driving an electric car can save about a ton of carbon dioxide a year, but that still doesn’t have as much of an impact as just not driving. That will require big changes in how we live. Getting rid of your car is technically an individual choice, but it requires cultural change.

That isn’t easy.

But we’ve done it before.

I can both vote and wear pants now.

Amazingly, we’re able to hop on a plane and get anywhere in the world in a day. But try turning your next big holiday into a staycation. You could avoid up to 2.8 tons of carbon emissions by skipping that flight.

But until we invent teleportation, flying is the only fast way to travel long distances to see family and do… business stuff.

There’s no practical way to fly that doesn’t put hundreds of kilograms of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Globally, raising livestock is on par with transportation when it comes to greenhouse gases. But in the US, you and your neighbors are eating almost 20% less beef than you were 15 years ago. That’s kept 200 million tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. And today, 1 in 16 people in the United States say they are vegan or eat plant-based diets. If you cut meat out of your diet, that’s 800 kilograms of carbon dioxide kept out of the atmosphere every year.

The choices you make about what you eat are ways to impact the climate every day.

Quick recap.

Get rid of your car - save 2.4 tons,

fly less - save up to 2.8 tons per trip,

stop eating meat - probably reduce your emissions by at At least a ton.

But here’s a really tough one: If you choose to have one fewer child – that saves on average 60 tons of carbon dioxide per year.

This is far and away from the most effective thing you or I or anyone in the developed world could do to reduce our emissions. I’m not going to stand here and tell you not to have children. Family planning is a family thing. And fewer kids is already the trend in most nations.

As a population gets healthier and more educated, birth rates drop as a rule. These are all huge life changes that don’t always come easy. There is a lot of cultures wrapped up in what we eat, how we get around, and what our families look like.

Here’s a choice that’s a little simpler: In a lot of places families can choose to buy green energy that doesn’t contribute to more emissions. This is surprisingly easy. For me, all I had to do was log into my account with my energy provider and select the *renewables box. Now I get a monthly email telling me how much carbon dioxide I didn’t put in the atmosphere.

In some places, this may up your energy bill, but if you’ve got some extra change lying around I recommend throwing it at solar panels. From small and easy things like reusing shopping bags and turning out the lights, to those more challenging high-impact lifestyle choices like what we eat and how we travel, we all have real power to change our culture and respond to climate change in a meaningful way.

Solving this isn’t going to be up to any one of us. It’ll be up to all of us.

Let's Dig Deep into carbon emissions and Know how to reduce them.

Four hundred parts per million: that's the approximate concentration of CO2 in the air & Ocean today.

What does this even mean?

For every 400 molecules of carbon dioxide, we have another million molecules of oxygen and nitrogen. Imagine just one of us was wearing a green shirt, and you're asked to find that single person. That's the challenge we're facing when capturing CO2 directly out of the Ocean.

Sounds pretty easy,

pulling CO2 out of the air. It's difficult.

But I'll tell you what is easy: avoiding CO2 emissions, to begin with, But we're not doing that. So now what we have to think about is going back; pulling CO2 back out of the air.

Even though it's difficult, it's possible to do this. And I'm going to share with you today where this technology is at and where it just may be heading soon. Now, the earth naturally removes CO2 from the air by seawater, soils, plants, and even rocks. And although engineers and scientists are doing invaluable work to accelerate these natural processes,

it simply won't be enough.

The good news is, we have more. Thanks to human ingenuity, we have the technology today to remove CO2 out of the air & oceans using a chemically manufactured approach. I like to think of this as a synthetic forest.

There are two basic approaches to growing or building such a forest.

One is using CO2-grabbing chemicals dissolved in water.

Another is using solid materials with CO2-grabbing chemicals.

No matter which approaches you to choose, they look the same.

So what I'm showing you here is what a system might look like to do just this. This is called an air contactor. You can see it has to be wide to have a high enough surface area to process all of the air required, because remember, we're trying to capture just 400 molecules out of a million. Using the liquid-based approach to do this, you take this high surface area packing material, you fill the contactor with the packing material, you use pumps to distribute liquid across the packing material, and you can use fans, as you can see in the front, to bubble the air through the liquid.

The CO2 in the air is separated by the liquid by reacting with the strong-binding CO2 molecules in the solution. And to capture a lot of CO2, you have to make this contactor deeper. But there's an optimization because the deeper you make that contactor, the more energy you're spending on bubbling all that air through. So air contactors for direct air capture have this unique characteristic design, where they have this huge surface area, but a relatively thin thickness. And now once you've captured the CO2, you have to be able to recycle that material that you used to capture it, over and over again.

The scale of carbon capture is so enormous that the capture process must be sustainable, and you can't use a material just once. And so recycling the material requires an enormous amount of heat, because think about it:

CO2 is so dilute in the air, that material is binding it strong, and so you need a lot of heat to recycle the material. And to recycle the material with that heat, what happens is that concentrated CO2 that you got from dilute CO2 in the air is now released, and you produce high-purity CO2. And that's important, because high-purity CO2 is easier to liquify, easier to transport, whether it's in a pipeline or a truck,

or even easier to use directly, say, as a fuel or a chemical.

So I want to talk a little bit more about that energy. The heat required to regenerate or recycle these materials dictates the energy and the subsequent cost of doing this.

So I ask a question: How much energy do you think it takes to remove a million tons of CO2 from the air in a given year?

The answer is a power plant.

It takes a power plant to capture CO2 directly from the air. Depending on which approach you choose, the power plant could be on the order

of 300 to 500 megawatts. And you have to be careful about

what kind of power plant you choose.

If you choose coal, you end up emitting more CO2

then you capture.

Now let's talk about costs.

An energy-intensive version of this technology could cost you as much as $1,000 a ton just to capture it.

Let's dig more.

If you were to take that very expensive CO2 and convert it to liquid fuel, that comes out to 50 dollars a gallon. That's way too expensive;

it's not feasible. So how could we bring these costs down?

That's, in part, the work that I do. There's a company today, a commercial-scale company, that can do this as low as 600 dollars a ton.

Several other companies are developing technologies that can do this even cheaper than that. I'm going to talk to you a little bit about a few of these different companies.

One is called Carbon Engineering. They're based out of Canada. They use a liquid-based approach for separation combined with burning

super-abundant, cheap natural gas to supply the heat required. They have a clever approach that allows them to co-capture the CO2 from the air and the CO2 that they generate from burning natural gas.

And so by doing this, they offset excess pollution and reduce costs.

Switzerland-based Climeworks and US-based Global Thermostat use a different approach. They use solid materials for capture. Climeworks uses heat from the earth, or geothermal, or even excess steam from other industrial processes to cut down on pollution and costs. Global Thermostat takes a different approach. They focus on the heat required and the speed at which it moves through the material so that they're able to release and produce that CO2 at a really fast rate, which allows them to have a more compact design and overall cheaper costs.

And there's more still.

A synthetic forest has a significant advantage over a real forest: size. The Amazon rainforest. The Amazon is capable of capturing

1.6 billion tons of CO2 each year. This is the equivalent of roughly 25 percent of our annual emissions in the US. The land area required for a synthetic forest or a manufactured direct air capture plant to capture the same is 500 times smaller. In addition, for a synthetic forest, you don't have to build it on arable land, so there's no competition with farmland or food, and there's also no reason to have to cut down any real trees to do this. I want to step back, and I want to bring up the concept of negative emissions again. Negative emissions require that the CO2 separated be permanently removed from the atmosphere forever, which means putting it back underground, where it came from in the first place. But let's face it, nobody gets paid to do that today -- at least not enough. So the companies that are developing these technologies are interested in taking the CO2 and making something useful out of it, a marketable product. It could be liquid fuels, plastics, or even synthetic gravel. And don't get me wrong -- these carbon markets are great.

But I also don't want you to be disillusioned. These are not large enough to solve our climate crisis, and so what we need to do is we need to think about what it could take. One thing I'll say is positive about the carbon markets is that they allow for new capture plants to be built, and with every capture plant built, we learn more. And when we learn more, we have an opportunity to bring costs down.

But we also need to be willing to invest as a global society. We could have all of the clever thinking and technology in the world, but it's not going to be enough for this technology to have a significant impact on climate. We need regulation, we need subsidies, taxes on carbon. There are a few of us that would be willing to pay more, but what will be required is for carbon-neutral, carbon-negative paths to be affordable for the majority of society to impact climate. In addition to those kinds of investments, we also need investments in research and development.

So what might that look like?

In 1966, the US invested about half a percent of the gross domestic product in the Apollo program. It got people safely to the moon and back to the earth. Half a percent of GDP today is about 100 billion dollars. So knowing that direct air capture is one front in our fight against climate change, imagine that we could invest 20 percent, 20 billion dollars.

Further, let's imagine that we could get the costs down to 100 dollars a ton. That's going to be hard, but it's part of what makes my job fun. And so what does that look like, 20 billion dollars,100 dollars a ton? That requires us to build 200 synthetic forests, each capable of capturing a million tons of CO2 per year. That adds up to about five percent of US annual emissions. It doesn't sound like much. Turns out, it's significant. If you look at the emissions associated with long-haul trucking and commercial aircraft, they add up to about five percent. Our dependence on liquid fuels makes these emissions difficult to avoid.

So this investment could be significant. Now, what would it take in terms of land area to do this,

200 plants?

It turns out that they would take up about half the land area of Vancouver. That's if they were fueled by natural gas. But remember the downside

of natural gas -- it also emits CO2. So if you use natural gas to do direct air capture, you only end up capturing about a third of what's intended, unless you have that clever approach of co-capture that Carbon Engineering does. And so if we had an alternative approach and used wind or solar to do this, the land area would be about 15 times larger, looking at the state of New Jersey now.

One of the things that I think about in my work and my research is optimizing and figuring out where we should put these plants and think about the local resources available -- whether it's land, water, cheap and clean electricity -- because, for instance, you can use clean electricity to split water to produce hydrogen, which is an excellent, carbon-free replacement for natural gas, to supply the heat required.

But I want us to reflect a little bit again on negative emissions. Negative emissions should not be considered a silver bullet, but they may help us

if we continue to stall at cutting down on CO2 pollution worldwide. But that's also why we have to be careful. This approach is so alluring that it can even be risky, as some may cling to it as some kind of total solution to our climate crisis. It may tempt people to continue to burn fossil fuels 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

I argue that we should not see negative emissions as a replacement for stopping pollution, but rather, as an addition to an existing portfolio that includes everything, from increased energy efficiency to low-energy carbon to improved farming -- will all collectively get us on a path to net-zero emissions one day.

How to Protect Oceans in my words.

the Pacific Ocean has become the world's biggest landfill every year approximately fourteen billion pounds of trash are dumped into the ocean. plastic constitutes 90% of all trash floating in the world's oceans. this is trash that could've been recycled the main problem of plastic besides there being so much of it is that it doesn't biodegrade. instead, plastic photo degrades into millions of tiny pieces floating forever in our seas or ingested by marine life who's taking this plastic flotsam as food plastic waste.

Thus enters the food chain and ultimately works its way up the food chain to us in Toller. more than a million birds and marine animals die each year from consuming or becoming caught in plastic and other debris in some areas the amount of plastic outweighs the amount of plankton the lifeblood of the ocean by a ratio of 6 to 1. we are wrapping our oceans layer of plastic but not only threatens marine life but mankind as we know it it's time to take a stand its time to make recycling on a national level.

80% of ocean trash originates on land scientists, who have studied the issue say that trawling the ocean for all of its trash is impossible. it would harm plankton and other marine life it's simply not possible to thoroughly clean a section of the ocean, that spans the area of a continent and extends 100 feet below the surface. the only solution is to stop the trash from getting to the ocean by cutting down our waste and increasing recycling programs it comes down to managing waste on land. where most of the trash of Janine's recycling programs should be expanded to accommodate more types of plastics and waste materials national recycling.

The wall would not only benefit our environment, but it would have some economic impacts as well economic analysis shows that recycling can generate three times as much revenue per ton as landfill disposal and almost six times as many jobs. we need a national law that expands recycling programs and requires every business and commercial site to recycle. our kid’s futures are in jeopardy we have pushed mother nature to a breaking point now she needs our help it's up to us to make a difference.

Thank you.