 Hello everybody. Thanks so much for having me here. I'm delighted to talk with you about a topic I've been working on for the last 20 years, actually more than 20 years And this is about how to manage carbon and really this is about climate change and having energy at the same time We need to figure out how to balance our carbon books. So for this theoretical physicist here It seems actually very simple It's a conservation law if you take carbon out of the ground and you put it into the system It will stay there unless you take it back out from a societal perspective This is much much more complicated because as we fix it there will be winners and losers on the other hand We also need to have an engineering response to it. We don't have yet fully developed So our question then is how to do that and I started on the engineering side So I started to work on the idea. How can we pull the co2 back out of the atmosphere? Over those two decades, we all talked a lot about climate change and how serious an issue it is But we ended talking there was very very little action And I think in part that is because we thought of the problem as we have to reduce energy consumption We have to stop doing what we are doing and we should really think about it as a waste management paradigm Which actually I think will help us to make it an easier problem Think what my neighbors would say to me if I simply got out and dumped my garbage in the street and left it there And they would probably call the cops on me And they wouldn't take it for an answer if I came back to them and say see I really thought about this problem I worked very hard on it and over the last two years. I managed to reduce my Emissions my garbage by 20% aren't you proud of me? But if you think about it for a moment, this is exactly how we think about the problem in the terms of the climate change We pat ourselves on the back by having a 10% reduction, which by the way we never had So we have to clean up after ourselves, right? And we have to figure out how to do this the other neat thing about having a waste management Paradigm is that you actually don't have to think of it as something you can't have So which is unavoidable. We know that and therefore we deal with it rather than saying we can't have any right? And so we are working on this on water We we all understand we need water we all need food and we want to clean environment too for energy We actually have to also come to the point to admit that we need it and it gives us clean water It gives us food it gives us raw materials and by the way if we want to clean up after ourselves We also need energy So maybe we can solve the problem by simply avoiding fossil fuels in the in completely Well, perhaps perhaps over time, but not in the time we have so we are not running out of Fossil carbon and climate change is not self-limiting and there always will be an excuse So we have to figure out how to do this differently And I think the answer is we have to demand that we cannot wait We have to demand clean up and then the neat thing of having many different options Is the markets can figure out which of these options are the most cost-effective and which ones we follow So how much time do we have left? Is it a few years? Are we already too late? I think the best analogy to have there is to think about it like a carbon credit card the world is charging to and the problem is like the old American Express We don't really know what the overdraft limit is we don't quite know where we are But we do know the account balance because when we started in the pre-industrial times The CO2 in the atmosphere was stable at 280 parts per million and we started to get worried about it in Rio in 1992 We were at 356 parts per million in the atmosphere And by the way, we had a spending habit of 1.3 parts per million per year Right now we are at 404 parts per million and our spending habit has gone up to 2.5 parts per million a year So we are higher than we ever were and we are racing up in the amount of overdraft faster than we ever had Now it's not clear where exactly the limit is if you talk to the IPCC the intergovernmental panel on climate change They feel it's around 2 degree warming which is equivalent to 450 ppm or so We are about 16 years away from that Right, so we are nearly there and some people like people who subscribe to 350.org think we're already an overdraft And we just haven't quite figured out how much this will hurt because it takes another hundred years to really hurt So here we need to do something here at ASU Center for negative carbon emissions Which I started a couple years ago when I came here We are taking this seriously and we are working on technologies to pull carbon dioxide back from the atmosphere Technically that's not all that difficult if you think about it every tree can do it And by the way there are machines in every submarine and every spacecraft to do the same thing So we know how to do it the trick is to make it affordable So we designed artificial trees which literally stand in the wind There are leaves which are made out of a plastic sort of have the breeze blow over them and they bind the CO2 And they do this about a thousand times faster than a natural tree could do This plastic binds CO2 when it's dry so out in the wind it picks up CO2 after it dried And then it releases it when it's wet. So the process is actually very simple Think of this like leaves or a filter where the air blows through for about 45 minutes to an hour Then it's loaded up then you pack those filters in a box make it wet inside the box Harvest the CO2 which comes off process it further on and once the wet leaves are finished and have given up The CO2 you simply put them back outside and in the wind they dry again and the cycle repeats itself over and over So what do we do with the CO2 once we have it? Well, first of all we can store it right and we are working on mineral sequestration And we are now using minerals you find here in arizona to bind up that CO2 we can also Make that CO2 back in a fuel we are again working on a project where we are taking the CO2 Feeding it to algae which make biofuels out of it. We could also chemically take water And CO2 rip the oxygen out with electrolysis or some other process And then bind it with processes which have been around for a hundred years back into a fuel or alternatively into plastics Which you could store. So if you look at the Infrastructure we have it could hide a lot of carbon. So in a way our air capture becomes on the one side The street sweeper which cleans up the CO2 litter and on the other side It becomes the carbon miner which pulls resources back out of the atmosphere for new materials And of course making products is much more satisfying Then just dumping it into a disposal site But on the other hand we are all responsible for between 15 and 20 tons of CO2 a year We don't have pretty consumed that much So we will have to be honest about it in the end in order to balance the budget We will have to put some of the CO2 away in disposal So carbon taken from the ground must be put back Some people are doubtful that this can be done. They are skeptics and they say you can never reach get Low enough in cost and you can never reach the scale you need to to get to so let's ask the question How big would we have to be If you want a ton a day of carbon dioxide back you will have to build a device which is roughly as big as a trailer truck Or a standard size shipping container you can see in a harbor If you wanted to get all the CO2 back we produce right now by this means You would need 100 million of them That sounds like a horribly large number But on the other hand there are billion automobiles on the on the planet and we build about 80 million of them a year So we have the industrial capacity to get there If we choose to do that so industrial production can make that happen So we we know we can reach the scale the second question is Can we get to an affordable cost and the first question there is what is actually affordable? We are working in our edit. There are a few startup companies who want to sell you CO2 They capture it from the air and we all think we are around a hundred dollars a ton of CO2 Some actually think they could get a little lower with the technology they already have I feel we can get a lot lower if we actually advance the technology we have If you look at how much raw materials we need in the box itself in the energy we consume in the water It's less than 15 dollars per ton. Now. Is that a big number or not? If you think about a hundred dollars a ton that's 85 cents extra on a gallon of gasoline If we can get it down to 30 dollars a ton You would have to pay one quarter per gallon more at the pump in order to be carbon neutral So think about that. So the question then is Can volunteers lead the way to make it happen because we seem to have failed By regulatory ways of doing it imagine you could push a button at the pump Where you say I want my carbon back And you pay an extra 30 cents or maybe 50 cents extra and that carbon will be taken back on your behalf If volunteers started to do that You first of all start having a market Once you have a market It will get cheaper and so you can then Make it happen. So the question then becomes how do we convince people that this actually needs to be done? And that's difficult and will take time But on the other hand it exactly mirrors the discussion we had all in the 19th century about sewage And eventually people got convinced that sewage is dangerous Causes a problem with cholera and typhoid and once people understood that they were willing to pay the money Unfortunately co2 doesn't smell so it's harder to deal with on the other hand every gallon of gasoline you put out Puts 20 pounds of co2 into the atmosphere think about this next time you drive a car Right and it will be there for thousands of years. So how do we get there if we start small? We have to build that first one ton a day unit maybe a few of them That's a 20 million dollar project that you will have them Then you can start mass producing them I would argue we scale up just like the car engines in numbers Not not in sheer size of individual units Then that could actually go quite fast if you look at a picture from New York in 1900 you are hard pressed to find a car if you look in 1925 They're everywhere jet planes got in between 1951 when the first one started to fly and by 1965 the world's fleets With jet planes so it takes a decade or two For a new technology to really get in think of the cell phone. You see the same kind of thing So what we really need is that you and I and everybody else have to demand a closed carbon cycle Which is a little bit like the recycling projects of the 1970s and 80s You can convince people ultimately to do that and if we do that the policies will follow the volunteers In the beginning recycling was entirely voluntary today I don't have all that much of a choice anymore because people accepted it and it's a good thing Right. So volunteers will never change the carbon balance substance substantively because there will never be enough But they will give the politicians ultimately the cover to make it happen So what we need is a well-designed buy back the carbon campaign which sort of mirrors the old recycling Campaigns and in a way then gives the politicians the cover they will need The last 25 years in my view have shown that waiting for others to first Make this happen Will never work Top-down approaches seem to fail miserably. So let's begin at home Ask for ways to buy the carbon back demand that button on the pump and then Over time things will come into balance and I think that's what we will need Thanks so much for your time