DAVID BIELLO

This is where the concept of sky cooling comes in. 

It was inspired by ancient Persians:

 They would spread water out in the desert, in the hot desert, in a thin layer, and overnight it would form ice. And then

Aswath created a multilayer optical material, more than 40 times thinner than a typical human hair, and able to do two things simultaneously. 

1. First, it sends it heat out precisely where our atmosphere lets that heat out the best, targetting in the win...

Despite already promoting biking, public transit, walking, there is a problem with air pollution because of road transportation.

But Amsterdam has a plan to go emissions free by 2030.

• Billions of people in LEDCs simply lack enough energy to build a better life. (ie to run their businesses without daily blackouts/preserve their crops from rotting/power lifesaving medical equipment) Unreliable, expensive energy prevents them from growing and prosper...

Sadly, the world is looking at Africa in a completely contradictory way.

• When one side wants them to grow, to emerge from abject poverty, to build a middle class and become the next global market
• But, anxious to demonstrate action on climate change, ric...

Concrete is made with limestone (fossil carbon), which requires the burning of fossil fuels to get to super high temperatures that allow you to break down the limestone and turn it into concrete.

Yet concrete is an intrinsically low impact material

Yet US and China have been burning through the carbon budget with no restrictions, allowing them to develop to where we are today.

Africa has not benefited from that.

And so, any remaining carbon budget should be allocated to them so that th...

Luckily, chemists are inventing a new way of making cement that cuts down on the release of that CO2. 

L.C 3 uses Calcine clay: it is heated to around 800 degrees Celsius, (significantly lower than the 4050 needed to produce cement.) and th...

That ice formed, even though the temperature never dropped to freezing.

This is because of a window in our atmosphere: 

Certain wavelengths of heat pass right through our atmosphere and back out into space. 

So even thou...

There's twice more carbon in soil than there is in vegetation and air - hence a very small change in the amount of carbon stored in soil can make a big difference in maintenance of the Earth's atmosphere.

 The main problem is most of our agriculture is designed in a...

To make this work, we need this kind of pincer movement.

1. bottom-up pressure = people making these changes on their own (bike more /transitioning from an internal combustion engine car to an electric car) 
2. topmost level...

But electric cars aren’t fool proof, sometimes what has happened is that tailpipe has moved many miles away.

We hope that the electric comes from to a solar farm but in most cases it comes from a coal fired power plant. 

Luckily the technologies we need for this transformation are here today commercially available, getting cheaper and getting better.

E.G the huge bus fleets in China are being switched over to electric : single biggest thing that has been done in the transportation s...

Tom uses the idea that they could cure the concrete with pure CO2 itself, trapping it inside.

This could transform the third largest emitter as a country in the world to a net sink.

Yvonne Acky Sawyer is the mayor of Freetown, which is in Sierra Leone.

 Freetown has been suffering some of the extreme weather due to climate change. 

She ran for mayor with the goal to increase vegetation cover by 50 percent in Freetown by the end of her ter...