Elon Musk this year partnered with The X-Prize to create a $100 million prize for the best solutions for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or ocean. This $100 million represents the biggest incentive prize in history, and likely the biggest single investment made into negative emissions to date. We talk wih the X-Prize's Executive Director Marcius Extavour and Erica Dodds, the CEO of the Foundation for Climate Restoration about the prize and the lay of the land when it comes to developing and executing these processes that would pull CO2 back out of the atmosphere.

In this episode we speak to Peter Eisenberger the co-founder of Global Thermostat - one of the leading direct air capture companies in the world.

In the interview we talk about how we could create what Peter calls the renewable energy and materials related economy, how the current Coronavirus pandemic influenced his thinking on climate change, and why he is convinced that all organizations within the direct air capture sector need to cooperate to help accelerate the technology as quickly as possible.

Global Thermostat Website: https://globalthermostat.com/

You can find our original series on direct air capture here: https://bit.ly/directairpod

Today we're featuring an episode from one of our favourite podcasts Future Ecologies, and their new mini-series "Scales of Change."

In the series, hosts Mendel and Adam take a deep dive into the various "Dragons of Climate Inaction," the psychological barriers which prevent us from collectively responding to climate change with the appropriate urgency.

Listen to this episode on "Technosalvation" and subscribe to their series by searching for Future Ecologies, wherever you listen to podcasts.

Website: https://www.futureecologies.net/dragons

It’s the recommendation show! With all the new time many of us have on our hands, we wanted to tip our hat to some of our favourite things we think you should know about. In this episode we speak with Anja Krieger, the journalist behind one of our favourite environmental podcasts called The Plastisphere. In it she investigates the complex nature and hard to solve challenges caused by that most wondrous and durable of materials: plastic. And later on, we feature an episode of the Plastisphere called: “Confused About Bioplastics?”

The Plastisphere’s Website: www.plastisphere.earth

The Plastisphere on Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LpqhWz

The Plastisphere on Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/plastisphere-podcast

Foreign Policy’s Heat of the Moment Podcast: https://foreignpolicy.com/podcasts/heat-of-the-moment-climate-change/

Music in this episode by Podington Bear and Blue Note Sessions

Solomon Goldstein-Rose is a climate activist and former Massachusetts state representative. In his new book, "The 100% Solution" he breaks down what it will take in his view for society to come up with a complete systemic solution to climate change, and achieve net negative emissions by 2050.

Since we first started looking at the science of CO2 removal with our podcast series on direct air capture, a huge amount has happened. So In this episode, we take you inside all the exciting news and developments that have been announced recently, which are pushing the goal of taking large amounts of CO2 back out of the atmosphere closer to reality.

Imagine we overcame the many obstacles and successfully built the giant infrastructure that would be needed to directly capture billions of tons of CO2 back out of the air each year. You might reasonably think that we would have then completely solved the problem. But there’s one big question mark that would still be lingering in the air:

Where exactly are we going to safely store all of this carbon dioxide?

After all, it’s a gas! if you put it in the ground, it’s going to want to come back up.

That’s where an ingenious experiment underway in Iceland called Carbfix comes into play. Nestled among volcanic mountains, a team of scientists are hard at work experimenting with turning large amounts of CO2 into rock.

Is this the new alchemy? Or a genuine solution that could end up helping us solve climate change?

Listen to this, our final episode in our series on negative emissions, to find out!

Carbon dioxide removal does already exist, but only at the tiniest of scales. But what could a future where we're successfully capturing billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the air each year, actually look like?

Where would all the CO2 be stored? What might the carbon capture machines look like? And how are we going to get this whole carbon capturing business off the ground?

We explore these and other questions in this 3rd episode in our series looking at Carbon Dioxide Removal.

(Pictured: an artist's illustration from the Canadian company Carbon Engineering depicting what a future carbon capture installation might look like)

Taking carbon dioxide out of the air - as we learned in our last episode - is technically possible. And different researchers and start-ups are experimenting with the best ways to do just that. But there's much more than engineering that currently stands in the way of seeing Air Capture become a big part of the solution to climate change. There's also the not too small problem of paying for it. For example, would you be willing to pay $10,000 each year to offset your emissions?

In this episode we look at the social, political and financial hurdles that need to be overcome if we truly are going to find a way to take billion of tons of CO2 out of the air each year.

This is Episode 2 of 4 of our series looking at Carbon Dioxide Removal

(Pictured: The Climeworks Carbon Capture plant outside of Zurich Switzerland)

For over the past two decades scientist Klaus Lackner has dedicated himself to finding potential ways of taking CO2 back out of the atmosphere, all in a bid to help the world avoid the worst consequences of climate change. In this episode, we learn about Klaus’s journey, explore the science of CO2 removal, and learn if pulling CO2 back out of the air might just hold the key to us solving climate change.

This is the first of four episodes in a series that we’ll be releasing, which all deal with the subject of carbon dioxide removal. These episodes will be coming out on Wednesdays for the next several weeks.

This series of episode was made possible with funding from EIT Climate-KIC. Climate-KIC is a European knowledge and innovation community, working towards a prosperous, inclusive, climate-resilient society founded on a circular, zero-carbon economy. Find out more at www.climate-kic.org ​