Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman, and you're listening to Science Versus. Today on the show, How do we solve the Climate Crisis? Can we do it? A couple of weeks ago, we had an episode about climate change tipping points that ended a little, sadly. The climate's not doing well. It's hot. There's been fires, there's been floods, and we may have even crossed some rather scary climate tipping points. But I did tell you that there was hope, and that's what this episode is hopefully about. We asked for your questions, what you want to know when it comes to solving the climate crisis. We heard from hundreds of people all around the globe. Generally, these questions fit into two big batches. One, what can me, as a little individual person, do for the climate, if anything? Two, what exciting new technologies could help get us out of this mess? To answer these questions and more, we have our first guest, Dr. Sven Teske. He is the research director at the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology, Sydney. Sven studies how countries and industries can do the seemingly impossible, which is to get off fossil fuels. He has written detailed analysis for more than 50 countries for how they can get to net zero.

These are countries like the US, China, India, France, and Bangladesh. Welcome to the show, Sven.

Thanks for inviting me.

Our second guest is Wei Su. She is the Head of Strategy at Monash University's Climate Work Center in Melbourne. Climate Works is a climate nonprofit that gives advice to governments and companies about how to reduce their emissions, focusing on Australia, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific. Wei is a self-described nerd at heart. So welcome to It's a family.

Thanks for having me.

Question number one actually comes from the Science versus team. When you both think about climate change right now, which song best represents where we're at? I'll give you some options. It's the End of the World as We Know It by R. E. M, Cruel Summer by Taylor Swift. We Can Work It Out by the Beatles. Sunshine, Lollipops, and Rainbows, famously by Leslie Gore. What do you Where are we at with the climate right now? We can work it out. We can work it out.

I actually agree.

Why do you say that?

There's actually some really simple steps if you distill it down to what can be done. These steps are wonderful.

We'll have to save them for after the break. We don't want to do a spoiler alert there. Now, Sven, as someone who's been in the climate space for a long time, decades now, what's been the most frustrating thing for you?

Well, I was at COP1, a youth representative, so I'm almost 60 now.

So introduce people who don't know what's COP.

Cop1, the Climate Negotiations. They started in Berlin in 1995.

You were a little Greta Thunberg, were you? No.

I was about... It was my late '20s. The first 10 years of those climate negotiations, we were discussing, do we actually We have climate change. The next 10 years was, Yeah, we might have it, but it's not us. Then the last 10 is, Okay, we have climate change, and it is us. What can we do? We continue to go through the same loops of conversation. It's like an endless spiral that never actually continues. We really need to move on and focus on what works, and we actually know what works.

For you, maybe the The song of this moment is Lizzo It's About Damn Time.

Groundhog Day.

Groundhog Day. All right. Well, with all of that and a bit of hope and a bit of frustration, which sounds right for the time that we're in, after the break, we're going to jump into a list of questions.

What does the AI revolution mean for jobs, for getting things done? Who are the people creating this technology? And what do they think? I'm Rana El Khayoubi, an AI scientist, entrepreneur, investor, and now host of the new podcast, Pioneers of AI. Think of it as your guide for all things AI with the most human issues at the center.

Join me every Wednesday for Pioneers of AI.

Don't forget to subscribe wherever you tune in.

Welcome back. All right, let's jump in and find out how we can solve the climate crisis. To kick us off, Sven, let's just set the scene. Sarah Rose in a Bubble on Instagram wants to know, who creates the biggest carbon footprint?

If you look at the historical footprint, it's the US.

So if you look at- So historical is, how far are we going back here?

Between 1800 when it started, so the industrialization started until 2019. That's the The carbon emissions during that period, there were 450 gigatons of CO₂ from the US and about 280 from China. Oh, wow.

The US is ahead by a mile. Yeah.

If we look at the emissions now, China is by far the largest emitter. One-third of all emissions globally energy-related come from China, while having 18% of the population.

Our next question is from from sassy bitch Maddie on Instagram. The question is, I hear all the time that our individual choices won't have enough of an impact on climate change because of big corporations and government emissions. Is there anything we should be doing in our day-to-day that will actually make a meaningful difference in the face of climate change. Wei, what do you think?

Definitely. Even if we just start within our own homes, for example, if you think about where we use energy and where we create emissions, just going about our day-to-day When we cook, when we heat, when we cool, when we drive our cars to get from one place to another, all of that uses energy and therefore produces emissions. There are some simple steps that anyone today can take, which will actually have a significant impact, and I'll talk through that a little bit. But if we start with just thinking about energy efficiency, or put another way, minimizing wastage.

Having on a very basic level, having a window open while your heat is on.

Or just putting on a jumper before you think about putting the heater on that requires energy.

Does any of that actually make a difference? If you added up, if everyone in America put on a jumper instead of putting on their heating, would it matter?

But everything needs to happen because if everyone thinks that it's not going to matter, then it's not going to happen. That's one way to see it. But the energy efficiency side of things also has the additional benefit of actually reducing people's energy bills. Then there's other things that you can do as well around shifting away from from relying on fossil fuels. For example, rooftop solar PVs now are like people walk down the street and they see lots of it on their home, on other people's homes or on your own homes.

Surveys find that a lot of people think that recycling is one of the best things that they can do to reduce their carbon footprint. When it comes to recycling, at Mustash Ballerina on Instagram wants to know, how exactly does it help? How much of an impact does it make on climate change? I actually thought recycling It doesn't do anything for climate change. I'm very interested in this.

Recycling in itself, in principle, will actually have an impact on emissions because it avoids the extraction of raw materials. For example, plastics being- Everything.

Produce plastic, you produce fabrics from large extent, out of oil.

They're petroleum-based. By recycling plastics, it means that you avoid going upstream in the process to actually have to, for lack of a better term, Digging things out of ground requires energy, which has an emissions impact. There is that element in terms of avoiding that energy and emissions that goes into the production of raw materials. However, it can vary The amount of the emissions benefit from recycling different materials can vary.

The good news on steel, but also aluminum, is you can recycle it endlessly. You can't recycle plastic endlessly because it won't work. But steel and aluminum, we can recycle actually almost endlessly.

But people are recycling a yogurt tubs, milk bottles. Is the plastic from that making any difference?

Everything makes a difference.

But I mean- That's the answer for no. If both of you could snap your fingers and everyone on the planet would give up one thing for climate, what would it be? Options could include giving up meat, never flying in a plane again, never driving a gas car again, not having children.

I think riding a bicycle or walking and then downsize your car. I mean, you don't really need a very, very, very large car to move from A to B. I think a smaller car, electric vehicle, can do the same job.

Okay. Are those the things? Going vegan is not on either of your list. Are both of you big burger fans?

I think it's very important. I mean, for me, to be perfectly honest, I'm an engineer and focus on what I know.

So methane that comes out from cows, essentially, these emissions, they are quite large and actually quite difficult to address as well for a couple of reasons. They are very fragmented.

What do you mean by fragmented? It comes out of each cow.

Exactly. In terms of needing to capture it, it's almost an impossible task logistically.

You put a muzzle on every cow because it's from their burps. Exactly. Pivot on to EVs, electric vehicles. We had a lot of questions about these. Jake on TikTok wants to know, are electric vehicles making any impact at all? Does the energy they use from charging and being built still come from fossil fuels. Wait, you want to take this one?

Regardless of the amount of fossil fuels that are in the electricity grid, it is actually still better to drive an electric vehicle than it is to drive a petrol vehicle. The simplest reason there is because petrol cars are simply very inefficient in converting petrol into the energy that is required to move that chunk of metal along the road. And electric motors are actually a lot more efficient at doing that. An average combustion engine has an efficiency of about 50%, usually less.

You lose at least half of the petrol you put in your tank. Then if you then calculate the amount of energy you actually get on the wheels, when the rubber hits the road, you are down to 20%. Wow, so much wasted energy in your average gas-guzzling car.

Yes. Wow. Evs, how efficient are they? Much more efficient.

Electric engines have an efficiency of about 90%, The extreme growth of electric vehicles in China, first time ever, led to a reduction of the oil demand. We actually see that electric vehicles cut into oil demand. Okay, it's tiny, but it starts.

We can grow.

Choosing to buy an electric vehicle, for example, when you're replacing your petrol car, that sends a strong signal to car makers around the world that people want electric vehicles, and then they will go off and invest to invest in more technologies that are around electric vehicles or the infrastructure to charge electric vehicles. While individually, maybe my decision to buy one car is not going to make a difference, but collectively, it can make a difference.

With electric vehicles, though, there has been a lot of concern around how we're getting the materials used to make the batteries. We're trying to get these materials like cobalt and lithium. People say that the way that we do it now is really harmful for the planet. We got a couple of questions about this, probably because there's been a lot of headlines like this one, why surging sales of large electric vehicles raise environmental red flags. Is this actually a problem that we need to fix?

I think, yes, we need to fix it. But I have to say we also have options to avoid some material. For example, cobalt is technically not needed for batteries anymore. We can actually use battery. We can build batteries that don't need cobalt. We can phase out cobalt from batteries, and we should. Lithium is an element which is really, really almost everywhere. We're not running on of lithium.

That's interesting because they're called rare earth minerals. They really need a brand update, don't they?

No, I mean, lithium is not a rare earth. There are other rare earth metals. Also, if you look at rare earth, what is it used for? Electronics to a large extent, mobile phones, and every single electric motor or generator needs that. No matter if it's a wind turbine, a gas, a coal power plant, they all have the same metals in there. Unfortunately, we focus right now the debate about wind turbines using magnets with rare earth, but the gas power plant next door uses exactly the same.

The half the electronics Like stuff in your home is also using these minerals?

The laptops are not like an end of-Not my laptop. Come on now.

Also using these minerals. Interesting. Why the big blow up around renewables?

When I started promoting renewables for solutions, it was very expensive. It was $10 per kilowatt hour. How many years ago was it? That was 30 years ago. We are now at four cents or three cents. The argument against renewables is not the price anymore because it's the cheapest form of electricity generation. You can't do it cheaper than solar and wind. Full stop. There's no other technology. It's really cheap. The only argument, if you are an incumbent company, it's like a coal or gas power plant, is to argue, to find arguments against them, and the medal is one.

Interesting. Just broadly speaking, how do you feel about this idea that the individual, that we can make a change. Little old me can make a change.

While a lot of emissions are controlled and influenced by governments or big corporates, consumers or voters have a huge influence over the actions and decisions that corporates and governments make.

I mean, it's not a yes or no. Of course, you need to change. But maybe I'm too long around to see see that it doesn't work that way. We won't solve the climate crisis with voluntary measures. We need policy, and we need specific policy to implement specific technologies and to face on others. Without that, we won't be able to do it. It's nice if we can do something in our own household, but it will be only a very small fraction of what we actually need to do. But No, don't. I would say the biggest difference, first and foremost, is vote for politicians who actually implement the policy we need to change our economic system, to decarbonize our energy system.

I feel like where you're both headed is the biggest things we can do is if you are buying a new car, go EV. If you can do without a car, even better. And then voting, really, and I guess keeping your home as energy-efficient as possible.

It is important to actually also change your diet and eat less meat. Maybe not Totally give it up, but really eat less. That's, I think, the first good step.

Remember, during the Paris Agreement, the world agreed to net zero. You can't get to zero if there's still bits left.

Yes. We're going to have a quick break, and after that, we'll find out if carbon offsets are the biggest climate scams. Welcome back. Let's jump back in. This next one is a question that I've been thinking about a lot. It comes from music2742 on TikTok. They ask, When you look at carbon offsets, are these systems actually working? Sven, did you pay to offset your flight today?

It's a standard for our university to do that.

Is it a waste of money? Should they have done it?

It definitely serves a feel good factor.

Feel good. Well, let's go back a hot minute. When you do tick that box to say that you will pay an extra $8 to offset your flight, what is actually going on? How does carbon offsetting work?

I would say, let's put it first in a positive way. The idea was actually quite good, saying, Okay, we have some processes where we can't reduce the emission right now. We have another process, this old ancient machine to get CO₂ out of the air. It's called a tree. We plant them and then it levels out. In theory, that's a good idea.

What it's doing, basically, is your flight is going to emit just as many emissions as it always would. But instead, what they're going to do is plant trees somewhere else that somehow they've calculated how much that tree is going to remove carbon from the atmosphere. They're like, That's about right.

That's probably the first problem, because in the tree, when you plant it, will not take any CO₂ out of the air.

When you put a seed in, it's not going to do anything. It needs to get leaves first.

10, 15 After 10, 15 years, you start to actually see something.

It needs to survive for that 10, 15 years.

Let's hope it will not burn down like in the last forest fires or bushfires in Australia.

Yes, because there have been several now instances of huge swathes of forests that have been set aside for carbon offsetting, and now they burnt. Then when they burn, they then emit carbon into the atmosphere.

Yeah, they emit the same amount of CO₂ they actually captured before, obviously. There are other forms of offsets. For example, you invest in solar equipment in African country where They would usually maybe burn kerosine for light.

But fundamentally, offsetting is about the fact that I can't reduce the emissions by virtue of taking a plane or a flight, but I'm paying someone else to do it elsewhere. Now, that can be anywhere. The challenge there is, one, it's remote. It happens elsewhere. There is what we call a measurement and verification problem.

How am I- You don't know it's actually happening.

Exactly. If it's a tree planting project, what trees are they planting? How long have the trees been there? Are the trees going to survive? How much carbon is the tree going to sequester? All of those are questions that the payer, in this case myself, don't have readily accessible answers to. Yes.

I mean, carbon offsetting has also been blamed for allowing this huge industry of greenwashing to emerge. For example, there's this huge gas company of fossil fuel. It has a goal to be net zero by 2050. They've said that a big way they're going to do that is through offsets. How can a fossil fuel company be net zero?

That doesn't work. Sorry, that It doesn't work. On a global scale, if you sell gas, you will have emissions. With whom do you want to trade? With Mars? You can't. You have to actually reduce the fossil It's not going to fuel emissions entirely.

Okay, so then let's move to renewables. Canary Exploater on Instagram asks, How good are solar and wind these days? Can we really use it to power a bunch of our energy needs? Wei.

Solar and wind is really good these days. It is already one of the cheapest forms of new electricity generation. If anyone wants to think about building a new power station, solar and wind is the cheapest form of technology today. Wow.

How did that happen? How How did that happen?

One of the reasons is because of the sheer amount of solar and wind that has been built over the years. I'm a nerd at heart, as I said. About 10, 12 years ago, when we first started modeling solar PV as a technology, it was more expensive than things like some energy efficiency options, and it was more expensive than carbon farming, which is essentially tree planting. But today, it is one of the cheapest forms of technology in Australia, but also in other parts of the world, I'm sure. We are already seeing solar and wind making a huge impact in terms of reducing the emissions that come from powering our homes, in cases, our cars, our industries, and When I started my engineering degree, the global market for solar was about 60 megawatts.

Now we build 1,200 megawatts a day. That is economies of scale.

Solar panels are modular. You can actually bring down the cost of producing a solar panel significantly the more you make them. You can get huge economies of scale by having a factory line that's basically churning out solar panels and get much more efficient and much better and much smarter at doing it when you do thousands, millions. The difference between that and a gas or a coal power plant is that they are still going to be tied to needing to pay for the gas or pay for the coal or needing to extract- Pay to mine it out of the ground.

Mine it out of the ground.

Up to a point. Well, yes, you can't get that down to zero. Whereas with a solar plant, once you've got the panels in place, most of your cost is up front and it costs very little to continue maintaining it. You don't put any fuel into running a solar plant.

Fossil fuels, people are constantly complaining about the gas prices. Why are fossil fuels not getting cheaper?

Because it's not a technology, it's a source. That's why for so few companies will have a problem and had a problem in the past to actually go to renewables because that is absolutely not their business. They are digging out resources out of the ground. A solar and wind company is a technology company. They produce technologies, and it's a total different business concept.

In 2023, renewables provided 30% of global electricity for the first time, according to the think tank, EMBA. Also, calculations suggest that this year in Europe, they just hit this big milestone where wind and solar has overtaken fossil fuels for the first time. In the first half of this year, wind and solar power generated more electricity than fossil fuels in Europe. It's amazing. Just one more stat. In China, clean power made up 35% of China's electricity mix in 2023, all according to EMBA.

China is a big reason. Solar PV costs have fallen so much.

If we keep taking on renewables at the rate that we are with solar and wind, can we hit net zero?

Unfortunately, with the emissions that we talked about earlier, so a methane emissions from cows or process emissions from cement production being two examples, there are others. Renewables, unfortunately, is not going to be the silver bullet that will address those type of emissions.

Let's put it this way. It's the silver bullet for the energy part of the problem.

I feel like part of the climate denial, the journey of climate denialism, let's say, started with, as Sven, you told us at the beginning of the show, started with this isn't happening, it's It's happening, but it's not our problem. Oh, no, it's our problem, and it's definitely happening. Oh, but renewables, when the sun's not shining, when the wind isn't blowing, what are we going to use?

Storage.

What are we going to use? Tell me. Batteries. This is working. This is working. We're doing it.

I would say the electricity will be dominated by solar and wind in the next 10, 15 years. Most countries It will go north of 60%, so that is a relatively clean.

This is so exciting. It's happening.

It's happening. It's happening. It's just because it's cheaper and it's actually quicker to build. A coal power plant takes you 6, 7, 10 years to build. Solar and wind takes you depending on how long you wait for the construction permit. But once you have that, it's a few months.

Yesterday alone, a record high was set in Australia, where solar generated 64% of electricity.

Wow. Renewables, really exciting. Really exciting. They're going to do a lot of work here in helping us solve the climate crisis. But this does take us to our next question, which comes from Ian in Iowa.

It seems like nuclear power might be the silver bullet.

It seems like the big thing that's holding it back is the fear of a nuclear meltdown and disposing of the nuclear reactant and whatever's left over when you're done.

Am I right about that assumption that if we just switched over to nuclear, we would just fix everything? Or am I missing something bigger here? He's missing something bigger There we are there.

Okay. All right. Let's start. Tell us about where you grew up, because this is very relevant.

It's relevant.

Little Sven. What happened to you?

Little Sven was about 18 years old, and And just moved out with his friend, Dieter, and we lived together, and Chenobyl exploded. Chenobyl was only 1,700 kilometers from my hometown, and we had nuclear fall out in my hometown. We were not allowed to eat food, vegetables from our garden for two years. So we had to wash our clothes before we enter the apartment. So we basically We experienced firsthand what it means when a nuclear reactor actually blows up. At that time, I was an offset printer. I was a tradie. I decided to study engineering, to study renewable engineering, to actually provide a solution.

Then we fast forward.

For listeners who- I just wanted to add some stats. Nuclear right now, like 1 kilowatt capacity to build is about 6-10 times more expensive than wind and solar. A nuclear reactor construction on average, we have about 450 nuclear reactors globally. The construction takes on average 12 years. There is a one reactor in the US which took 30 years. It is extremely expensive. It is very slow. Then you nuclear waste. Germany paid about €40 billion, which is about €50 billion to build the fleet. Now, they pay exactly the same amount of money to decommission the fleet. It cost €1.1 billion a year for generations to come to store the nuclear waste next to the former nuclear power plant. We have no concept where to put My son, who just started working as an engineer, and his kids have to pay for grandpa and grandmother who actually had electricity from those power plants. It is extremely expensive. It's too slow, too expensive. We don't need it.

If I could be the nuclear lobbyist for the day, just to play. It is clean energy. It's not a Emitting carbon dioxide, at least. The length of time it takes to build it, I have heard a lot of that is getting permits, which is true of renewables as well. But is that the actual building process, even if the government was like, Let's do it.

It still takes too long. China is a good example. China has no problem giving permits. Five to six years is the absolute minimum. Usually, it's seven to 10 years.

Right. So you Would you agree nuclear not part of the solution?

Nuclear is definitely not the silver bullet. Firstly, it only addresses energy emissions, if at all, and then I'll get to that.

But then- We can't put little nuclear on our.

No, we can't. I don't even know how that would work. It still does not address non-energy emissions as we talked about. But the way I see it, when faced with these options where you have nuclear or renewable energy technologies, so you still have to put uranium in as a form of fuel for the life of the nuclear plant. Not the same case in renewable energy. You don't need to pay for the sun and wind. Not to mention the really huge hidden cost, if you like, which is the environmental impact and the social impact that nuclear plants can have, all of which does not come with wind and solar technologies.

Forget it.

Forget it. Okay, so forget nuclear. Our last batch of questions, really, a lot of people were We're curious about exciting big projects that can help get us out of this mess. Here is Liz.

There are days when I feel like all the little incremental changes are just not going to work.

My question is, do any of the big dramatic options, like the giant shade that someone wanted to put in space, Do any of those actually seem like they would work?

Are any of those something that I should be getting behind and supporting?

Because I'm honestly not sure.

Wei, is a giant shade going to save us?

I can't say yes or no at the moment, but there is a role for some of these new emerging, almost science fiction technologies. I am generally quite a bit excited about new technologies because I do believe that That solar and wind was that big shade that people are talking about today. Thirty years ago, people didn't understand that, how can we reliably get electricity at scale from this panel that absorbs solar radiation? Now we can. Who am I to say that this big shade isn't going to be the thing that's going to come and save us? However, we don't know that yet today.

Okay, Sven, what do you think? Because there's, I guess, other ideas out there. We're going to suck There's carbon out of the sky. There's direct air capture. We've got geo-engineering projects, giant shades. How do you feel about all these balls in the air?

I'm a professor at the Technical University. I'm agnostic. I'm interested in technology, but also I've seen a lot of proposals, which the first and foremost, the job is to delay to implement a solution and just to keep going business as usual.

That's right.

If I read one more headline about what about this?

What about that? My concern is that it gives people this idea that some magic scientific technology will come and save the day We can just keep living our lives on fossil fuels until that magic moment comes.

But my question is, do we really want to live on fossil fuel or do we want to have energy? I I don't want to have fossil fuels. I want to have a climatised home. I want to drive. I want to do stuff. But at the end of the day, as a consumer, isn't it totally irrelevant if it's from electricity or is it burning oil? It doesn't matter as long as it works.

To cap us off, how hopeful are you both feeling that we will solve this, that we will stay below some temperature that means we're not completely screwed?

I totally I believe that. I have to say. Do you really? I totally believe that because I think, first, we have no other option. Secondly, all the solutions actually grow exponentially right now. Solar and wind grows exponentially. I think that's the real hope That's a wonderful thing. All the solutions currently grow exponentially. That's really good.

We can do this. We are also seeing the most momentum in the public and private sector than we have ever seen in the past.

You're seeing this because you're going Getting into those offices, meeting those suits.

Yeah. We've got a commitment from basically every country in this world to get to net zero. The time matters how quickly we can get there, but there is a commitment. Most governments in the world have policies in place to reach these commitments to different extents, but they are talking about this. Net zero is now a household term where emissions wasn't even a thing 20 years ago. We are seeing the most momentum than we have ever seen in the past, in history, really, around understanding and acknowledging climate change and then taking action and also making some significant real investments, both by the public and private sector, in terms of reducing emissions.

Because a lot of our listeners, there was a lot of depression, a lot of hopelessness, but we don't need to feel like that. No. Thank you. Thank you both. It's Ben and's Fenn and way.