As Forest Whitaker guest hosting today, I want to tell you about a new initiative from Ted called Countdown, a global collaboration to accelerate solutions to the climate crisis cut down gives us tools to change the world for the better.

The threat of climate change is real, and it's necessary to discuss it both locally and globally. Now, here's a talk from the countdown. Global launch of it given by fossil fuel scholar Miles Alan Miles is not just knowledgeable about the causes and impacts of climate change. He has radically exciting ideas on tackling fossil fuels. To hear more and get involved. Check out Countdown that Dotcom described the Countdown podcast. Wherever you listening to this? Ted talks daily, is brought to you by the Project Management Institute, the real thought leaders are the ones who turn ideas into action.

Project Management Institute has partnered with TED to showcase the change makers, turning ideas into reality. These powerful TED talks from TED at PME will inspire you to take action and make a big impact. Watch now at PMI Mortgage, Ted. So here's a thought the fossil fuel industry knows how to stop causing global warming, but they're waiting for somebody else to pay and no one is calling them out on it. I was one of the authors of the twenty eighteen IPCC report on one point five degrees Celsius.

And after the report was published, I gave a lot of talks, including one to a meeting of young engineers of one of the world's major oil and gas companies. And at the end of the talk, I got the inevitable question. Do you personally believe there's any chance of a limiting global warming to one point five degrees IPCC reports? Not really my personal opinion. So I turn the question around and said, well, if you had to fully decarbonise your product, that is dispose safely and permanently of one ton of carbon dioxide for every tonne generated by the oil and gas you sell by 2050, which is what it would take, would you be able to do so?

Would the same rules apply to everybody? Somebody asked. Meaning, of course they competition. I say, OK, maybe they would. Now the management just looked at their shoes. They didn't want to answer the question. But the image it is just shrugged and said, yes, of course, you would like it's even a question. So I want to talk to you about what those young engineers know how to do decarbonised fossil fuels, not decarbonise the economy or even decarbonise their own company, but decarbonise the fuels themselves.

And this matters because it turns out to be essential to stopping global warming at a global level. Climate change turns out to be surprisingly simple, to stop global warming, we need to stop dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And since about 85 percent of the carbon dioxide we currently emit comes from fossil fuels and industry, we need to stop fossil fuels from causing further global warming.

So how do we do that? Well, it turns out there's really only two options. The first option is in effect to ban fossil fuels. That's what absolute zero means. No one allowed to extract, sell or use fossil fuels anywhere in the world on pain of a massive fine. If that sounds unlikely, it's because it is and even if a global ban were possible, do you arrive in wealthy countries in 2020? Have any right to tell the citizens of poor and emerging economies in the twenty sixties not to touch their fossil fuels?

Some people argue that if we work hard enough, we can drive down the cost of renewable energy so far that we won't need to ban fossil fuels, the people will stop using them of their own accord. This kind of thinking is dangerously optimistic. For one thing, renewable energy costs might not go down as fast as they hope. I mean, remember, nuclear energy was meant to be too cheap to meter in the 1970s. But even more importantly, we have no idea how low fossil fuel prices might fall in response to that competition.

There are so many uses of fossil carbon from aviation fuel to cement production, it's not enough for carbon free alternatives to outcompete the big ones to stop fossil fuels from causing further global warming. Carbon free alternatives would need to outcompete them all. So the only real alternative to stop fossil fuels causing global warming is to decarbonise them. I know that sounds old decarbonize fossil fuels. What it means is one ton of carbon dioxide has to be safely and permanently disposed of for every tonne generated by the continued use of fossil fuels.

Now, consumers can't do this. So the responsibility has to lie with the companies that are producing and selling the fossil fuels themselves. Their engineers know how to do it. In fact, they've known for decades. The simplest option is to capture the carbon dioxide as it's generated from the chimney of a power station or blast furnace or refinery.

You purify it, compress it, and reinject it back on the ground, if you inject it deep enough and into the right rock formations, it stays that just like the hydrocarbons it came from. To stop further global warming, permanent storage has to mean tens of thousands of years at least, which is why trying to mop up our fossil carbon emissions by planting trees can help, but it can only be a temporary stopgap. For some applications like aviation fuel, for example, we can't capture the carbon dioxide at source, so we have to recapture it, take it back out of the atmosphere that can be done.

This company is already doing it, but it's more expensive. And this points to the single most important reason why recapturing and safe disposal of carbon dioxide is not already standard practice cost. It's infinitely cheaper just to dump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than it is to capture it and dispose of it safely back underground. But the good news is we don't need to dispose of 100 percent of the carbon dioxide we generate from burning fossil fuels right away.

Economists talk about cost effective pathways by which they mean ways of achieving a result without unfairly dumping too much of the cost onto the next generation.

And a cost effective pathway which gets us to decarbonizing fossil fuels, 100 percent carbon capture and storage by 2050, which is what net zero means, takes us through 10 percent carbon capture in 2030, 50 percent in 2040, 100 percent in 2050. To put that in context, we are currently capturing and storing less than nought point one percent. So don't get me wrong, decarbonizing fossil fuels is not going to be easy, it's going to mean building a carbon dioxide disposal industry comparable in size to today's oil and gas industry.

The only entities in the world that have the engineering capability and the deep pockets to do this are the companies that produce the fossil fuels themselves. We can all help by slowing down our use of fossil carbon to buy them time to decarbonise it, but they still have to get on with it now. Adding the cost of carbon dioxide disposal will make fossil fuel based products more expensive. I mean, a 10 percent storage requirements by 2030, for example, might add a few pence to the cost of a litre of petrol.

But unlike a tax, that money is clearly being spent on solving the problem. And of course, consumers will respond perhaps by switching to electric cars, for example, but they will need to be told to do so. And crucially, if developing countries agree to use fossil fuels that have been progressively decarbonised in this way, then they never need to accept limits on the absolute amount that they consume, which they fear might constrain their growth. Over the past couple of years, more and more people have been talking about the importance of carbon dioxide disposal, but they're still talking about it as if it's to be paid for by philanthropy or tax breaks.

But why should foundations or the taxpayer pay to clean up after a still profitable industry?

No, we can decarbonise fossil fuels and if we do decarbonise fossil fuels, as well as getting things like deforestation under control, we will stop global warming. And if we don't, we won't. It's as simple as that. But it's going to take a movement to make this happen. So how can you help? Well, it depends on who you are. If you work or invest in the fossil fuel industry, don't walk away from the problem by selling off your fossil fuel assets to someone else who cares less than you do, you own this problem.

You need to fix it. Decarbonising your portfolio helps no one but your conscience, you must decarbonise your product. If you're a politician or a civil servant, you need to look at your favorite climate policy and ask, how is it helping to decarbonise fossil fuels? How is it helping to increase the fraction of carbon dioxide we generate from fossil fuels that is safely and permanently disposed of? If it isn't, then it may be helping to slow global warming, which is useful.

But unless you believe in that ban, it isn't going to stop it. Finally, if you're an environmentalist, you probably find the idea of the fossil fuel industry itself playing such a central role in solving the climate change problem, disturbing when those carbon dioxide reservoirs leak, you'll worry or won't some in the industry cheat over the coming decades? That probably will be leaks and there may be cheats, but those leaks and those cheats will make decarbonising fossil fuels harder.

They don't make it optional. Global warming won't wait for the fossil fuel industry to die, and just tooling for it to die is letting it off the hook from solving its own problem. In these divided times, we need to look for help and maybe even friends in unexpected places, it's time to call on the fossil fuel industry to help solve the problem their product has created. Their engineers know how we just need to get the management to look up from their shoes.

Thank you. PR ex.