Precis

For years scientists have been quietly working on extreme, last ditch solutions to slow global warming - just in case governments worldwide don’t get their acts together.

Cue scientists.

With the UN warning of climate catastrophe, it’s increasingly looking like a case of when, not if, we will reach for the once unthinkable fix: geo-engineering, or artificially hacking the climate.

We’re in deep shit and we need to dig ourselves out. For better or worse, geo-engineering is part of the mix going forward because we can’t get to where we need to be by conservation alone – Jason Box, Copenhagen-based ice climatologist and former IPCC lead author

Some climate hacking has moved beyond the research labs. In Switzerland, a start-up builds giant fans that suck carbon from the air. It’s then sold to a greenhouse where it’s absorbed by plants to make them grow faster.

In the not too distant future, imagine sprinkling iron filings into the seas to encourage carbon eating plankton… Or sending armadas of ships to pump sea mist into the sky to diffuse the sun’s rays… Or using high-altitude balloons to scatter sulphur in the atmosphere to lower the temperature – a bit like what happened naturally after the Mt Pinatubo volcano erupted in 1991.

All these and more are on the drawing board.

If anything it’s too cheap, so cheap we’re talking single digit billions of dollars to potentially influence the entire planet’s climate – Harvard University’s Gernot Wagner on his sulphur blocking project

Because it’s so cheap, it’s very likely to happen sooner or later. Some Indian billionaire or some Saudi billionaire is going to do it all by himself – Bjørn Lomborg, political scientist

Geo-engineering scientists know they may be playing God.

There’s a huge amount of hubris in saying, ‘Let’s fix the problem and we know exactly what’s going to happen.’ Quite frankly, it makes me anxious – Frank Keutsch, Harvard engineering professor

Apart from some potentially nasty side effects like damaging the ozone layer, there’s also a risk that climate hacking will give government and industry an excuse to run dead on cutting carbon.

It’s not unlike America’s opioid problem, according to Frank Keutsch.

Like pain killers, this doesn’t fix the problem. We’re just reducing symptoms and then human nature can kick in and say, ‘Well you know, it’s hard to deal with changing the energy infrastructure’ - Keutsch

The fossil fuel industry is looking to less exotic solutions. In Texas, reporter Eric Campbell tours a “clean coal” power station that’s held up as a model by the Australian Government. The idea is to capture much of the carbon before it’s expelled into the air.

But as Campbell discovers, the technology is not as clean as it seems. It’s also hugely expensive and still in its infancy…

…Which just makes it more likely that the climate hackers, perhaps sooner than you might think, will have their day in the sun.

Episode teaser. GFX: Foreign Correspondent

TEASE ERIC CAMPBELL: Twelve years to avoid catastrophe.  That’s the UN’s grim warning on climate change.

PROF JASON BOX: “We’re already pretty fucked.  I like to say we’re in deep shit and we need to dig ourselves out”.

ERIC CAMPBELL: Governments are failing to cut emissions, but could new technology be the shovel to save us.

DR BJØRN LOMBORG: “We could basically find the thermostat of the planet and say what would you like it to be placed at?”

00:00

ERIC CAMPBELL: Tonight, we’re travelling the world to see technology to change the climate.  In Switzerland, giant fans that suck carbon from thin air.

00:36

CHRISTOPH GEBALD: “It is that simple”.

00:48

PROF FRANK KEUTSCH: “So this is a big vacuum tank”.

ERIC CAMPBELL: And at Harvard, a sulphur seeding project to literally lower the entire earth’s temperature.

00:50

“Do you ever worry that this is playing God?”

00:58

PROF JASON BOX: “It may sound like science fiction to talk about techno fixes to climate, but we have to get really smart as a species and stop doing things that are risking our future”.

01:02

ERIC CAMPBELL: So will brave new technology save the world?  Or could it just be an excuse to keep burning the planet.

01:16

GFX: Foreign Correspondent

01:25

GFX:  Climate Hackers

01:31

GFX: Copenhagen, Denmark

01:40

People on bikes

ERIC CAMPBELL: We start our journey in a city moving on from carbon.

01:43

Campbell walking on street
GFX:
reporter
Eric Campbell

Few places are as eager as

01:49

GVs Copenhagen/Wind turbines

Copenhagen to get power from wind, and even in this weather, from sun. 

01:53

Drone shots. Solar panels

02:01

People on bikes. Bike shots around city/Bondam cycling

Nowhere has been keener to ditch cars for bikes.  Klaus Bondam is Director of the Danish Cyclists Federation and a former mayor of this city.  He’s leading its push to be the first carbon neutral capital by 2025.

02:03

KLAUS BONDAM: [former Copenhagen mayor] “I do believe that there is a strong political consensus in Denmark that we need to act.  It’s pretty cold right now, but we had an extremely hot summer.  It didn’t rain for two and a half months here. 

02:25

Campbell with Bondam. Super:
Klaus Bondam
Former Copenhagen mayor

But it made us think is this right?  Is there something going on?  And I think we have to realise that something is going on”.

02:39

People on bikes

ERIC CAMPBELL:  Copenhagen has been breaking all records in traditional ways to clean the air.

“Now according to this metre,

02:47

Campbell to camera standing by digital sign on street

1631 have crossed this bridge this morning alone. In the past year, it’s been three million, five hundred and nineteen thousand and sixty-two. It’s extraordinary.  But the problem is no matter how much we ride,

02:57

no matter how much we recycle, no matter how fast communities transition to renewables, it’s probably not going to be fast enough, because governments aren’t meeting the commitments they made at the Paris Climate Change Conference to cut emissions.  The politics are failing.  Which is why there’s now such an urgent push to try new technology, to experiment with things that sounds like science fiction, but could be the only way to ensure a secure future is a fact”.

03:12

Wildfire/IPCC meeting

The warning was sounded in October by the IPCC, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change.  Leading scientists

03:45

GFX: Graph showing 45% cut by 2030

said carbon needed to be almost halved from 2010 levels to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees.  Otherwise runaway temperatures would destroy

04:00

GFX: Graph showing temperature rise by 2100

the Great Barrier Reef, droughts and hurricanes would become the norm.  Melting ice sheets would flood major cities.

04:13

Jason Box pushing craft off ice into water

But ice climatologist Jason Box, a former contributing author to the IPCC, says even that won’t be enough.

PROF JASON BOX: [Ice Climatologist] “It’s frightening and I’m sorry to say this, but at one and a half degrees of global warming, we still have like two and a half degrees of summer Arctic warming and

04:25

Campbell with Jason Box. Super:
Prof Jason Box
Ice Climatologist

that pushes Greenland beyond its threshold of viability, so we still lose Greenland, but at a slower rate”.

04:44

Greenland drone shots

ERIC CAMPBELL:  Based in Copenhagen, he measures ice retreat for the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland.

PROF JASON BOX: “When we lose the reflective cover of the Artic sea ice, when we lose the Greenland ice sheet, the climate system globally unravels and it’s going to create the kind of

04:52

Jason Box

problems that will make it pretty hard to govern society. 

05:17

People queueing for water

The migrations, the droughts, those destabilise our societies and our economies in ways that we lose control.  So what’s at risk here is

05:21

Jason Box

practically civilisation”.

05:32

Jason working in Arctic

ERIC CAMPBELL: Professor Box shares the frustration of all scientists contributing to the IPCC.  Evidence gathered through years of painstaking fieldwork is often just ignored by politicians.

05:34

PROF JASON BOX: “Politicians and governments that dismiss IPCC reports, that’s not conservative, it’s not progressive - certainly

05:52

Campbell with Jason

it is insanity”.

06:00

Satellite pic of earth

ERIC CAMPBELL: He fears the world will need massive technological fixes called geoengineering, literally re-engineering the earth to hold back what’s coming.

PROF JASON BOX: “For example, we can slow down melting of the

06:03

Jason

Antarctic ice sheet by piling up the sand

06:23

3D computer graphics. Ice sheet and sand

on the sea floor simply to block warm currents that are already destabilising the whole west Antarctic ice sheet”.

06:26

3D computer graphics. Plankton

ERIC CAMPBELL: Other ideas include covering oceans with iron filings to encourage carbon-eating plankton.

06:34

3D computer graphics. Sea water mist

Or sending ships round the world to pump sea water mist into the sky to diffuse the sun’s rays.

PROF JASON BOX: “We don’t yet know which they will be,

06:42

Jason

but we have some ideas and we need to try several technologies and evaluate them and figure out which are the least risky, etcetera, to get the carbon curve which is like this now to get it negative and that all needs to happen in the next 10-20 years to start down that path.  It’s extremely ambitious”.

06:53

Copenhagen. Campbell walks into building and to Lomborg speech

ERIC CAMPBELL: The idea of geoengineering has excited both scientists and industry.  On the other side of Copenhagen, I’ve come to meet a prominent political scientist, Dr Bjørn Lomborg.  He’s a favoured commentator in conservative media for arguing against major cuts to fossil fuels.

07:15

Campbell with Lomborg. Super:

Dr BJØRN LOMBORG: [Copenhagen Consensus Center] “Look if you say to people there’s another solution, yes, it is going to take the attention somewhat away from the original solution.  But we should also be honest and say we’ve tried the first solution, namely, ask people could you please use the car less?  Could you please use less energy?  Could you please turn off your lights and all that, and it’s not worked for 30 years and actually there’s about half a planet who’s waiting to get more energy availability”.

07:44

Lomborg chatting in hall

ERIC CAMPBELL: Dr Lomborg says he accepts that fossil fuel emissions are warming the planet. He just thinks geoengineering will cool it much faster than switching to renewals.

08:08

Lomborg interview

DR BJØRN LOMBORG: “Because it’s so cheap it’s very likely to happen sooner or later.  Some Indian billionaire or some Saudi billionaire is going to do it all by himself.  Just turn it down a little bit to pre-industrial temperatures or wherever we decide to have it, and that would be essentially avoiding a large part – not all – but a large part

08:22

GVs Copenhagen

of the global warming problem”.

ERIC CAMPBELL: So, what are the most likely fixes and would they really work?

08:41

“Most of these globally ambitious projects are still on the drawing board, but one surprising new technology

08:50

Campbell to camera on street

is up and running in a place generally seen as neutral territory”.

08:57

Map. GFX: Zurich, Switzerland

09:02

Zurich GVs

Music

09:07

ERIC CAMPBELL: It’s long been a home of precision innovation – from Swiss watches that never lose time, to Swiss army knives in a country permanently at peace.

09:11

Campbell to camera on bridge

“Switzerland hasn’t really been part of the climate change wars or any other war for that matter. It’s always been happy to sit back and make money while everyone else is fighting.  Now, a small company here in Zurich believes it’s found what could be a big part of the solution to climate change”.

09:23

Cristoph and Jan at office drinks

09:42

Christoph Gebald and Jan Wurzbacher were PhD students when they decided to form a world-changing company.  Tonight, they’re celebrating Climework’s ninth anniversary.

09:46

CHRISTOPH GEBALD: [Climeworks co-founder] “So we’re still not making money, so

09:58

Christoph interview. Super:
Cristoph Gebald
Climeworks co-founder

of course money’s not the motivation, the motivation is solving a big challenge and there is probably as little as challenging as climate change”.

10:00

Animation. Carbon fans

ERIC CAMPBELL: Their solution is building giant fans that draw in air and bind carbon molecules onto filters.  The carbon free air is released back into the atmosphere.  The CO2 is super-heated and collected as gas.

CHRISTOPH GEBALD: “I like to call it low tech, not high tech.

10:10

Christoph interview

It is actually very simple.  The challenging part is making it work and making it cheap”.

10:32

Campbell at Climeworks plant/Drone shots of plant

ERIC CAMPBELL: In just two years they’ve opened plants in Switzerland, Iceland and Italy. They believe they could remove ten per cent of the carbon the IPCC wants cut.  Their first target is one per cent by 2025.

10:37

CHRISTOPH GEBALD: “It’s like 300 million tonnes of CO2 and that would require a quarter of a million machines”.

10:58

ERIC CAMPBELL: But in this developmental stage, removing just one tonne of carbon costs an uneconomical 600 US dollars.

11:05

CHRISTOPH GEBALD: “We are confident that in the next two to three years we will halve our cost

11:15

Christoph interview

in the range of two to three hundred dollars per tonne and in the mid to long term, and that’s for us 2025 to 2030 we see costs at one hundred dollars as feasible”.

11:20

Climeworks plant

ERIC CAMPBELL: “So the big question is what do you do with all this captured CO2? 

11:32

Campbell to camera at Climeworks

Well fortunately in this case there’s a greenhouse just three hundred metres away, so after the carbon’s sucked into the fans, it’s piped underground to the greenhouse and turned into veggies”.

11:38

Vegetables growing in greenhouse

Plants absorb carbon so the greenhouse buys the gas as fertiliser.  Since it started spraying, crop production has increased by ten per cent.  Climeworks is also selling carbon for soda drinks and

11:51

Audi animation

partnering with Audi to recycle it into fuel.

CHRISTOPH GEBALD: “What was your first thought

12:09

Campbell and Christoph walk at Climeworks office

when you saw the plant?”

ERIC CAMPBELL: “It’s a very simple process”.

The quicker the process can turn a profit, the more likely it is to spread around the world.  Even in frosty Switzerland, there’s a real sense of urgency about limiting global warming.

12:15

CHRISTOPH GEBALD: “I am German by origin and I came here for the mountains,

12:32

Christoph interview

to climb, to ski, and in the Alps you could see very early signs of climate change, like of course glaciers are disappearing, like we won’t stop that, if with and without climate change, but the speed of disappearance is shocking”.

12:37

View of Alps from train

Music

12:56

Campbell and Patrick on train through Alps

ERIC CAMPBELL: Patrick Hofstetter from the World Wildlife Fund took us out to see the disappearing glaciers.  The Alps are warming more than twice as fast as the rest of Europe.  Over summer there was unprecedented drought.

PATRICK HOFSTETTER: [WWF Switzerland] “Yes that’s really special for us.

13:06

Patrick interview on train. Super:
Patrick Hofstetter
WWF Switzerland

The farmers don’t know the situation yet.  The grass stopped growing, so there is a shortage in feed; they actually started to slaughter their cows much earlier.  After this really dry summer I can feel a renewed sense of urgency, especially also because the farmers now really accept that they are directly affected by it and the farmers being part of the conservative population that’s a very important group also in terms of politics”.

13:30

Campbell and Hofstetter off train to glacier

ERIC CAMPBELL: Three hours from Zurich we come to what used to be the start of the giant Morterartsch glacier.

14:08

“So this all used to be solid ice, this track?”

PATRICK HOFSTETTER: “Actually, 160 years ago the glacier came up to here so”.

ERIC CAMPBELL: “Al the way to the town?”

PATRICK HOFSTETTER: “All the way to the station down here, yes”.

14:20

Markers showing glacier retreat/Campbell and Hofstetter walk

ERIC CAMPBELL: Since then it’s retreated by three kilometres and six hundred meters of that in just the past decade.

[walking along the track] “This is 1940. 1970”.

14:33

This ancient glacier is expected to disappear entirely within a lifetime.

“So are all the glaciers in Switzerland receding?”

14:45

PATRICK HOFSTETTER: “The predictions show that by the end of the century, most of them will disappear completely; only a few will remain in the very top mountains”.

14:54

Campbell and Hofstetter on to cable car

ERIC CAMPBELL: The changing climate is already hurting the economy.  Many ski fields are now bare until after Christmas.

PATRICK HOFSTETTER: “This is a new situation we face in the last ten years it got later and later.  So you to do a lot of the snow machine to prepare all the downhill slopes”.

15:03

Skiers at ski run, on slopes

ERIC CAMPBELL: Even at higher altitudes, ski resorts are laying giant insulation sheets over glaciers to preserve snow.

PATRICK HOFSTETTER: “From May to October, more or less they cover it like that, then they remove it in October and start to ski again”.

ERIC CAMPBELL: “They’re covering glaciers with blankets to try to stop the melting?”

15:28

Campbell and Hofstetter at top of ski run/Drone shots over ski resort

PATRICK HOFSTETTER: “Well, it’s actually just slowing down the process so it’s not a solution, it’s just to fight the symptoms of climate change.  We have been doing geoengineering now for many, many decades in actually burning so much fossil fuel and altering the climate by humankind, that we have to look now in a similar scale into solutions to that problem”.

15:51

ERIC CAMPBELL: “And as high as we are here, some believe the real antidote to climate change

16:18

Campbell on glacier to camera

is twenty kilometres up there. At our next stop we’re meeting scientists who don’t want to put blankets on glaciers, they want to blanket the atmosphere”.

16:25

Satellite image.
GFX:  Boston, USA

Music

16:34

Boston GVs

16:42

Exterior. Harvard University

ERIC CAMPBELL: “If climate change is the biggest problem in the world then at least

16:45

Campbell to camera at Harvard

some of the smartest people on the planet are trying to deal with it”.

16:48

In the hallowed halls of Harvard University, researchers are looking at just how

16:52

Campbell at Harvard with Keutsch in lab

practical and dangerous geoengineering might be.

PROF FRANK KEUTSCH: “So in here we have one of the big pieces of test equipment that we use in preparation for putting instruments into the stratosphere”.

ERIC CAMPBELL: Engineering Professor Frank Keutsch is preparing for the first test mission later this year.

PROF FRANK KEUTSCH: [Harvard University] “Open it up

16:58

Keutsch opens vacuum tank. Super:
Prof Frank Keutsch
Harvard University

and so we can put instruments into the vacuum tank and then we can simulate the stratospheric pressure you have at twenty kilometres”.

17:19

GFX: aerosols into upper atmosphere

ERIC CAMPBELL: They’ll use a high-altitude balloon to scatter sun reflecting aerosols across the upper atmosphere.  Right now, they’re fine tuning equipment to measure the effect.

17:29

Campbell and Keutsch at vacuum tank

“It feels a bit like the space race”.

17:43

PROF FRANK KEUTSCH: “In a way it does, on a much smaller scale. 

17:45

Keutsch drawing on white board

They fly up into the stratosphere high above us”.

ERIC CAMPBELL: The white board theory is that tonnes of tiny sulphur particles delivered by specially modified planes would lower the earth’s temperature.

PROF FRANK KEUTSCH: “Would result in cooling the planet”.

17:48

Archival. Mt Pinatubo eruption

ERIC CAMPBELL: It’s what happened naturally in 1991 after the Philippine’s Mount Pinatubo volcano erupted.

PROF FRANK KEUTSCH: “And this gas

18:05

Keutsch and Campbell at white board

then reacts in the stratosphere with occidents and turns into sulphuric acid. 

18:15

Archival. Mt Pinatubo eruption

For the few years after Mount Pinatubo, the temperature was noticeably lower and it cooled down the planet.  That was one effect that you got from this”.

ERIC CAMPBELL: “By what degree?”

PROF FRANK KEUTSCH: “It was

18:24

Keutsch and Campbell at white board

probably in the range of about half a degree Celsius”.

18:34

Time lapse. Clouds over river

ERIC CAMPBELL: Trouble is a quick fix like that could have nasty side effects.

18:36

Keutsch and Campbell at white board

PROF FRANK KEUTSCH: “And what was also apparent after Mount Pinatubo and other volcanic eruptions is that these particles in the end reduce the amount of ozone in the stratosphere. So you know we’ve been trying to do a lot to actually fix the ozone layer, and here you now have the idea of introducing something that could destroy it again”.

18:44

ERIC CAMPBELL: “And it’s not just those risks that make this project controversial,

19:03

Campbell to camera walking down street

it’s the fear held by many of the scientists themselves that just the suggestion of a magic bullet gives governments an excuse to keep pumping up emissions”.

19:09

Campbell and Gerot sit

“So Gernot, you’ve been running the numbers on this, is it economically feasible?”

Part of the problem is just how much cheaper this geoengineering would be than switching to renewables.

GERNOT WAGNER: “If anything it is too cheap”.

ERIC CAMPBELL: Economist Gernot Wagner is the project’s executive director.

19:21

Gernot interview. Super:
Gernot Wagner
Harvard Geo-engineering Program

GERNOT WAGNER: [Harvard Geo-engineering Program] “It’s so cheap that we are talking about single digit billions of dollars to potentially influence the entire planet’s climate”.

19:37

ERIC CAMPBELL: “Now if I was running a fossil fuel corporation, I’d be thinking great, this can solve the problem and we can keep digging up coal”.

19:47

Gernot interview

GERNOT WAGNER: “And frankly, that’s the problem, right? So, you might consider that a vested interest would in fact be very interested in something like this as yet another excuse not to cut CO2 emissions”.

19:54

Volcanic cloud

PROF FRANK KEUTSCH: “I very often compare stratospheric geoengineering to painkillers. 

20:07

Keutsch and Campbell at white board

This does not fix the problem, right?  It has nothing about CO2, the first order.  We’re just reducing symptoms and then human nature can kick in and say, well you know, it’s hard to deal with changing the energy infrastructure – which is very true, it’s a huge problem – so we’re not there yet.  Let’s wait with that”.

20:14

Campbell into geoengineering lab

ERIC CAMPBELL: The irony is that for all the work this team is doing, they hope this geoengineering will never have to be used.  They just want to make sure the real benefits and hazards are known before governments or corporations try it.

PROF FRANK KEUTSCH: “But what we can do is provide as many facts as possible that can inform us about the risks, that can find ways that perhaps have

20:31

Keutsch interview at white board

less risks, but in the end, any decision will always have to be based on imperfect knowledge”.

20:58

ERIC CAMPBELL: “Do you ever feel like this is playing god?”

21:04

PROF FRANK KEUTSCH: “It is. There’s a huge amount of hubris in this idea of saying, well oh we’ve caused the problem, let’s fix the problem and I know how to do this.  We’re going to do this and we know exactly what’s going to happen to the whole planet.  Yes, it has a lot of that.  It’s actually quite unsettling and, quite frankly, makes me quite anxious”.

21:07

Advertisement.
GFX: Minerals Council of Australia advertisement

ERIC CAMPBELL: Whatever geoengineering can achieve, the IPCC says the most carbon intense fuel should still be phased out by 2050.  At our next stop we’ll see how the industry is fighting back.

21:27

ADVERT: “And it can now reduce its emissions by up to 40 per cent.  It’s coal.  Isn’t it amazing what this little black rock can do?”

21:46

Satellite image.  GFX: 
Houston, USA

21:55

GVs Houston. Saloon, boot scooting

Music

22:03

ERIC CAMPBELL: Houston is a city built on carbon.  Mining fossil fuels is as much a part of Texan culture as raising cattle or boot-scooting.  But these days big energy is trying to sidestep demands to cut production.  Its response is a much-touted technology to cut the carbon footprint.

22:06

Campbell driving

Music

22:32

Campbell to camera while driving

ERIC CAMPBELL: “Well today we’re heading out to Texas’s biggest power plant.  It’s a pioneer of what the industry likes to call ‘clean coal’.”

22:40

Driving towards Petra Nova

This is Petra Nova.  It’s a coal fired generator with a billion dollar absorption tower. 

22:48

Campbell at Petra Nova with David Knox

After the coal is burned, the emissions are pumped through it and solvent collects much of the CO2 before it hits the atmosphere.

22:59

Frydenberg Facebook video

JOSH FRYDENBERG: [Facebook Video May 2017] “Hi, I’m here with David, the vice president of NRG, the owner of…”

In 2017 Josh Frydenberg, then Australia’s Energy and Environment Minister, took to Facebook to extol it.

23:06

JOSH FRYDENBERG: [Facebook Video May 2017] “What’s so exciting about this project and this facility is its inclusion of carbon capture and storage.  Helping to reduce the carbon footprint by some 40 per cent but also including enhanced oil recovery”.

23:22

Drone shots. Petro Nova

ERIC CAMPBELL: But it’s early days to get excited.  The tower captures carbon from just one of the complex’s ten generator units. 

23:36

Knox shows carbon capture tower

What’s more, it doesn’t actually reduce emissions overall.  The captured carbon is pumped in liquid form into an oil field. 

23:48

“So you put CO2 in an oil field and you get more oil out?”

DAVID KNOX: “Right”.

ERIC CAMPBELL: As company spokesman David Knox explains, it breaks up stubborn deposits so they can extract more oil.

DAVID KNOX: [NRG Energy] “The CO2 has a tendency,

23:59

Campbell with Knox. Super:
David Knox
NRG Energy

it bonds with oil and when it bonds it makes it slipperier.  And when it’s slipperier, it comes off of the rock, that last bit of oil in there”.

24:13

Shots around plant

ERIC CAMPBELL: “But if you’re capturing CO2, but to get more oil out, aren’t you actually increasing the amount of CO2 overall?”

DAVID KNOX: “It would if we were increasing the

24:21

Campbell with Knox

amount of oil that’s being used, but we don’t actually have any impact on the amount of oil that’s being used.  The oil is the same amount being used, we’re just increasing the domestic production and we don’t have to import as much oil from foreign countries”.

24:29

Drone shots of plant

ERIC CAMPBELL: The industry is looking at other options like super heating coal, but that still produces high emissions without cost offsets.  This unit and a smaller one in Canada, are the only ones at coal fired plants using carbon capture commercially.

DAVID KNOX: “There is such a thing as clean coal

24:44

Knox interview at plant

but it is only at these two units.  The economics are very challenging.  When will there be another one built?  I’m not good at predicting the future, but we now know that we can build one on time, on budget”.

25:09

ERIC CAMPBELL:  The uncertainty hasn’t stopped politicians insisting the industry is saved.

DONALD TRUMP: [State of Union Address, 30 January 2018] “We have ended

25:24

Archival.  Trump State of the Union address

the war on beautiful clean coal”.

ERIC CAMPBELL:  Even Bjørn Lomborg, a sometime

25:31

Campbell with Lomborg

consultant to big energy, is sceptical.

25:39

Lomborg interview

DR BJØRN LOMBORG: “Well clean coal has been a mirage for very many years. It would be wonderful if you could actually have all the benefits of the cheapest fossil fuel and cut the carbon emissions.  But it turns out, it’s fairly expensive to do on the coal fired power plant.  That is, it actually takes out some of the energy that you would otherwise have produced.  So it has real costs and of course you also have to store it securely, and there’s been lots of conversations about that.  We’ve not really seen it running and we certainly haven’t seen it running cheaply.  So again, it’s one of the things that we should investigate but we’re not ready to do it any time soon”.

25:42

Copenhagen. Bikes

ERIC CAMPBELL:  Back in Copenhagen, ordinary citizens continue to do their bit for the environment.  Dr Lomborg doubts his compatriots would ever accept the real cost of abandoning fossil fuels.

26:19

Copenhagen. Wind turbines

DR BJØRN LOMBORG: “Most people are not content to only be able to charge their phones or have their TVs running or indeed their operating

26:37

Lomborg interview

theatres in hospitals running when the sun is shining and when the sun is not shining, the cost from solar panels is infinite and likewise with wind turbines and when the wind is not blowing”.

PROF JASON BOX: “It’s not true this idea that when the sun’s not shining, the wind’s not

26:43

Jason Box interview. Super:
Prof Jason Box
Ice Climatologist

blowing that we’re not getting energy.  Because when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, you can charge batteries and so the frontier is battery technology”.

27:01

Drone shots. Solar panels

ERIC CAMPBELL: No matter how fast the world switches to renewable energy, the age of untested, high risk geoengineering could soon be upon us.

PROF JASON BOX: “We don’t get there by going neutral.

27:10

Wildfire

For better or for worse, geoengineering is part of the

27:25

Jason Box/Floods

mix going forward.  Because we cannot get to where we need to be by conservation alone”.

27:30

Drone shots. Floods

ERIC CAMPBELL: It could be the last throw of the dice to save the planet.  After decades of governments ignoring dire warnings, simply going green may not be going far enough.

27:38

Glacier. Credits over:

Reporter Eric Campbell

Camera Tomás Ybarra

Editor Lile Judickas

Copenhagen Producer Marie-Louise Olson

Archival research Michelle Boukheris

Graphics artist Andres Gomez Isaza

Additional footage

Audi

UCLA

Korean Polar Research Institute

Joe Taheny

NASA

Storyful

UNHRC

AP

Climeworks

Executive Producer Matthew Carney

27:51

GFX: Foreign Correspondent

Abc.net.au/foreign
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28:12

Outpoint

28:17