Translator: sherry zhang Reviewer: Leonard Ryunosuke
Hi. Here is a topic that I really want to share with you today: the climate change.
I took this photo when
I travelled to Changbai Mountain during the National Day this year.
I thought it was gonna be cold, so I brought a down jacket.
But when I got there, I found it was over 68 degrees Fahrenheit.
In the past, at this time of the year, Changbai mountain would’ve already snowed.
Let’s all think about it, have you felt that this summer was too hot?
And extreme weather conditions, like typhoons and storms, are rampant.
Let’s see a video clip about the torrential rains in Zhengzhou
[Zhengzhou’s cloudburst]
The disastrous rains are mainly caused
by the typhoon “Fireworks” thousands of miles away.
[Typhoon “Fireworks” ]
It brought water vapor to the Taihang Mountains even before landing
and formed a rainstorm in Zhengzhou.
It’s hard to imagine the horrible scene if we are not witnessing in person.
Have you all been to the West Lake in Hangzhou?
The rainfall in Zhengzhou in an hour equals the water volume of 150 West Lakes.
And the rain lasted for three days.
The recent catastrophic flood in Shanxi also happened for similar reasons.
The rainfall is no less than that of Zhengzhou.
In fact, not only China, in this summer, the whole world is suffering.
The temperature in North America was near 50°C, killing more than 700 people.
The dry weather in Europe caused massive forest fires.
In Africa, the droughts has left the fields grainless
and hundreds of thousands of people starving.
Even the North Pole, was also 48°C this summer.
These series of extreme climate phenomena are not accidental.
This is a detailed record of the Earth’s average temperature since 1880.
142 years since the Industrial Revolution, the Earth’s temperature has risen by 1°C.
You might think this temperature difference of 1°C is very small,
This temperature difference usually doesn’t warrant us to turn on the AC.
But note that this is an average temperature.
We’ve all seen the movie “Ice Age” right?
In that age where it was difficult for even long-haired beasts to survive,
the average temperature of our earth was only 6 degrees lower than now.
So if this situation continues to develop, by 2050,
when those born in the 90s will be 60 years old,
the Earth’s temperature will rise another two degrees.
The consequences of this are serious.
First, this temperature exceeds the temperature red line for food production.
Production will be reduced, causing a scarcity of vegetables, grains, and meat.
And the high temperature will make a lot of water vapor enter the atmosphere.
The extreme torrential rains and typhoon we have experienced this summer
will become particularly frequent in the future.
The root cause of such extreme weather events like drought and flood
is our greenhouse gases.
Well-known ones such as methane, carbon dioxide, nitrous oxides, and so on,
are the main culprits of greenhouse gases.
Among them, carbon dioxide is the protagonist.
We wonder why these gases generate heat,
This is because when the sunlight radiates through these gases,
Their molecules generate tiny vibrations,
It releases heat as soon as it vibrates.
We need to be thankful for this heat,
because it helps our planet Keep warm in the icy universe,
This is how life can be born.
But excess gas would overheat the Earth.
Our human activities emit into the atmosphere every year
50 billion tons of greenhouse gases.
How do we conceptualize 50 billion tons?
That is, if we rely on planting trees to absorb these gases,
We need about 5 times of Earth’s land area.
So simply by planting trees
is not enough to keep up with the rate of human emissions.
So what should we do?
The answer is quite straightforward.
[Carbon Neutral: Reduce Emissions, Accelerate Uptake]
We must use subversive technical means to reduce emissions
and speed up absorption.
I divided these technical means into 4 areas
so it’s easy for everyone to understand:
Energy, food, carbon capture and carbon sequestration.
[Energy field]
First, the most important is the energy sector.
We are a deeply fossil energy-dependent society.
Have we all noticed,
if we fill a liter of gasoline. It’s about 7 to 8 bucks,
But the price of a liter of mineral water is also 7 to 8 bucks.
This is a little unreasonable,
Because of the gasoline mined from deep underground,
Then through a series of very complex processing,
And then deployed to our side over long distances.
It can be as cheap as water.
[Hydrogen production, fertilizers, plastics, gasoline]
All thanks to efforts of countless scientists in the past 100 years.
in this regard,
it shaped one after another such industrial system
But now we need to spend another 50 years
in shaping a series of new institutions to subvert them
This includes that we will develop inexpensive, green hydrogen
production process;
[cheap hydrogen energy, stable wind energy, Solar, clean nuclear]
To develop a large rechargeable battery
to improve the stability of solar and wind energy;
And we have to break through the difficult controlled nuclear fusion technology.
These tech ideas that sound like sci-fi,
have to be explored before the worsening climate in 2050.
Then in the field of food Our task is also very heavy.
We have to feed by 2050 the world’s population
of nearly 10 billion.
But not relying on fossil energy, we have no way to produce fertilizer.
[Zero-carbon fertilizer, artificial food]
So we have to develop new Zero carbon fertilizers to replace chemical ones.
Even later we have more and more food, possibly synthetic,
like artificial starch, artificial meat, to secure our food supply.
More importantly, we have to explore The solution to food waste.
You know, because of food waste,
their decomposition creates 3.3 billion tons of carbon emissions per year
and we only have 50 billion tons to processe in total.
3.3 billion tons is equivalent to the sum of all air conditioning emissions.
Then my personal field of deep cultivation is to reduce the carbon foot print
of food waste.
Do we know, the small bag of kitchen waste we carry downstairs every day,
How far do they need to travel?
Taking Shanghai as an example, they need to first take the electric tricycle
to the community garbage room,
then load the cart to the transfer station, load into containers
and transported to the terminal,
finally by boat arrive at the Laogang Incineration Site, 70 kilometers away,
be burnt and released as carbon dioxide into the air.
The whole process of transportation and disposal cause a lot of carbon emissions.
We have nearly 10,000 tons every day in Shanghai
such kitchen waste is busy running.
So while advocating saving,
Why can’t we put this garbage at its source
and turn it into a useful resource? No more shipping.
So my job is to distribute and resource garbage.
We know that in fact kitchen waste is mostly water,
When we eat a cucumber, 90% of its contents is water.
If the water can be dragged out,
The remaining dry matter is the essence of nutrition,
They can be made into organic fertilizers.
So based on this, we have developed an efficient dewatering process.
Then this device can be made very small,
it occupies about the space of a parking space,
can handle 5,000 people’s kitchen waste.
Well, such devices are already starting in some
commercial complexes, farmers' markets and communities have started using it.
Then the above in energy and a series of explorations in the field of food
are just to reduce emissions.
While accelerating the exploration of these technologies,
we’re going to speed up the uptake of carbon.
[Carbon capture field]
This is the realm of carbon capture.
We already have scientists starting to make such a giant fan,
to suck carbon dioxide from the air little by little,
then hit them to the ground and bury them deep.
This is a very inefficient way, It cannot generate any financial return.
How inefficient is it?
Because carbon dioxide only accounts for 0.04% of the air, very thin.
To capture carbon more efficiently and economically,
I set my sights on our solid waste.
In fact, the plastic, paper, and clothing waste created by our daily lives
are essentially made of carbon compounds.
including all living things, birds and beasts, plants and flowers,
their bodies contain a lot of carbon.
Then when these substances reach the end,
they will rot or burn
convert the contained carbon into carbon dioxide released into the air.
And what I’m trying is a carbonization method of air isolating.
This type of carbonization,
we can put the carbon in the object retained in a solid state,
making it no longer participate in the regional cycle.
Moreover, the process of carbonization can produce a lot of extra heat,
We can use it to dispose of kitchen waste.
Thus, a technical concept of treating waste with waste is formed at the source.
The obtained carbon is also an interesting material.
In the next thousand years it will always remain that way.
That’s the equivalent of my locking up the carbon dioxide
that should have been expelled into air for a long time.
This carbon is rich in pores, it has a certain use value,
can improve soil and promote plant growth to a great extent.
I also hope that the end of the garbage can be the starting point of another life.
So you see, what we’re going to do is not only to collect carbon efficiently,
What’s more important is to give them higher value, make them useful products.
This is an important undertaking in the field of carbon sequestration.
The good news is that carbon dioxide can be
cured into many things, especially plastic.
This means most of our future daily consumer goods
may be made out of carbon dioxide.
And some entrepreneurs have already made these products.
So in the context of future carbon neutrality,
Most of our daily necessities
will be based on the concept of zero carbon and
the redevelopment of zero carbon materials.
Compared with the professionalism in the previous fields,
in the field of carbon products,
Each of us has the chance to participate in their design,
manufacturing and the building of brand trend.
Then only when
we return all the emissions to our daily lives
can we truly achieve carbon neutrality, and let the earth cool down.
So you see, we have a lot to do.
Both the production and lifestyle of the past need to change.
I personally still keep an optimistic attitude,
Because we still have many, many means.
But my concern is
our society does not pay enough attention to climate change.
Currently we are concerned about how to make money faster than others,
not the survival of hundreds of millions of people in the next 50 years.
In fact, climate change innovation is slow and linear,
Internet-style exponential returns are hard to come by.
We need to have more patience towards this linear growth logic.
We only have 50 years,
if we don’t start investing and accumulating
during our current prosperity,
What can we do in a future of climate deterioration,
and in a economic recession?
So I hope more people, especially the young people of today,
can start paying close attention to climate change,
and become a part of the solution.
Thank you.