What we wanted to do was look at the problem in a new way, which was – is there a solution to climate
change that is projected to solve the entire problem, at scale, within a reasonable period of time?
Is that possible? And it turns out that if you do the numbers, massive reforestation can do it. It is, by far,
the cheapest, fastest, most effective, safest, and most politically feasible answer. So, we made an organization
to bring that about.
My name is Yishan Wong. I'm the founder and CEO of Terraformation. Before I started this company, I worked
at a variety of tech startups, including PayPal, Facebook, and then later Reddit.
After you've worked in technology for many, many years, you learn that if you want to solve a really large, really
complex problem, you want your components to be as low-tech as possible. There's a thing that many people,
who are not in Silicon Valley, don't understand, which is that technology is risky and flawed. The marketing from
Silicon Valley is that technology is magical, and that we're all wizards. That's not actually true.
You look at your newest gadget, it breaks all the time, right? It has problems. So, it's not that developing new
ways to sequester carbon is bad. It's that we have to solve a problem that's larger than any we've ever
contemplated before. We also have a very tight timeline. And, in order to do that, you want to use reliable
components that are proven, and you want to use a lot of them.
There's a number of bottlenecks, but one of the key rate-limiting factors to plant growth or tree growth is
water availability. One of the key points that is often lost when talking about reforestation, whether or not it can
be a full scale solution, is the economic calculation of whether or not it is affordable.
And so the project that we did in Hawaii is, in fact, a cost validation project. Because the science, as I noted earlier,
we're trying to use the most low-tech solution, right? And so it's really trying to determine can this be done?
And can it be done within the cost envelope that we originally calculated? And the answer is yes. So what
we built was a fully off-grid, 100% solar-powered desalination facility that purifies brackish water and
provides irrigation to a reforestation project on what would otherwise be a completely dry piece of land that
doesn't receive anywhere near the necessary rainfall to restore a forest.
But, it turns out that half an acre of solar panels worth of power is enough to power a desalination plant that
fits inside a single car garage. And it's just a couple large, long white tubes.
It's really boring.
And that's what I like – my hard-won experience as a technologist is you want to use really boring technology,
so that you can do a lot of it.
What we're doing is we're executing reforestation projects of our own, at increasing scale and speed.
And the idea behind doing that, is that, you know, as more people listen to us,
we can say, "Hey, we're doing it, it can be done. Here's how you do it, you can do it, too." Because really,
what we want is we want copycats. The nice thing about mass reforestation is that it's extremely parallelizable.
You can plant the thousandth acre at the same time as when you plant the two millionth acre at the same time.
So what we actually need to do is we need to drive a worldwide decentralized parallel effort to do all of this.
And to do that, you know, it's nice, because we don't have to develop new technology, we just have to
convince everyone to also do it.
I am a fan of science fiction and I often look at what we're doing today, from a sort of future viewpoint
looking back. And in science fiction, there are usually two futures of far futures mainly depicted. One of them
is of the Earth as a barren wasteland, because of nuclear war, environmental degradation, alien attack, whatever.
In the other science fiction future, Earth is a beautiful garden of Eden. And that's the future I want.
the one where Earth is a garden planet, and we look back on it proudly.