The Elephant

Elon Musk this year partnered with The X-Prize to create a $100 million prize for the best solutions for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or ocean. This $100 million represents the biggest incentive prize in history, and likely the biggest single investment made into negative emissions to date. We talk wih the X-Prize's Executive Director Marcius Extavour and Erica Dodds, the CEO of the Foundation for Climate Restoration about the prize and the lay of the land when it comes to...

In this episode we speak to Peter Eisenberger the co-founder of Global Thermostat - one of the leading direct air capture companies in the world. In the interview we talk about how we could create what Peter calls the renewable energy and materials related economy, how the current Coronavirus pandemic influenced his thinking on climate change, and why he is convinced that all organizations within the direct air capture sector need to cooperate to help accelerate the technology as quickly as...

Today we're featuring an episode from one of our favourite podcasts Future Ecologies, and their new mini-series "Scales of Change." In the series, hosts Mendel and Adam take a deep dive into the various "Dragons of Climate Inaction," the psychological barriers which prevent us from collectively responding to climate change with the appropriate urgency. Listen to this episode on "Technosalvation" and subscribe to their series by searching for Future Ecologies, wherever you listen to podcasts....

It’s the recommendation show! With all the new time many of us have on our hands, we wanted to tip our hat to some of our favourite things we think you should know about. In this episode we speak with Anja Krieger, the journalist behind one of our favourite environmental podcasts called The Plastisphere. In it she investigates the complex nature and hard to solve challenges caused by that most wondrous and durable of materials: plastic. And later on, we feature an episode of the Plastisphere...

Solomon Goldstein-Rose is a climate activist and former Massachusetts state representative. In his new book, "The 100% Solution" he breaks down what it will take in his view for society to come up with a complete systemic solution to climate change, and achieve net negative emissions by 2050.

Since we first started looking at the science of CO2 removal with our podcast series on direct air capture, a huge amount has happened. So In this episode, we take you inside all the exciting news and developments that have been announced recently, which are pushing the goal of taking large amounts of CO2 back out of the atmosphere closer to reality.

Imagine we overcame the many obstacles and successfully built the giant infrastructure that would be needed to directly capture billions of tons of CO2 back out of the air each year. You might reasonably think that we would have then completely solved the problem. But there’s one big question mark that would still be lingering in the air: Where exactly are we going to safely store all of this carbon dioxide? After all, it’s a gas! if you put it in the ground, it’s going to want to come back...

Carbon dioxide removal does already exist, but only at the tiniest of scales. But what could a future where we're successfully capturing billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the air each year, actually look like? Where would all the CO2 be stored? What might the carbon capture machines look like? And how are we going to get this whole carbon capturing business off the ground? We explore these and other questions in this 3rd episode in our series looking at Carbon Dioxide Removal....

Taking carbon dioxide out of the air - as we learned in our last episode - is technically possible. And different researchers and start-ups are experimenting with the best ways to do just that. But there's much more than engineering that currently stands in the way of seeing Air Capture become a big part of the solution to climate change. There's also the not too small problem of paying for it. For example, would you be willing to pay $10,000 each year to offset your emissions? In this...

For over the past two decades scientist Klaus Lackner has dedicated himself to finding potential ways of taking CO2 back out of the atmosphere, all in a bid to help the world avoid the worst consequences of climate change. In this episode, we learn about Klaus’s journey, explore the science of CO2 removal, and learn if pulling CO2 back out of the air might just hold the key to us solving climate change. This is the first of four episodes in a series that we’ll be releasing, which all deal...

Look pretty much anywhere on our planet and it’s clear that human beings are having an outsized impact on the Earth. And it’s not just climate change. There’s our enormous land footprint, our rapidly growing numbers, our thirst for resources, and the vast quantities of waste we produce every year. But how did homo sapiens transform from a species with only minor numbers in parts of Africa, to one that’s spread across the world with 7 billion people, and whose consumption patterns have become...

Conservatives, especially in America, are known for doubting the scientific basis of man-made climate change, and the need to do anything about it. But earlier this February something surprising happened - several elder Republican statesmen released a proposal for what they call a Conservative solution to climate change. The plan consists primarily of carbon tax - something that many progressives have long advocated for. But controversially for Democrats, the plan also calls for repealing...

March 8th marks international women's day, an annual celebration of the achievements of women across the globe. And this year’s campaign is: Be Bold For Change. To discuss climate change and equality, and how it intersects with the role of women worldwide, our new Elephant producer and co-host Charlotta Lomas spoke with a woman who has herself been bold for change - Mary Robinson who was the first female President of Ireland from 1990-1997. She now leads the Mary Robinson Foundation: which...

The Elephant has been in Marrakech Morocco the past week for COP 22. And on Friday, on the last day of the conference, we caught up with a few youth groups from around the world to find out what motivated them to come to the talks, and how they feel about the future in a world grappling with climate change.

Last week Donald Trump's election sent shockwaves around the world - particularly within the climate community. Trump has long denied that climate change even exists and has vowed to roll back all federal action. So what should those of us who actually care about reality do next? We caught up with activist and campaigner Nicolas Haeringer, of 350.org, in Marrakech to get his thoughts on where the climate movement goes from here, and what lessons we can draw from Trump's shocking win.

When humanity first travelled into space, it didn’t just mean exploring new worlds and frontiers. It also meant for the first time seeing our home planet in an entirely new light. What from the ground seemed infinite and indestructible - something that we could never impact -from space suddenly appeared finite and fragile. When it comes to truly understanding that blue marble we all call home, few people can claim as much insight as Piers Sellers. Not only as an astronaut did Piers get the...

The Greenland ice-sheet is massive. So massive that if it were to melt completely global sea-levels would rise by more than 6 meters. So it's critical that scientists understand how the ice-sheet is changing because of climate change. Liam Colgan is a glaciologist and professor at York University who specifically studies the Greenland ice-sheet and we got a hold of him by satellite phone as he was in Greenland on a 36 day research expedition led by NASA. We learn about how the Greenland...

For decades Noam Chomsky has been one of the most important political dissidents and intellectuals in the world. Now in an exclusive new interview with The Elephant, Chomsky reflects on the incredible period in human history we currently find ourselves in, and how the peculiar institutional systems we've set up put considerations of short-term profits ahead of the very future of our species. In our interview, Noam Chomsky also shares his thoughts on the 2016 U.S. presidential election and...

The Great Barrier Reef in Australia is right at this moment suffering from what is the most devastating bleaching event in its entire fossil history, with 93% of its reefs experiencing at least some degree of bleaching. Many of these reefs will be killed permanently, and similar damage is occurring to countless other coral reef systems around the world. And the culprit? Human caused climate change. We called up professor Justin Marshall, a coral reef expert who has studied these ecosystems...

The Occupy movement of 2011 was one of the most successful activist actions of the last few decades. It changed the discourse, raised the issue of income inequality world-wide, and it galvanized a new generation of activists. But its co-founder, Micah White, considers Occupy a 'constructive failure', but one that that has lessons that activists - including those of us in the environmental movement - can learn from. With Micah we talk about the story behind how Occupy Wall Street started, the...