Millions of mail in ballots are being counted and the world is waiting, edge-of-seat, for the outcome of the US Election. The result of Tuesday’s vote will critically impact the future of the planet, but at XPRIZE, we understand that the only way to guarantee a more hopeful future is to create it for ourselves. The future is in our hands as individual changemakers. It’s in our radical ideas. Our power for innovation. Our ability to invent groundbreaking tech.
At this very moment, we have the potential to use science to reimagine the future for the better. Starting today, we can implement the research and development that will benefit us all tomorrow. Many of us are asking ourselves: Will the result be one that prioritizes our moral obligation to put climate change at the top of the agenda? Will we get a President that acts on a vision for a climate-conscious nation, while we still have time?
These are important questions, but we don’t have to wait for a political answer to the climate emergency – we can use our curiosity to drive our passion.
“We have to celebrate the fact that climate change was on the agenda … at all, for the first time in a presidential debate in decades,” says Marcius Extavour, Executive Director of Prize Operations, Energy and Resources at XPRIZE and a leading expert on climate change. But the trouble with the discussion of climate in the Presidential race and debates so far, he says, is that it’s lacked nuance, a clear action-oriented plan, and much-needed future positivity.
Looking back on the Presidential debate in September, Extavour says: “It was great to see the two candidates layout – let’s face it – very different views on the topic of climate, but from the President, I wanted to hear more about exactly how he would support the oil and gas industries in this era of low demand and low prices. And for Biden, well, exactly how he would map out a transition plan.”
The overall takeaway, says Extavour, is that the emphasis on possibility was missing: “I wanted more inspiration and hope on the opportunity side of addressing climate change, of switching to renewables over time. Instead, both candidates were defensive – How do we maintain our industries? How do we protect workers and families?” says Extavour. “We have to ask these questions, yes, but there’s more room to talk about the opportunities of addressing the climate crisis – the opportunity of creating a better life and finding new ways for society to flourish.”
As for those opportunities, Extavour and XPRIZE believe that they lie in technology. The radical tech that’s already being developed to combat climate change, as well as the tech we don’t even know exists yet – the tech of tomorrow. If we want a climate revolution that pulls a cleaner future forward, we need dynamic innovation and clearcut plans for how to use it. This is central to our work at XPRIZE, and there are three main ways to make it happen.
The first is switching to new ways to generate energy. “Renewables – be that solar tech, wind tech, or something else – they might seem mature because they’re no longer brand new to the market,” says Extavour, “but they’re still relatively new technologies, which means there’s a whole lot of room to make them better. It means there will be subsequent technologies. Think of iPhone 1… mesmerizing, but iPhone 3 is better, and iPhone 7 even better...” Focusing on improving this tech will only become more fruitful, he claims, and there is a great opportunity to make them more effective and cheaper.
The next tech is raising much discussion and attracting much curiosity, and that’s recycling CO2 into useful materials. At XPRIZE, we call this carbontech.
“This is circularity concept: instead of making manufactured goods out of fossil fuels we can make them out of recycled CO2 and solve the circularity problem and the climate problem at the same time by asking: How can we take greenhouse gasses and make them into chairs and shoes and cars?” Extavour explains. “This might sound like magic to you but it should sound like magic. Carbon XPRIZE is a competition to stimulate that kind of innovation.”
The third type of tech is carbon removal. “Imagine a giant vacuum cleaner that sucks out all of the greenhouse gasses from the air to remove them and you’ve got a good idea,” offers Extavour.
“But wait. What about trees!” you argue.
“Exactly,” says Extavour. “Trees have figured out how to do this. The problem is – with full respect to plants – they’re very inefficient. What we can do is understand how trees do this then use technological means to do what trees do better, more efficiently.”
These last two technologies are growing fast and gaining big interest, says Extavour, with several companies developing these technologies. Yet none are fully deployed on a huge scale – meaning, you got it: opportunity.
So yes, political and legislative approaches to fighting climate change are key. Biden’s historic $2 trillion climate plan, which aims for zero carbon pollution from the US electricity sector by 2035 and net-zero emissions by 2050, would be a gamechanger. Trump signing the Trillion Trees pledge to plant one trillion trees to conserve and regenerate America’s forests is significant. But we can do so much more if we want to save our earth.
“An analogy I like is that carbon is a giant waste removal problem. We took a bunch of it out of the ground, lit it on fire, got the energy out, then the emissions went into the air and some went into the ocean. That’s our climate problem in a nutshell,” says Extavour. “Think of these fossil fuels like a pile of trash – we can stop throwing trash on the pile but the pile won’t go anywhere if we don’t clean it up.”
Whatever you think about climate change you can’t get around this fact. So, whatever the election results are, we know that the research and development that was happening last week must continue to happen today. At XPRIZE we say: we can't wait for politicians to win this battle for us. There are climate problems to address immediately. That is exactly what we are doing now and will continue to do tomorrow.