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Premieres Wednesday, April 26, 2023 at 9 p.m. on KPBS TV / PBS App + Encore Sunday, April 30 at 9 p.m. on KPBS 2
The altering local weather could be one of many largest and most necessary challenges humanity has ever confronted — however can we cease it earlier than it’s too late? NOVA “Chasing Carbon Zero” examines the science behind the know-how that would assist us obtain internet zero within the subsequent thirty years.
The U.S. just lately set an bold local weather change purpose: to realize net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 and slash emissions in half by 2030. However is that even possible? What precisely would it not take? This episode takes a tough have a look at the issue and identifies real-world applied sciences that may very well be as much as the duty. From increasing the provision of renewable vitality choices, to designing extra energy-efficient buildings, to revolutionizing the transportation sector, the movie casts a hopeful however skeptical eye. The issue is huge and time is operating out, however there may be nonetheless hope that we will obtain carbon zero in time to keep away from the worst impacts of local weather change.
“Chasing Carbon Zero” is reported, produced and directed by Miles O’Brien, a journalist who has been on the local weather beat for 30 years. “It’s time to shift the reporting narrative from gloom and doom to potential options,” says O’Brien. “It is necessary that our viewers know we’ve got the know-how to succeed in internet zero.”
NOVA: Chasing Carbon Zero Sneak Peek
To crunch the numbers, O’Brien turns to Melissa C. Lott, a Senior Research Scholar and the Director of Research of the SIPA Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia College. Utilizing simply a few easy however elegant charts, Lott helps O’Brien perceive the important steps we should take to remain on the trail to internet zero:
- (1) electrify as a lot as we will — issues like vehicles and buildings; on the identical time
- (2) decarbonize the electrical energy — that’s changing carbon-emitting electrical energy technology with renewable and different zero-carbon applied sciences
- (3) search out and squelch the emissions of methane, a greenhouse gasoline way more potent than carbon dioxide
- (4) push for the breakthroughs that can permit us to deal with the thorniest carbon emitters: aviation, trade, and agriculture
Buildings symbolize 13% of complete emissions within the U.S., so electrifying our heating and cooling programs, notably in cities, is essential for decarbonizing. In 2022, People purchased extra warmth pumps than gasoline furnaces, and on New York Metropolis’s rooftops, we will see proof of how electrical energy is gaining floor.
Viewers meet landlord Lincoln Eccles who invested in 14 warmth pumps — one for every of the items within the early Twentieth-century constructing he owns in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Warmth pumps are extra environment friendly than oil or gasoline as a result of they are not creating warmth; they’re simply transferring it from one place to a different. However can this know-how be made extra accessible to everybody?
That’s exactly the purpose for Donnel Baird, founder and CEO of the inexperienced tech firm BlocPower. Its mission is to make inexperienced buildings accessible to all. Baird is kickstarting the transfer away from combustion by eradicating previous boilers and furnaces in getting old multifamily buildings and electrifying them with warmth pumps. He believes it’s potential to scale that as much as electrify an entire block of buildings, and ultimately an entire metropolis and past.
One other evident carbon emitter in our properties: gasoline ovens and stoves. At Chatham College’s Eden Corridor Campus, Chef Chris Galarza, a culinary sustainability advisor with years of expertise operating kitchens, offers viewers a “cook dinner’s tour” of a totally electrical business kitchen. The cooktops function with induction, which not like conventional resistance stoves, use electrical energy to generate a magnetic discipline to maneuver the electrons contained in the cookware. The ensuing vibrations warmth meals a lot sooner than gasoline burners, with out turning the kitchen right into a sauna.
Transportation is one other giant sector liable for emissions. In Detroit, viewers meet Linda Zhang, the chief engineer for the all-electric Ford F-150 Lightning. The pickup truck is a crucial innovation for mass adoption of electrical autos since F-150 sequence homeowners are very loyal to the model and continuously depend on autos for his or her livelihoods. Demand for the brand new autos is excessive, only one indicator that electrical autos could also be transitioning from novelty to mass adoption.
However “Chasing Carbon Zero” producer Will Toubman and O’Brien drove a loaned Lightning from Boston to Bangor, Maine, and located big gaps in fast-charging functionality. Even when we’re capable of electrify many buildings and far of the transportation sector, we nonetheless won’t attain our purpose if the electrical energy is produced by burning fossil fuels.
NOVA: Chasing Carbon Zero Preview
The movie returns to Melissa Lott, who explains that the quantity of electrical energy being generated will improve, and the sources of unpolluted electrical energy might want to improve by including new zero-carbon sources — like wind, photo voltaic, geothermal, and others. Happily, we’re properly on our method, as the prices of wind, photo voltaic, and batteries have dropped lately.
Wind is a serious, and fast-growing, contributor to a clear vitality grid. Floating wind is a comparatively new concept that opens up waters deeper than 200 ft — the restrict for generators mounted to the underside. This know-how seems ripe for fast development, provided that floating generators might be towed to deeper waters the place the wind is extra constant. It additionally makes it potential to develop wind vitality off the west coast of the U.S. the place waters are precipitously deep.
We meet Habib Dagher, Executive Director of the University of Maine’s Advanced Structures and Composites Center, whose crew is growing a singular wind and wave simulator to check a scale mannequin of a floating hull for wind generators referred to as VolturnUS. Dagher hopes to have a bigger 11-megawatt turbine floating inside a couple of years and theorizes that offshore wind capability inside 50 miles of U.S. coasts may very well be sufficient to energy the nation 4 instances over.
However what to do when the solar doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow? For a renewable grid to work, we have to develop some new strategies of storing electrical energy. The lithium-ion batteries which are utilized in electrical vehicles, for instance, are too costly for multi-day storage on the grid.
However Yet-Ming Chiang of MIT reveals one innovation that would permit for grid-scale vitality storage: iron-air batteries. He co-founded an organization referred to as Form Energy, which goals to harness the response of iron with air because it types rust. The corporate hopes to construct batteries that may present electrical energy to the grid when renewables like photo voltaic and wind are down, but additionally create jobs within the rust belt of America — Kind’s first manufacturing facility is underneath building in Weirton, West Virginia.
Carbon dioxide isn’t the one greenhouse gasoline of concern. In truth, controlling one other could be one of many strongest levers we’ve got in curbing emissions within the near-term. CO2 represents 80% of greenhouse gasoline emissions within the U.S. at this time, however a lot of the remaining emissions come from methane, a greenhouse gasoline that’s greater than 80 instances as potent as carbon dioxide at trapping warmth within the environment over 20 years.
Within the oil fields of the Permian Basin in Texas, we meet environmental advocate Sharon Wilson, who makes use of a thermal digicam to detect leaking methane. Whereas consultants clarify that the transition off of oil and gasoline can’t occur in a single day, limiting the methane emissions from these “tremendous emitters” could be the low-hanging fruit.
“Having spent my profession reporting on the dire state of the local weather disaster, I now really feel an infinite duty to current viable options to our audiences,” stated O’Brien. “This movie reveals that we’ve got the know-how and the means to succeed in our local weather targets — I hope this movie will present audiences with the data and instruments wanted to implement them.”
Watch On Your Schedule:
“Chasing Carbon Zero” premieres Wednesday, April 26 at 9pm ET/8C on PBS and shall be obtainable for streaming at pbs.org/nova, NOVA on YouTube, and the PBS App, obtainable on iOS, Android, Roku streaming units, Apple TV, Android TV, Amazon Fireplace TV, Samsung Good TV, Chromecast and VIZIO.
Credit:
A NOVA manufacturing by MOBIAS Media, Inc. for GBH. Produced by Will Toubman. Reported, Produced, and Directed by Miles O’Brien. Senior Producer for NOVA is Caitlin Saks. Government Producers for NOVA are Julia Cort and Chris Schmidt. NOVA is a manufacturing of GBH.
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