2024 was the hottest year ever recorded on Earth, and we’ve crashed the 1.5-degree threshold for global warming, says the Royal Meteorological Society. And this is why we need to begin thinking about scrubbing carbon dioxide out of the sky, says Ed Whittingham, a podcaster, former executive director of the Pembina Institute, and the host of a new podcast entitled “Scrubbing the Sky.”
The idea for the podcast originated around a campfire when Whittingham told Peter McKendrick that if he wrote the book called “Scrubbing the Sky,” he’d produce a podcast on the topic. And so he has. Scrubbing the Sky is about “carbon removal,” the idea of sucking carbon dioxide out of the sky and locking it up permanently to stave off the most dire impacts of climate change.
Not surprisingly, one of the central characters in this race to cool the planet is Dr. David Keith, the Harvard physicist who founded Carbon Engineering, a company based in British Columbia that has commercialized the technology and, with investment support from some tech luminaries, is now building a commercial-scale plant in the U.S. Keith is one of Whittingham’s co-hosts of the other podcast “Energy vs Climate” along wth Dr. Sarah Hasings-Simon.
We explore carbon removal in this 30-minute chat along with the differences between carbon removal and geoengineering, the most Earth-invasive strategy of injecting chemicals into the atmosphere, thus further altering the atmosphere’s composition to block the warming of the planet, a practice some find worrisome.
So is carbon removal a distraction from the huge efforts to transition our energy systems from fossil fuels to zero-emissions energy technologies? Ed doesn’t think so and offers a “both-and” formula that he believes gives us the best chance of avoiding the most catastrophic impacts of climate change.
Full interview with Ed Whittingham on Scrubbing the Sky
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Check out our six-part series on Blatchford, the largest planned carbon-neutral community in North America to see stories of people moving to solar energy, geoexchange district energy and low to no-carbon energy systems. We talk to residents, the developer, a city councillor and an expert on “The Magic of Heat Pumps” in the series. This is our six story playlist.
Also check out our blogs in the series.