Geoengineering: Hacking Planet Earth | Thomas Kostigen
04/21/20 • 28 min
“I believe the private sector and the scientific community has a bit more of a nimble opportunity here to change things more rapidly than what we keep looking at, you know, governments to do for us.” ~ Thomas M. Kostigen, author of Hacking Planet Earth: How Geoengineering Can Help Us Reimagine the Future
Today we’ll be speaking with Thomas M. Kostigen, a New York Times bestselling author and journalist and has written for such publications as National Geographic, Discover, The Wall Street Journal, and The Los Angeles Times. As a journalist, Kostigen has traveled across the world to report on everything from war zones to extreme weather. I could go on listing Thomas’s many accomplishments but I'll let them speak for themselves. Today we’ll be focusing primarily on his new book, Hacking Planet Earth: How Geoengineering Can Help Us Reimagine the Future. We’ll talk with him about things that frankly seem more fitting for a sc- fi novel than a climate change podcast, things like zapping clouds with lasers to make it rain and using nanoparticles to reflect the sun’s rays back into space.
Thomas: Hacking Planet Earth really goes into my definition of geoengineering, which is how we can take better control of not only the climate but what the climate accelerates and is connected to. And that's pretty much everything in our lives. So our food systems, mobility systems, how we conduct urban planning and how we are going to even socialize and interact in the future. And given today’s circumstances, the unfortunate circumstances With COVID-19, we're getting a little taste of what invisible threats, just like climate change, can do to our everyday life. So within the pages of Hacking Planet Earth, I get into all sorts of technologies that can affect with a big “E” the climate today, not 10 years from now, or 20 years from now or 30 years from now but today. And these technologies range from different types of devices that can deflect the sun to taking carbon out of the atmosphere, to better enhancing our soil for agriculture, to all sorts of things that we have on the innovation front and mad, mad geniuses have gotten behind, we just need to bring to scale. And so the book is really a marriage or a call for a marriage between the investment and business community and the science community. Clearly the government and political forces that traditionally would be our societal benefactors and protect us from things like climate change or other public health issues such as COVID aren't there for us. So we need to take matters into our own hands and start to do what nature can no longer do for herself. And that is to manipulate the climate for the better for all of us.
David: When I first heard about geoengineering, I thought it sounded...
Click here for the full transcript.
Music by:
- Avery Reidy
- Keaton Butler
- Theme music is by Juices
Audio production by Keaton Butler – [email protected]
Please share the show with a friend.
If you would like to support the show please click here.
Do you have a great idea for stopping climate change? We want to hear it.
Click here to share your idea and it might be featured on the show.
“I believe the private sector and the scientific community has a bit more of a nimble opportunity here to change things more rapidly than what we keep looking at, you know, governments to do for us.” ~ Thomas M. Kostigen, author of Hacking Planet Earth: How Geoengineering Can Help Us Reimagine the Future
Today we’ll be speaking with Thomas M. Kostigen, a New York Times bestselling author and journalist and has written for such publications as National Geographic, Discover, The Wall Street Journal, and The Los Angeles Times. As a journalist, Kostigen has traveled across the world to report on everything from war zones to extreme weather. I could go on listing Thomas’s many accomplishments but I'll let them speak for themselves. Today we’ll be focusing primarily on his new book, Hacking Planet Earth: How Geoengineering Can Help Us Reimagine the Future. We’ll talk with him about things that frankly seem more fitting for a sc- fi novel than a climate change podcast, things like zapping clouds with lasers to make it rain and using nanoparticles to reflect the sun’s rays back into space.
Thomas: Hacking Planet Earth really goes into my definition of geoengineering, which is how we can take better control of not only the climate but what the climate accelerates and is connected to. And that's pretty much everything in our lives. So our food systems, mobility systems, how we conduct urban planning and how we are going to even socialize and interact in the future. And given today’s circumstances, the unfortunate circumstances With COVID-19, we're getting a little taste of what invisible threats, just like climate change, can do to our everyday life. So within the pages of Hacking Planet Earth, I get into all sorts of technologies that can affect with a big “E” the climate today, not 10 years from now, or 20 years from now or 30 years from now but today. And these technologies range from different types of devices that can deflect the sun to taking carbon out of the atmosphere, to better enhancing our soil for agriculture, to all sorts of things that we have on the innovation front and mad, mad geniuses have gotten behind, we just need to bring to scale. And so the book is really a marriage or a call for a marriage between the investment and business community and the science community. Clearly the government and political forces that traditionally would be our societal benefactors and protect us from things like climate change or other public health issues such as COVID aren't there for us. So we need to take matters into our own hands and start to do what nature can no longer do for herself. And that is to manipulate the climate for the better for all of us.
David: When I first heard about geoengineering, I thought it sounded...
Click here for the full transcript.
Music by:
- Avery Reidy
- Keaton Butler
- Theme music is by Juices
Audio production by Keaton Butler – [email protected]
Please share the show with a friend.
If you would like to support the show please click here.
Do you have a great idea for stopping climate change? We want to hear it.
Click here to share your idea and it might be featured on the show.
Previous Episode
Carbon Offsets and Soil Carbon Sequestration - Aldyen Donnelly - Nori
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~Aldyen Donnelly, Co-Founder and Director of Carbon Economics at Nori.
Aldyen Donnelly is a co-founder and the Director of Carbon Economics at Nori, a company whose goal is to “create a new way for anyone in the world to pay to remove excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.” She has 30 years of experience in environmental and carbon markets and developed the world's first major forward emission reduction credit purchase agreement to finance carbon sequestration in agricultural soils.
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Please share the show with a friend.
If you would like to support the show please click here.
Do you have a great idea for stopping climate change? We want to hear it.
Click here to share your idea and it might be featured on the show.
Click here to read the full transcript.
Music was provided by:
- Avery Reidy
- Keaton Butler
- Theme music is by Juices
Audio production by Keaton Butler – [email protected]
Next Episode
Sustainable Business: Samantha Richardson author of Ethical Profit
Samantha Richardson is the author of Ethical Profit: A Guide to Increasing Profit Using Sustainable Business Practices. She’s also the founder and CEO of Ethical Profit Accounting Agency, specializing in helping small businesses with a social or environmental mission get a handle on their finances so they can better understand their cash flow and finances. With this information, they are able to make smarter business choices to help fuel their growth.
It was a fun conversation. Here are some of the topics that we covered with Samantha:
- Myths that persist around sustainable business like the idea that it’s too expensive to operate sustainably
- Small and large steps that businesses can take to become more sustainable and all of the benefits that they can gain from doing so.
- What are B Corps and why is it that they can be even more profitable than businesses that are strictly focused on profit
- How a focus on short term profit can cost a business more in the long run (for example the infamous Ford Pinto)
- How Samantha brought Quidditch to Australia
Please share the show with a friend.
If you would like to support the show please click here.
Do you have a great idea for stopping climate change? We want to hear it.
Click here to share your idea and it might be featured on the show.Music by:
- Grace van't Hof
- Avery Reidy
- Keaton Butler
- Theme music is by Juices
Audio production by Keaton Butler – [email protected]
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