Climate change: 10 ideas to save the planet

We are all pretty familiar with the debates about loft insulation, wind-farms and electric cars, but could any of the these technologies really stop the planet baking? And what about new ideas – still a twinkle in a professor’s eye – that perhaps need to shine a whole lot brighter given the apparent magnitude of the looming climate crisis?

Of course, I had my own ideas. This is a subject in which Channel 4 News has always been very interested, and we have done plenty of stories in recent years about scientific progress in this area. But the imminent climate change conference in Copenhagen presented a great opportunity to find out what the experts think.

So we thought we’d ask them. Who better to answer the question than Britain’s finest scientific minds? With the help of the Science Media Centre, we’ve spent the last couple of weeks tapping into networks of British scientists – some working directly in this area, others who are just interested.

Our question was simple – what idea, policy or technology holds the greatest promise for tackling climate change?

1. Climate of apathy
We may be able to engineer solutions to the climate change problem – but can we engineer societies to become “responsible consumers”?
2. Wind, waves and sun
Which renewable energy holds the greatest prospect in reducing emissions?
3. The nuclear option
Governments are striving to replace nuclear fission with cleaner alternatives, but should we be throwing money at fusion?
4. British racing green
While the UK pushes battery-powered cars with cash incentives our experts give their opinion on the future of fuel cells.
5. Burying the problem
With coal demand expected to soar by 2030 capturing and storing carbon emissions is as vital as ever.
6. Geoengineering
Could cloud whitening be the answer to mitigating climate change?
7. Efficiency deficiency
If UK homes were properly insulated carbon emissions would drop by 3.8 million tonnes. Can ageing British housing stock keep up with the green revolution?
8. Biofuels
Hailed as both climate saviour and food stock stealer biofuels are one of the most controversial technologies in the climate change battle.
9. The growing problem
Agriculture is the second largest source of UK greenhouse gases. How will cultivation evolve in order to meet climate targets?
10. Keeping our cool
In order to keep businesses running computers must be cooled. But that comes at a price for the economy and the environment.

Finding the answer

We’ve contacted hundreds of scientists, and now many are contacting us to add their wisdom to the crowd. One lecturer at Imperial College got in touch to say she’d like to send our question to the 32 PhD students in her department.

The result is a tsunami of technological thought, which we’ve been struggling to keep up with. In fact, we hired someone to go through all the ideas and put them online.

Many of the contributing scientists pointed out the perhaps obvious answer: there is no single solution – only a range of approaches can address a problem so global and multi-dimensional.

“If you ask the scientists it doesn’t get much more urgent than this.” Tom Clarke

We understand that, but in asking for a “narrow beam” response, we hoped to get a sense of where the scientific community would focus its efforts. Some of the answers were super succinct – “nuclear power” or “condoms”.

Others were considered essays and even advances on yet to be published papers. All much appreciated.

Of course this isn’t a scientific sample. Well it is in one sense, but it certainly isn’t representative in the sense that YouGov or Mori would understand it. But there are some interesting indicators we’d like to share.

For example, very few people mentioned wind power. Kind of surprising given its prominence in the British government’s obligation to generate 20 per cent of the country’s energy needs from renewable sources by 2020. Perhaps because it’s not that “new.”

But other scientists felt a technology like wind power doesn’t yet “scale” – i.e. can be feasibly ramped-up to meet realistic levels of global energy demand – and shouldn’t therefore be their top pick.

Instead, there’s a lot of focus on geoengineering – changing the way we produce food, run our agriculture or manage the Earth’s ecosystems.

Many scientists seem to think the importance of the planet’s ecosystems in storing and releasing carbon are seriously overlooked. Burning fossil fuels emits about 5.5 billion tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere each year but changing land-use accounts for about two, another three are soaked up by plants and animals in the oceans.

And then there’s nuclear power.

Many scientists and engineers felt traditional nuclear power had much to offer as an on-stream solution to carbon-intensive power generation. But more than a few picked the Holy Grail of energy that really could be too cheap to metre – nuclear fusion.

Unlike the atom splitting (fission) reactors that already provide some 13 per cent of Britain’s electricity a fusion reactor harnesses the energy when two atoms join together. It is how the sun works and that’s been supplying reliable carbon-free energy for well over four billion years.

More than a few picked the Holy Grail of energy that really could be too cheap to metre – nuclear fusion. Tom Clarke

Demonstration fusion reactors like the one in Culham in Oxfordshire have shown mind-boggling amounts of energy can be harnessed his way.

Newer experimental reactors are under development in California and southern France – but their potential is barely mentioned in the current political debates about a technological response to climate change. Why? The scientific and engineering challenge is scarily big, would need huge resources to crack, and other technologies can undoubtedly be developed more quickly and cheaply.

Does climate change need a Manhattan Project?
That reminded me about the nature of scientific progress and what lessons this might have for our approach to climate change. 

In 2002 Daniel Kammen, a brilliant academic at the University of California Berkeley, reminded the American congress of what it had achieved - for better or worse - in its efforts to end world war two.

Back in 1942 the race began to develop a nuclear weapon. The extraordinary human achievement that became the Manhattan Project and created the world's first atomic bombs. 

Yet it was only a decade before that physicists first theorised how the newly discovered properties of atoms might be harnessed to created a weapon. It proved that when science puts its mind to it, and leaders put money behind the scientists, the normal pace of progress can accelerate in a dramatic fashion.

Remember Kennedy's commitment to put an American on the moon, and ask yourself whether a similar approach could now happen to protect us from climate change. 

Under President Obama, America is aiming to spend big on energy once again (around 3 per cent of GDP - the highest it's been since JFK looked to the Moon) and Europe is aiming to follow suit. 

But to me, current efforts don't have the urgent optimism of the Kennedy era, or the Manhattan Project's goal to end the costliest war in human history.

Yet if you ask the scientists, it doesn't get much more urgent than this.
We're already well on our way to dangerous levels of climate change (a global rise in temperatures of four degrees centigrade by the end of this century) and we have only a decade or two to stop it. 

Perhaps it's why a surprising number of scientists and engineers who replied to our question us strayed from their own intellectual comfort zones to answer that it was political and social change that was most needed to solve the problem. 

The idea being that the experts have outlined broadly what needs to be done - now it's up to the rest of us to support them in getting on with doing it. 

Gordon Brown compared the challenge of building a low-carbon economy to the need for a new industrial revolution. 

When he goes to Copenhagen perhaps he should remember that the last one took a hundred years to really get going - the Manhattan Project took less than four.