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 changing climate might be one of the biggest and most important challenges humanity has ever faced — but can we stop it before it’s too late? NOVA “Chasing Carbon Zero” examines the science behind the technology that could help us achieve net zero in the next thirty years.
The U.S. recently set an ambitious climate change goal: to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 and slash emissions in half by 2030. But is that even feasible? What exactly would it take? This episode takes a hard look at the problem and identifies real-world technologies that could be up to the task. From expanding the availability of renewable energy options, to designing more energy-efficient buildings, to revolutionizing the transportation sector, the film casts a hopeful but skeptical eye. The problem is vast and time is running out, but there is still hope that we can achieve carbon zero in time to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
“Chasing Carbon Zero” is reported, produced and directed by Miles O'Brien, a journalist who has been on the climate beat for 30 years. “It’s time to shift the reporting narrative from gloom and doom to possible solutions,” says O’Brien. “It's important that our viewers know we have the technology to reach net zero.”
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 University. Using just a couple of simple but elegant charts, Lott helps O’Brien understand the essential steps we must take to stay on the path to net zero:
- (1) electrify as much as we can — things like cars and buildings; at the same time
- (2) decarbonize the electricity — that’s replacing carbon-emitting electricity generation with renewable and other zero-carbon technologies
- (3) hunt down and squelch the emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas much more potent than carbon dioxide
- (4) push for the breakthroughs that will allow us to tackle the thorniest carbon emitters: aviation, industry, and agriculture
Buildings represent 13% of total emissions in the U.S., so electrifying our heating and cooling systems, particularly in cities, is crucial for decarbonizing. In 2022, Americans bought more heat pumps than gas furnaces, and on New York City’s rooftops, we can see evidence of how electricity is gaining ground.
Viewers meet landlord Lincoln Eccles who invested in 14 heat pumps — one for each of the units in the early 20th-century building he owns in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Heat pumps are more efficient than oil or gas because they're not creating heat; they're just moving it from one place to another. But can this technology be made more accessible to everyone?
That is precisely the goal for Donnel Baird, founder and CEO of the green tech company BlocPower. Its mission is to make green buildings accessible to all. Baird is kickstarting the move away from combustion by removing old boilers and furnaces in aging multifamily buildings and electrifying them with heat pumps. He believes it’s possible to scale that up to electrify a whole block of buildings, and eventually a whole city and beyond.
Another glaring carbon emitter in our homes: gas ovens and stoves. At Chatham University's Eden Hall Campus, Chef Chris Galarza, a culinary sustainability consultant with years of experience running kitchens, gives viewers a “cook’s tour” of a fully electric commercial kitchen. The cooktops operate with induction, which unlike traditional resistance stoves, use electricity to generate a magnetic field to move the electrons inside the cookware. The resulting vibrations heat food much faster than gas burners, without turning the kitchen into a sauna.
Transportation is another large sector responsible for emissions. In Detroit, viewers meet Linda Zhang, the chief engineer for the all-electric Ford F-150 Lightning. The pickup truck is an important innovation for mass adoption of electric vehicles since F-150 series owners are very loyal to the brand and frequently rely on vehicles for their livelihoods. Demand for the new vehicles is high, just one indicator that electric vehicles may be transitioning from novelty to mass adoption.
But "Chasing Carbon Zero" producer Will Toubman and O’Brien drove a loaned Lightning from Boston to Bangor, Maine, and found huge gaps in fast-charging capability. Even if we are able to electrify many buildings and much of the transportation sector, we still will not reach our goal if the electricity is produced by burning fossil fuels.
The film returns to Melissa Lott, who explains that the amount of electricity being generated will increase, and the sources of clean electricity will need to increase by adding new zero-carbon sources — like wind, solar, geothermal, and others. Fortunately, we are well on our way, as the costs of wind, solar, and batteries have dropped in recent years.
Wind is a major, and fast-growing, contributor to a clean energy grid. Floating wind is a relatively new idea that opens up waters deeper than 200 feet — the limit for turbines fixed to the bottom. This technology appears ripe for rapid growth, given that floating turbines can be towed to deeper waters where the wind is more consistent. It also makes it possible to develop wind energy off the west coast of the U.S. where waters are precipitously deep.
We meet Habib Dagher, Executive Director of the University of Maine’s Advanced Structures and Composites Center, whose team is developing a unique wind and wave simulator to test a scale model of a floating hull for wind turbines called VolturnUS. Dagher hopes to have a larger 11-megawatt turbine floating within a few years and theorizes that offshore wind capacity within 50 miles of U.S. coasts could be enough to power the country four times over.
But what to do when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow? For a renewable grid to work, we need to develop some new methods of storing electricity. The lithium-ion batteries that are used in electric cars, for example, are too expensive for multi-day storage on the grid.
But Yet-Ming Chiang of MIT reveals one innovation that could allow for grid-scale energy storage: iron-air batteries. He co-founded a company called Form Energy, which aims to harness the reaction of iron with air as it forms rust. The company hopes to build batteries that can provide electricity to the grid when renewables like solar and wind are down, but also create jobs in the rust belt of America — Form’s first production facility is under construction in Weirton, West Virginia.
Carbon dioxide is not the only greenhouse gas of concern. In fact, controlling another might be one of the strongest levers we have in curbing emissions in the near-term. CO2 represents 80% of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. today, but most of the remaining emissions come from methane, a greenhouse gas that is more than 80 times as potent as carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere over 20 years.
In the oil fields of the Permian Basin in Texas, we meet environmental advocate Sharon Wilson, who uses a thermal camera to detect leaking methane. While experts explain that the transition off of oil and gas can’t happen overnight, limiting the methane emissions from these “super emitters” may be the low-hanging fruit.
“Having spent my career reporting on the dire state of the climate crisis, I now feel an enormous responsibility to present viable solutions to our audiences,” said O’Brien. “This film shows that we have the technology and the means to reach our climate goals — I hope this film will provide audiences with the information and tools needed to implement them.”
Watch On Your Schedule:
"Chasing Carbon Zero" premieres Wednesday, April 26 at 9pm ET/8C on PBS and will be available for streaming at pbs.org/nova, NOVA on YouTube, and the PBS App, available on iOS, Android, Roku streaming devices, Apple TV, Android TV, Amazon Fire TV, Samsung Smart TV, Chromecast and VIZIO.
Credits:
A NOVA production 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. Executive Producers for NOVA are Julia Cort and Chris Schmidt. NOVA is a production of GBH.
