Amongst the political bluster, lobbying and publicity campaigns, real progress is being made in technologies to help combat climate change.
Whilst the publicity campaigns are important, and we should all take more ownership of our negative and positive impacts, consumer behaviour is a difficult thing to change. Especially when economic growth and pandemic recovery plans hinge on consumers continuing to buy things they don't necessarily need.
Meanwhile, long term solutions for slowing and even reversing our damage to the climate are being developed, tested and brought to market by scientists and engineers.
Company Insights:
Blue Planet
There are many approaches to climate control, spanning from reducing emissions with renewable energies and carbon neutral/negative initiatives through to proactively scrubbing carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air.
Direct Air Capture (aka carbon scrubbing) and tree planting are two of the biggest areas of research and development. Over the last decade the cost of scrubbing CO2 from the air has plummeted from $600 per tonne to as little as $94 per tonne, which has helped open up investment into the area, and spurred some very promising developments.
Blue Planet
Blue Planet, established in 2012, specialises in carbon sequestration, transforming atmospheric CO2 into building materials.
Carbon sequestration is the process of capturing and storing carbon from the atmosphere, and Blue Planet 's technology transforms atmospheric carbon dioxide into commonly used building materials.
They say that this can actually lead to carbon negative building materials, as it means construction companies don't need to dig materials from the ground (which causes C02) emissions, instead they can use building materials created from carbon dioxide that has been scrubbed from the environment.
Find out more about what they do, including their project with a place I used to visit frequently, San Francisco International Airport, here.