Thinking about climate change differently

His speech sent shivers down your spine. The kind of wet shivers that run down your spine and make the hairs on your arms stand on end. Piloerection, for the scientists in the room. Horripilation is also appropriate, especially in the face of fait accomplis. “This is the darkest presentation you will ever see,” he did not hesitate to say right from the start. Greta Thunberg would surely be proud.

Cartesian, methodical, Frédéric has been looking at the facts since 2019. He has gone through the reports of the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in detail. He has looked at the Keeling curves, the variations in the carbon cycle since the interglacial period of the Holocene, he has correlated the data, repatriated them to draw up their frightening history and arrived at the conclusion that "everything we heard was inaccurate. The margin of error is too great. Scientists predict global warming between 1.5 and 5 degrees: they are in total uncertainty!"

Now, here's what we know. In the Pliocene epoch, about fifty million years ago, there was a violent warming of the climate. Palm trees grew at the North Pole. Forests took root in Antarctica. Greenland was green, hence its name. Water was rising. Temperatures were three to five degrees warmer than in the 1800s. Volcanoes were erupting, destabilizing reservoirs of methane buried deep in the ocean sediments. The methane, changing from a gel to a gas, turned into CO2 as it rose. That was the last time the planet had a concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere around 400 ppm (parts of CO2 per million). Today, it's 421 ppm with the emissions we're producing. We're sitting on a time bomb.

The urgency to act was yesterday

The natural carbon cycle has gone haywire. Since industrialization, the combustion of fossil fuels that our activities have generated in an excessive manner has meant that there is a surplus of carbon stored in the atmosphere and in the oceans, which can no longer be balanced and regenerated naturally.

"Global warming has been accelerating ten times faster since 1980. Fifty years ago, we were at 320ppm. And the effect is not felt instantly. What we feel today is related to the 320ppm of fifty years ago, not the 421ppm recorded… And this effect is not linear, it is exponential. Also know that CO2 remains trapped in the air for 300 to 10,000 years." Take a deep breath, while there is still time.

The Amazon now generates more carbon than it absorbs; it can no longer be the lungs of our planet. The melted glaciers will not freeze again tomorrow morning. Alarming increases in water levels and temperatures, tropical storms, droughts, floods, forest fires: these are the consequences of about fifty years ago.

Last year, California lost 800,000 acres of farmland, floods impacted over two million acres in Asia, and Africa lost 30% of its grain production. It even banned its export. A global food crisis, economic, social, and political, with governments becoming more radical… But it doesn’t matter, because tomorrow is already too late. “At 421ppm, our earth is uninhabitable. We don’t have until 2100 to fix this .”

Capturing and sequestering CO2 underground and on a large scale

Our house is on fire! The time for nice green incentives is over. Obviously, we need to stop burning fossil fuels, but let's be realistic: "the energy transition is not going to happen overnight. We're going to continue to use oil and natural gas. Besides, on a global scale, we're still increasing the use of coal! So obviously, we need to capture at the level of our chimneys."

But before we can even turn things around, literally, if we shut down the economy and stopped everything now, the famous deadline hampers all hope. "But we can still do something. It takes an exit strategy before we even start. That's 800 million tons of CO2 that we have to eliminate right now, all the historical CO2, the one that was emitted before. We should have started in the 1950s and 1960s. The problem we have is not the technology to capture and store it, it's the scale-up . The scale is so great, the impacts so accelerated, the deadline so tight, that what takes thirty years to do, we're going to have to find a way to do in five."

The technology is relatively simple. “It’s basically the oil industry on its head. It was tested in 1972 by taking what came out of the smokestacks and putting it back underground.” Relatively. Today, there are about 20 projects in development to capture carbon in the air and oceans, and Deep Sky is working in partnership with these global technology leaders. In Iceland, for example, a facility near a geothermal power plant sucks in air, isolates the carbon dioxide, mixes it with the plant’s water, and injects it back underground. “Two kilometers below our feet, it’s 400 degrees Celsius and the pressure is such that the CO2 changes state and can mineralize.”

The infrastructure needed to remove gigatons of tons of CO2 at a rapid pace will be powered by renewable energy. “Quebec, with its hydroelectric reserves and its geology, is the dream place to start this industry. Ontario too, which wastes its energy, and maybe Alberta. It takes fifty million dollars. We have almost a quarter of it.” Investissement Québec and Canadian firm Brightspark Ventures have jointly invested $10 million. Hopper co-founder Joost Ouwerkerk and former Airbnb CFO Laurence Tosi are also among the founders.

The product that DeepSky will sell is a credit: the negative ton of CO2, which will certainly be as valuable as gold, at least, which should already be.