Will There Be Way to Remove Carbon from the Atmosphere? w/Boyan Slat | Joe Rogan

Do you ever conceive of a possibility of coming up with something that removes carbon from the atmosphere? That's a giant issue with us, right? Right. Carbon emissions. So definitely I believe negative emissions, I think you refer to them, will be required to make the goals to kind of keep the warming in check. However, it's a much more difficult problem because if you think of the ocean, it's basically a two-dimensional problem. It's a plastic on the surface and fortunately it's not even the whole ocean. It's kind of concentrating in these accumulation zones. So the garbage patch, although it's twice the size of Texas, it's still 1.6 million square kilometers while the ocean is like 300 million square kilometers. So it's really just maybe less than a percent of the ocean which needs to be cleaned. And again, it's a two-dimensional problem. Well, the atmosphere is three-dimensional. So it's just this one-dimensional increase is just a huge, huge challenge. So I do think it needs to be tackled. It's definitely an exciting problem to think about. I do think that's definitely, that's not a good starter problem to work on. No. Wasn't there something, Jamie, that we had talked about where they had figured out a way to make these building-sized essentially vacuum cleaners they were going to put in the center of certain cities? I believe it was in Asia, maybe perhaps China, they'd come up with this. I don't know if they implemented it yet, but the idea was to have these enormous things in place that look like a skyscraper. And really it was just a huge vacuum cleaner for carbon. I know of a few companies that work in a bit of carbon engineering is one. There is also one out of Switzerland, forgot the name. But definitely good, smart people are working on that problem. I'm not sure where they are in terms of the economics and scale of energy. Is it right here? When you mentioned this, carbon engineering is this one. Okay, so that looks like giant fans, like a huge building filled with fans. We believe humanity can solve climate change. Yikes. Imagine we have filters for air, the same way we have filters for water, direct air capture technology. Carbon engineering, more than 10 years in the making, it can capture carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere. And look at that machine, try to get a close up on what that thing looks like. It looks like giant fucking washing machines. Right, like it's washing the air. Doesn't it? Look at giant washing machines? Wow. It seems like it's feasible. It doesn't seem like it's something that's impossible. Yeah, I think it's the scalability that's the main challenge. Well, it's also funding. If you drive over, or fly over Manhattan rather, and see the density of the structures and how many buildings are in there, you know that people can make some pretty insane shit. Why couldn't they make some giant insane vacuum cleaner for the air that's as big as a city block? Of course, a lot of it comes down to economics. Our system is not very good at valuing things that are long term, or directly benefit ourselves. So definitely. People tax it. They'll find a way to make it profitable. Is this another one? Rendering of what one would look like to capture one million tons of CO2 per year. Whoa. Sounds like it looks like it'd be noisy. Oh yeah, probably annoying as fuck. Look at those fans. It's so weird though. Like the whole array of fans. Like, okay, that seems like a way to do it. Looks like somebody built a giant computer and tried to cool it or something. And then they'll have all this carbon. What the fuck do they do with that? Burn it? What do they do? Yeah, I don't know. What do you make shit out of it? What do you do? Make diamonds? Imagine that. Diamonds are a girl's best friend. You make it out of the carbon that you pull out of the air. Be a good business model. That would be a great business model. This would be like a green diamond. Right? A diamond that's actually made, and it's all pressured by solar power. They use solar power to fucking smash it. Carbon fiber too. Is that the same carbon fiber? I don't know. Is it the same shit? Yeah, why not, right? It must be. It's carbon, right? So carbon is how they make dimes. It's coal, right, which is essentially carbon, right? Do they make diamonds from carbon or do they make diamonds just from coal? What is coal? Coal's like burnt shit, right? There's many, many forms in which carbon exists. Yeah. So different crystal structures. I know they are doing that now where they are making commercially made diamonds. Diamonds are made of carbon. So they form as carbon atoms under a high temperature and pressure. They bond together to start growing crystals. That's why a diamond is such a hard material because you have each carbon atom participating in four of these very strong covalent bonds that form between carbon atoms. I've never read that word out loud. Covalent? Have you ever read that word out loud? Covalent, I believe. Is that how you say it? Yeah. I've never even seen that word. So these bonds that form between carbon atoms. So I know they're doing that now. They're making diamonds with certain machines. High pressure, high ice. Yeah. That would be hilarious. That would be a good thing too because they would put a dent in the actual diamond market, which is this weird lockdown fucking strange market because diamonds aren't nearly as valuable as they're set out to be. De Beers takes these diamonds and they stockpile them and they only release a certain amount of them and they keep the price very high. But it's all engineered. Diamonds used to be far more rare than they are now. But with the innovation in mining technology and their ability to get to diamonds they couldn't get to before, they have a lot of diamonds. It's not as valuable as it appears when you go to buy one. So we can make carbon diamonds, bro. And actually plastic, again, it's carbon chains. We could even make diamonds out of ocean plastic. That would be the ultimate green diamond. Imagine if you're a really ecologically minded rapper, you can wear all your ice could come from the ocean. Let everybody know. From trash to treasure. Yes. Dude, that's the fucking ... That's the signature of the company, in quotes, from trash to treasure. You're telling me to write these things down. Boy and diamonds. How about that? I like it. Yeah. Dude, you could be the first guy to do this. Here we go. A plastic base is an ocean diamond. Whoa. Earth is crushing the ocean into salty diamonds. That's a dope looking diamond too. What is that? It's salt, I guess. Recreated salty diamond deposits in a high pressure, high temperature experiment suggesting that many of Earth's diamonds form when the mantle crushes ancient seabed minerals. Oh, isn't science and the Earth cool?