Solutions to our environment with Thomas Kostigen

Bulletproof radio, a state of high performance. You've done so much crazy stuff like extreme weather survival guide and all things from conservation to things are kind of a shit show environmentally. What are we going to do about it? I'd like to start by asking you straight up, how bad is it, our environment, the state of the planet right now?

Well, if we want to look at Northern California as an example, that's a big one. With the wildfires raging now, moving into the Midwest, one of the most active hurricane seasons that we've seen. Major droughts, incredible storms every single winter, major precipitation, as well as, you know, sea level rise. That's just a few things. Has it always been no laughing matter? It's, you know, people are really in dire straits. You know, you overlay that with a pandemic and we really need to get our act together. And that's why I become so passionate about it. But it does bring up this sense of, like, it's almost laughable that we haven't done enough because you look at what's going on and you think, what more is it going to take for us to actually do something?

In your book, you say fate cannot be left to chance any longer, which is actually kind of funny. It's like saying it's not too late to panic in that fate is ideally chance. You're advocating, and you're probably one of the biggest voices advocating, saying, all right, we know the direction things are headed. It's time to pull out really, really big engineering solutions to this in a way that maybe Peter Diamandis would support, who's been on the show a few times. Peter has talked. In fact, he's advocated for an X prize around putting up a space umbrella. I'm one of the backers of the Carbon X Prize, the carbon Capture X Prize. And what do you think about the space umbrella idea? Talk about what it is and what you think. Should we really do that?

Well, the space umbrella, I get right up front in the book because I wanted to show people what the farthest out type of thinking is. And, you know, the space umbrella for people don't know it, is there's several different iterations of it where you would literally launch reflective materials, nanoparticles, into space that would create a space shade or space umbrella, what have you, that would deflect the sun's radiation and therefore cool the planet. So again, thinking about the logistics on that, not an engineer myself, but I think any reasonable person go, wow, that's way out there and very expensive. And it is several Trillion dollars. And we'd have to in some way probably colonize the moon in order to create manufacturing facilities out there to launch the space umbrella from there. Otherwise, launching it from Earth would be, you know, very, very difficult and expensive and would take a very long period of time.

It would also probably create a huge amount of atmospheric pollution sending all those rockets into space, right?

Yeah. I mean, it's just out there, like so far out there on the theoretical, like, you know, let's go back to college and think about some stuff that's way out there and then model it. That's what I think the scientists do on that. So for me, that's not a reasonable alternative right now. But I do put it out there as an nth degree and then work the way back to say, here's some shit that we can do right here, right now that doesn't involve colonizing the moon, that doesn't involve trillions of dollars, and doesn't, of course, set off a lot of carbon emissions by sending rockets into outer space.

Okay, so you're not a fan of the space shield there, and you're talking about one that's relatively far out from the planet because there's one plan that says we should put something closer to the sun so you can block out more of the sun, and one that says you have nanoparticles kind of closer in. You looked at both of those and you're saying they're both expensive and far out there and not worth the trouble, basically.

Well, it's very difficult when you start to look at what you have to go to Lagrange Point, which is kind of those place that doesn't move between the Earth and the sun. So if you didn't do that, then you're talking about a satellite that you would then have to control and you start getting into some weird Gerard, Gerard Butler, like, action movie things that I think is just a little far out there. When we're going to tell him you said that? Please.

He endorsed my last book.

As we all do.

I love it that you said his name. It just made me laugh. I'm like, of course.

So I think there's some things like look, cool roofs, cool roads, right? You could do right here in your community today. We could start to get into some of the other things like marine cloud brightening that will start to lower things with clouds, or scopex, which I'm sure you know about, which is. David Keith out of Harvard University has been toying with the idea and has set up a committee to spray certain types of aerosols into the tops of clouds to reflect the sun. So I think there's some things that we could do here on planet Earth first. Before we start getting into outer space. As a kind of a last resort, in my mind.