Can Tech Save The World? - COP26 Special

[Music] this week sustainability is the name of the game which is why i'm on the eve e cargo bike it's electric it's made from natural and recycled materials and it's usually used for inner city deliveries but today it is delivering me to the studio nice wheels oh hello down there hey sinclair c5 blaster in the past i know an icon of the 80s created by a computing icon in memory of the clive sinclair i'm taking this for a spin but it's really been souped up inside is an e-scooter with some brand new batteries which means i can go pretty fast yeah wait for me [Music] ah [Applause] oh look at us we've got a shiny studio we have an audience hello audience i'm right next door through that wall and across the river a bit we have some very important neighbors yes we're here at bbc scotland in pacific key glasgow and just over there the united nations climate conference cop 26 is hosting leaders from around the world along with 25 000 delegates from 196 nations the question is will they agree to take the steps needed to tackle our climate emergency the un says current systems won't suffice we need new ideas and solutions to secure our future and so in this show we're asking what role do technology and innovation play in helping reduce our emissions can technology save our world so let's start and did you know that one of the biggest causes of greenhouse gas emissions is the agriculture industry now we know we need to cut down on our meat consumption and one of the reasons is that cattle are responsible for 10 of those emissions yes but it's not from what we think it is is it the back end no no it's not no nearly all methane from cows 95 comes from the front and not the back yep it's all about the burps 10 of our entire greenhouse gas emissions come from cow burps and that means you magenta everybody meet magenta magenta everybody she's appearing here alongside her team and her showbiz agent eileen wall head of research at scotland's rural college eileen welcome hi spencer and hello magenta hello magenta can i ask you what is magenta wearing and why magenta is wearing the latest in wearable technology for our bovine friends she's got two bits of kit on her one a pedometer kind of like what we all wear on her wrists that measures what she's doing lying down sitting walking around and how much energy energy she's using and around her neck she's got something that measures her head movement so we can know when she's eating and when she might be producing something out of her front end and that helps you to work out how much methane she's so methane is produced after she's eaten her meals so if we know what how much she's eating how often she's eating we'll be able to extrapolate her meat thing as well as being able to measure it to compare it and you have belch chambers is that right we do we use those for research that's not something we do routinely in the field and we use it very infrequently to really get an idea of how the methane changes over time how it might differ for this cow over another cow or eating different foods is there any way we can find out how much methane magenta is producing right now yeah so the equipment that we have in the chamber is not exactly the same as this this is a laser methane reader that measures the parts per million of methane that might be coming out of magenta's front end all right let's give that a go i'm gonna get out of the way because it's a laser there's a laser and we all know how dangerous lasers are so magenta if you don't don't listen magenta okay oh she's licking it she knows it's coming she doesn't chase it like a cat does she's and the reading is 18 parts per million so it's been a while she's seen she's had a lot of food she's having a clean day all right um thank you eileen now one way to cut down on kel burps is to cut down on cows of course but in the meantime did you know that there's a company that's working on a way to catch the methane as it comes out how are they doing that cow masks of course true story the masks have fans in them which suck in the methane and oxidize it and the makers say they can cut the amount of methane released by half cow masks everybody eileen that is fascinating thank you so much thank you team and thank you magenta lara well that went a lot more smoothly than it may have done but what comes out of a cow can also be affected by what you put into a cow this lot are eating feed created from seaweed found in the waters of hawaii and its makers blue ocean barns claim it cuts emissions by 80 percent but will it make your beef taste fishy apparently not because the thing is flags can i get you lovely bugs 100 pounds you tasty crunchy nutritious bugs so what are you doing laura welcome to my wondrous emporium filled to the brim with fine foods from the future oh great because i'm absolutely starving okay well i'll tell you what get your lips around these delicacies um okay i'm actually thinking that because our audience have gone to the trouble of coming here to join us today okay yes they may be more deserving of this than me i'm sure you'd love to try some wouldn't you just here we've got the first course for you help yourselves did we fill in the forms for this i'm sure there were forms listen trust me they're not bad i've eaten roasted meal worm in china they've never done me any harm um see in the future we might be eating more insects than meats they are cheap they're richer in protein calcium and iron and have less fats than beef pork or chicken best of all there are bazillions of them yes i heard there are one and a half billion per person on earth what do you think how do they taste they're very crispy crispy you don't look too impressed and you like roasted chickpeas okay that's true not bad do you like roasted chickpeas love them okay fair enough listen they're not just for humans either take a look at these right these are black soldier fly larvae fancy one no i'm not really feeling so hungry anymore correct answer because they're for pigs because it's a way of feeding farm animals more sustainably they're bred by beta bugs which is a startup based in scotland well i know in certain parts of the world eating bugs is commonplace but i still can't imagine them being on my shopping list well okay how about these okay that actually looks borderline appetizing just behind here you will find that all right just have a taste of that there we go any time you're ready and i will tell you that these are drum roll spicy crickets yes these dishes are made from insect packs by a british firm called bug who love bugs obviously and they say that bugs use less water they use less land than animals they need less feed than animals and in fact they can be fed on the things that we throw away but are they delicious they're quite spicy they have a bit of a kick right i don't think you're impressed by any of this i think it's like sweet and sour chicken okay again that's not bad yeah i think you've got dinner here sorted haven't you totally now it's all very well having tasty stuff to eat but in terms of the climate how our food is produced is key and our very own gen coat steak is in a greenhouse for us jen yes i'm here in the norwich greenhouse and it looks completely different than it did on my last visit it's absolutely filled with plants now there are 378 000 tomato plants here and that represents five percent of the uk's consumption of tomatoes [Music] last year we saw this world first project being built using an environmentally friendly heating system a typical greenhouse would would burn fossil fuels to create the heat that you need to go through these rails but our greenhouse takes waste heat from sewage treatment works we use that heat instead of burning fossil fuels [Music] the hard hats and high-vis gear we wore last time have been replaced by coveralls to protect the crops from bringing in external bugs and viruses workers here have their clothes cleaned on site and how many people are working here now because when i came before there was nobody yeah so we have about 50 people currently working in here on picking so these tomatoes are going out to the shops yes yeah they're being picked ready to be packed and you'll see them in the supermarket soon and we see different varieties of tomatoes so can you explain what's going on as we get here this is ready to be picked yep um reasons you're just starting to get some color on so they'll be picked within the next 10 days we introduced predatory insects so at the beginning of the year we introduced something called macalophus pygmaeus which is a true bug it's a predatory insect that feeds on anything like white fly aphids coming as green fly um spider mites that's one of my macrolife yeah you're searching away looking for something to eat um because we're coming to the end of the crop we've taken the top of the plant off so this would have extended all the way to the top of the greenhouse up the top of the white the string here um so we keep a buffer above the top of the greenhouse so we can control the atmosphere and the climate within here and more produce is growing in a greenhouse just next door using the same green technology how many cucumbers are you growing in the other greenhouse the other greenhouse here is 14 million cucumbers 14 million 22 million peppers 22 million peppers i don't know how many tons of tomatoes but a lot it's done better than we'd anticipated in its first year if i'm honest yeah but you know great so this project has proven that you can grow a large scale of produce in a low carbon way you just need to be near a waste heat source and there are plenty of those around the world thanks jen of course once our crops have been harvested they need to be stored safely so they don't spoil an estimated 630 million tons of grain goes bad each year which is such a waste well dr lorenzo conte thinks he might have a solution dr lorenzo what is it what we have developed lara is the world's first subterranean drone and we're using it specifically to help grain storage operators maintain the quality of their stock you called it a drone but it doesn't look much like a drone that's right since there wasn't a word in the dictionary to describe what it is we have come up with one we call it a crover how does it work and what does it do exactly it swims through grain in storage like in silos and sheds monitoring conditions of the grain like temperature and moisture and helping maintain their quality how does this vary from conventional methods of looking after your grain well traditionally you would need a farmer to physically walk on top of the green bulk with a heavy-hand spear and taking samples at a few points which is dangerous and in some situations not possible to do okay that sounds like a bigger job so do you think farmers are going to use this right now we're focused mostly on centralized grain storage jobs which are usually owned by great merchants and port operators but we like to develop in the future a version that is suitable for farmers as well okay and i'm hoping when it's used in the real world it doesn't mix up the grains like that i can hardly look thank you so much dr lorenzo thank you lara [Music] hey chris here with the week in tech this was the week the web giant yahoo pulled out of china blaming an increasingly challenging business and legal environment there meanwhile epic games has announced that the chinese version of fortnite will also close facebook said it would stop using facial recognition on the social network and will delete a billion people's face print data the system was used to recognize and tag people in photos but privacy campaigners had criticized it facebook said the tech needed to be debated in the open it was also the week that facebook whistleblower francis haugen appeared on stage at web summer in portugal calling for mark zuckerberg to be replaced as chief executive she was also critical of the company's rebrand to meta over and over again facebook chooses expansion in new areas over sticking the landing on what they've already done and metta isn't the only company with its eyes on the so-called metaverse microsoft announced 3d avatars will come to microsoft teams next year so you don't have to get out of bed or do your hair before a video call and the game streaming site twitch announced it was branching out with a new section for animal and aquarium live streams so if you're more into rabbits than rabbids or prefer otters to overwatch or fish to fortnite then they've got you covered now when it comes to reducing our emissions keeping heat from escaping our homes is really important and paul carter has something particularly warming to show us paul thanks laura yes home insulation is certainly a hot topic at the moment and rising energy bills are also making the headlines but of course click wouldn't be click if we didn't have a robot that might be able to help with that this is cubot and dana from cubot is here with me thanks for joining us thanks for having me the first question what is cubot and what does it do right this is cubock what we do is we create intelligent tools which retrofit sustainable solutions in the construction industry so this is boudicca oh my goodness right so buddha is spraying here what is it that she's spraying right and how is it getting from the robot up into the floor so what she's doing is she's spraying a polyurethane foam uh which has been used in industry for years to retrofit insulation so what can a robot do in this environment that a person can't do for example so what we've actually done is created jobs using robots in an industry which didn't exist before these robots actually navigate very small environments which are far too dangerous to send a human and i notice that you're controlling this all from a video game controller there i am everything can be done from a gamepad it looks kind of it does look like a game it looks like a lot of fun what is it that you're actually seeing on your screen there right so what i'm seeing is my virtual aiming arrow which shows me where i'm spraying i've also got my spray pattern which i'm just running through here to get the job done so it's nice and easy nice and safe and obviously this is a mock-up that we've got here will this solution work in everybody's homes right so what we're looking for is two things suspended timber floors and floors which are have less than 20 moisture so we can do jobs down from 20 centimeters up to 2 meters high yeah i mean i'm not an expert in flooring insulation but it looks to me like it's done a pretty good job thanks paul nice job paul thank you now then we are a tech show and we can't avoid the fact that tech is a heavy user of electricity tech is contributing to global emissions for example there are data centers all over the world filled with power hungry computers but also filled with power hungry cooling systems now some data centers are being moved north so they can use the naturally colder air but there are other options too microsoft has been running an experiment just off the coast of orkney and they put a data center underwater what could possibly go wrong let's find out lucas joppa is chief environmental officer at microsoft lucas welcome so the idea with this is you're using colder sea water to cool the computers right yes exactly you asked what could go wrong it turns out when you put data centers underwater a lot fewer things can go wrong that might seem a bit counterintuitive but we can completely seal that environment it has to be to go underwater that means that there's no human operator error that's allowed inside we can remove all of the kind of the natural gases that we find here and put gases in that keep the uh the computers running extremely efficiently and we can use that natural cooling power of the sea to keep the computing at the right temperature at the for for the entire time and all of that adds up to this really nice small portable you know basically underwater cloud if you will how much is it up to governments to make demands of the tech industry on what it needs and how much is it up to big tech to devise new solutions to show governments what can be done well i think it's an entirely collaborative process i think about it about trying to move like a a heavy dresser across a room all by yourself you know you go to one side you move it you go to the other side you move it back and that's kind of the way that i think public and private sector work together in this space it's for the public sector to show the way with regulations and and um and the like and it's for the private sector to respond with solutions and to show that these things are possible how much is big tech to blame for climate change well i think you know everybody's to blame for climate change this is a shared socio-economic problem i think when you look at tech the tech sector itself um where you really see the impact is around energy use so um you know tech is obviously uh is is driven by electrons and and what the the generation of those electrons and electricity we need to think about any emissions that are coming from that it's why microsoft we have 100 renewable energy goal by 2025 many of the other tech players do as well and i think that's really the single place that tech has to really make sure that it is helping transform you know taking care of its own house while also helping to decarbonize the electrical grids that we of course operate on but so does everybody else okay lucas joppa thank you very much for your time thank you one way to help save the planet from carbon emissions is to drive electric but although electric car sales have taken off with more than double the number being registered in the uk this year compared to last year many of us who may be considering the jump are still worried about running out of charge nearly half of homes don't have a place to park which means you can't have a charger at home but dan's found something that may be able to help thanks laura i want to show you a world first at least for us ordinary drivers consumers now maybe your ev is a little bit low on juice but you can't just charge it up anywhere and there really is no such thing as a joey can for electric vehicles so you can just top them up well not at the moment this is jonathan he comes from a company called zip charge what is that this is the zip charge go it's a portable ev charger that gives people the freedom to charge anywhere they park and that box there you just plug it into any regular socket yeah that's right you plug it into your socket at home it charges in just over 60 minutes you wheel it out to your car plug it in and then it discharges in just over 30. and it works with any make of car yeah that's right any any electric vehicle so how far will that get me so this is a four kilowatt-hour unit that will give this nissan leaf about 18 miles of range which is more than enough the average daily commute here in this country now the big question how much does it cost so this unit will cost 49 pounds on subscription and if you want to buy it outright it'll cost 1500 pounds which is in the ballpark of a fully installed fixed home charger it's gonna cost me a bit to carry around isn't it batteries are not sort of lightweight are they i mean how much does that unit weigh so this weighs just under 25 kilos so that's sort of roughly about the amount of luggage i would take on a two-week holiday and you're expecting me to carry that in my beautiful electric vehicle wherever i go i mean that's going to affect the efficiency of this vehicle isn't it well not really if you put it into context that weighs less than two percent of the weight of this nissan leaf so the really the impact is marginal there's a lot of talk about battery-powered technology being maybe disposable throw away doing a lot of damage to the planet how long will that actually last me so if you were to charge every day this will last you almost four years but at the end of its life we'll take the batteries and we'll reuse them elsewhere for energy storage okay and at the moment it's just a prototype shouldn't get too excited should we yeah but we've brought this to showcase at cop but also it's its first global premiere here for the bbc but it will be available for anyone to buy about this time next year thanks jonathan great stuff and something to raise a glass to last orders oh right well in that case i'll have a pint of lager then please we've got two on tap today one's made from bread the other one is a local brew made from old scraps excuse me i'll explain right you try that this is a zero waste sour made by dry gauge brewery across the clyde there it's concocted from unwanted fruit and veg that would otherwise just end up in landfill okay well it tastes just like a fruity sour beer so veggies good but don't enjoy it too much because it is just part of a campaign that's lasting for a month over cop 26. okay so not a long-term plan then all right tell me about the bread beer okay this is made by a brewery called toast it's from the leftover ends of loaves which the sandwich industry otherwise just chucks in the bin okay well fair enough i mean the booze industry also is responsible for lots of emissions isn't it i mean they grow the crops they add the water they package it they heat it up they cool it down again at least british breweries are focusing on the issue total co2 emissions from it have almost halved over the past decade crumbs which this doesn't taste like so but i do have something else special for you to try today pee and tonic pee and tonic i think i'll just have the tonic thanks here you go look it's got actual peeps oh right okay i'll explain okay june is usually made from wheat or barley which is grown using synthetic fertilizer that contains nitrogen but this nodagen from our growth is made from peas which don't need added nitrogen to flourish and by not using synthetic fertilizer it saves one and a half kilograms of carbon emissions per bottle well there's definitely a hint of pee about it i have to say and on that note i think i should call time all right fair dudes then listen thank you so much for watching i hope you've enjoyed it as much as we have but i've been drinking so probably not seriously though we've seen some incredible ideas today but let's be honest they aren't going to solve the issues we face on their own for that we really need the world leaders gathered here in glasgow to step up and act so that in five years we're not still saying time is running out but sadly time has run out for us thank you so much for watching we'll see you next week and cheers [Music] you

Channel: BBC Click

Views: 19,265

Keywords: BBC, BBC Click, BBC News, Click, Technology, Tech, click;, cop26, climate, sustainability, insulation, energy, robot, car, ev, charge, battery, greta, boris

Id: VhWGZtqh5ao

Length: 24min 17sec (1457 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 06 2021