The World as You'll Know It: The Great Rebuild

Transcript for Season 5 Trailer

Audio here

RACHEL KYTE:  There are things which are better about a cleaner world. we can be excited about what the world we can build might be, but we've just got to move quickly. [6.8s]

[THEME MUSIC IN]

HOST: Most of us understand the reality of climate change. We see and experience the effects.  Rising heat, drought, more severe weather events.

What’s harder to see and experience is what’s being done to combat it.

DAVID FERRIS: It's really hard to describe how big the change underfoot is. there is an entire new industry or even, I think you could say, a set of industries rising right now.  

HOST: Remaking our world from one that primarily runs on fossil fuels to one powered by clean energy … It’s a monumental task. Something we’ve never attempted before. A story full of big successes, major failures, and difficult, grinding work. 

[MUSIC SWITCH]

DANIEL BETTS: So if air conditioning could be flexible in its load and ultra-high efficiency, that would enable us to solve the principal things that make air conditioning unsustainable

KLAUS LACKNER: And so I said, well, if that's true, we ought to be able to build something akin to a tree or a windmill that scrubs the CO2 out of the wind.

HOST: Things that seemed beyond reach 10 or 20 years ago … are coming into view. Like driving cross country in an Electric Vehicle. But to reach our climate goals, we need new ways of thinking about the challenge. We need to find the most promising ideas, then roll them out on a massive scale.

JASON MORTIMER: we're taking electricity that is not generated from fossil fuels. And we're cracking water. Simplistically, that's all we're doing.

HOST: I’m Arielle Duhaime-Ross. I’m a science journalist, and I’ve spent more than a decade reporting on technology, health, and climate change. I’ll be hosting the new season of The World As You’ll Know It. Where we’ll take you into the heart of this transition.

It’s a story full of breakthroughs, frustrations, and hard pivots. And we don't yet know how it ends.

MORTIMER: We're doing the thing that hasn't been done at the scale that's never been imagined. And, you know, good for us, right? We still have to prove it.

HOST: This is The World as You’ll Know It. The Great Rebuild.

[MUSIC UP AND OUT] 

Coming this summer.