Dr. Steven (Steve) Novella
speaker
1,490 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 27 Jun
Dr. Steven (Steve) Novella’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So that's the process that they're working on.
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And they developed a process where they can do that.
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But here's the thing.
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This is why I don't think this is ever going to be that useful.
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It requires heating the vegetation to 1,600 degrees Celsius.
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So you're essentially burning it to mush, right?
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Well, it's not just that.
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It's that you are – it takes a lot of energy to create that heat.
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And, of course, that making energies releases carbon.
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They say if we could do this process entirely with renewable energy, it wouldn't.
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OK, sure.
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But for now, we're not 100 percent renewable in our energy.
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And so anything that any industrial process that requires high heat is energy intensive is going to be counterproductive, basically.
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Also, this process only captures about 14% of the carbon in the vegetation, so it's not that efficient.
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So it's a good idea.
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I just don't think it's going to be a meaningful solution for those two reasons.
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It's pretty inefficient.
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It requires super high heat, which is going to be energy intensive, and that's not a good thing.
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But the idea is a good one, the idea of forget about trying to capture carbon directly from the atmosphere.
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Let plants do their job, and then let's just figure out ways to use the plant material and to turn it into something useful, ideally, like something hard, like the carborundum, or at the very least is stable and we could bury it.
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Showing 201–220 of 1,490 · page 11 of 75
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