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 over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe · The Skeptics Guide #827 - May 15 2021 podcast

So, however, the other limiting factor here is we're kind of limited in the amount of land that we have to use. matched

And we're kind of using it all, you know, all the arable land to make food. matched

And so turning over any significant portion of land to capture carbon is, matched

It's not a good idea, which is also why biofuels are always going to be niche because we're not going to solve our problem with biofuel because we don't have the land to do it. matched

So what are the solutions there? matched

One is you can use existing vegetation that's currently waste. matched

So corn stalks, right, or switchgrass or something where, you know, it's already there and we're just sort of taking out of the stream and using it in a process like this. matched

Or there's research programs trying to figure out how to grow algae in vats, things that don't use land that you could either do in the ocean, of course, without being disruptive to the ocean. matched

Or you could do in vats of liquid or something where you could do vertically. matched

It's not going to use a lot of arable land. matched

So this isn't the thing. matched

And again, it's one of those technologies where it's got to have simultaneously have a lot of characteristics that are all lining up in order to be useful. matched

And we're not there yet. matched

But I think this this research may bear fruit. matched

And there's a lot of researchers independently working on different ways of doing this. matched

And what I like about this is that it's not trying to reinvent the wheel in terms of the carbon capture itself. matched

And you're kind of already halfway there with plants because the plants are making high energy compounds with photosynthesis. matched

So they're capturing energy, capturing carbon, making high energy molecules. matched

And then all we got to do is figure out a way to make use of them in a form that does not put that carbon back into the atmosphere. matched

So that is something to keep an eye on. matched

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