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You know, we love recommending new movies for you guys to watch, and I'm obsessed with Regretting You.
It's based on the bestselling book Regretting You, introducing audiences to Morgan Grant, played by Alison Williams.
We love her and girls.
And her daughter Clara, who's played by McKenna Grace, as they explore what's left behind after a devastating accident, reveals a shocking betrayal and forces them to confront family secrets, redefine love and rediscover each other.
Regretting You is a story of growth, resilience, and self-discovery in the aftermath of tragedy.
It also stars Dave Franco and Mason Thames, with Scott Eastwood and Willa Fitzgerald, and it's in theaters this October.
It has an all-star cast based on the book written by number one New York Times bestselling author, Colleen Hoover, and director Josh Boone is no stranger to bringing these books to life.
He's the guy behind The Fault in Our Stars.
It's the perfect film to share with your best friend, your mom, your grandma, your high school niece.
It's filled with love, tears and laughter, balancing comedy with romance and drama, which you know what?
Sounds right up our alley.
It'll be available in the U.S.
October 24th, 2025 to watch on the big screen.
See it at a theater near you.
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You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day.
I'm your host, Elise Hu.
It's clear there are so many mind-blowing ideas and solutions already out there for tackling climate change.
So how do we scale up the solutions?
For climate tech innovator Xu Hao, it's a lot about how we make these solutions profitable.
In his talk he explains that we already have the science to turn, for example, captured CO2 into plastic or even jet fuel.
But we need more infrastructure to scale up to accelerate climate action across the globe.
Humans have been using alcohol for thousands of years, but when did we understand it soberly?
It wasn't until the 1700s that scientists first discovered the formula of alcohol, C2H5OH.
That alcohol finally got its professional LinkedIn profile called ethanol, and started working as an important chemical.
Advances in engineering and business have since enabled large-scale production of ethanol, and today it is a 114 billion industry.
We use it in cosmetics, in fashion, in medicine, in food and obviously beverages, and it's even more relevant today as fuel and raw material for some of the low-carbon industries.
So why am I telling you about alcohol?
Because it is a good example of how science, engineering and business work together to change the world.
But it actually took ethanol more than 200 years to do so.
We simply couldn't wait that long to tackle our climate challenge.
We urgently need to speed up and scale up low-carbon solutions.
So my name is Xu Hao, and I lead Tencent's climate change initiatives.
We're a major Chinese tech company with products in social media, video games and cloud services.
And we also care about climate change.
It's not just limited to data center efficiency or sourcing of renewable energy, as important as that is.
My colleagues and I have been working to explore how we could contribute to the acceleration of low-carbon technology innovations.
That's why we launched CarbonX program.
And three years in, we're actually more optimistic than ever.
Why?
Because we felt the right answer is not so complicated.
We already have lots of innovation in science, in engineering and business, and the secret to further accelerate the process.
It's also simple.
Just do them all at once.
Let me further explain.
First, most of the scientific discoveries needed to decarbonize our economy have already been made.
Really.
Today we generate electricity from solar and wind.
We store energy using chemistry or physics, we turn carbon dioxide into all kinds of chemicals, and nuclear fusion is also on the horizon.
All right?
100 years already saved.
Let me give you a specific example.
CRISPR is a genetic scissor that's well known in the pharmaceutical industry.
They use it to edit genetic code, to find cures for diseases and new drugs.
But it can be applied to carbon, too.
Take Gatsjin, a Chinese startup.
They actually apply CRISPR to a certain bacteria called Clostridium, so that these little guys can actually feed on carbon dioxide and produce butanol.
So why does butanol matter?
Because, together with our old friend ethanol as well as butanol, we actually get acetylene glycol polyethylene polypropylene, butyl acetate, dibutyl phosphate, tributyl citrate and many more.
A bit lost, right?
These are the chemicals that are actually used in paint clothes toys, water bottles furniture, and the list goes on and on and on.
Essential to everyday life, but all made out of fossil fuel today.
With clostridium, we could potentially make all of them using carbon dioxide instead.
It's really great science.
So it's not the science holding us up.
What about engineering?
Very important, but unglamorous.
Well, engineering requires lots of innovation too, because we have to replicate a success in the laboratory test tubes and scale up it in a much, much bigger way, from grams to kilograms, to tens, to millions of tens.
Eventually, a big factory.
To do that, engineers often face two challenges.
First, how to build a factory faster and cheaper, and then how to operate it effectively.
Let's say we want to build a plant that produces 20000 tons of clean chemicals using carbon dioxide.
Do we build one big reactor or a few smaller ones?
This is where the process engineers come in.
How much pressure is needed in these reactors?
What are the flow rates needed for the gases or the liquids so that they are balanced and the production is most effective?
How much land such a facility will occupy?
How does it integrate with the existing factory?
And probably most importantly, how can we build such a plant faster and cheaper?
Well, all of these considerations determine the fans pumps compressors, reactors and all the other parts we will use, and whether we could use off-the-shelf standardized equipment.
Because otherwise, if we have to design a novel part, it will be much more expensive and often takes much longer.
So it's almost like picking up pieces of Lego blocks to build a beautiful model of your own design.
Both creativity and discipline are needed at the same time.
Then it comes to operational efficiency.
Feynman Dynamics is another startup.
They actually combine carbon dioxide and green hydrogen to make green hydrocarbons and produce sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF, that could potentially clean up our flights.
So the key is actually a catalyst that can efficiently convert carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide.
And the engineering challenge here is how to manufacture such a high-quality catalyst at much bigger volume.
So the process is almost like making a fruit smoothie.
You need to blend the fruit just right to get a delicious drink.
But when you try to make much bigger batches, sometimes the blender got too hot or the fruit doesn't mix well and that will jeopardize the taste of our drink.
To tackle this challenge, engineers at Feynman Dynamics actually borrowed practice from pharmaceutical chemistry.
They designed a special high-speed mixer that passes the chemicals at really high velocity in a tube and then circulates back the finished product, back to the main reactor to make high-quality catalysts.
It's almost like you pre-blend avocados and apples first and then put them back into the big blender to get the ultimate drink.
So these rather small engineering steps actually enabled Feynman Dynamics to produce their catalyst at industrial scale.
So today, SAF is still more than five times more expensive than conventional jet fuel, but with lots of innovation like this and also the production at scale, I believe SAF can beat jet fuel in cost within 10 years' time.
Yeah.
So the engineers are hard at work, but what about business?
Because business is all about price, cost, market and profitability.
And in order to reduce carbon emission in the scale of gigatons, startups must turn their science and engineering innovation into profitable ventures.
But we got plenty of good news here, too.
Some of the technologies are approaching the moment where they cost the same or even less than the fossil fuel alternative, sometimes without a carbon price.
Yuanchu is a startup that makes calcium carbonate out of carbon dioxide.
So calcium carbonate may also sound unfamiliar, but these white powders are actually in our everyday life, from paper to toothpaste, to washing powders, to car tires.
By using leftover calcium from biomass or the steelmaking industry, Yuan Chu can actually produce high-quality calcium carbonate cheaper than the conventional method, which is digging limestone out of the ground and burning lots of fossil fuel to make it.
Great green discount, right?
Then sometimes, business is all about the size of the eventual market.
Moguang is another startup that actually developed this really groundbreaking new material called radioactive cooling.
So this material not only reflects 93 percent of sun radiation back, it could achieve additional cooling by radiating the heat back to outer space, leveraging a certain wavelength cooling window.
Guess what requires cooling?
Melting glaciers.
That's why we launched a pilot project with Mo Guang in Dagu Glacier, one of the endangered glaciers near the Tibetan Plateau.
Over the past three years, the melting has slowed down by as much as 80 percent.
But ...
But the project itself is actually not a business.
Guess what it is?
Any service that requires cooling.
So that's your mobile phone, glass wall of a building or data centers.
So the great news is not only Mo Guang covered Glacier with this material.
They already integrated many of their material into hundreds of thousands of mobile phones and sports cameras and expanding to other products very quickly.
So there is truly huge market potential.
All right.
So the science is here, the engineers are hard at work and the business models are scaling up.
So our final question is, can we further accelerate?
Of course we can.
Simply by bringing together scientists, industry experts and the business people in the same room, so they start to think about all the tough questions from the very beginning at the same time.
So the scientist will probably ask how much gigajoules of energy is required to capture one ton of carbon dioxide.
The industry expert will ask how does your technology help me decarbonize my industry and how does it fit into my factory?
And the investor will probably ask what's your plan?
To grow your business by 100 times in the next five years and to go public?
This is almost exactly what happened at the Common Acts program.
Let's just say this productive dialogue, heated debate, sometimes really disagreement, can be challenging.
But it really helped speed up the process because it got everybody to thinking about everything at the same time, not waiting 200 years like alcohol.
Now, remember Gastine and those cute Clostridians?
We recently launched a clean chemical consortium that brings consumer brands, big chemical companies and startups like GasGene or YuanChu to try to make everything out of carbon dioxide.
That's also working on science, engineering and business all at once.
So by now hopefully, you guys understand why I felt we should have every reason to be really optimistic, because we already have plenty of scientific discovery engineering, innovation and business models so that we should be inspired to imagine a world with net zero and a cleaner future, most likely much better than what AI can generate for us today.
Therefore, I'm definitely drunk on the possibility of a better and a cleaner future.
Cheers, everyone.
Thank you.
That was Shu Hao speaking at TED Countdown Summit in Nairobi, Kenya in 2025.
If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines.
And that's it for today.
TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective.
This talk was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little and Tansika Sangmarnivong.
This episode was mixed by Christopher Faisy-Bogan.
Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Balarezo.
I'm Elise Hugh.
I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed.
Thanks for listening.
We are the future.
Hear us.
It's our tomorrow you're building today.
When you create technology, put us at its heart.
Think differently to build a better working world.
Be confident.
Do not allow the future to shape you.
Shape it.
And shape it for the better.
If not for yourselves, for us.
How will your decisions today shape the future for generations to come?
EY.
Shape the future with confidence.
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