Choose an area

Ecology

Carbon, reefs, protein, plastic — living systems and their waste.

Energy

Fusion, geothermal, storage — energy that obeys thermodynamics.

Artificial intelligence

Models for Earth systems, materials, grids, and recycling.

Every card below is a real technology or a clearly labeled myth. Status means research, pilot, deployed, or myth-busted — not a stock pitch.

Hellisheiði geothermal power station in Iceland, the energy landscape around Climeworks DAC + Carbfix storage

Ecology Pilot

Direct air capture — Climeworks

Fans and filters pull CO₂ from ambient air. The plants exist; the tonnes are still small.

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A North Sea offshore platform — the kind of industrial sea-space used for CO₂ transport and storage projects

Ecology Deployed

Northern Lights — point-source CCS

CO₂ from factories, shipped and injected under the North Sea. The first industrial volumes moved in 2025.

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Columnar basalt at Svartifoss, Iceland — the rock chemistry Carbfix uses to mineralize carbon

Ecology Deployed

Carbfix — turning CO₂ into stone

Dissolve CO₂ in water, inject it into basalt, and chemistry does in years what sediments take millennia to do.

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Stainless-steel laboratory bioreactors used for industrial fermentation

Ecology Pilot

Precision fermentation

Microbes, not cows, make some of the proteins we eat — if the sugar, power, and taste hold up.

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A healthy branching coral garden in clear water — the living target of restoration hardware

Ecology Pilot

Coral restoration technology

Nurseries, larval seeding, and reef frames can regrow coral on a bay. They cannot outrun a hot ocean alone.

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A graphene-like sheet, the class of two-dimensional material studied for water and gas membranes

Ecology Research

Nanomaterial membranes

Atom-thin sheets and tailored pores promise cheaper desalination and cleaner separations — mostly still in the lab.

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Collected PET bottles, the feedstock enzymatic recyclers want to depolymerize

Ecology Pilot

Plastic-eating enzymes — Carbios

An enzyme can unzip PET back to monomers. A full-scale plant is still a financing and engineering problem.

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Holstein dairy cows, the animals whose rumen methane 3-NOP additives target

Ecology Deployed

Methane-reducing cattle feed (Bovaer)

A spoon of 3-NOP in the ration can cut dairy methane by about thirty percent. It is a tool, not a vegan cow.

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Aerial view of the ITER construction site at Cadarache, France, in 2018

Energy Research

ITER — magnetic-confinement fusion

The world’s largest tokamak is being built in France. It is a physics experiment, not a power station.

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The National Ignition Facility target chamber at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Energy Research

NIF — inertial fusion ignition

On 5 December 2022 a laser shot made more fusion energy than it delivered to the target. The building still draws a grid’s worth of power.

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Geothermal plant at The Geysers, California — a working steam field of the kind enhanced geothermal wants to copy in new rock

Energy Pilot

Enhanced geothermal — Fervo

Horizontal wells and fracking tricks, used on hot rock instead of oil, made electricity in Nevada in 2023.

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Containerized grid battery modules at a U.S. energy-storage project

Energy Pilot

Long-duration batteries

Lithium covers the evening peak. Multi-day storage is the unsolved piece of a wind-and-solar grid.

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A large cryogenic hydrogen storage tank — the kind of industrial hydrogen hardware already used at launch sites

Energy Pilot

Green hydrogen

Useful for steel, ammonia, and ships. Wasteful as a default way to heat homes or move cars.

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An operating nuclear power plant — context for modular fission, not a photograph of a specific SMR

Energy Pilot

Modular and advanced nuclear

China’s HTR-PM entered commercial operation in December 2023. Most Western SMR logos have not poured first concrete.

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International Space Station solar arrays — the closest working cousin of proposed power satellites

Energy Research

Space-based solar power

A 2023 Caltech demo beamed a trickle of power from orbit. The physics works; the economics are the question.

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A PEM fuel-cell / electrolyzer stack — the hardware whose catalyst layers nanotechnology tries to thin

Energy Research

Nanostructured electrolyzer catalysts

Green hydrogen is limited by iridium and energy. Nanotechnology is trying to use less metal, not to invent free fuel.

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Historical engraving of a water-screw perpetual-motion scheme — a closed cycle that cannot feed itself

Energy Myth-busted

Perpetual motion — why it fails

A closed machine cannot run forever or make “free infinite energy.” That is not a conspiracy. It is thermodynamics.

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GOES-16 full-disk image of Earth — the observations AI weather models train and run on

Artificial intelligence Deployed

AI weather models — GraphCast

A graph neural net now rivals classical medium-range forecasts — and it still needs the satellites.

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A quartz crystal — the kind of ordered solid materials models try to explore faster than trial-and-error

Artificial intelligence Research

GNoME — AI for materials

A model proposed hundreds of thousands of maybe-stable crystals. Chemistry still has to make them.

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High-voltage transmission pylons — the physical grid that optimization software sits on

Artificial intelligence Pilot

AI for the power grid

Better wind forecasts and dispatch tools shave reserves. They do not replace transformers.

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A protein ribbon diagram on a dark field — the class of structure these models predict

Artificial intelligence Deployed

AlphaFold — proteins for science

Structure prediction became a working tool in 2021. Designing a climate enzyme is the next, slower step.

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An industrial robot arm sorting a PET bottle on a recycling conveyor

Artificial intelligence Deployed

Recycling robots — AMP

Cameras and arms already pick cartons and bottles on real sorting lines. They do not invent a market for the bale.

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An IBM Q System One-class quantum computer, the chandelier of cables over a dilution refrigerator

Artificial intelligence Research

Quantum computing — chemistry hopes

Public machines from IBM, Google, and IonQ keep adding qubits. They have not designed a climate catalyst yet.

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An oil refinery at dusk — the class of industrial site emissions inventories try to measure from space

Artificial intelligence Deployed

Climate TRACE — seeing emissions

Satellites and machine learning now estimate many plumes independently of what a ministry reports.

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Apollo 17 Blue Marble — the planet that Earth-observation foundation models are built to read

Artificial intelligence Research

Prithvi — Earth foundation models

NASA and IBM trained an open model on years of Harmonized Landsat–Sentinel imagery. It is a starting weight, not an oracle.

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