Mark Lovett

Can the great barrier reef be saved from climate change? Theresa Fyffe gives us some insights at TED 2025

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I often write about the storytelling side of climate change, as this modern day phenomenon will shape billions of stories in the coming decades. Some of the effects can be seen and felt above ground — fiercer storms, more intense fires, increased temperatures, droughts, etc. — but a very different sort of damage is occurring out of sight, below the surface of our oceans.

Coral reefs are one such example that have been given a great deal of attention, as they are under assault in much of the world, and no spot has achieved more notice than the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. In her talk at TED 2025, Theresa Fyffe talks about the work being done to reverse this trend.

As you can imagine, the full story is quite complicated, and Theresa could speak for hours on the topic. But in ten minutes she give able to give us an overview of the situation. She doesn’t tell the entire story, but does tell us enough to get us up to date, and hopefully to inspire us to dive further into what’s happening on the reef. Check out her TED Talk: A new lifeline for the world’s coral reefs.

Coral reefs are the most biodiverse ecosystem on our entire blue planet, home to more than a quarter of all marine life.

Key Points of Concern:

  • Coral reefs affect the livelihoods of over one billion people
  • They’re also anchoring the economies of over 100 nations
  • Rising ocean temperatures can cause coral bleaching
  • Already we have lost half of the world’s coral reefs
  • By 2050 90% of coral could be lost

As the Executive Director Impact of the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, Theresa has a front-row seat to the innovative processes that are now being deployed to rebuild damaged reefs. Review the section from 4:09 to 4:56. In just 93 words & 47 seconds, she changes the tone of the talk, pivoting from problem to solution, and setting the stage for the balance of her story. She doesn’t go into depth, or use complex jargon that the audience won’t understand.

When Theresa introduces Uncle Bob, a Wopabara man from the Great Barrier Reef, her talk shifts from technology to human — it’s the story block I refer to as Someone Else’s Story — and we learn about the impact this innovation can have if deployed. To be honest, I would have enjoyed hearing more about Uncle Bob. By adding a minute, I would have developed a deeper connection to the topic.

So I’m asking you — don’t look away. Change your perspective and join us in the fight to sustain not just coral reefs, but the livelihoods, the cultures and the futures they safeguard. This isn’t game over. It’s game on.

Transcript

When I say Great Barrier Reef, what do you see? If you grew up in the 2000s, I’m guessing it might be Nemo and his best friend, Dory.

Or perhaps it’s this. It’s the best part of my job. Taking people underwater to witness such a wonder and so much life. Coral reefs are the most biodiverse ecosystem on our entire blue planet, home to more than a quarter of all marine life.

They are food, livelihoods and coastal protection for more than one billion people. They anchor the economies of over 100 nations and hold deep cultural significance for saltwater First Nations peoples, who see coral reefs as their family and the creators of life.

But increasingly, when I say Great Barrier Reef, people think of this. Or even worse, this. Sadly, our reef, my reef, has become the poster child for climate change. And here’s why.

Coral polyps, the tiny animals that build reefs, are incredibly sensitive to warming oceans. When stressed by heat, they expel the algae that nourish them, exposing their skeletons and turning them white, a phenomenon called coral bleaching.

Now a bleached coral isn’t dead, but it is sick and starving. And if temperatures stay too high for too long, it dies. Coral reefs are the absolute lifeblood of a thriving ocean. We thought them too big and too important to fail.

Already we have lost half of the world’s coral reefs. In 2024, the global extent of coral bleaching reached 53 countries and every ocean on Earth. By 2050, 90 percent of corals could be lost, and with coral reefs thought to be one of the most vulnerable ecosystems to climate change, we could witness their extinction in our lifetime.

Because of this, many people have already given up. They see the problem as just too big and the progress too slow. But I haven’t given up. And I’m here to tell you why you shouldn’t give up either. Prior to working at the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, I worked in medical research, and the parallels are surprisingly striking.

While many cancers have no cure, a cancer diagnosis is no longer a death sentence due to the expanding toolkit of treatments. This is how we must think of coral reefs. Yes, we need the cure. The solutions to climate change itself.

But right now, corals also need treatments to buy them time. Enter reef restoration. Reef restoration has been around since about the 1970s, mainly through coral gardening. It’s pretty simple. You take small pieces of coral, you grow them in an underwater nursery, and when big enough, you replant them in a reef.

While an important part of the reef restoration toolkit, this approach is slow, expensive and very difficult to scale. As a result, it is thought that less than 200,000 corals are planted across the world’s oceans each year, with many of these corals not surviving. We needed a breakthrough.

Over the past five years, 350 Australian scientists and engineers have been working on just that: technology to make reef restoration faster, cheaper and smarter. We’ve made more advancements in the last five years than the previous 50.

Using an automated process, we can now produce millions of baby corals, not just thousands. We can naturally increase the heat tolerance of these corals so they are better adapted to warming oceans. And we have developed ceramic cradles for mass deployment, eliminating the need for divers to replant each piece of coral by hand.

But in a race against time, the key to dramatically scaling our impact is to deploy this technology in a highly targeted way. We will focus our restoration solution on the reefs that are the most connected to other reefs via the ocean’s natural currents.

By seeding these highly connected reefs with more heat-tolerant corals, their subsequent and stronger offspring will be spread far and wide. By using this precision approach across the Pacific, restoring as little as three percent of coral reefs can drive the recovery of 50 percent of the entire ecosystem. This would be restoration on an unprecedented scale. And we’re making it local. Thank you.

Packaging these technologies into portable coral micro-nurseries for coastal communities to own and operate. The productivity of one single micronursery is expected to exceed that of all global coral gardening efforts combined today.

By 2031, we will be planting 1.2 million heat-tolerant surviving corals per year, about 30 times more than planted across the Pacific today. By 2040, it is our ambition to increase the global scale of reef restoration by 120 times. But we know — Thank you.

We know that the technology on its own isn’t enough. To have real impact, this technology needs to be in the hands of those on the front line, those that know the oceans best.

Meet Uncle Bob, a Woppaburra man from the Great Barrier Reef. His people have been caring for their sea country for millennia. Now when Bob talks to me of his country, he says, “Country is sick, country is crying.”

But with this technology, his community is empowered to be the first responders to heal their sea country by blending this modern innovation with their ancient knowledge. For many coral reefs, unfortunately, it is already too late. But for the half of the world’s reefs, including our Great Barrier Reef, that call the Pacific home, there is still time.

These corals haven’t given up. They are still resilient. They can regenerate. So if the corals haven’t given up, how can we? Now hope without a plan, it’s nothing more than a wish. But thanks to the generosity of the TED community, we have a plan. A lifeline for coral reefs.

So I’m asking you — don’t look away. Change your perspective and join us in the fight to sustain not just coral reefs, but the livelihoods, the cultures and the futures they safeguard. This isn’t game over. It’s game on.

Thank you.

Back to you…

If you have a complex topic that you want to talk about, whether it’s a scientific story or not, think about how Theresa was able to craft a narrative that was both brief and informative. That explained the problem and solution. That ended on a hopeful note, but in this case, with a call to action too. After someone hears your story, what do you want them to think, to feel, and to do? Have you enlightened them? Inspired them? Given them food for thought?

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Mark Lovett

It Took Thousands of Personal Stories to Create the Mariner 9 Story

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Fifty-four years ago today, on May 30, 1971, a symphony of human ambition lifted off from Cape Kennedy. Mariner 9 wasn’t just a spacecraft — it was the culmination of thousands of individual stories, each person contributing their unique thread to a tapestry that would forever change how we see our place within the cosmos.

Launch of Atlas-Centaur Rocket Carrying Mariner 9 Mars Probe

Launch of Atlas-Centaur Rocket Carrying Mariner 9 Mars Probe

The Genesis of a Dream

The Mariner program began in 1962, nine years before the launch of Mariner 9. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory conceived this series of robotic explorers as stepping stones to the planets. Each mission built upon the last — Mariner 2 had whispered past Venus, Mariner 4 had glimpsed Mars in passing. But Mariner 9 would be different. It would stay, orbit, & see.

The development of Mariner 9 took approximately four years of intensive work, from initial design concepts in 1967 to its 1971 launch. Yet this timeline barely captures the human drama unfolding behind the scenes — engineers working through weekends, mathematicians recalculating trajectories late into the night, technicians hand-assembling delicate instruments with the precision of watchmakers.

A Cast of Thousands

Picture this: over 5,000 people directly involved in the Mariner 9 mission, with countless more supporting roles spanning across multiple states. From the assembly floors of Denver to the tracking stations scattered across the globe, this was humanity at its collaborative best. Each person — whether they wielded a soldering iron or a slide rule — contributed their personal skills and passion.

Mariner 9 Mars Probe

Mariner 9 Mars Probe

The mission required an extraordinary convergence of skills, including:

  • Aerospace engineers designing the spacecraft’s structure
  • Propulsion specialists calculating fuel requirements
  • Computer programmers writing navigation software
  • Antenna technicians ensuring Earth-Mars communication
  • Planetary scientists planning observation sequences
  • Materials experts selecting heat-resistant components
  • Optical engineers crafting camera systems
  • Electrical technicians wiring complex circuits
  • Systems integrators coordinating all subsystems
  • Project managers orchestrating timelines
  • Quality assurance inspectors checking every detail
  • Mathematicians computing orbital mechanics
  • Thermal engineers managing temperature extremes
  • Power systems designers creating solar panel arrays
  • Attitude control specialists maintaining spacecraft orientation
  • Data analysts interpreting incoming signals
  • Mission planners designing observation strategies
  • Telecommunications engineers establishing deep space communication
  • Launch vehicle coordinators preparing the Atlas-Centaur rocket
  • Ground operations controllers managing the mission from Earth.

Five Gifts to Humanity

Mariner 9’s achievements resonate through the decades. First, it became the first successful Mars orbiter, proving we could establish a permanent robotic presence around another planet. Second, it mapped most of the Martian surface with unprecedented detail, revealing a world of stunning geological complexity. Third, it discovered evidence of ancient water flows — those mysterious channels that whispered of a warmer, wetter Mars. Fourth, it provided our first detailed study of the Martian moons, Phobos and Deimos, expanding our understanding of small celestial bodies. Fifth, it demonstrated that long-duration interplanetary missions were possible, paving the way for every Mars mission that followed.

The Ripple Effect

Imagine if Mariner 9 had failed. Would we have the rovers — Sojourner (1997), Spirit (2004–2010), Opportunity (2004–2018), Curiosity (2012–present), and Perseverance (2021–present) — exploring Martian soil? Would we still dream of human colonies on the Red Planet? Would countless young minds have been inspired to pursue careers in science and engineering? The mission’s success created a cascade of possibility that continues to shape our technological vision of space exploration.

Back to you…

I’ve worked with a long list of folks whose story involved technical achievements, from scientists to engineers and entrepreneurs. While digging below the surface we invariably discover a cast of supporting characters that made their project a success. If your story involves a team effort, weaving bits of their stories is one way to add depth and richness to your story.

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Mark Lovett

The Day America Reached for the Moon: Understanding President John F. Kennedy’s Bold Promise

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Yesterday’s article talked about Samuel Morse and the birth of the telegraph, and how an inventor’s vision, driven by grief, jump started the era of electronic communication. But that’s not to say that such technological achievements can only be initiated by someone with technical skill. Politicians with a vision of the future far different than the present can serve as inspiration for shifts in the timeline of humanity.

One such story began with a young man standing before Congress, promising to accomplish something that had never been done in human history. On May 25th 1961, President John F. Kennedy did exactly that, declaring America would land a man on the moon before the decade’s end. But this wasn’t just about exploring space. To understand why Kennedy made this audacious promise, we must first step back into a world gripped by fear, competition, and the urgent need for national purpose.

The Shadow of Sputnik

Four years before Kennedy’s bold declaration, the world had changed overnight. On October 4, 1957, a metallic sphere no larger than a beach ball began orbiting Earth, beeping its simple signal across radio waves around the globe. Sputnik 1, launched by the Soviet Union, represented far more than a technological achievement — it was a thunderclap that shattered American confidence.

Exploded view of the Sputnik 1 satellite

Picture the American families of 1957, stepping outside their homes to peer up at the night sky, knowing that somewhere among those familiar stars was a man-made object placed there by their Cold War adversary. The implications were terrifying. If the Soviets could launch a satellite, they could certainly launch a nuclear warhead. The same rocket technology that lifted Sputnik could deliver destruction to American cities.

The psychological impact was perhaps even more profound than the military implications. America had long considered itself the world’s technological leader, the nation that had won World War II through industrial might and innovation. Suddenly, we were playing catch-up to a communist rival we had underestimated.

A String of Soviet Triumphs

The humiliation deepened with each Soviet space achievement. In November 1957, they launched Sputnik 2, carrying a dog named Laika — proving that living creatures could survive in space. America’s first satellite attempt, Vanguard TV3, exploded on the launch pad in December 1957, earning the mocking nickname “Kaputnik” in the press.

Then came the ultimate blow: on April 12, 1961, just weeks before Kennedy’s moon speech, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit Earth. The smiling young pilot returned to a hero’s welcome, his achievement broadcast around the world. Once again, America was second.

Consider the personal stories embedded in this moment. Gagarin, a farmer’s son who had worked in a steel foundry, now represented the triumph of Soviet ideology. Meanwhile, American parents worried about their children’s futures in a world where their nation seemed to be losing the most important race of the modern era.

The Cold War Context

To truly understand Kennedy’s moon commitment, we must appreciate the global stakes of the Cold War in 1961. This wasn’t merely a competition between two superpowers — it was a battle for the hearts and minds of the entire world. Newly independent nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America were choosing between American capitalism and Soviet communism. Every achievement, every failure, was scrutinized as evidence of which system was superior.

Space exploration had become the ultimate proving ground. Unlike military might, which remained largely hidden and theoretical, space achievements were visible to all. When a Soviet rocket successfully launched, people around the world could see it, hear about it, and draw their own conclusions about Soviet capabilities.

Kennedy’s Personal Stakes

For Kennedy personally, the space race represented both tremendous risk and opportunity. At 43, he was the youngest elected president in American history, criticized by some as inexperienced and untested. The failed Bay of Pigs invasion had damaged his credibility. He needed a victory — something bold and inspiring that would restore confidence in American leadership.

Yet Kennedy was also a pragmatist who understood the enormous challenges involved. Before making his moon commitment, he consulted extensively with NASA officials, scientists, and engineers. He wanted to be certain that while the goal was ambitious, it was achievable. As he privately told NASA administrator James Webb, “I’m not that interested in space. But we’ve got to beat the Soviets.”

Beyond the Moon: The Deeper Goals

Kennedy’s moon commitment served multiple purposes beyond the stated goal of lunar exploration. First, it provided a concrete, measurable objective that would focus American scientific and technological efforts. Rather than competing with the Soviets on multiple fronts, America would concentrate its resources on one spectacular achievement.

Second, the moon program would drive innovation across countless industries. The technologies developed for space exploration would find applications in civilian life, from computers to materials science to telecommunications. Kennedy understood that the space program would accelerate American technological development in ways that would benefit the entire economy.

Third, the moon goal would inspire a generation of young Americans to pursue careers in science, mathematics, and engineering. The president recognized that America’s long-term competitiveness depended on nurturing scientific talent, and the space program would serve as a powerful recruitment tool.

The Ripple Effects Through History

Looking back across the decades, we can see how profoundly Kennedy’s decision shaped not just American history, but human civilization itself. The Apollo program employed over 400,000 people at its peak, driving innovations that gave us everything from cordless tools to freeze-dried food, from improved computers to advanced materials used in everything from aviation to medicine.

Earthrise, taken on December 24, 1968, by Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders

But perhaps most importantly, Kennedy’s moon commitment changed how we see ourselves as a species. When Apollo 8 astronauts photographed Earth rising over the lunar horizon in 1968, that image — our blue, fragile planet suspended in the cosmic dark — helped launch the environmental movement. When Neil Armstrong stepped onto the lunar surface in 1969, he spoke for all humanity: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Consider how different our world might be had Kennedy not made that commitment. Without the technological drive of the space program, would we have developed personal computers as quickly? Would satellite communications have advanced as rapidly? Would our understanding of Earth’s climate and environment be as sophisticated?

The young president who stood before Congress that May day in 1961 was doing more than committing America to reach the moon. He was choosing hope over fear, ambition over resignation, and in doing so, he set in motion a chain of events that would transform not just America, but our entire understanding of what it means to be human in an infinite universe.

The moon, as Kennedy understood, was never really the destination. It was the journey that mattered — and the proof that when we dare to dream beyond our limitations, we can achieve the impossible.

Back to you…

Maybe your story is not as dramatic. Not one that changed the course of history. But think about those moments when you made a bold decision that change the course of your life. Then consider how that decision rippled out to affect the lives of others. And the point of telling your story now, is that the lessons you learned, the wisdom you gained in the process, can continue to benefit others.

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Mark Lovett

What Hath God Wrought: The Telegraph’s Birth and the Transformation of Human Connection

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Picture this: It’s May 24th, 1844, and in a small room in the Supreme Court chamber of the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., a man sits nervously before a peculiar contraption of wires and metal. Samuel Finley Breese Morse, artist turned inventor, is about to send a message that will forever change how human beings connect across vast distances. With careful deliberation, he taps out a biblical phrase in his newly invented code: “What hath God wrought.”

Forty miles away in Baltimore, Maryland, his assistant Alfred Vail receives those dots and dashes, translates them back into words, and immediately sends the same message back to Washington. In that moment — lasting mere minutes — the world became fundamentally smaller, and the pace of human civilization began to quicken in ways that Samuel Morse himself could never have imagined.

Samuel Finley Breese Morse from National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; Frederick Hill Meserve Collection

Samuel Finley Breese Morse from National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; Frederick Hill Meserve Collection

The Man Behind the Message

Samuel Morse was not born to be a communications revolutionary. Raised in a strict Calvinist household in Charlestown, Massachusetts, he initially pursued his passion as a painter, creating portraits of prominent Americans and grand historical scenes. His artistic training at Yale College and later in London shaped his meticulous eye for detail — a skill that would prove invaluable in his later scientific endeavors.

But tragedy has a way of redirecting our paths. In 1825, while Morse was painting a portrait in Washington, he received a letter telling him his wife was gravely ill. By the time he rushed home to New Haven, she had already died and been buried. The slow pace of communication in that era meant that the most important moments of our lives could slip away while we remained blissfully unaware. This personal anguish planted a seed in Morse’s mind: surely there had to be a faster way for people to share urgent news across great distances.

The inspiration struck him during a ship voyage back from Europe in 1832. Conversations about electromagnetism with fellow passengers sparked his imagination.

What if electricity could carry messages instantaneously across wires?
What if human thoughts could travel at the speed of lightning itself?

The Day That Changed Everything

That May morning in 1844 represented the culmination of over a decade of experimentation, frustration, and persistence. Morse had endured years of financial hardship, skeptical investors, and technical setbacks. Politicians questioned whether the government should fund such a seemingly frivolous invention. Even on the day of the demonstration, many observers remained doubtful.

Morse chose his inaugural message carefully. “What hath God wrought” came from Numbers 23:23 in the King James Bible, suggested by Annie Ellsworth, daughter of the Patent Commissioner. The phrase carries profound meaning — it speaks to divine wonder at human achievement, a recognition that we sometimes create things beyond our own understanding of their consequences.

The technical specifications were remarkably simple by today’s standards. Morse’s telegraph used an electromagnet to move a stylus that marked dots and dashes on a moving strip of paper. The famous Morse Code — combinations of short and long electrical pulses representing letters of the alphabet — allowed complex human language to be reduced to binary electrical signals. The Washington-Baltimore line stretched across wooden poles, carrying a single copper wire with the earth itself serving as the return circuit.

When that first official message crackled across the 40 miles of wire, it traveled at roughly 186,000 miles per second — the speed of light through the copper conductor. Compare this to the fastest previous method of long-distance communication: a horse and rider, covering perhaps 30 miles in a day over rough terrain.

The Fabric of Society Rewoven

The telegraph didn’t just speed up communication — it fundamentally altered the rhythm of human existence. Within a decade, telegraph lines were spreading across America like a spider’s web, connecting distant cities and remote towns to a shared nervous system of information.

Consider how this changed the simple act of conducting business. Before the telegraph, a merchant in New York who wanted to know grain prices in Chicago had to wait weeks for a letter. Decisions were made with old information, and fortunes were built on who could move physical information fastest. The telegraph democratized market information, creating the foundation for modern commodity exchanges and stock markets. Suddenly, prices could be coordinated across vast distances, creating truly national markets for the first time in human history.

The transformation went far deeper than commerce. Families separated by migration could maintain relationships in ways previously impossible. A mother in Boston could know within hours if her son in California was safe after an earthquake. Young people could court across state lines through romantic telegrams. The very notion of “long-distance relationships” was born.

Watercolor painting of railroad tracks and telegraph poles running through the desert

Perhaps most profoundly, the telegraph began to standardize time itself. Before instant communication, every town kept its own time based on the sun’s position. But railroad schedules coordinated by telegraph required synchronized clocks across entire regions. The concept of time zones — which we now take for granted — emerged directly from the telegraph’s need to coordinate activities across vast distances.

The Ripples Through Time

Standing here in 2025, we can trace direct lines from Morse’s first message to the device in your pocket. The telegraph established the first principles of electronic communication: encoding human language into electrical signals, transmitting those signals across distances, and decoding them back into meaning. Every text message, every email, every video call follows the fundamental pattern Samuel Morse established that May morning.

The telegraph also birthed the first global communication networks. By the 1860s, underwater cables connected America to Europe. News of Lincoln’s assassination reached London in days, not weeks. The world’s first “information superhighway” was built from copper wire and wooden poles, but it established the template for our modern internet.

More subtly, the telegraph began humanity’s complicated relationship with instant communication. The same technology that could save lives by quickly summoning doctors could also spread panic through false rumors. The same wires that connected distant lovers also enabled new forms of fraud and deception. We see these tensions playing out today in our debates about social media, digital privacy, and information verification.

Imagining the Alternative

What if Samuel Morse had remained focused solely on painting? What if Annie Ellsworth had suggested a different biblical verse, or no verse at all? What if congressional funding had been denied by just one vote?

Without the telegraph, the American Civil War might have unfolded differently. Lincoln’s ability to coordinate Union forces across vast distances proved crucial to victory. The transcontinental railroad, built with telegraph coordination, might have taken decades longer to complete. The settling of the American West would have proceeded more slowly and chaotically.

Globally, the British Empire‘s ability to govern distant colonies depended heavily on telegraph cables. Without instant communication to London, colonial independence movements might have succeeded earlier, or imperial control might have required even more brutal local enforcement.

Perhaps most intriguingly, our entire relationship with time and distance might have evolved differently. Would we have developed different social structures, different concepts of privacy, different expectations about response times and availability?

The Timeless Lesson

Samuel Morse’s legacy reminds us that individual human curiosity, persistence, and ingenuity can reshape the world in ways we never anticipate. He set out to solve a personal problem — the slow pace of communication that had cost him his final moments with his dying wife. Instead, he created the foundation for the connected world we inhabit today.

The next time your phone buzzes with a message from someone thousands of miles away, remember that May morning in 1844. Remember Samuel Morse tapping out “What hath God wrought” and marveling at the power of human innovation to compress time and space. In our age of instant global communication, we are all still living in the world that telegraph built, dot by dash by dot.

Back to you…

Think about how communication technology has affected your life. Your romances, your career path, your view of the world. Imagine a life that didn’t have instant access to loved ones. Maybe there’s a thread of your personal story that involves a digital connection. Connections made, connections broken, or miscommunication.

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Mark Lovett

Science Storytelling with TILclimate – Farm to table, with a side of fossil fuels

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Climate change stories can be complex, especially when they’re full of technical descriptions and lists of numbers. But when these stories are linked to our daily lives we can understand the issue more clearly. So I had to laugh when listening to this episode of the TILclimate Podcast as I happen to be a fan of tortilla chips — artisan style, of course — and this story highlights how fossil fuels are part of the journey, from start to finish, of tortilla chips traveling from the farm to store.

While this narrative involves a specific food product, you can easily see how the process applies, with minor variations, to a host of other items that end up on our table. In this case, we have farm machinery, giant fans, trucks, fermenters, grinders, dryers, fryers, fertilizer, and even the plastic bag the chips come in.

Instead of people, the cast of characters includes objects, chemicals, processes, but we get a visual sense of how everything works as raw ingredients are grown, processed, packaged and delivered. Instead of a, “This is what climate change is doing to the planet” story, we have a, “Behind the scenes look at how the things we consume contribute to the problem of climate change” type of story.

There are no villains here, no finger pointing or blame, just a real life example of how a food manufacturing process works. And since there are many steps in the tortilla chip supply chain, finding a more sustainable solution involves solving a number of problems.

If you’re working on a personal story that’s founded in science, think about how your technology or research can be explained within the context of a story that your audience can relate to. And if you need help creating and presenting that story, reach out, I enjoy working with scientists who are making an impact!

Transcript

LHF: Hello, and welcome to Today I Learned: Climate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I’m Laur Hesse Fisher.

If you’re like many of our listeners, you might be wondering: okay, so the CO2 from burning fossil fuels is warming the planet, right? So why haven’t we just gotten rid of all these fossil fuels already?

Because we live in a world that’s currently dependent on fossil fuels, yet a lot of that dependence is invisible to us. So we collaborated with TABLE, an international coalition of universities that helps the public understand our food system. Their recent podcast miniseries is called Fuel to Fork, and it explores all the many ways that fossil fuels are involved in putting food on our plates.

And today, we’re going to get a glimpse into the hard work that is happening to eliminate pollution from the food system—and in doing so, explore the very real ways that our food now depends on fossil fuels.

Even to produce the simplest thing, like a tortilla chip.

JC: I love tortilla chips. In fact, I had some on the weekend, and they were very tasty.

LHF: That’s Jennifer Clapp.

JC: I’m a professor and Canada research chair in global food security and sustainability at the University of Waterloo in Canada. I’m also a member of IPES-Food, which is the international panel of experts on sustainable food systems.

LHF: She’s here to help us follow the journey of a tortilla chip from farm to grocery store, taking note of all the ways fossil fuels are used along the way. So let’s get started.

JP: Well, tortilla chips have relatively few ingredients. They’re made of corn, or in the rest of the world, it’s called maize.

LHF: Here in the U.S., we have over 90 million acres of cornfields. If that were a state, it would be the fifth largest, just barely behind Montana. And if you took a drive through this great state of corn, the first thing you might notice above the vast, waving expanses of green are the machines that tend the corn from planting to harvest.

JP: Farm machinery typically runs on Diesel fuel. And that’s the machinery used to plow the fields, drill the seeds, spread the fertilizer, spread the pesticides, spread the herbicides. Also for harvesting crops, big machinery is used, you know, combine harvesters and other kinds of machines that thresh the grain.

LHF: It’s probably no surprise that these great machines need fuel to run. But what about the quieter parts of a corn farm—like the barns?

JC: Corn has a lot of moisture in it. It’s a heavy crop, and to store it properly it needs to be dried. And farmers typically use giant fans in a barn to dry out the corn and typically heat those barns with propane fuel.

LHF: The two things we’ve mentioned so far—the farming machinery, and drying the crop—make up about half of the fossil energy use on a typical corn farm. There’s one last big chunk of emissions that we’re going to come back to a little bit later in this episode.

For now, though, we’re packing up our corn for sale.

JC: Commodities like corn do travel around a fair bit. If it’s trucked, it’s typically using diesel fuel. And also, if it’s shipped, it’s definitely using oil.

LHF: Those fossil fuels get our dried corn to a factory, where it will be turned into masa, the delicious dough that makes a tortilla.

JC: And what it involves is soaking and simmering, like cooking, these dried kernels of corn for up to 12 hours. And that process is called wet milling.

LHF: For our tortilla chips, this is almost the end of the line: the masa from the wet mill is ready to be shaped, baked and fried. Other corn products will keep passing through more screens and grinders and dryers and fermenters, on their way to becoming things like cornstarch, and corn syrup, and even the ethanol we add to gasoline.

There isn’t good recent data on this, but back in 2001 the US Energy Information Administration did a study of corn wet mills and found that they used 15% of all the energy in, not just corn, but the entire U.S. food industry.

JC: So that gives you a sense of just how energy consumptive it is.

LHF: When you hear about “ultra-processed” foods, this is what it means: the ingredients go through a whole bunch of machines to break them down to their proteins and fibers and oils and such. And it tends to use a lot of fossil fuels—and be less healthy for us, too.

With our tortilla chips, the last machine would be the fryer that makes them nice and crispy and snackable. But there’s one more step before they’re shipped to the grocery store, and that’s packaging.

JC: In my local community I can buy corn chips that come in a paper bag, which really makes me happy. But most corn chips that you’re going to find in a grocery store shelf are packaged in plastic.

LHF: And that plastic is made of—do you know? It’s oil!

Yeah, our food system doesn’t rely on fossil fuels just for energy. Tons of stuff—packaging, farm equipment—is also made of fossil fuels.

JC: You might have seen large sheets of plastic covering farm fields that sort of keep in moisture and keep temperatures warm in the soil, or covering a greenhouse, Herbicides, pesticides; they’re all fossil fuel sort of oil based chemicals. So when we think about fossil fuels on the farm, they’re just, they’re everywhere.

LHF: Remember earlier, when we found that the farming and drying machinery added up to about half of a farm’s fossil energy use? Well, most of the remaining half comes from just one of those fossil fuel-based chemicals alone.

JC: The fertilizer use is probably the biggest use of fossil energy when we’re talking about growing corn.

LHF: For as long as there’s been farming, people have been adding fertilizers like manure and wood ash to soil to revitalize it.

JC: These products really started to be used much more frequently after around the 1840s, when scientific developments led to an understanding about the importance of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium as key nutrients that plants need for better plant growth.

Phosphorus and potash are actually today typically mined from the earth and processed to make fertilizers.

LHF: But the third nutrient, nitrogen, is trickier: there’s no nitrogen rock that we can mine. On the other hand, there is one very abundant source of nitrogen very close to hand. It’s in the air we’re breathing. Earth’s atmosphere is almost 80% nitrogen gas.

JC: And scientists knew that nitrogen was in the air. They just didn’t know how to capture it and make it into a physical, usable form that could be applied to soil.

LHF: And then, in the early 1900s, two German chemists, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, figured it out. If you react nitrogen with hydrogen, they mix to make NH3, also known as ammonia. And this became the main ingredient for modern fertilizers.

The catch is that the hydrogen comes from yet another fossil fuel: natural gas.

JC: So the Haber Bosch process really changed everything because people didn’t have to worry about where the nitrogen was going to come from to fertilize crops. And the use of synthetic nitrogen increased massively.And what that’s meant is that more crops can be grown. More land around the world can be cultivated for agriculture, because the nutrients can be continually replenished.

LHF: And on that land, humans are supplying a regular stream of nitrogen, provided mostly by natural gas. Where, unfortunately, it continues to impact the climate in yet another way.

JC: There’s been a tendency to over-apply fertilizer. Just as kind of like an insurance policy that farmers want to be sure that they’re putting enough on the field to ensure plant growth.

But not all nitrogen that’s put down in the field is taken up by the plant. And then soil microbes eat up the nitrogen, and it converts it into a gas called nitrous oxide, which is more damaging than carbon dioxide when we’re talking about climate change. And corn uses a lot of fertilizer, so it has a lot of nitrous oxide emissions.

LHF: Fertilizer is by far the biggest way that humans create nitrous oxide, this highly climate-warming gas. If you add both the manufacturing process and the nitrous oxide, fertilizer has the same impact on the climate as a major country—in fact, it contributes as much to climate change each year as Japan does, which is the world’s seventh-largest climate polluter.

JC: So all in all, the fertilizer industry is pretty significant.

LHF: Okay, so what do we do about all this? You might ask: is it even possible to have our tortilla chips without the climate pollution?

JC: Can I imagine a fossil fuel free bag of corn chips? I think, in this current world that we live in, that’s a bit hard to imagine, given all of the places in the whole production process that have relied on and continue to rely on fossil energy.

LHF: Let’s take farming machinery for a moment. You might say, well, couldn’t we just run these machines on electricity, like switching a gas-powered car for an electric car? And, yeah—we probably could.

JC: But it’s not straightforward. Because a tractor has to have a lot of horsepower, especially for plowing, especially for these sort of harvesting and threshing activities.

LHF: That means that an electric tractor would need to hold a lot of energy in its battery. For the heaviest equipment like combine harvesters, the industry is still waiting on more powerful motors and batteries to hit the market—and to be affordable.

But don’t throw up your hands. There is a lot we can do right now. Like in the drying barns, which can be heated electrically, and the wet mills that can switch to clean power sources. Or what about the problem of overapplying nitrogen? That’s no good for anybody who cares about our climate—but it’s also especially bad for the people buying all this fertilizer that just ends up being wasted.

JC: Because it’s a big cost for farmers. And the big companies are all investing in digital technology that can analyze the type of soil and its fertility, and then provide advice to farmers that says you should only put this much fertilizer in this part of your field. Maybe you want to use a little bit more in that part of your field.

LHF: There are also these things called “slow release” fertilizers, which are coated in a slow-dissolving plastic so all the nitrogen doesn’t get dumped on the field at once. Or, could we produce the nitrogen our corn needs without using natural gas? There are emerging processes that use clean electricity instead, or even engineered microbes in the soil. All of these ideas are being actively pursued right now—and also studied to see what kinds of unintended effects might arise if we start doing things like treating our soils with plastics, or using a lot of energy for AI-powered digital farming tools.

So today, we wanted to highlight the often hidden fossil fuel use in our food system—but we also wanted to highlight the often-invisible solutions that are happening. Because as more and more of us get activated and equipped to tackle this issue, researchers, innovators, investors, and folks working across the food system get creative, and solutions like these become possible.

JC: So it’s a big ask to say, okay, throw that model out the window and start from scratch with something else. But there are models of other things that can work, such as agroecology, which is using nature’s own processes to provide the fertilization of soils by growing different crops next to each other. It’s a big change. And so it’s not going to happen overnight.

But I always think about the fact that the way that we ended up with the agriculture we have today took about 200 years. Farmers did adopt synthetic fertilizers. They did adopt hybrid seeds. You know all of the aspects that we think of as conventional farming today were at one point new technologies. So we shouldn’t think necessarily that farmers are going to be resistant to change. But that change has to be tangible for them in terms of the benefits, and it has to be easy, and it has to be affordable.

LHF: And that’s harder than just saying, keep the fossil fuels in the ground. But in the end, this hard, steady work is what it’s going to take to have a clean economy that offers us a good living and the things that we need. And even the things that we like, like a bag of chips.

That is our show. But if you’re interested in learning more about fossil fuels in the food system, I invite you to check out the entire Fuel to Fork miniseries from TABLE, in collaboration with IPES-Food and the Global Alliance for the Future of Food. Just look up Fuel to Fork on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And hey, you can also look up TILclimate there and follow us—there are lots more episodes to brush up on your climate knowledge. Or get in touch and ask us your climate change questions! Email us at tilclimate@mit.edu, or leave us a voicemail at 617 253 3566.

TILclimate is the climate change podcast of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Aaron Krol is our Writer and Executive Producer. David Lishansky is our Audio Producer. Michelle Harris is our fact-checker. Grace Sawin is our Student Production Assistant. The music is by Blue Dot Sessions. And I’m your Host and Senior Editor, Laur Hesse Fisher.

A big thanks to Prof. Jennifer Clapp for speaking with us, and to you, our listeners. Keep up your climate curiosity.

And if you want to dive deeper into this topic:

  • Read more about Prof. Clapp.
  • For a deeper dive into where fossil fuels are used in the global food system, check out the Fuel to Fork podcast mini-series produced by TABLE, IPES-Food and the Global Alliance for the Future of Food.
  • For detailed data on the sources of greenhouse gas emissions in the global food system, see this scientific publication from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. The data is also summarized in this report, and made available in an interactive tool where you can break down emissions by source, country, and type of greenhouse gas.
  • Learn more about how fertilizer is produced and why it contributes to climate change with this Explainer from the MIT Climate Portal.
  • This episode breaks down the use of fossil energy on a typical corn farm. You can find data on this question from the University of Minnesota and Iowa State University.
  • TILclimate has covered related topics in our episodes on farming a warmer planet and what I eat.
  • For an overview of climate change, check out our climate primer: Climate Science and Climate Risk (by Prof. Kerry Emanuel).
  • For more episodes of TILclimate by the MIT Climate Project, visit tilclimate.mit.edu.

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