The Great Endeavour

As project collaborator and environmental social scientist Holly Jean Buck writes, “First World nations have colonised the atmosphere with their greenhouse gas emissions.” Even if we only wanted to reach current climate targets, we cannot rely solely on slashing future emissions; we must also develop the capacity to remove existing CO₂ from the atmosphere and store it underground at gigatonne scales. The great endeavour to capture all of this carbon will involve the construction of the largest engineering project in human history, the development of a new infrastructure equivalent in size to that of the entire global fossil fuel industry. This is our generation’s moon landing, a mobilisation of workers and resources on a planetary scale that would only be possible through international cooperation to an extent never before achieved.

The Great Endeavour approaches this challenge with radical optimism. Created in collaboration with a network of scientists and technologists, the short film captures the design, construction, visualisation and drama of what it might look like to build this infrastructural imaginary, transforming airborne carbon into liquified gas to be pumped deep beneath the ocean floor or mineralised into desert rock.

Supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Ljubljana.