The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper S01E02 - How to Unscrew a Planet

CNN's Chief Climate Correspondent Bill Weir marks Earth Day with this captivating adventure, crossing the globe to interact with the most innovative players in the trillion-dollar race to remove carbon from the sea and sky. Since human activity has released a monster made of more than one trillion tons of carbon into the Earth's atmosphere, innovators and investors are joining the global race against time to defeat it. With tools that include everything from Icelandic geysers to humpback whales, they are putting down stakes in the most significant new industry you've never heard of.

From Silicon Valley to Cambridge and aboard hot air balloons in the Swiss Alps and fishing boats in Maine, Weir searches for perspective, hope, and ideas. "If science and stone-cold evidence are telling us that the future is screwed, how do we unscrew a planet?" Weir said, explaining the show's inspiration. "I went looking for the biggest, boldest ideas in planetary repair and came back blown away, both by the scale of the challenge and the wave of new ideas being put into action every day."

Weir analyzes innovative carbon removal techniques that mimic nature itself, including spraying the ocean with artificial whale feces made of volcanic ash, creating synthetic clouds made of seawater mist, and sinking carbon-absorbing seaweed buoys to the bottom of the ocean. He speaks with leading experts in their field, including Swiss explorer and environmentalist Bertrand Piccard who was the first person to complete a non-stop balloon flight around the globe, former Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Government and founder of the Center for Climate Repair at Cambridge University Sir David King, and Silicon Valley titan Peter Reinhardt, who co-founded and is CEO of carbon removal tech company Charm Industrial®.