The Great Endeav­our

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To achieve our climate goals, we must not only reduce future emis­sions through a massive devel­op­ment of renew­able ener­gies but also install large-scale capa­cit­ies for captur­ing carbon diox­ide from the atmo­sphere. The short film The Great Endeav­our envi­sions the design and construc­tion of infra­struc­tures to achieve this, offer­ing a glimpse of what could be the largest engin­eer­ing project in human history. By enga­ging with the tech­no­lo­gical sublime, The Great Endeav­our addresses this chal­lenge of our time with radical optim­ism.

We have always built the impossible. We have dug canals between oceans, construc­ted rail­ways across contin­ents, sent probes to distant plan­ets, and erec­ted cities that flirt with the clouds. On the brink of climate collapse, we must once again build the impossible.

Accord­ing to Holly Jean Buck, a scientific consult­ant for this project, “First World nations have colon­ised the atmo­sphere with their green­house gas emis­sions”. To meet current climate goals, we must drastic­ally reduce future emis­sions, though this alone will not suffice. We must also capture carbon diox­ide from the atmo­sphere and trans­form it into a lique­fied gas, to be buried deep in the ocean or injec­ted into desert rocks. Thus, The Great Endeav­our, the largest engin­eer­ing project in human history, calls for inter­na­tional cooper­a­tion on an unpre­ced­en­ted scale, mobil­ising work­ers and global resources to build infra­struc­ture equi­val­ent to that of the fossil fuel industry. Set to music by singer and composer Lyra Pramuk, this short film chron­icles a cosmo­pol­it­ical tech­nofix.