The Great Endeavor: A Planetary Scale Carbon Sequestration Machine

The Great Endeavor- Speculative Fiction Film Project

As project collaborator and environmental social scientist Holly Jean Buck writes “First World nations have colonized the atmosphere with their greenhouse gas emissions”. Even just to reach current climate targets we cannot rely solely on slashing future emissions but must also develop the capacity to remove existing CO2 from the atmosphere and storing it underground at gigatonne scales. The Great Endeavor 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 generations moon landing, a mobilisation of workers and resources on a planetary scale that would only be possible through international cooperation at an extent never before achieved.

The Great Endeavour approaches this challenge with radical optimism, collaborating with a network of scientists and technologists to create a short film that captures the design, construction, visualisation and drama of what it might look like to build this infrastructural imaginary, transforming airborne carbon into a liquified gas to be pumped deep beneath the ocean floor or mineralised into desert rock. Featuring workwear created in collaboration with Hollywood costume designer Ane Crabtree and set to the score of a new planetary workers song composed by vocalist Lyra Pramuk, the film captures millions of people on the construction site, in coordinated action to decolonize the atmosphere in our last great act of planetary transformation.