this week, sustainability is the name of the game, which is why i'm on the eve ecargo bike. it's electric, it's made from natural and recycled materials, and it's usually used for inner city deliveries. but today, it is delivering me to the studio. nice wheels! 0h, hello down there! hey! sinclair c5 — blast from the past! i know! an icon of the �*80s created by a computing icon. in memory of sir clive sinclair, i'm taking this for a spin, but it's really been souped up. inside is an escooter with some brand—new batteries, which means i can go pretty fast! here! wait for me! cheering and applause spencer chuckles whoa! ah! 0h! good engines! that's how to arrive in a studio! hey! welcome to click! hello, hello, hello! oh, look at us! we've got a shiny studio! we have an audience! hello, audience! cheering and applause. and right next door, through that wall and across the river a bit, we have some very important neighbours. yes, we're here at bbc scotland in pacific quay glasgow and just over there, the united nations climate conference, cop26, is hosting leaders from around the world, along with 25,000 delegates from 196 nations. the question is will they agree to take the steps needed to tackle our climate emergency? the un says current systems won't suffice. we need new ideas and solutions to secure our future. and so in this show, we're asking what role do technology and innovation play in helping reduce our emissions? can technology save our world? so, let's start, and did you know that one of the biggest causes of greenhouse gas emissions is the agriculture industry? now, we know we need to cut down on our meat consumption and one of the reasons is that cattle are responsible for 10% of those emissions. yes, but it's not from what we think it is, is it? the back end? no, no, it's not, no. nearly all methane from cows — 95% — comes from the front and not the back. yep, it's all about the burps. 10% of our entire greenhouse gas emissions come from cow burps. and that means you, magenta — everybody, meet magenta, magenta, everybody. applause. she's appearing here alongside her team and her showbiz agent eileen wall, head of research at scotland's rural college. eileen, welcome. hi, spencer, and hello, magenta. hello, magenta. can i ask you what is magenta wearing and why? magenta's wearing the latest in wearable technology for our bovine friends. she's got two bits of kit on her. one, a pedometer — kind of like what we all wear on our wrists — that measures what she is doing, lying down, sitting, walking around and how much energy she's using. and around her neck, she's got something that measures her head movements so we can know when she's eating and when she might be producing something out of her front end. and that helps you to work out how much methane she's producing? yeah, so methane is produced after she's eaten her meals, so if we know how much she's eating, how often she's eating, we'll be able to extrapolate her methane, as well as being able to measure it to compare it. and you have belch chambers, is that right? we do. we use those for research, that's not something we use routinely in the field, and we use it very infrequently to really get an idea of how the methane changes over time, how it might differ for this cow over another cow or eating different foods. is there any way we can find out how much methane magenta's producing right now? yeah, so the equipment that we have in the chamber is not exactly the same as this — this is a laser methane reader. right. that measures the parts per million of methane that might be coming out of magenta's front end at any one time. let's give that a go. i'm going to get out of the way because it is a laser! there's a laser, and we all know how dangerous lasers are. so, magenta, if you don't mind. yeah, don't listen, magenta! 0k. 0h...she�*s licking it, she knows it's coming. she doesn't chase it like a cat does. 0h, she's... and the reading is 18 ppm. so it's been a while since she's had a lot of food. 0k, she's having a clean day. all right. thank you, eileen. now, one way to cut down on cow burps is to cut down on cows, of course. but in the meantime, did you know that there is a company that is working on a way to catch the methane as it comes out? how are they doing that? cow masks, of course. true story. the masks have fans in them which suck in the methane and oxidise it and the makers say they can cut the amount of methane released by half. cow masks, everybody. eileen, that is fascinating. thank you so much. thank you, team, and thank you, magenta. woo! lara. well, that went a lot more smoothly than it may have done! but what comes out of a cow could also be affected by what you put into a cow. this lot are eating feed created from seaweed found in the waters of hawaii, and its makers, blue ocean barns, claim it cuts emissions by 80%. but will it make your beef taste fishy? apparently not, because the thing is... bugs! come and get your lovely bugs! your tasty, nutritious bugs! spencer, what are you doing? lara, welcome to my wondrous emporium filled to the brim with fine foods from the future. 0h, great, because i am absolutely starving. 0k. well, i tell you what, get your lips around these delicacies. um, ok, i'm actually thinking that because our audience have gone to the trouble of coming here to join us today, that they may be more deserving of this than me. i'm sure you'd love to try some, wouldn't you? just here, we've got the first course for you. help yourselves. did we fill in the forms for this? i'm sure there were forms. listen, trust me, they're not bad. i've eaten roasted mealworm in china and it never did me any harm. see, in the future, we might be eating more insects than meat. they are cheap, they're richer in protein, calcium and iron and have less fats than beef, pork or chicken. best of all, there are bazillions of them. yes, i heard — there are 1.5 billion per person on earth. what do you think? how do they taste? they're very crispy. crispy. you don't look too impressed. and you? like roasted chickpeas. ok, that's not bad! interesting. do you like roasted chickpeas? love them, yeah. 0k! fairenough! listen, they are not just for humans either. take a look at these. right, these are black soldier fly larvae. fancy one? no, i'm not really feeling so hungry anymore. correct answer because they're for pigs. what?! because it's a way of feeding farm animals more sustainably. they are bred by beta bugs, which is a start—up based in scotland. i know in certain parts of the world eating bugs is commonplace, but i still can't imagine them being on my shopping list. well, 0k. how about. . .these? ok, that actually looks borderline appetising. hmm—mm. do you want to try? i think i may be asking you again. yeah, right, 0k. just behind here you will find that. all right. just have a taste of that. there we go, any time you are ready, and i will tell you that these are — drum roll — spicy crickets. yes, these dishes are made from insect packed by a british firm called bug — who love bugs, obviously — and they say that bugs use less water, they use less land than animals, they need less feed than animals and, in fact, they can be fed on the things that we throw away. but are they delicious? weakly: they're quite spicy! clears throat 0k. a bit of a kick! right, i do not think you're impressed by any of this! i think it's like _ sweet—and—sour chicken. 0k — again, that's not bad. you'll eat anything! chickpeas and sweet and sour chicken! i think you have got dinner here sorted, haven't you? totally! now, it's all very well having tasty stuff to eat, but in terms of the climate, how ourfood is produced is key. and our very ownjen copestake is in a greenhouse for us. jen. yes, i'm here in the norwich greenhouse and it looks completely different than it did on my last visit. it's absolutely filled with plants now. there are 378,000 tomato plants here, and that represents 5% of the uk's consumption of tomatoes. last year, we saw this world—first project being built using an environmentally friendly heating system. a typical greenhouse would burn fossil fuels to create the heat that you need to go through these rails. but our greenhouse takes waste heat from sewage treatment works. we use that heat instead of burning fossil fuels. the hard hats and hi—vis gear we wore last time have been replaced by coveralls to protect the crops from bringing in external bugs and viruses. workers here have their clothes cleaned on site. and how many people are working here now? because when i came before, there was nobody. yeah, so we have about 50 people currently working in here on picking. so these tomatoes are going out to the shops? yes, yeah, they're being picked, ready to be packed and you'll see them in the supermarket soon. and we see different varieties of tomatoes, so can you explain what's going on? as we've got here, this is ready to be picked. these ones are just starting to get some colour on, so they'll be picked within the next ten days. we introduced predatory insects. at the beginning the year, we introduced macrolophus pygmaeus, which is a true bug. it's a predatory insect that feeds on anything like whitefly, aphids, commonly known as greenfly, spider mites. there is one of my macrolophus. ah! hello! so we do not want to damage him? he's fine? he looks like a greenfly. yeah, he's just searching away, looking for something to eat. because we're coming to the end of the crop, we've taken the top of the plant off. so this would have extended all the way to the top of the greenhouse? up to the top of the wire, the string here. oh, wow. so we keep a buffer above the top of the greenhouse so we can control the atmosphere and the climate within here. and more produce is growing in a greenhouse just next door using the same green technology. how many cucumbers are you growing in the other greenhouse? the other greenhouse here is 1a million cucumbers. 1a million?! 22 million peppers. 22 million peppers?! i don't know how many tons of tomatoes, but a lot. it's done better than we'd anticipated in its first year, if i'm honest. yes. um, but, you know, great. so this project has proven that you can grow a large scale of produce in a low—carbon way — you just need to be near a waste heat source and there are plenty of those around the world. thanks, jen. of course, once our crops have been harvested, they need to be stored safely so they don't spoil. an estimated 630 million tons of grain goes bad each year, which is such a waste. well, doctor lorenzo conti thinks he might have a solution. doctor lorenzo, what is it? what we have developed, lara, is the world's first subterranean drone and we're using it specifically to help the grain storage operators maintain the quality of their stock. you called it a drone but it doesn't look much like drone. that's right. since there wasn't a word in the dictionary to describe what it is, we have come up with one. we call it a 'crover'. how does it work and what does it do exactly? it swims through grain in storage, like in silos and sheds, monitoring the conditions of the grain like temperature and moisture and helping maintain quality. how does this vary from conventional methods of looking after your grain? well, traditionally, you would need a farmer to physically walk on top of the grain bulk with a heavy spear and taking samples at a few points, which is dangerous and in some situations not possible to do. ok, that sounds like a biggerjob. so do you think farmers are going to use this? right now, we're focused mostly on centralised grain storage hubs, which are usually owned by grain merchants and port operators, but we'd like to develop in the future a version that is suitable for farmers as well. 0k, and i'm hoping when it's used in the real world, it doesn't mix up the grains like that. i can hardly look! thank you so much, dr lorenzo. thank you, lara. when it comes to reducing emission keeping heat from escaping our homes is important. paul carter has particularly and forming to show us. yes, home insulation is a hot topic at the moment. rising energy bills are also making the headlines. but of course, click wouldn't be click if we didn't have a robot that might be able to help with that. this is q—bot and dana from q—bot is here with me. thanks forjoining us. thanks for having me. first, what is q-bot what does it do? this is q-bot. what we do as we create intelligent tools which retrofit sustainable solutions in the construction industry. so this is boudicca. oh, my goodness. so boudicca spraying here. what is it she is spraying, if i can call her a she? how is it getting from the robot up to the floor? she is spraying a polyurethane foam which has been used in industry for years to retrofit insulation. so what can a robot do in this environment that a person can't do, for example? so what we've actually done is create jobs for robots an industry which didn't exist before. these robots actually navigate very small environments which are far too dangerous to send a human. and i notice you're controlling this all from a video game controller there. i am, everything can be done from a game pad. it does look like a game, looks like a lot of fun. what are you seeing in your screen there? what i'm seeing my virtual aiming arrow which shows me where i'm spraying. i also got my spray pattern which i'm running through here to get the job done. so it's nice and easy, nice and safe. this is obviously a mock—up here. will this work in everyone's homes? what we're looking for is two things. suspended timber floors, and floors that have less than 20% moisture. so we can do jobs down from 20cm up to 2m high. i'm not an expert in flooring installation but it looks to me like it's done a pretty good job. thanks, paul. nicejob, paul, thank you. now, we are a tech show and we can't avoid the fact that tech is a heavy user of electricity. tech is contributing to global emissions. for example, there are data centres all over the world filled with power—hungry computers but also filled with power—hungry cooling systems. some data centres are being north so they can use the naturally colder air but there are other options as well. microsoft has been running an experimentjust off the coast of 0rkney and they put a data centre underwater. what could possibly go wrong? let's find out. lucasjoppa is chief environmental officer at microsoft. welcome. so the idea with this is you are using colder seawater to cool the computers? yes, exactly. you asked what could go wrong. it turns out when you put data centres underwater, a lot fewer things can go wrong. that might seem a bit counter—intuitive but we can completely seal that environment. it has to be to go underwater. that means that there is no human operator error that's allowed inside. we can remove all of the kind of natural gases that we can find here and put gases in that keep the computers running extremely efficiently. and we can use the natural cooling power of the sea to keep the computing at the right temperature for the entire time. and all of that adds up to this really nice, small, portable, basically underwater cloud if you will. how much is it up to governments to make demands of the tech industry on what it needs, and how much is it up to big tech to devise new solutions to show governments what can be done? i think it's an entirely collaborative process. i think about it about trying to move a heavy dresser across a room all by yourself, you move it, go to the side, you move it back and i think that's kind of the way public and private sector work together in this space. it's for the public sector to show the way with regulations and the like, and it's for the private sector to respond with solutions. and to show that these things are possible. how much is big tech to blame for climate change? well, ithink, you know, everyone's to blame for climate change. this is a shared social economic problem. i think when you look at tech, the tech sector itself, we really see the impact around energy use. so, you know, tech is obviously driven by electrons and the generation of those electrons, and electricity any omissions, so with microsoft, we have a 100% renewable energy goal by 2025. many of the other tech players do as well, and i think that's really the single place that tech has to really make sure that it is helping transform, taking care of its own house while also helping to decarbonise the electrical grids that we of course operate on but so does everybody else. lucas joppa, thank you for your time. thank you. one way to help save the planet from carbon emissions is to drive electric, but although electric car sales have taken off, with more than double the number being registered in the uk this year compared to last year, many of us who may be considering the jump are still worried about running out of charge. nearly half of homes don't have a place to park, which means you can't have a charger at home, but dan's found something that may be able to help. thanks, lara. i want to show you a world first, at least for us ordinary drivers, consumers. now, maybe your ev is a little bit low on juice but you can'tjust charge it up anywhere, and there really is no such thing as a jerry can for electric vehicles, so you can just top them up. well, not at the moment. this isjonathan, he comes from a company called zipcharge. what is that? this is the zipcharge go. it's a portable ev charger that gives people the freedom to charge anywhere they park. and that box there, you just plug it into any regular socket? that's right, you plug it into your socket at home, it charges in just over 60 minutes, you wheel it at your car, plug it in and it charges in just over 30. and it works with any make of car? that's right, any electric vehicle. so how far will that get me? this is 4 kilowatt hour unit. that will give this nissan leaf about 80 miles of range which is more than enough of the average daily commute here in this country. now the big question — how much does it cost? so this unit will cost £49 on subscription, and if you want to buy it outright, it will cost £1,500 which is in the ballpark of a fully installed fixed home charger. it's going to cost me a bit to carry around. batteries are not lightweight, are they? how much does that unit weigh? this weighs just under 25 kilos. that's roughly about the luggage i would take on a 2—week holiday and you are expecting me to carry that in my beautiful electric vehicle wherever i go. that's going to affect the efficiency of this vehicle, isn't it? not really. if you put it in context, that weighs less than 2% of this nissan leaf so the impact is marginal. there's a lot of talk about battery—powered technology being maybe disposable, throwaway, doing a lot of damage to the planet. how long will that actually last me? so if you were to charge every day, this will last you almost four years but, at the end of its life, we will take the batteries and use them elsewhere for energy storage. 0k, and the moment, it'sjust a prototype? shouldn't get too excited, should we? we brought this to showcase at cop but also its its first global premier here at the bbc. it will be available for anyone to buy next year. thanks, jonathan. great stuff. now, something to raise a glass to. last orders! 0h, right, in that case i will have a pint of lager, please. we've got two on tap today. one is made from bread, the other one is a local brew made from old scraps. excuse me? i'll explain. right. you try that, this is a zero—waste sour made by drygate brewery across the clyde there. it's a concocted from unwanted fruit and veg that would otherwise end up in landfill. itjust tastes like a fruity sour beer, so fair do's. good, but don't enjoy it too much because it is just part of a campaign that is lasting for a month over cop 26. ok, so not a long—term plan then. tell me about the bread beer. this is made by a brewery called toast, which is made from the leftover ends of loaves which the otherwise chucks in the bin. fair enough. i mean, the booze industry is responsible for a lot of emissions, isn't it? they grow the crops, they add the water, they package it, they heat up, they cool it down again. at least british breweries are focusing on the issue. total co2 emissions from it have almost halved over the past decade. crumbs! which this doesn't taste like, so fair enough. but i do have something else special for you to try today. pea and tonic? pardon? pea and tonic? i think i'lljust have the tonic, thanks. here you go, it has got actual peas in it. alright, 0k. i'll explain. 0k. gin is usually made from wheat or barley which is grown using synthetic fertiliser that contains nitrogen but this nadar gin from arbroath is made from peas which don't need added nitrogen to flourish. and by not using synthetic fertiliser, it saves 1.5kg of carbon emissions per bottle. well, there is definitely a hint of 'pea' about it, i have to say. and on the note, i think i should call time. alright, fair do's then. listen, thank you so much for watching. i hope you've enjoyed it as much as i have but i've been drinking, so probably not. seriously, though, we've seen some incredible ideas today, but let's be honest, they aren't going to solve the issues we face on their own. for that, we really need the world's leaders gathered here in glasgow to step up and act so that in five years, we're not still saying time is running out. but, sadly, time has run out for us. thank you so much for watching. we'll see you next week, and cheers! hello. sunshine has been in short supply of late, but wednesday certainly made up for it with widespread blue skies across the uk. there is a price to pay for those clear skies. 0vernight tonight, temperatures falling very sharply. it will stay chilly across the uk through the next couple days and nights. in fact, chilly enough we'll see a top up of this snow across the highlands through thursday as these weather fronts start to work their way in. ahead of that through the course of the night with light winds and clear skies the temperatures will fall away very sharply. where we have lying snow and some of the sheltered scottish glens with temperatures low as —10 degrees. even to the south of the uk, —6 or seven. it will be milder by the end of the night for the likes of northern ireland where the wind starts to pick up and the cloud arrives. then, this weather system runs into the cold air through thursday. for northern ireland we're largley looking at rain, perhaps some snow breifly across the hills, but for scotland and northern england, not exclusively across the high ground but particularly for the high ground there wil be some heavy snowfall for a time. some briefly across north wales and the midlands. with strong winds, we could have blizzard conditions. also some heavy rain to the south as this front goes through. maybe even the odd flash of lightning or rumble of thunder. it is a cold afternoon even as things brighten behind the weather front. a few showers continuing to funnel in on a notable northwesterly wind. that stays with us overnight thursday into friday. because of the wind, it won't be quite so cold overnight thursday into friday. we will still have a frosty start across the northern half of the uk, a risk of ice first thing and snow showers again for northern and western scotland. some for northern ireland, the west of scotland getting down into the midlands, at lower levels as well. rain for the far southwest. a lot of sunshine, but a cold feel. temperatures in the mid range of single figures at best. quite a change come saturday as this weather system comes in. it's got a big pocket of milder air tucked inside it and it will lift the temperatures quite noteably up into double figures once again. the start of the weekend we will see a return of some widespread cloud and some fairly heavy outbreaks of rain. this is bbc news with the latest headlines for viewers in the uk and around the world. one in 15 people in england had covid in the run up to new year's eve, but borisjohnson�*s defends his decision to not bring in new restrictions. because of the balanced and the proportionate that we've taken to covid, we've been able to keep this country open, keep our economy moving, more open than any other comparable economy in europe. 0micron continues to surge throughout europe. france has reported a record 335,000 new cases of covid—19. the us attorney general promises to hold accountable anyone who was involved in the deadly capitol attack almost a year ago — whatever their status. will he or won't he defend his australian open title? 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