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Phillip Milner on using sunlight to capture carbon - Research Matters S2E12

• Cornell University • Season 2 • Episode 12

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In this episode of Research Matters, Cornell chemist Phillip Milner explains a breakthrough carbon-capture system that uses sunlight — rather than fossil-fuel energy — to both capture and release carbon dioxide, potentially transforming how we tackle emissions. The conversation explores why carbon capture remains essential, how the technology works in real-world conditions, and what it could mean for the cost and scalability of climate solutions. Watch here.

Phillip Milner:

Nowadays, when you take a flight, for example, you can pay a little bit more for your ticket and it kind of offsets the carbon of your flight. A lot of airlines offer this. Someone has to go capture that carbon dioxide on your behalf.

Laura Reiley:

Sure.

Phillip Milner:

And you can imagine if you're a really, really big company, I won't name any so we don't get in trouble, but if you're a big company, like a software company, you don't really produce a technology that you can try to decarbonize. A lot of your energy consumption is in running servers, for example. There's nothing you can do about that. So if you want to become a carbon neutral company, your best approach is to —

Laura Reiley:

Pay another company.

Phillip Milner:

You pay another company to capture carbon on your behalf.

Laura Reiley:

Hello, and welcome to Research Matters, Cornell University's video podcast, putting a spotlight on research that aims to solve real-world problems. I'm your host, Laura Reiley. Today, we're talking about climate change and a fresh twist on one of the most urgent challenges we face. How to pull carbon dioxide out of the air or from power plant emissions in a way that doesn't itself add more pollution. With us is Professor Phillip Milner, associate professor of chemical and chemical biology at Cornell. His lab at Cornell University recently developed a novel system that uses sunlight, not fossil fuel energy, to capture and release carbon dioxide. It's a breakthrough that could reshape carbon capture technology worldwide. Hi, Phillip, it's great to have you here.

Phillip Milner:

Yeah. Thank you for having me here.

Laura Reiley:

So I guess, first of all, for for all of the non-science people among us, including myself, why is carbon capture such a vitally important thing?

Phillip Milner:

Rising atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases are causing significant changes to our climate. We're starting to see that a little bit now, and it's only going to get worse. And so we need to think about how we're going to reduce those levels in a way that doesn't... that we reduce those levels to minimize climate impact, but without, you know, causing further damage. And I think that's the problem a lot of the technologies we've developed require fossil fuel combustion, kind of, counterintuitively, to power them in order to operate. So, we really need to think about how we can reduce the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere in a sustainable way that will help us kind of minimize climate change for the, for future generations.

Laura Reiley:

Why can't we just lean heavier on emission reduction and cleaner cars and etc.?

Phillip Milner:

Yeah, that's a great question. So, yeah, I can kind of break down a little bit about the different ways we can tackle this. I think we're going to need hundreds of solutions to tackle this. It's a huge problem. I mean, the scale is something we cannot fathom as people. It's, something like 40 gigatons of CO2 is how much we release as a species into the atmosphere every year. And that's just thousands of times more than anything else that we produce. And so we need many, many different solutions. So energy transition is a big part of it. But that's not going to help with everything. For example, solar doesn't work very well in Ithaca. We need many different energy transition options for different places around the world. But also there are a lot of sectors in industry that are very hard to decarbonize. So a big one, big ones that people don't really know much about are steel and cement production. They're about a quarter of all global CO2 emissions come from those. And it's very hard to envision what are we going to use instead of concrete. What are we going to use instead of steel. And so inevitably to decarbonize those sectors, we're going to have to do carbon capture. So there is... that's part of it. And the energy transition part of it is that, we can't transition fast enough. We're still going to need to burn fossil fuels for the next 50 years, transitioning hopefully from coal towards natural gas, which does release less carbon dioxide. But, you know, we're still going to be burning natural gas 50 years from now to power different sectors. And along the way, new technologies are also going to arise that are very energy intensive. We're seeing that right now with AI and data centers. And so that shock kind of of demand of more energy means we're going to probably be burning fossil fuels for that. So I think it's we... the the goal should be in terms of energy transition we get away from fossil fuels eventually, but we're not going to be able to do it in the timescale that's fast enough, where for the next 50 or even 100 years, those emissions are still going to be going into the atmosphere. So we have to do something about post combustion, it's called, capture from power plants, but also these industrial sectors like cement and steel that are hard to decarbonize. Those we also need carbon capture for, as well.

Laura Reiley:

So I want to just back up a little bit. So we have carbon capture, which is kind of the grab and then carbon sequestration, which is kind of the putting it away.

Phillip Milner:

Yes.

Laura Reiley:

So in terms of the grab, what are the main mechanisms that we use now and, and are they all fossil fuel intensive.

Phillip Milner:

Yeah. So the main way that we do carbon capture right now, I guess I'll say the main application we use it for is actually as part of natural gas production. We have to remove carbon dioxide from natural gas when we harvest it from the ground. And so that's where a lot of the technology development has come from. And that we use these molecules that are called amines. It's not that important what they are, but they selectively react with carbon dioxide out of a mixture of different gases, and they can pull it out of the mixture. And why that's important is that that step, we have got to work very well. We have many different ways of doing that. The next step is the hard one though, because now you have this molecule that has pulled the CO2 out and you need to take the CO2 back off so you can reuse it many, many, many times. And then you can take that CO2 and either turn it into something, use it to carbonate sodas or sequester it underground. So that step, which is called regeneration, that is where all the energy goes. You have to put in energy to break that strong bond and release the CO2 molecule back. And right now, the way that we typically do that is we burn fossil fuels to produce the energy. We either heat up the molecule so it releases that bound CO2, or we pull vacuum on it. We reduce the pressure. Those things are all very energy intensive. So that's that's the way we do it right now. And I think that you can see that, for example, many estimates say that if we were to go do post-combustion carbon capture at every power plan in the United States right now, we could do it. But the cost of electricity would go up by about a third, or maybe about 40% because of the parasitic load —

Laura Reiley:

All right, listeners say no way on that right now. Absolutely.

Phillip Milner:

Yeah. There's no way we can do that. So we need to think of a way to to not use the energy of the power plant to capture to power the capture unit, to remove CO2 from that power plant. That's just not going to really work very well.

Laura Reiley:

All right. So let's talk a little bit about the research that you're doing. So I think in May you had some research that came out that to me sounded very magical, kind of utilizing sunlight — in this process. What did you — what did you do?

Phillip Milner:

Yeah. So we've... There are a lot of people who have been interested in alternative ways of removing CO2. This regeneration step, using different types of, of energy inputs. And so we in my lab have been interested in photochemistry or using light to drive chemical reactions for a while now. And so actually, the graduate student who's the first author on that paper, Bayu, he's the one who came up with this idea that what if we could use light as the energy input, both for the capture CO2, the CO2 capture step, and for the CO2 releasing step of a carbon-capture process. Using it for both steps had never been done before. There was some work, previously, about using light for either the capture or release. But putting it all together means that we can kind of distribute the energy demand and really just use light as the only real energy input for the system. So, that's how that works. And essentially what we do is we take a molecule that's very inexpensive. It's something like a dollar a kilogram. We shine light on it, and it kind of triggers it to become like a trap for carbon dioxide. And it reacts very selectively with it. And then we switch the pressure. We kind of, pull vacuum on it for now, and we shine light on it and it releases the carbon dioxide back. We can kind of capture and release over and over again —

Laura Reiley:

Releases it where? Releases it into —

Phillip Milner:

So what you usually would do is you would take a stream of dilute carbon dioxide. So the emissions of a power plant or even potentially air, and then what you produce is pure carbon dioxide that you could then use for conversion into something, sequestration or like I said, you can carbonate sodas and beer with it, as well. So what you're doing is you're turning dilute carbon dioxide into pure carbon dioxide. And so that's what we usually release it into is just pure carbon dioxide gas that we can do something with.

Laura Reiley:

So I think I read that there was some inspiration from plants. Can you explain that, that connection?

Phillip Milner:

Yeah, there's, let's see if I can explain the chemistry behind that. But, so most carbon capture technologies are based on nitrogen- or oxygen-based molecules. But actually the way nature fixes carbon dioxide is using a carbon based molecule that reacts with the carbon dioxide. And so that's where we took that happens in the enzyme rubisco in plants. We fixed carbon dioxide by using a carbon-based molecule. And so our system very closely mimics that chemistry using a carbon-based molecule to capture the carbon dioxide. That's very, very rare in terms of the chemistry of how this works. And also the release step is also precedented in there are enzymes that achieve this, what's called the decarboxylation process, where they remove the carbon dioxide from a molecule. And so we took some inspiration from how enzymes do that, as well.

Laura Reiley:

So, all right, this, this, experiment. Have you tried it outside the lab? Like what — What how would that scale and what would that look like?

Phillip Milner:

We have tried it in the window of our lab using the sunlight...

Laura Reiley:

I don't know if that technically is outside the lab.

Phillip Milner:

It's not outside the lab, but it's the closest we've gotten so far. We did it in the window. A little bit of a tricky experiment to do in Ithaca. You have to find the right day where the sun is shining strong enough that we could do it. We just use a magnifying glass.

Laura Reiley:

This is not a ringing endorsement of Ithaca.

Phillip Milner:

Yes, this this technology is something we would probably want to do somewhere like, Texas, for example, in West Texas.

Laura Reiley:

How about Hawaii?

Phillip Milner:

Or Hawaii would work great, too. But yeah, I guess we have done it that way. We have done it in the courtyard of our chemistry building, as well. So we have used real sunlight to actually power it, as well as simulated sunlight. So that's the closest we've gotten so far to getting it out of the lab. The other thing that we have done that is more advanced, I think it's something we definitely can talk about, is we also showed that our system could work on real flue gas that we got from Cornell's heat and power plants.

Laura Reiley:

Great. So what did that look like? How how did you orchestrate that? And what did you find?

Phillip Milner:

Yeah, it's a great story. And I think it led us to a really exciting project we're doing with the Cornell Atkinson Center right now. So what we actually did is we just went to the power plant and asked them, can we have a bag or have some of your actual flue gas? So Cornell has a natural gas fired power plant on campus. It produces a flue gas stream. It's about 10% carbon dioxide. And mostly the rest of it's nitrogen and oxygen, water. We asked them, can we get some? And they actually loaded up —

Laura Reiley:

This is just a byproduct of...

Phillip Milner:

Yeah, it's a byproduct of electricity production.

Laura Reiley:

What do they do with it ordinarily?

Phillip Milner:

They just vent it into the air. So they just release it into air. That's it's called flue gas. It comes out of the basically the flue, the smokestack of, you know, the power plant. So, they just release it into air, but they do test it all the time. So they're good about making sure no weird impurities got into it. So they they collected a lot. And so we asked them —

Laura Reiley:

What is it? Is it like a balloon?

Phillip Milner:

It's like a garbage bag. Yeah, it's basically a garbage bag filled with gas. And, we asked them when you're testing it, can you give us some? And they gave us a few essentially garbage bags with a little nozzle on it filled with gas. And we showed that we could capture the carbon dioxide.

Laura Reiley:

It's like the weirdest gift ever.

Phillip Milner:

I know —

Laura Reiley:

The bag of flue gas.

Phillip Milner:

But it led to some interesting conversations with people at Cornell, in particular with Tobias Hanrath, who's in chemical engineering, about how difficult it is for academic and even industrial scientists to get your hands on this flue gas, because you can imagine if you go to a commercial power plant, you say, give me some of your flue gas, they'll be very hesitant because they don't want anybody to know what's in that stream, right? But Cornell has no skin in this game, right? They don't care if we publish what is in our flue gas, right? And so it got us talking about can we make it really easy to get access to samples of flue gas. This is really difficult for us.

Laura Reiley:

So now it's about capture of flue gas, right?

Phillip Milner:

Exactly. So can we get real samples and everybody use a simulated gas, but can we get the real stuff? And so we approached Cornell Atkinson Center with an idea to build what we call CAPTURE-Lab. The acronym very cleverly spells out the word capture about how we can provide samples of gas for people to test their catalysts or, or scrubbers that can remove carbon dioxide. And so that's, we're in the process of trying to get this online. Atkinson Center funded it. There's we're going to basically put a trailer that can go to the Cornell power plant, and people can run experiments on actual flue gas instead of simulated kind of mixtures. So we're hoping that will be online next year. And that was all inspired by us just getting garbage bags of this real gas to test our technology on.

Laura Reiley:

Sounds very unsexy, but very cool.

Phillip Milner:

Yeah, I think it we're hoping that it will help streamline the advancement of the translation of technologies from the laboratory, where we tend to use, you know, we can go buy a cylinder of 10% CO2 and nitrogen, but the real flue gas has trace impurities and it has trace oxygen and things like that in it that can really mess with scrubbers. And so you really want the real stuff.

Laura Reiley:

Was it problematic in this case? I mean, were the kind of impurities...

Phillip Milner:

No, our molecule was totally OK with it, but it's very well known that these trace contaminants, in particular oxygen, can be a real problem for current technologies and lead to degradation. That's a big challenge. Also, when you're trying to pull carbon dioxide out of air because air has a significant fraction of oxygen, that's what we need to live, right. But that oxygen oxidizes things, you know, like iron turning to rust or steel turning to rust. That's what can happen to a lot of scrubber technologies. Ours so far seems to be okay with it. And so that's a real advantage, as well, over current technologies. So that's something that people tend to miss because you use these simulated mixtures. But if you've got the real stuff you can't hide from those impurities, right? So that's what we're hoping we can push, especially the academic community to test out their technologies on a real carbon capture challenge.

Laura Reiley:

So what would it look like if industry adopted this? How would it scale? What would it look like, and what benefits would accrue to the industry or their, their bragging rights? You know.

Phillip Milner:

So scaling it up, I think, we're working on that now, and one of the big kind of, I guess inspirations, of course, is, solar technologies or photovoltaic solar cells. You could imagine having essentially a solar cell that pulls in the light but also pulls carbon dioxide in from the air, for example. Sorry, it just pulls air in and then removes the carbon dioxide from that air as it's as it's running. So that's kind of what we envision.

Laura Reiley:

So a dual a dual system essentially a —

Phillip Milner:

Yeah, it would look something like a solar panel. Whether you could also harvest electricity at the same time as you're doing all of this to power a little bit of that. We do have to, for example, change pressure. So we do need a little bit of electrical input for that. That's something we've talked about kind of a dual system. Doing that requires us to make some advances on the chemistry where we can move from, right now our molecule is dissolved in solution, but we need to translate it to a solid material, that we can kind of, you could imagine coating on top of a solar cell, for example. So that's what we're trying to do now. I think the advantages are that, you know, you kind of have... we haven't talked very much about direct air capture. We've been talking about industrial, what's called post-combustion capture, either from cement and steel production or from fossil fuel combustion. You know, you can remove that carbon dioxide, but also, you can imagine pulling carbon dioxide out of air, which has some advantages in terms of not requiring you to work with oil and gas companies or cement and steel manufacturers. Anybody could go put a direct air capture unit in their backyard, for example. So it's a little bit more democratic, a little bit easier legislatively to make happen. The downside is that it's more energy intensive to do because carbon dioxide is pretty dilute in the air. It's causing lots of problems, but it's actually a very minor fraction of air. So there's a, you know, in flue gas, it's pretty concentrated in the air. It's pretty dilute. Direct air capture is one way you could imagine going here. That's very easy to envision what it could look like. And that's something where you're pulling carbon dioxide out of air, which is benefiting everyone. And then you, the key to that is that the carbon dioxide you get has to be useful for something, either —

Laura Reiley:

So you wouldn't just sequester it then.

Phillip Milner:

Well you could still sequester it —

Laura Reiley:

You would you would capture it and use it as you said in something...

Phillip Milner:

But you could still sequester it. And its value then would be in the form of, for example, carbon credits. Like nowadays when you take a flight, for example, you can pay a little bit more for your ticket and it kind of offsets the carbon of your flight. A lot of airlines offer this. Someone has to go capture that carbon dioxide on your behalf.

Laura Reiley:

Sure.

Phillip Milner:

So a lot of the direct air capture startups and and companies that are advancing right now, that's one of the ways that they can go is these kind of carbon credits. And you can imagine if you're a really, really big company, I won't name any so we don't get in trouble, but if you're a big company, like a software company, you don't really produce a technology that you can try to decarbonize. A lot of your energy consumption is in running servers, for example. There's nothing you can do about that. So if you want to become a carbon neutral company, your best approach is to pay another company...

Laura Reiley:

Pay another company.

Phillip Milner:

You pay another company to capture carbon on your behalf. So that's where the value can also be in sequestration. And so —

Laura Reiley:

So I mean, agriculture is obviously another big area where they thought credits were going to be, you know, kind of an ancillary revenue stream for all of the struggling farmers with like a third party audit like Indigo or, you know, one of those big companies that that was going to be a moneymaker. And I think it's it's been a little wobbly.

Phillip Milner:

Yeah, it is, it is tough because I think the tricky thing is, you know, if you go to a company and you say we'll sequester, you know, $300, $400, $500 a ton for you, that's a lot of money to be investing. And so kind of our mission is, how do you make that number be smaller? And, the Department of Energy has put a number of $100 a ton is something you want to shoot for, for example. And so I think that to do that, you need lower energy, lower cost technologies to do this. That's kind of where the basic science side is trying to push towards. I would say. Yeah.

Laura Reiley:

All right, so your lab does more than just carbon capture. So I know that you've done kind of research on sustainable catalysts, light driven chemical reactions to reduce environmental toxins. What are the other things that you've been working on or the other questions that you've been asking?

Phillip Milner:

Yeah. Good question. Our lab works on a lot of different areas related to sustainability and in terms of both chemical production and also these separations, which are, you know, something like 15% of global energy use. And so the way we think about this is, we combine aspects of chemistry and also material science and chemical engineering together to try to design solutions that we can use to make fine chemicals. That means drug molecules, agrochemicals much more sustainably from inexpensive building blocks. They often tend to be gas molecules, like carbon dioxide. But for example, some of the gases we work with, these hydrofluorocarbons, they are tens of thousands of times more potent greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide. And so we have a lot of interest in how do we take those gases and turn them into drugs.

Laura Reiley:

What are the industries that, that, that release those?

Phillip Milner:

Oh, a lot of different... There are a lot of different industries. So there's probably a dozen of these fluorinated gases. Together they are about 2% of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. So a lot of it is from refrigerate — refrigerators, the refrigeration industry, but also semiconductor manufacturing, polymer manufacturing. So Teflon production, for example, for nonstick pans, produces this greenhouse gas called fluoroform...

Laura Reiley:

Yep.

Phillip Milner:

... that our lab has done a lot of work with to try to turn into drug molecules. I, I, we see this kind of beautiful synergy that we have these gases that are kind of hurting the environment, but they are inexpensive, great building blocks for chemists to use. And over here we have a chemical production industry that's based mostly on petroleum and not that sustainable. And so if you can take these cheap gas molecules, capture them, and then turn them into drugs and agrochemicals, you can kind of create this sustainable ecosystem.

Laura Reiley:

Sure, take fossil fuels out of the loop, sure.

Phillip Milner:

People are of course thinking about this with carbon dioxide, how to turn it into various things. But I think there are other greenhouse gases, as well. You know, nitrous oxide. You mentioned agriculture that comes mostly from agriculture, from fertilizer. Methane is a big problem, too. It comes from many different sources. And then these fluorinated gases. So we are interested in how do we capture all of those and then how do we turn them into sustainably into different chemicals.

Laura Reiley:

Do you work on methane? I know Cornell has a lot of a lot of research just because of the ag school.

Phillip Milner:

Methane is the, like, real big challenge. I mean, carbon dioxide is a challenge because of the scale. But in terms of the chemistry, it's reactive enough that you can design chemical reactions that can work to capture carbon dioxide. But there's other greenhouse gases that's much more difficult. They're much more inert chemically. So methane is one of the most inert gases. So finding a way that you can pull methane out of air, I would say, is a grand challenge for, for our the community that we're part of. No one has a great technology to do that. Our lab has not done too much with methane because it is really, really difficult. And, we focused on particularly these fluorinated gases and carbon dioxide and also a little bit nitrous oxide. Methane is is a really, really big challenge. And I think it's in the United States, methane is probably already is probably as much of, if not more of a problem than carbon dioxide. As we switch more and more to natural gas, natural gas, when you burn it, produces less carbon dioxide than coal, which is good. But methane, the the main component of natural gas is methane. So everywhere it leaks out of a pipeline, it actually is worse than if you just burn some coal. Because it's 40 times more potent greenhouse gas in the short term than CO2. So, it's tough. That's a tough problem. Methane is a really, really hard one. That's probably our our real next big grand challenge to figure out what to do about methane emissions.

Laura Reiley:

All right, so I want to... before we end, talk a little bit about I mean, listeners hear segments like this and they say, OK, we're, we're screwed. What if there's nothing we can do? Is there anything — are there behaviors or lifestyle changes or directions that the average person can go or adopt? That may move the needle nominally.

Phillip Milner:

Yeah, it's a good question because it can feel a little overwhelming if you look at the numbers that most of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions come from industry, from electricity production. And so, you know, the the standard thing you always hear, it's a little bit trite, but it is true. You know, if you lower your thermostat a few degrees in winter, raise it in summer a few degrees, make sure you turn lights off and things like that. Electricity production is the biggest contributor to all of this. And so saving electricity and, you know, not taking unnecessary trips, things like that, those things can all help. But because this is such a —

Laura Reiley:

We should stop using AI, right?

Phillip Milner:

Yeah. AI is an interesting one, because if we can harvest the power of AI to design better climate solutions, it could be great. But in the short term, it's definitely going to present a big challenge because of energy. You know, it needs a significant amount of energy to operate.

Laura Reiley:

No AI, no crypto.

Phillip Milner:

They certainly presented a fun challenge to think about for electric. You know, we we I think until recently we're imagining electricity scaling one way. And now it's got to scale electricity demand in a much different way. And that's where I say like, you know, going back to what we said originally, we are going to need to burn fossil fuels for a while. We're still going to be burning them in 2100. It would be my guess if I had to bet money on it. And there are people that are smarter than me that say the same thing, which is why post-combustion carbon capture sometimes, for example, has been called a distraction from energy transition, but...

Laura Reiley:

Or somehow, like, enabling not moving forward.

Phillip Milner:

Yeah, we're enabling us to stick with fossil fuels for longer, which is probably true. It could lengthen the time that we still burn natural gas if we can capture the carbon from it.

Laura Reiley:

But it also seems honest, you know...

Phillip Milner:

It's the honest assessment. That's why I say, you know, solving the climate crisis is going to take a thousand solutions, and one of them will be that we need we'll still be burning fossil fuels. So if we just ignore those emissions, it's going to present a problem. So I guess those are the things like it comes from the greenhouse gas emissions come from many different sources. But even small things like, you know, not, you know, upgrading your refrigerators and air conditioners and things, a lot of the really old ones leak these fluorinated greenhouse gases, they're really bad. You can get them... you have to treat them properly to dispose of them.

Laura Reiley:

So the Low-E appliances, is that just a feel good or are those legit?

Phillip Milner:

I think there are a lot of legitimate solutions for things like that. I mean, old refrigerators have these gases in them that are not great, and they're very they drain a lot of energy. There are ones that are now much more energy efficient. I mean, a big area of research, it sounds a little silly, but is, you know, for example, air conditioning. Air conditioning is a huge part of electricity demand around the world, especially in obviously very hot places.

Laura Reiley:

Yeah, as as the temp as the temperature goes up.

Phillip Milner:

So if you can make an air conditioner that is 20% more energy efficient, you could save so much greenhouse gas emissions and electricity at the same time from doing that. Same for heating, right. Heating is probably more of an issue in Ithaca than air conditioning. And so we — a lot of energy demand in this city is heating people's homes, right? So if you can make them more energy efficient, you can help with things like that, too. So that's why I, I'd say like people looking for a silver bullet. Unfortunately, I don't think there is one. I think there's going to be a 100, you know, lead bullets. I don't know, not silver bullets, you know, to fix everything in one shot — I know, that's a bad analogy, but what I mean is there are going to be 100 solutions that we're going to need to pursue. So, for example, I get asked a lot in Ithaca by people about not eating beef anymore, right? Methane emissions from cattle are actually quite high. That's about 25% or so of the methane, anthropogenic methane emissions come from cattle. So if you eat less meat —

Laura Reiley:

But then you have to also eat less cheese, because the amount of milk used for a pound of cheese is worse in terms of emissions.

Phillip Milner:

Yeah. That's the part that, you know —

Laura Reiley:

It's very difficult for me personally.

Phillip Milner:

Yeah. You can't just become a vegetarian and smother everything in cheese that doesn't, that will not help.

Laura Reiley:

That does not solve, y eah.

Phillip Milner:

So I think that all these small lifestyle adjustments, if you multiply it by, you know, 300 plus million Americans or billions of people around the world, they can start to make a dent. But the big one to never lose focus on and where, you know, some political pressure, for example, on your your, people in Congress and the government is that it's energy production and industry are the biggest, you know, releasers of anthropogenic greenhouse gases. That is very hard for an individual person to do something about. But we have to kind of keep the pressure on that. We need things like carbon taxes or credits and these kind of systems that the government can do on a bigger scale than any one person can do. So that's that's just part of staying involved. And so, you know, you know, use your vote to to help push these solutions as well.

Laura Reiley:

Well, Phillip, thank you for sharing your work. And, giving us hope about what's possible when scientists push the limits of chemistry and imagination. I'm Laura Reiley, and this has been Research Matters. If you want to learn more about Professor Milner's research, you can check the Cornell Chemistry and Chemical Biology website. Until next time, be curious, stay hopeful, and keep watching the world with fresh eyes.