Reimagining Climate Action

WASHINGTON D.C.—March 17, 2025 —At the 2025 ARPA-E Innovation Summit, Anthropocene Institute Co-Founder and President, Carl Page, delivered a compelling address to an audience of students, engineers, and researchers, sharply critiquing the UN’s climate strategy. He called out the complacency with atmospheric carbon levels of 420 ppm—levels he argues are not sustainable—and advocated for a more ambitious goal: restoring the atmosphere to its pre-industrial state of 280 ppm.

Page urged a shift from a mindset of mere mitigation to one of full-scale ecological restoration. Rather than accepting worsening disasters as inevitable, he called for transformative action to rebalance Earth’s systems, highlighting that much of the necessary technology already exists or is in rapid development.

Restoring Biodiversity and Ocean Health

Central to Page’s vision is the ocean. He invoked the historical abundance of marine ecosystems, when ocean waters once teemed so densely with krill they appeared orange, rather than blue or green. This vitality, he explained, was supported by complex food chains now deeply disrupted by industrial-era pollution.

Restoring ocean productivity, Page said, is urgent—perhaps even more so than curbing greenhouse gases. Ocean acidification and nutrient depletion pose immediate threats to all life on Earth. Today, nutrient imbalances—especially excess carbon and phosphorus—have disrupted marine ecosystems and financially hurt our fishing industries. Page advocated for targeted ocean iron fertilization to stimulate plankton blooms and rebalance nutrients to restore fisheries and draw down atmospheric carbon. Done correctly, he argued, this could help return us to 280 ppm by 2050.

Energy Innovation: An Array of New Nuclear

To further address Earth’s myriad of man-made challenges—ocean acidification, dead zones, run-off and erosion, disease, and pollution—Page emphasized the importance of expanding nuclear energy as a cornerstone of restoration. He dismissed the idea that more wind and solar alone could solve the crisis, noting that such issues as California’s “water problem” is fundamentally a problem of inadequate energy for desalination.

Page proposed a bold yet pragmatic vision: clean up pollution and restore ecosystems using cheap, abundant nuclear energy.

He noted a need to use an array of nuclear technologies to achieve these goals, however, he emphasized the need to adopt and promote the right technologies. Page was especially critical of the term “Small Nuclear Reactors,” which pools a variety of new nuclear technologies, but may lead to the wide adoption of small light water reactors that “will not meet our economic challenges and will fail.” Instead, he advocated for "hot, dry, manufactured" reactors that could repower existing coal and gas infrastructure using uranium or thorium, dramatically improving economic viability and extending the life of current energy systems.

Nuclear fission, Page states, can take care of our power grid needs but the development of solid-state fusion technologies could address the world’s needs for distributed energy. Over the past 10 years, rapid progress has been made in solid-state fusion and LENR research, fields once stigmatized but now gaining traction thanks to new funding and institutional support.

Thanks to Solid State Fusion Pioneers

Page expressed gratitude to filmmakers and scientists advancing solid-state fusion and low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR) research, particularly those behind documentaries like “The Conspiracy to Kill Cold Fusion” and “The Men Who Promised the Impossible: Unlimited Energy.” He noted that ARPA-E’s modest $10 million investment has already mobilized elite institutions—including MIT, Stanford, Texas Tech, and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab—to push the bleeding edge of fusion research.

Solid-state fusion is complex, but Page sees real progress—and real promise.