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In 2007, director Leila Conners and actor Leonardo DiCaprio teamed up for a harrowing documentary about the dire state of the earth’s environment. Twelve years later, they’ve made another one—Ice on Fire—and the stakes are, somehow, even higher.

Ice on Fire, which premieres on HBO tonight, is, in part, a tale of despair: Climate change is accelerating rapidly, the polar ice caps are melting, and the earth reaching various tipping points. But it is also a tale of hope: There have been many new technologies and breakthroughs on reversing climate change made in the past ten years. DiCaprio—who provides sparse narration for the film, as well as produced—was, said Conners, the one who wanted to make the film in the first place, originally as a way to educate the public on methane leaks, which contribute to global warming.

“He was very interested in the methane discussion, and that’s how this started,” said Conners in an interview with Decider. “I said, ‘Hey, let’s do that, but we also need to talk about the solutions of drawdown.'”

That term, drawdown, is one used for the goal of reversing climate change by targeting its main culprit: Greenhouse gasses, specifically carbon dioxide (CO2). The term was coined by environmentalist Paul Hawken, who launched Project Drawdown in 2014, which ranked 80 possible drawdown solutions to climate, ranked by their impact. “Drawdown is simply saying we have dug up carbon that was in the ground and put it in the sky,” explained Conners. “So we need to draw that down back into the earth. Very simple.”

Conners highlights several of those drawdown solutions in Ice on Fire, and gamely explained a few of the more surprising and crucial ones to Decider. “There are really powerful ideas that might actually work. We just need to support them, rather than say, ‘We’re all gonna die,'” Conners said. However, she also stressed that “there isn’t a ‘top five answers’ list. There are eighty answers to drawdown right now. There isn’t ‘the most important one.’ We need all of it. Sadly at this point, we’ve waited long enough: We need all of it.”

Kelp (and other plants)

In Ice on Fire, Conners interviews oyster farmer Bren Smith, who explains that kelp, a fast-growing type of seaweed, “soaks up five times more carbon than land-based plants,” and can be used for animal feed, fertilizer, and food for humans.

Leila Conners: The [possible solution] that everyone responds really well to is kelp, because it’s unexpected. Kelp is a very powerful plant—it’s the most powerful drawdown plant in the world. We can reverse 50 percent of our global emissions if, I think the number is 9 percent, of global waters, were filled with kelp. So go grow kelp!

If you’re living in Kansas, there’s no kelp farm there, but you can plant something in your front yard, you can put it on your windowsill. Just start growing things. We live inside a planet that has a carbon cycle, and the carbon cycle involves plants. And we basically destroyed all that.

We’re actually gonna launch a campaign where people can help plant kelp and trees, and make biochar [a charcoal-type substance made from plant and animal materials to store carbon, which some theorize could help reverse climate change]. Go to iceandfire.film. We have to give respect to the movie, but we’re gonna capture signatures. If you want to be part of the solution, if you want to reverse climate change, we’ll tell you [how to help]. It’s coming soon.

Direct air capture

Direct air capture, or DAC, is a method of carbon capture and storage from the air, using machines. Though still in its early stages, Ice on Fire highlights one of the direct capture projects underway via a company called Climeworks, which opened a small-scale CO2 air-capture commercial plant in Zurich, Switzerland, as well as one in Hellisheidi, Iceland.

Conners: Direct air capture simply takes carbon out of the atmosphere. We have created machines that can suck carbon out of the air, and there’s a bionic leaf that does the same thing. [The direct air capture machine that is seen in the film] can put that carbon in the ground in Iceland, and turn it into rock in two hours using geothermal energy. So the actual machine is carbon neutral. It basically puts carbon into the ground, and that carbon will never be used as fossil fuels ever again. But that same machine can be used to—they call it atmospheric carbon—and basically it can take carbon and turn it into jet fuel, or whatever you want.

So essentially, direct air capture disrupts the fossil fuel industry. You don’t have to dig anymore, into what’s in the ground, you can just pull it out of the sky. Like recycling an aluminum can. The only difference right now is because there are so few of these machines in the world, they’re not as competitive, price-wise. But the moment they get past a certain number—which they will get past—it’ll be cheaper. All this will happen within years.

Tidal power and wave energy

One of the last innovations Ice on Fire leaves us with is two similar forms of renewable energy being harvested in Orkney, Scotland: tidal power and wave energy.

Conners: The ocean is a huge resource for energy. There’s tidal and wave energy. Dams literally generate energy from the motion of water through turbines. They dam up a river, the water runs through the turbines, it turns the turbines, and makes electricity. So this is the same idea, but in the ocean. The hard part about tidal, until now, is how to create a machine that won’t degrade in the ocean. The ocean is relentless. What’s nice about the machine we profiled, was that young engineers who have a much more open-source and modular approach, created a very small machine—it’s very powerful and it can be taken back to shore to be fixed. Whereas, up until now, a lot of the ocean turbines were mounted at the bottom of the ocean floor, which made fixing them very difficult.

Solar and wind power

You’ve likely heard of those ones before, and it may not be a new innovation, but Conners wants to remind viewers of her film that solar and wind energy, thanks to better technology, is more efficient and cheaper to capture than ever. Martin Hermann, the CEO of the environmental design company BrightNight says in the film, “We would need about 30 square miles [of solar panels] to power all the power grids in every state of the United States.”

Conners: Renewable energy is at a scale—especially solar—that competes and is cheaper than fossil fuels. We can do this, we can transition, we will have more jobs. We will not have an environmental catastrophe or an economic one if we respond to this and get going with this transition. Solar and wind [energy] together with battery storage can power civilization. That is for sure. That’s not an if, it’s just a when at this point.

Marine snow

Another interesting concept Ice on Fire briefly touches on is that of marine snow—though Conners warns it’s a potential solution that’s still in a very theoretical stage.

Conners: Marine snow is a natural process that takes millions of years. Essentially, organic life that lives in the ocean eventually dies. When it dies, it sinks to the ocean floor. And if it sinks all the way down to the deep ocean floor, it gets organized into the bottom of the ocean floor and becomes material in the earth crust. It’s just a cycle. Carbon cycles are just like water cycles. So marine snow is part of the ocean carbon cycle. It helps bring carbon that’s floating around in the ocean into the bottom depths of the ocean.

Now—because the ocean has been sucking up so much carbon and the marine snow process is a little slow—this is a very experimental thing. It’s still in the lab. But it was an interesting thought: What happens if you use a special coat of bacteria on iron? Not the iron fertilization—that’s not what it is, because that’s not good. But homeopathically-coated iron, put with these different bacterial precursors, goes into the ocean, captures carbon, and sinks to the ocean floor. It just stimulates an already organic process. That’s just theoretical, though. It’s essentially structures that suck carbon in, and put it into the ground, where it belongs.

Those looking to get directly involved can sign up on for the Ice on Fire mailing list to receive updates on the launch of a drawdown community.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Stream Ice on Fire on HBO