Could bringing back the woolly mammoth slow global warming? Ben Lamm, co-founder and CEO of Colossal Biosciences, says scientists disagree about it, some of them at his own company. On an episode of Moonshots with Peter Diamandis, recorded on September 25, 2026 at Moonshots Live 2026, he described how he handles the disagreement: by telling both camps they might be right.
Colossal is a biotechnology company that uses genetic engineering and AI in de-extinction and species-preservation work. According to its mammoth project page, it is not aiming for an exact copy of the extinct animal. Its target is a cold-resistant elephant with core mammoth traits, made by comparing ancient mammoth genomes with elephant DNA and editing elephant cells.
"I have the cure for global warming"
Dave Blundin, founder and general partner of Link Ventures and one of the show's hosts, raised the subject with a story. George Church, whom Blundin called Lamm's "guy", was at a presentation on global warming at MIT. There, Blundin recalled, Church said he had "the cure for global warming." Lamm joked: "We have several, but yes."
The cure, in Blundin's telling, was to bring back the woolly mammoth. The animals' native habitat was the tundra of Siberia and northern Canada, and Blundin said there were no trees there back then because mammoths walked around knocking them down. Lamm added that elephants do the same in Africa and are "incredible at this."
Blundin said the audience first wondered what that had to do with climate. The link, as he told it, is that grass grows where trees are cleared, and grass stores more carbon than trees do. Lamm added his own figures. Grass, he said, is "about six times more efficient" and gives "a two to three X albedo effect for light reflection to space." Albedo is how much sunlight a surface reflects instead of absorbing.
Colossal's project page frames the ecological idea in two parts. Large herds could disturb the snow that insulates the ground, so winter cold reaches deeper into the permafrost, the soil that stays frozen year-round. And changes in vegetation could alter how much sunlight the surface reflects. On stage, Lamm's remarks covered the grass and reflectivity side.
Six to eight degrees, and the doubters
Lamm, who describes himself as "a big data guy" with a background mostly in software and some space hardware, said he wants to "go where the data takes us." He said that "high conviction, really smart scientists like George" argue that a given density of mammoths in particular parts of the tundra would lower temperatures there by six to eight degrees in the summer months, so that the permafrost "only melts so far." Colossal, he said, has extrapolated that out: "We have actually done that exercise. And it's quite interesting."
Not everyone accepts the estimate. Lamm said there are "other people in the scientific community, including at Colossal," who think the animals will not have that level of impact. He framed the dispute as a top-down versus bottom-up disagreement about how the animals affect their environment.
In his view, the argument matters less than it seems. Whichever side is right about solving climate change with 10,000-plus mammoths in the Arctic, he said, the herds would have "a net positive benefit on the environment" by helping restore the ecosystem.
Telling both sides they're right
Lamm then explained his method for managing strong-minded experts. He said he has no PhD and that people sometimes think he has "a war on academia." In his experience, getting two people to agree gets much harder when both are PhDs. What works, he said, is to sit them down, tell them they are both right, and walk them through it.
On mammoths, that sounds like this: maybe Church is right that a certain density of mammoths at a certain latitude and longitude will have the effect he predicts. Maybe the others are right that the animals will benefit the tundra's plants and wildlife but "won't cure climate change." Either way, Lamm said, there is a net benefit for elephants today and for the tundra ecosystem, which he called "highly degraded." Everyone can agree it needs to get better.
He was careful about taking a side. "I don't want to say that George is right," Lamm said, "but I'll just say, I've looked at the math, and I think George is pretty smart."