Science Friday - Book Club, Green New Deal, Louisiana Shrimpers. Jan 18, 2019, Part 1

Episode Date: January 18, 2019

In a world roiled continuously by earthquakes, volcanoes, and other tectonic disasters large and small, a cataclysmic earthquake is about to change the course of human history… again. On the same day, a woman comes home to find her son dead, killed by his father for being an “orogene,” one of the few people in the world with strange powers to manipulate geophysics to start—and stop—these disasters. Thus begins The Fifth Season, the first book of N.K. Jemisin’s triple Hugo-winning Broken Earth trilogy, and this winter’s SciFri Book Club pick. Join Ira and the team as we ponder seismology, volcanology, and how societies respond to disaster. We’ll read the book and discuss until mid-February. A Green New Deal is the idea of an economy based on renewable energy, green jobs, and other policies that combat climate change. The idea was recently proposed by newly elected Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; former President Obama put out a stimulus plan (in year) that included elements of a Green New Deal. But the term was first coined over a decade ago by the journalist Thomas Friedman. Friedman talks about what possible green proposals could entail and what obstacles it might face. Louisiana shrimpers are facing low prices. They say the business is tougher than it’s ever been, and recently considered striking. Many are looking for creative ways to make more money. Charles Robin IV, a shrimper, says the shrimp are great—the problem is selling them. Like most shrimpers, after a fishing trip he’ll pull up to the local dock, refuel his boat, stock up on ice, and sell his catch to the dock. The dock owner then turns around and sells it to bigger buyers. But that’s not paying much these days. Shrimp prices have been low. “It’s been really bad,” Robin says. “And you need to catch a lotta lotta shrimp to make up for the difference.” That’s why he goes to the seafood market—to cut out the middleman, make a little more money by selling directly to customers. Julie Falgout, Seafood Industry Liaison for Louisiana Sea Grant, says more and more shrimpers are doing this. She says selling direct makes a lot of sense for some people, but it’s not easy. Cutting out the middleman means becoming the middleman. “And so it becomes a business where you have more things that you have to do and it’s less time fishing.”   Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Later in the hour, we're going to talk about the Green New Deal. What are your thoughts on turning our economy towards green tech? What would you like to talk about? You make the call, but only if you make the call. On number 844-724-8255. 844-724-8255. Or you can tweet us at SciFri.

But first, consider the hard disk drive. You know, it's been around since the 50s. but the hard disk drives are running up against a storage problem themselves. Scientists are looking into how we can put more data onto the magnetic material inside these disks. Amy Nordrim is the news editor at IEEE Spectrum. She reported this story. Here to fill us in on that and other short subjects in science. Welcome back, Amy.

Thanks, Sarah. So what's the problem with our hard disk? Well, hard desks store information in tiny magnetic grains. There are trillions of these grains on a desk, And they've gotten to be very small over the years, but in order to make them even smaller, engineers have run into a problem. And that these grains are typically flipped with a magnetic force that comes from the drive itself, a magnetic field.

But now, because they're so small, they're able to actually just flip due to ambient energy in the air, which is not what you want if you're making a hard drive because that can wipe out data. I hate it when that happens. Yeah, it's a problem. So they've had to switch to new materials, which make it harder to flip the individual grains. Then the drive manufacturers themselves, in this case, I reported on Seagate and Western Digital. They've had to come up with new technologies that make it easier to flip these hardened grains that are very, very small, smaller than ever before. So these companies have actually developed two different techniques, and they're rushing to commercialize each of them in the next year and a half.

And they both say that their technique will work better than the others. One called Hammer, heat-assisted magnetic recording C-Gate's approach, and it involves infusing energy from a tiny laser into these grains to make them easy. easier to flip. And then the other one is called Microw-assisted Magnetic Recording or MAMR, that's Western Digital's approach. And it's kind of the same strategy. It uses a microwave as an energy source in order to kind of stir up a little wobble in these grains and make them easier to flip as well. But in my laptop, though, the trend is to solid-state drives, right? Why not here? Yeah. So these drives, you're right, have been around for a while. And in a lot of laptops and consumer technologies, solid state drives based on flash memory taking over.

These do have a couple of advantages. They're certainly faster, and they don't have any moving parts. So you don't have a disc in there spinning around that can get out of whack. But the truth is, for large data centers, companies like Google, Apple, Netflix that need to store lots of files that need to be accessed every kind of once in a while. Still, magnetic hard drives are much cheaper in the long run. So they'll still be around hanging out for a while in these big data centers. But you're saying it's going to be a great upgrade in the amount of storage we have. Give me an idea, how much more?

Yeah, so probably on the order of five to four times as much data in these advanced hard drives that will be coming out in the next year and a half. So right now the best hard drives are about 16 terabytes of data, and then they're going to move more toward like 40 terabytes over the next couple of decades using these two techniques, they hope. We'll look forward to that. Your next story looks at a possible new particle collider at CERN. Yeah, this was big news in the world of physics this week.

Right, so they have over there the Large Hadron Collider, of course, which discovered the Higgs-Boson a couple of years ago. But now CERN is proposing a new particle collider. It will be four times as long as the Large Hadron Collider, and it's called the Future Circular Collider. And right now this is just a proposal, and they have design plans that they've put together for this new particle collider. and it's kind of on the drawing board, I guess you could say.

Kind of a boring name, future is something you'll learn. Well, I think it's a funny name because at some point we will be in the future, but maybe they'll change the name and maybe it'll be something else. You hope it's not always in the future, right? Well, that can be the way that these projects go sometimes. Even if all goes well, it wouldn't open until 2040 and the final phase of it probably wouldn't be finished until around 2050. But the hope is for those physicists that are proposing this, that this would help you explore. particles and discover particles at even higher energies than the Higgs boson and perhaps help fill out some of the holes that are right now in the standard model. Because we've been, you know, scientists have been disappointed in what they saw at the large Hadron Collider so far.

Yeah, they did find the Higgs boson, and that was big news, but they did not find any other new particles. And the standard model, which is sort of the way that physicists explain the forces and particles at work in the world, is still incomplete. You know, it can't explain things like gravity or dark matter. and we do need new research to dive into these areas, but there's no guarantee if you build this thing that you're going to find particles at those higher energies either. So it's a little bit of a risk. If you build it, they may not come.

That's very true. China's also building a particle accelerator. Wow. Well, that's another question is, does the world need two of these because they're quite similar in terms of their design and the way the stages at which both particle colliders would be rolled out. They're even roughly the same size.

So, yeah, there are competing proposals out there. for these types of colliders. And you talk about hagfish slime. Yes. I noticed you even tweeted about that one, something that you'd like to talk about. Yeah, the hat. What's the story about that?

Well, hagfish, they're also known as slime eels. So that's kind of what they look like. Do they look like a large eel? They're these very strange fish. And they have a really weird defense mechanism, actually. So when a predator, like a shark, grabs onto a hagfish, its response is to produce like massive amounts of slime in half of a second. And that fills the predator's mouth and allows the hagfish to kind of squirm away. So this is a weird phenomenon and an interesting one.

And researchers over the years have tried to look at like how this happens and what's going on that helps them produce this much slime. So they know that it comes out of glands and that there's these fibers that sort of unravel that the slime is all wrapped around. But recently a fluid dynamics expert got together with the materials engineer to kind of simulate this process, and they actually kind of settled on a better explanation of how the slime is actually deployed. And according to their models, they think that parts of the fiber that are embedded in the slime get stuck in the predator's mouth, and that helps kind of unravel and pull the slime and its fibers out of these glands. So it's kind of a graphic thing to think about. But, you know, this slime attack happens in less than a half of a second, and it's a pretty clever way on part of the hagfish to get away from something that's trying to eat you. Getting slimed.

Literally. And quickly, you have a story about the effects of screen time on kids. It's not what we think it is? Yeah, there's been a lot of conflicting research about this over the years, studies that have seen a negative effect from some type of digital technology use or maybe a slightly positive one. The most comprehensive study to date came out this week in nature behavior. Some University of Oxford researchers took a look at three large data sets

that covered more than 300,000 teenagers and their parents and found almost no association between digital technology use and teenager well-being. So they found really a slight negative effect of 0.4%, but that's so small that there are many other things, such as even just eating potatoes regularly or wearing, glasses that have a stronger effect on a teenager's well-being than this concept of screen time. Well, that's sort of good and bad news at the same time.

Yes. Thank you. Amy Nordermis news editor at the IEEE Spectrum. Now it's time to check in on the state of science. This is KERNO, St. Louis Public Radio News. Iowa Public Radio News. Local science stories of national significance. Pull a bag of shrimp out of the freezer at your local supermarket and check the fine print. You might discover those shrimp come from India.

or Indonesia or Thailand or Ecuador. We're importing tens of thousands of tons of shrimp from those countries every year, and the shrimpers down in Louisiana say it's driving down the price they get for local catch. Some shimpers are working to make up their losses by cutting out the middleman and selling directly to you for dinner tonight. Joining us with that story is Travis Lux, coastal reporter at WNO, New Orleans Public Radio. Welcome back, Travis. Hey, Ira, thanks for having me.

And we want to do a special shout-out, and welcome to WWNO for putting Science Friday back on their airwaves this week. Oh, yeah, we're glad to have you back. Well, nice to be back there. So tell us about the problem. Your story says it's getting harder and harder for shrimpers to make a living. Why is that? Yeah, well, you alluded to it there in the beginning. Basically, there are a number of problems that shrimpers point to, but one of the main ones is this issue of imported shrimp.

They say this imported shrimp from countries like Ecuador and Thailand. It's really flooding the market and driving down the local prices and making it harder for them to basically get by. Are there any environmental factors at play here? Well, yeah. So in addition to sort of this longer-term economic story, there's also been a number of big environmental moments here in Louisiana. There was, of course, Hurricane Katrina back in 2005. And that really kind of wiped out a lot of the infrastructure, like a lot of the homes and boats and businesses. for a lot of these shrimpers.

And then, of course, just five years later, as a lot of these folks were recovering from Katrina, that's when the BP oil spill hit. And so that actually, the spill happened on the first day of the summer season, the summer shrimp season here. And so that wiped out the whole, cancel the whole summer season.

And it's, shrimpers still say they're recovering from that spill. In fact, you talked to a shrewner named Charles Robin the 4th, and we have a clip of him here explaining the situation. as he sees it. It's been real bad. The shrimp we catch and we can't even get average a dollar pound on a smaller shrimp. We're getting like 75 cents, 60 cents, and you need thousands and thousands of pounds

just to try to get the expenses. And it's been rough. So whenever we get marketable shrimp, we try to go to markets and take all different people. And my wife, she just gets on the Facebook and just advertisers we got shrimp. people message us and we just try to get what we could get. Facebook to sell shrimp, there's an idea. Yeah, so basically what's going on here is they're trying to cut out the middleman to make as much as they can per pound.

So that means selling directly to consumers as much as possible. So, you know, you'll see folks if they have the time to have more of a presence at farmers markets or to create a presence in random parking lots or just sell off their boat as much as possible. So, yeah, in a lot of cases, that means turning to Facebook to say, here's what I caught today. Do you want some? We've got X amount of pounds of medium-sized shrimp, and so it's kind of interesting. Are shrimp on President Trump's Chinese tariff lists? They are on that tariff list. It's kind of hard to say, though, how much of an effect that will have,

because China is just outside the top five of countries where some of these imports are coming from. So it's kind of hard to say what effect that will or won't have at this point. Any predictions on your own about how this is going to play out? You know, I don't know. I think that it's really just unclear to me. This issue's been going on for so long here in the state that it's a little bit hard, just looking at recent history, to see anything changing with the prices for shrimpers.

So I kind of expect it to stay like this for a little bit longer, frankly. We'll check you back in with you, Travis. Thank you for taking time to do with us today. All right, thank you. Travis Hux, a coastal reporter at the New Orleans Public Radio, and a special thanks and hello to WNO and WRKF and all our listeners in Louisiana. Good to have you back. Speaking of back, we're going to take a short break and come back and talk with Tom Friedman about the Green New Deal.

If you'd like to talk about it, we'd love to welcome you. 844-8255, 845-844-724-8-25. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. Perhaps you've heard the term now, the green. New Deal. The idea has been gaining lots of support by lawmakers like Representative

Alexander Acacio-Cortez, but the term Green New Deal is really more than 10 years old. Journalist Thomas Friedman first came up with the term. So what might a green proposal look like? What would need to change? And would it really work to curb climate change? What are your thoughts about a Green New Deal? Do you have questions about how it might work? Our number is 8447-2-4-5. 48255-844-Sy Talk. And Thomas Friedman joins us to talk about all of this. He's Foreign Affairs columnist for the New York Times. His latest book is Hot Flat and Crowded, Why We Need a Green Revolution,

and How It Can Renew America. Welcome back to Science Friday, Tom. Great to be with you, I, right. Okay, this was your idea. The Green New Deal, it's not a proposal or set of laws. It's an idea. Give us some background on this. Yeah, so I came up with this in a column back in 2007.

And in the context, Ira, was this. We were in the depths, the darkest moments of the Iraq War. It was clearly not going to work to transform Iraq or the Middle East. We were about to enter the deepest recession since 1929. And there was a sense that China was really ascendant and America was descendant. And basically, I came up with the idea of a Green New Deal as a way of addressing all of these things at once. The idea was basically making America the cleanest, greenest leader of the Clean Tech Revolution, which would drive down oil prices and give us a way to reform the Middle East,

maybe or drive reform there outside of an invasion by actually just lowering the price of oil and really forcing reform. It would make us more innovative. It would make us a moral leader in the world. It would make us more competitive with China. The idea was it would help us get our groove back. And that's really where the idea came from. How has it morphed in those 10 years to what people are talking about today? Well, the first morphing happened when President Obama picked up the idea.

He read the column and then hot, flat and crowded in the book, and he made a part of his early stimulus plan. And, you know, we tend to remember the stimulus IRA for what failed, cylindra, you know, but actually the stimulus gave great stimulation to a lot of solar, wind, and battery technologies. Tesla grew out of that among the other companies. And so I think President Obama did a very good job with it on balance. And then, you know, he tried to go for a carbon tax. We got really close. The idea failed for political reasons. And then the idea really went into remission, I would say.

And so it has been revived by some of the new freshman congresswomen. Yeah, I'm Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Sunshine Movement, which is independent, a group of young people, have brought the idea back to the public consciousness. I think it's fantastic that they have. They're defining it in their way, which I think is also fantastic. I say let a thousand flowers bloom. And my own ideas have become much more refined as well in terms of how. I think about it going forward. I hope all of these get into the public space and politicians begin to pick up on it.

When you say your ideas have been refined more, what would be the biggest redefinition of your idea? Well, I think I was really sharpened my focus. You know, my main idea was twofold. One was political. I'm a big believer that to name something is to own it. If you can name an issue, you can own the issue. And my problem with Green all the years was it felt to me like it had been named by the people

who hated it. And they named it liberal, sissy, girly man, unpatriotic, uneconomic, vaguely French. You know, vaguely French. And my goal was to rename green, geopolitical, geostatic, geopolitical, geoeconomic, patriotic, capitalistic, innovative. Green is the new red, white, and blue. So part of it was to re-energize the movement. As I said, you know, in my book, I'm not a nice green. I'm mean green.

I think, you know, there's this sort of sense over the years that, The green movement had to be apologetic. You know, would it be okay, sir, if we just put up a solar panel next to your coal belching furnace? And my attitude is I'm not apologetic about anything. I'm as tough-minded. I'm a mean-green as any oil and gas guy. Because I think that green is a way to actually revive or propel the American economy, make us more energy independent, more geopolitically secure and more innovative. and I'll fight any fossil fuel guy on that position.

So is this the right time then? Because we have some of these new Congresswomen who are willing to fight along with you. I mean, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would seem to fit exactly into that kind of personality that needs to bring this thing forward. And I love that. And I love it from the Sunshine Movement as well. You know, my advice, which to them and to myself is I have a chapter in hot, flat, and crowd. And it's one of my favorite. But it's called, if it isn't boring, it isn't green.

And what the chapter is about is, you know, everyone wants to be Al Gore. I'd like to be Al Gore. I'd like to win a Nobel Prize and an Oscar and an Emmy. But some of the real heroes of the Green Movement, I profile one in the book, are people like the guy from NRDC who figure out how to reduce the power consumption in every Coke dispensing machine in America. You know, when you change the power consumption in every Coke machine, you really impact the climate.

Now, to do that, though, you have to understand how a Coke machine works, and you have to understand how it interfaces with a utility. Now, there is no more boring institution on God's Green Earth than a public utility, basically. But you've got to kind of know this stuff to really know where the leverage points are. And that's something I had to learn. I think it's what anyone who wants to really have an impact here has to learn, because I'm a big believer. There's only one thing as big as Mother Nature, and that's Father Greed. That's the marketplace. And to me, a green revolution is how do I reshape the marketplace with the right regulations, standards, and incentives and taxes?

So it really will propel all of these green opportunities and innovations and technologies forward. By couching it as a marketplace changer, then that's sort of a way of taking the tree hugger aspect out of it and making it sound more capitalistic. Well, the way I presented when I talk into climate doubters, I said, look, You don't believe in climate change. I do. That's between you and your beach house, okay? But let me tell you what we can both believe in. We can both believe in math.

There are 7.4 billion people on the planet. And according to the UN, by 2030, there'll be 8.2 billion. There'll be another billion people here in less than, in roughly a decade, okay? Now, that means a billion, if those billion people want to drive in American-sized cars, live in American-sized homes and eat American-sized big-max, we're going to burn-up, choke-up, eat up, burn-up, smoke-up, and devour-up, and devour-up, this planet, faster than even El Gore predict. So what does that mean? It means only one thing. Clean power, clean energy, energy efficiency, and clean water have to be the next great

global industry. Otherwise, we're going to be a bad biological experiment. Okay. So who here believes, please raise your hand in this group of climate deniers. Who believes America can be the most powerful and wealthy country in the world and not participate in the next great global industry? And that's how I frame it, okay? Because if you believe that, you're a wimp and we greens, we are the red, white, and blue, we are the tough guys.

You are the surrender monkeys. But some of the proponents of the deal say, we want to bring other social change in with it. You know, health care systems, things like that. Is that muddying the waters, for lack of a better term? Yeah, I mean, look, they're going to face a lot of criticism on that. And I think, you know, they'll have to navigate that their way. I'm not, you know, against it as long as you can find ways to. to pay for it and sell it and build a majority in Congress for it.

So I don't want to prejudge anything because I think our politics is in a really fluid place right now. Right now, I love their energy. Put it out there. Put your ideas out there. Let it compete in the marketplace of ideas. And let's see what sticks. Let's go to the phones. 844724-8255.

Alexander in Jersey City. Hi, welcome to Science Friday. Hi. I just want to say thanks for the show. I love listening to it. But I would like to take a little issue with this idea of a green new economy. You said it at the outset of the program that this is nothing innovative. The idea has been around for quite a long time.

I myself have been working for over a decade in the space of risk reduction and resilience. And my issue with the likes of Ocasio-Cortez and others is they're jumping on an antiquated set of technologies and ideas and methodologies. And what we really need to be looking at is how do we make our cities and our assets in terms of infrastructure and where we live, considering the rapid rates of global urbanization, how do we make our cities more resilient? And that is really, I think, where we see sustainability and this whole, I mean, the word green itself is becoming quite antiquated. They're being subsumed into this practice and methodology of resilience, and you can see this, with Rockefeller's 100 Resilient Cities program

or the United Nations has a global platform for urban resilience. And so while I like and appreciate the positive impulse on the topic in this current negative environment when it comes to climate change, we have to understand that the sustainability is, while helpful, it really only becomes practical in dollar terms when we can protect assets from, from the negative effects and impact of climate change for resilience. Well, you know, it's a very valid point.

And I would simply say, I were at your question, you know, what is my version of the Green New Deal today? I didn't really answer that. It's really to focus on the four zeros. And my friend Hal Harvey, the CEO of Energy Innovations, came up with these. That is, I think our goal should be zero waste manufacturing, zero net energy buildings,

zero emission vehicles and zero carbon electricity generation. And what the government's role should be is to set the standards that we want in all four of those areas, lay them out, raise them gradually every year as the state of California does, and then simply say to the innovation community, let a hundred flowers bloom. Whoever can reach these standards aimed at these four zeros, you know, we will reward in the marketplace. And so I'm rather tightly focused around those things and not trying to get into the jobs question or health care. But if you can make that work, God bless you. But that's where my Green New Deal is focused right now.

Go to Lawrence, Kansas. Bob, hi, welcome to Science Friday. Hi, it's wonderful the topic that you're talking about. One of the things that I see has been a problem. I've been active in these sinks for a number of years. my first encounter was the work with West Jackson at the Land Institute. Ah, good friend of mine, wonderful man. Wonderful man.

I know you're familiar with that. The other thing is the work of the Rocky Mountain Institute. Other friends of mine. These people are really, you know, bringing really doable technologies. Bob, do you have a question you want to discuss? Yeah, my question is, Tom, how do we do? deal with the bipolar disorder that's currently the political polarization around the issue of sustainability, green technology.

How can you get the right-to-life movement on the right side to see that right-to-life involves an expanded version of life and sustainability on the planet to avoid extinction? Well, you just said it. You know, we're not going to get everybody on board because I don't think without some form of making birth control and family planning technology to more people available who want it that we can ever get where we need to go on the green agenda. But as I alluded to earlier in response to IRA's question, again, I think the way I do it is I frame this as an innovation opportunity, as an economic opportunity, as a moral leadership

opportunity, and as a actually geopolitical strategy. And if you put it in those terms, it's not that I don't want to or believe in the climate arguments, but if you put it in those terms, it becomes harder for people to resist. I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from WNIC Studios, talking about the Green New Deal. I'm always so tempted to say New Green Deal, which I guess would be just as accurate, with Tom Friedman. What about the bigger question of how are we going to pay for this? Well, you know, again, you know, let's just take the issue I was just talking to someone the other day, solar panels.

My son-in-law happens to work for, you know, Canadian solar. And so I know through him a lot about what's going on. You know, solar panel, solar generation today with the subsidy is, it can beat coal straight up now, you know. I certainly can compete for it in any area. Wind, you know, I are, it's very interesting. I believe the top, I might have the number wrong. People can check up. I think it's the top eight wind states in America, all red states.

Yeah, Texas. Texas, Wyoming. The number one is Wyoming, you know, Kansas. So, you know, it's really there. It's getting people to get over the sort of culture resistance, resistance at climate is somehow a liberal issue. And understanding, and this has been my whole objective, that it's innovative, it's about power,

It's about economic growth. It's about an America that can really lead the next great global industry. And that's how I try to frame it. Do you think we have turned a corner in climate change, at least talking about it? Actually, a whole hour of Meet the Press was dedicated to climate change. I almost fell off my seat when I saw that. Do you think people are talking about it a little bit more as part of the daily discussion? I think they are, but I think people don't realize.

You look at it, we have the biggest utility, electric utility in California, going bankrupt, basically, because its technology allegedly triggered all these wildfires. I think this is coming at us much more quickly. And, you know, we are, I don't know, five or eight years away from this becoming the dominant issue. I wouldn't be surprised if in the 2020 campaign, God knows what's going to happen over the next two years in terms of disruptive climate events. and I hope there's none, but I wouldn't be surprised if Mother Nature just forces her way into the 2020 campaign. There's such political talk about whether these new young Congress people coming in can drag, what is the average age in Congress, 106, something like that? You know, drag these other people with them. Do you think that's possible?

I do. And, you know, at some point, and this is what I love about them, they just not ready to take no for an answer. They're just not ready to go into the corner and behave. And I love the example they're setting for other young people because sometimes when I talk to young people about this issue, they say, well, I tweeted about it. I say, you tweeted about it. That's like firing a mortar into the Milky Way galaxy. You know, ExxonMobil, they're not on Facebook.

They're in your face. They're not in the chat room. They're in the cloak room of the U.S. Congress, sometimes with bags of political donations. that's where the green movement has to be. You've got to play tough. You have to be a mean green. And you have to be on the right congressional committee. You have to be on the right congressional committee,

but also paired with that, you have to have realistic proposals that can cross party lines and that are framed in a narrow and focused enough way that people can say, okay, I get that, I'm ready to get behind. We're going to talk more with Tom Friedman. We have to take a break.

Our number 844-724-8-255. If you'd like to tweet us, you can tweet us at SciFry. We're talking about the new Green Deal, Green New Deal, whichever way you'd like to say it. And with Tom Friedman, stay with us, but right back after this break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato talking with Thomas Friedman, Foreign Affairs columnist for the New York Times, and author of Hot, Hot, Flat and Crowded, Why We Need a Green Revolution, How It Can Renew America of America.

Maybe they'll reissue that book. It's still in print. It's still in print. You can read the original blueprint. Exactly. In paperback. In paperback. Is there going to be a litmus task for people who want to get in on the New Deal here?

Like the Sunrise Movement says, you can't take any money from fossil fuel companies. Well, again, I think before we're done, because of the way that Sunrise and Ocasio-Cortez have put this on to the Democratic agenda again, I suspect we're going to see IRA four or five versions of this. Some may say, hey, you can't take any money from fossil fuel companies. Some may have a different view of it. Right now, I want to see everybody getting their own version of it on the table, and let's see what wins in the marketplace of ideas. Let's see what's on the phone. Let's go to Oakland.

Kevin and Oakland, welcome to Science Friday. Oh, hi. I'm so excited to be talking with you. So my question or discussion topic is regenerative agriculture, and I'd really like to see some soil legislation to regenerate our soils. I think there's a lot of opportunity for jobs, especially for young people that want to be farmers because the majority of farmers in America are over the age of 80. And I'd like to see some legislation come so young people like me can get some land and start

building our soils back. All right. What a great issue, Tom, to take it in between the ends of the country and to middle, America. You know, I love the question. It reminds me earlier caller brought up West Jackson from the Land Institute, and Wes used to have a saying that was, you know, topsoil is so important. We need to stop treating it like dirt. And the point is, you know, what is planet Earth? It's basically a rock floating in space with this very thin layer of topsoil and oceans, basically, and ice, you know, on top of it.

And that thin crust of topsoil sustains in basically all human, plant, and animal life. And so what the caller is saying is hugely important. Part of my Green New Deal idea was that whatever money was raised from a carbon tax would be divided up between all 50 states and with the obligation, We'd have a new Morel Act, just as, you know, in the last century, we had the Morel Act that created all the land grant universities a century before.

We'd have a new Morale Act, and all money from a carbon tax would go to establish two new community colleges in every state. State could choose where, but it has to be in a rural area. Because I want rural people to feel that they will benefit from this, too. It can be focused on more agricultural orientation, but I want everyone to feel they can be part of this. Let's look at some tweets that are coming in from Les, who says, Where does your guest stand on nuclear and breeder reactors? So my view is I don't see how we can get to the level of carbon reduction we need without at least maintaining our current nuclear fleet.

because as far as building new nuclear reactors, you know, that's almost become uneconomical. It's a bet-the-business proposition for utilities today. But I sure would be maintaining our current nuclear fleet of reactors because, you know, we're talking about one gigawatt, basically your average nuclear reactor. And you've got to have a lot of solar panels to create one gigawatt, you know. So I believe it can be made safe, and I would be for retaining it. There's talk about designating a congressional committee to this idea, not the nuclear, but the Green New Deal, but not have subpoena power. Does that matter? Well, you know, I'd have to think about that.

I never really thought about it. I wouldn't want it to turn into a kind of grilling of coal and oil companies. We know all the bad stuff they're doing. I don't need to drag them out. I would want it to be positive, inclusive, the kind of thing that would basically be used to illustrate and elevate the coolest green new technologies in the country today. Don't think you need subpoena power for that. So give me, in the few minutes I have left with you, give me an idea of a roadmap of how we get to where you would like to go. Well, I would like to see legislation.

Obviously, we'd like to see in partnership with the administration that would really do for the country what California did, which is, to set a benchmark of ever-rising standards around that would lead in and stimulate zero waste manufacturing, zero, you know, carbon emission electricity generation, zero net energy buildings, buildings that could generate as much electricity as they give off, and zero emissions transportation. You take all four of those areas. You create a roadmap, just what you said, Ira, of what are the increasing standards we want every year in all of those, tell every oil and coal, every auto, every emissions company, every energy company, you've got to meet these standards, every building company of efficiency in these four areas. And then let just the best one win.

Now what the industries will howl is, oh, my God, and we went through this in the 70s, with seatbelts and we went through it with catalytic converters. What they always scream is you're going to bankrupt us. It's too expensive. And what happens in every case is that they achieve the goal sooner, faster, cheaper, and suddenly then they have a competitive edge over their global competitors. You know, if you're the one making the most efficient air conditioner, you know, that's going to give you a real leg up in a world we're going into

where that's going to be needed everywhere around the world. Do you have the basis of a real export industry? Quick call before we have to go to Brooklyn, Allen. Welcome to Science Friday quickly. Yes, I hear very little discussion that includes the term the public trust doctrine. And I think that's kind of at the core of making this thing move among the larger part of the population. Because basically the public trust doctrine, if you boil it down, is about recognizing the rights of today's children, non-voting age,

and also unborn children of all future generations to a property right in the resources that are being harmed, that are part of the fundamental, sustainable machinery of our world. And the doctrine goes back to the Supreme Court on other topics than climate, to the 1850s. I have to say it's a great point, and the big challenge for getting a Green New Deal is that the people who will need it most, and who will be affected most by climate disruptions are the very people who can't vote their young. young and unborn children. All right, Tom. Thank you very much for taking time to be with us today.

My pleasure. Tom Friedman and Foreign Affairs columnist for the New York Times, and author of the book, Still in Print, Hot, Flat, and Crowded Why We Need a Green Revolution and how it can renew America. Well, the holidays are long gone and long cold winter continues. A bit quieter, maybe a little less hectic, a little ripe for cabin fever maybe.

Well, what a better way to pass the time to curl up with a good book about the end. of the world. Yes, it's that time again. The SciFri Book Club is back in action. And here to explain what's up this winter, give us our reading assignments and tell us how to participate. Producer Christy Taylor, our chief bookworm. Hi there, Christy. Hey, Ira, how's it gone? Okay. What's what's going on with the call? Well, you know, we try to alternate fiction and nonfiction when we do our twice a year book

club. So this time, it's a work of fiction. Our book is N.K. Jemison's apocalyptic fantasy, or maybe it's science fiction. It's called the fifth season. The fifth season. Why the fifth season? So in this book, a fifth season is anytime anything happens when you have a volcano where you have ash maybe blotting out the sun and causing a winter type effect or an earthquake or something else that otherwise disrupts society for a long period of time, which in this world happens a lot. So we were lucky enough actually to have NK on the show two years ago to talk about writing this book. Here's how she describes the world that this story is set in.

It's kind of a society of preppers. They have built their entire culture around the idea of trying to survive the apocalypse again and again and again. And there are forces at work in this world, possibly magic, possibly science, which allows some people to stop and start earthquakes and to possibly save or make worse the apocalypse. Yeah, and when she's talking about people starting and stopping earthquakes, they can. really stop and start earthquakes or volcanoes or basically manipulate a lot of the geophysical forces of the earth. But as a result, they're also pretty widely hated and feared. And you'll see that plays a huge role in this story, which centers on some of those origins, as they're called. Now, I know you love science fiction. Why choose this book? You know, so dystopia is pretty big

right now. And one of the things that this book does a really good job of is conversing about, is the world worth saving? What parts of the world are worth saving? For whom are we saving it? Those kinds of questions. I also think there's something really compelling as a climate analogy in here in some ways. You have planetary scale disasters,

but you also have a society that's sort of adapted to constant chaos and sort of had a society that's built around constant chaos and they're dealing with it. So this is sort of an imaginative leap that might be really interesting to follow in a time where we're thinking about the future of our own planet. I really like that. There's another reason.

Volcanoes are neat, and you get to learn about some of that science. They are. The planet itself is really interesting. It's being framed as the enemy of the people. There's a lot of subtle geoscience and physics we can learn in this story, and there's a sociological side. These are people who are constantly living through disasters. What does that like?

And for a last plug, here's just a neat thing, NK. Jemison said about what inspired her to write the book in the first place. It's kind of a society of preppers. They have built their entire culture around the idea of trying to survive the apocalypse again and again and again. And there are forces at work in this world, possibly magic, possibly science, which allows some people to stop and start earthquakes and to possibly save or make worse the apocalypse. So as you can see, Ira, there's a lot of really compelling stuff in there. You know, you got me. I'm excited. I saw a copy lying around the office.

I've already started reading it. Good job. I'm in the chapter two. Perfect. It's a great read. Yeah. And so now we're going to start actually beginning the book club part of this. For listeners, we want them to pick up the book.

And first things first, you can see everything I'm about to talk about on our website, Science Friday.com slash book club, including an excerpt of the book if you're not sure, and you want to take a sneak peek. And then we are, as usual, giving away 20 free copies, thanks to a generous donation from our friends at Powell's books. You can enter on our webpage by Monday. midday, and that's at Science Friday.com slash book club. And even if you don't win, Powell's is selling the fifth season at a 20% discount

through the end of February. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios, talking about our book club with Christy Taylor. So we'll read the book. This is a book club. And when do we get to talk about it? Well, we can start right now, Ira. We're going to be discussing the book in a few different forums over the next four weeks, including our new Facebook group.

We're trying that out, Twitter, and, of course, our weekly book club newsletter are straight to your inbox. And all of this culminates in an on-air discussion on February 15th with you, Ira, me, and we have two special guests. Do we know who the guests are yet? Yeah, I'm really excited about this, as maybe you can hear. Dr. Lucy Jones, who is a world-renowned seismologist, most recently the author of The Big Ones, she'll be one of our guests.

She's been on our show before. The other is Dr. Lori Peek, who directs the Natural Hazard Center at the University of Colorado and Boulder. She's written tons about the intersection of society and disasters, and I'm excited to meet her on our airwaves. I'll bet you are. Any other ways people can get involved. Heck yeah. We are also throwing a volcano party for our New York listeners with guest volcanologists. We'll have hands-on activities and NK. Jemison herself is going to be coming. Yeah. And so there'll be more details about that that's coming in February at caveat in New York. And then lastly, this is a book

with some adult themes and content, but if you're a teacher and you want to get your students excited about geosciences in general, we have a ton of educational resources from our great education team also on our website at science friday.com slash book club. And of course, we're going to wrap up with a big roundtable discussion. That's going to be on February 15th, right, with Lucy Jones and Lori Peak. Any discussion questions I should be ready to think about? Give me my homework assignment. Sure, Ira.

I'm actually going to let NK. Jemison answer that one for you. I already alluded to this a bit, but let's just say that even though the science in this story seems like it might be geoscience, seismology, volcanology, the various apococelial. elliptic ways, that this planet could be erupting. There's another element that I think is just as worthy of discussion that I really want people to think about, too. Here's NK. Jemison one last time. Since I was dealing with a society that was responding again and again to these immense

extinction-level events, you know, what I was trying to get at is not only how do people react to that constant pressure, but how do they react to the fact that they've got a group of people who could help them. And so you're looking at things like sociology and group dynamics and so forth and roles, power dynamics. How do people behave under pressure? So yeah. Sounds great. Yeah. And there's this whole science to human beings in these extreme crisis scenarios. We'll be digging into how disaster has shaped society in different societies over time. I mean, there's a volcano connection to Frankenstein and that writing, for example. And we'll dig into that. We'll learn

a bit more about how people are researching volcanoes around the world. We have a lot of really fun stuff in store. So for people who are just tuning in and say, oh, I missed the book club, let's just go a little thumbnail of what we're reading, how we're reading. Yeah, yeah. So NK. Jemison's the fifth season. That is a work of fantasy or maybe science fiction, depending on how you read the book. It is the first in a trilogy, by the way, and we are not going to discuss the second two

books necessarily in our book club yet. So if you have spoilers already, please keep them to yourself. And then everything you need to know about participating is on our website, ScienceFriiday.com slash book club. We're giving away books this weekend. You can enter on our website, random drawing. We have all sorts of fun activities planned on our website and on our airwaves in the next couple weeks.

We have a really cool piece of art that was drawn for, created for us, to help us sort of tie everything together. And it's going to be a seismically good time. And we're all going to meet back here. February 15th. February 15th. Please don't miss it, Ira, please. I hope I'll be back in the country.

I know it's because it's always exciting, and, you know, this is an award-winning. Yeah, oh, yeah, I forgot to mention. She won the Hugo for it. Yeah, that's not chopped liver, as we used to say in the Europe. The following two books also won the Hugo. So she was actually, I think, the only person to win the Hugo three consecutive years, three years in a row for this series. So it's really exciting, and it's a great story, and I hope everyone enjoys it. Good plane ride you coming up.

Thanks again, Christy. It's Christy Taylor, SciFri producer and head of our SciFri Book Club. One last thing before we go, just a quick note, as you can probably tell as I've been talking about, I'm going to be heading off for a few weeks vacation to explore Anger Wat on lots of other sites in Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand. So John Dan Koski is going to be filling my shoes while I'm away. I hope to be sending along a few dispatches from the road. So please, take good care of John. Well, I'm gone, and hopefully I'll send some stuff back you can listen to.

Charles Berkowitz is our director, senior producer, Christopher and Taliatta. Our producers are Alexa Lim, Christy Taylor, and Katie Feather. We had technical engineering help today from Sarah Fishman, Kevin Wolfe and Rich Kim, and we're active all week on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all the social media. And, you know, your smart speaker will play Science Friday whenever you want it to. So every day is now Science Friday. Have a great weekend.

Holiday weekend coming up. I'm Ira Flato in New York.