StarTalk Radio - Protecting Our Environment, with Gina McCarthy

Episode Date: February 5, 2016

What will it take to keep Earth habitable for humanity? Neil Tyson finds out from EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy. Also featuring environmental blogger Andrew Revkin, science historian Naomi Oreskes, co-host Maeve Higgins and Bill Nye the Science Guy. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. Welcome to the Hall of the Universe. I am your personal astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson. And tonight, we're going to be talking about keeping Earth habitable for humans. And in the United States, there is an agency charged with doing just that. It is the Environmental Protection Agency. And we will be featuring my interview with the head of that agency Gina McCarthy so let's do this as you know I never do this alone I always need some help and so tonight we

have back as StarTalk comedian Maeve Higgins. Maeve, welcome back. Thank you. Thank you. I am out of prison and ready to start again. And thank you for giving me this chance. Okay. So to talk about the environment, Andrew Rifkin, you're a journalist who cares deeply about the fate of life on Earth. That's a good thing.

And so you write a blog for the New York Times. So you've been writing for the Times for how long? This. So you write a blog for the New York Times? You've been writing for the Times for how long? This is my 20th year writing for the New York Times. 20 years. So let me ask you, you've been following the environment and our relationship to it. Is there any hope for us? Let me start with that.

Is there hope? What do you base that hope on? Because recent research among I guess, is it anthropologists and especially geologists, want to describe a new geologic era called the... Anthropocene. And that just means the age of humans, right? Right. Well, the Holocene was this...

Since the last ice age, we've been in an epoch called the Holocene. And scientists have proposed we have entered a geological age of our own making, which is what's the new thing. That's kind of cool, though. What's wrong with that? Yeah, well, cyanobacteria did this a couple billion years ago. They totally did. They oxygenated the atmosphere, but they didn't know it.

See, that's the thing. We kind of— Wait, wait. Let's back up. So before we had oxygen in the atmosphere, we had these cyanobacteria that dined upon whatever was the gases in the air and excreted oxygen, enabling subsequent creatures to thrive on that. So you can argue that they were the most disruptive creature ever to live on the face of the earth. Correct. Okay.

So did we name that geologic period after them no so i answered for you no yeah so so but they didn't know why go up all blame humans now well that's one of the one of the debates about this is are aren't we being rather anthropocentric i don't mind an era or an epic, whatever is the unit, to be named after us. But my feeling is that you want to call it that because we're doing bad things. I actually think there's a decent chance we can navigate the century and come out the other end,

those who are around at the other end, saying we did the best we could, and that there'll be losses. Look at the losses that have already happened. 80% of the tunas and sharks that were in the ocean 50 years ago are gone. But there's plenty. You can rebuild stocks of fish. The atmosphere has profoundly changed.

We're going to have centuries of climate change. But we can modulate that and do what we can to thrive. Engage, engage is my thing. Okay, so you want to fix the earth? No. No, I want to fix us. Okay, well, sure. We're part of earth. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Because that's, of course. No, I want to fix us. Okay, well, sure. We're part of Earth.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, because that's, of course, the EPA is trying to do that. Yeah. And they're trying to do that, like, starting in the United States. And so in my interview with Gina McCarthy, I wanted to find out how she began in this. And how did she go from here to there, from her childhood to being the head of the agency that's charged with watching out for our own health and well-being on this planet? Let's check out what she says. I grew up in the 60s.

You know, I know I look like that's not the case, but it is. I grew up, and when I was a kid, I was outside all the time. Loved the outdoors. And when I was a kid, I was outside all the time. Loved the outdoors. To me, an ecosystem is what I looked at when I grabbed a log and I picked it up and you saw all the creepy critters underneath and you realized how vibrant life was. So your heart and mind were already there as a kid. They are.

And I will be very honest with you. I think one of the biggest threats to the environment is that kids don't go out and play anymore. Yeah, I didn't. I didn't really. Yeah. It's really tough to get them to understand. If you don't have strong science education in your schools, it's really tough to get people engaged and excited about environmental work.

But I was outside so often that it became really a part of me. I remember I grew up in New York City, and the rivers were not— Yeah, that was not pleasant. I mean, there was stuff floating up in the rivers. How were the waterways of Boston? Oh, they're much better, but not when I was a kid. When you were a kid, how were they? Well, we went to the city of Lawrence, which is the heart of the Industrial Revolution. And it used to run green one day, yellow one day, blue one day. We used to take a bet on

which one it would be the day we were going by. What color the water would be? Because that's where the textile industry was, and it depended on whether they were doing yellow or blue or red textiles that day. And that's what the color of the river ran. I didn't come from a rich family. I actually did swim in a beach off of Boston Harbor when you really weren't supposed to. And we used to go there as our day trip. It was 20 minutes away. It was right in a little boat yard. But when you came off, your mother was picking the tar off of you and the oil. But we still loved it and we still went there.

But that's what we had available and we used it. Maybe everyone needs to have that kind of experience to jump start their immune system. Well, I'm pretty healthy, so maybe it works, but it's not what I would suggest to this generation. Let me ask, how often do you get sick? Very infrequently. There you go. There's got to be wood I can knock on.

There you go. I'm pretty healthy. You fix your... Well, there is an argument about getting kids' hands in soil outside and how that exposes them at a young age to different types of germs that at that age they're going to be able to get some immunity towards. There's arguments about that. I just think it's really fun to go outside and walk in the woods and play in the mud,

and that's what we did as kids. No one told us to, but our mothers simply wouldn't allow us to stay in the house, that's for sure. So she made a comment that more people should go out and play than they might embrace the environment. And I went out and play, I was in the street. So to me, the environment was cars and trees. So she must mean go out to nature. So do you agree that this would solve all the problems, or many of them?

It's a wonderful and vital component of getting people to care about something beyond the built environment, absolutely. Let's find out. Gina, she thinks a lot about awareness of the environment. And let's see her continued take on that. We used to, you know, if you had trash and you would, you know, eating McDonald's in your car, you'd throw it right out the window. This wasn't just, I don't think it was just my family. I'm certainly hoping it's not. It was just, it was so. Everybody did. I remember it.

There was just, you know, the gasoline was awful. When you went to fill up your tank, it just, the emissions coming out of the tanks, because we didn't have the sophisticated equipment now to capture all that. The smoke was everywhere. Boston Harbor, you, I went in it as a kid. I also went to college along Boston Harbor. And even at that point, you were warned when we went sailing not to fall in the water or you'd have to go out and get a shot. You couldn't swim in the Charles River.

But now we have Boston Harbor that is the engine of the city of Boston. That's the engine of all of our economy there. It's just things change dramatically for the good just as much as they change for the bad. So we try to think what are the drivers that created this change of awareness? Because no one really does that without feeling guilt, even if you did. Throw things out the window with disregard. In fact, there's some interesting scenes in Mad Men, which of course takes place in the 60s.

You just see them doing things. Wow, did we do that? People walk into an elevator smoking a cigarette. Did we do that? And they finish a picnic and they toss everything on the ground. Did we do that? So why did all this change?

What happened in the late 60s? And we go to 1968, the most turbulent year of a turbulent decade. Assassinations, the Tet Offensive, the anti-war movement. And in that year, Earthrise. Apollo 8. They went to the moon, orbited a dozen, 15 times, and then came back, snapped this picture. orbited a dozen, 15 times, and then came back, snapped this picture. This was published in 1968, and we see Earth as nature intended us to view it,

like with oceans and land and clouds. We go to the moon to explore the moon, and we discover Earth for the first time. And I looked at what happened after this photo was taken in the four years that we were going to the moon 68 69 70 71 and into 72 five years excuse me end of 68 into 72 that's when all of this happened when was the environmental protection agency founded 70 1970 okay When was Earth Day founded? 1970. We were going to the moon then, and we had other issues in 1970. Assassinations and unrest on college

campuses, and all of a sudden, people started thinking about Earth. Earth. 1972, the catalytic converter is introduced. Leaded gas is banned. DDT is banned, 1973. These early years of the decade. The Comprehensive Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act,

all was in that period. So I'm thinking, we go to space. Why are we going to space? We need space for it. There's one other really cool thing about that image. It was, you know how the NASA missions are so scripted. They plot out. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That was unanticipated. And when you listen to the dialogue that took place, it was, hey, get the camera, quick. No one had actually said, hey, we're going to come around the backside of the moon and see the Earth. They didn't even think to think that. And I love the idea that that appreciation, the narrative power of that,

actually was more important than the mission part of it. Well, when StarTalk returns, we're going to find out what kind of new gadgets the EPA is invoking to help us all monitor our environment better on StarTalk at the American Museum of Natural History right here in New York City. And we're sitting beneath the Hayden Sphere. Yeah. So we are joined, of course, by Maeve Higgins, straight off the boat from Ireland. Yes. Yes, yes, yes.

And Andrew Revkin, long-time journalist for the New York Times, writing Dot Earth. Right. One of the challenges of getting people to change their behavior is to convince them that it is in their best interest, or that they'll save money, or that they'll live best interest or that they'll save money or that they'll live longer or that they'll be happier. Nobody wants to do something they don't want to do. And in a free country, at least we tell ourselves, we live in a free country,

if they can't benefit from a behavior change, I wonder if that's even possible. Would you agree with that? Oh, I do. And that's why some things are easier to get done than others, including on the environment. All the pollution that spawned the environmental movement was actually not that hard to get rid of. You stuck a special filter on a smokestack or you built a sewage treatment plant. What a novelty. And amazingly, the Hudson River got cleaner and everyone could, even on a political

timescale, someone could cut a ribbon and then take credit for it. And with something like global warming, slowing biodiversity loss, you're talking about things that don't have those, the reward factor isn't there. And sometimes it can be really expensive. You know, getting off of carbon is not going to be cheap. So I asked Gina McCarthy,

what plan does the EPA have to get people on board? Because without incentives, without people being better off for having done so, I wonder if it's even possible. Let's get her take on it. I think EPA started out in a pretty reactive mode where people were doing what they were doing, and we were trying to catch up and make sure it did things well. Now we have, I think, an opportunity to use data to actually get people much more engaged in thinking about how they interact with the environment and thinking about their behaviors themselves. I'll give you a really quick example. You know that little blue energy star label you see on appliances? Oh, yeah, yeah. On washing machines and dishwashers. I mean,

it's all over the place. People love it. They recognize it because we tell them how efficient that product is and they start buying more efficient products because it saves them money. They base decisions on that information. And guess what happens? Businesses start basing their decisions on the basis of that information because if you want people to buy your product, you make it more efficient. Those are actually, that's an EPA program, because EPA was trying to reduce greenhouse gases. I didn't say you had to suffer by buying a really lousy piece of equipment, because I'm regulating that piece of equipment. I said, let's drive the market to recognize that efficiency is good, it saves people money, businesses

who drive towards efficiency will do better, and as a result, the greenhouse gases will be reduced. So it's both changing the impact that human beings have on the environment and recognizing that environment is changing, as well as getting tools to be able to continue to have people live the way they want to live. But can I tell you about another technology that we have? As you probably know, people have been worried about toxic chemicals for a long time. And EPA is working with a pretty outdated statute

right now on how to do an assessment of how to get toxic chemicals in their place, if you will. What's toxic, what isn't, how do you use them, how do you protect people? Toxic at what level versus another level. Right, and what's the management strategy? There are always going to be chemicals out there. How do we protect people and make sure that we can keep putting chemicals on the market we all need? Some of my best friends are made of chemicals, so you don't want to ban all chemicals. And I don't want to ban all carbon either or we'd be withering away.

All right, I get all that. How do you spell carbon? C-A-H-B-O-N. Okay. Carbon. You're not even embarrassed by your Boston accent. No, I love it. Are you kidding me? You're not trying to suppress it. You're just laying it all out. I interrupted. Please continue. Let me tell you about this really cool technology. So basically, EPA has been given the job to take a look at how we manage chemicals. And so we have spent the past decades looking at doing a traditional way of doing risk assessments. And we have managed to do something in the order of 50 when there's thousands and thousands of chemicals out there, new ones every single year. And we've spent a million bucks on each one. What we're doing now is something called computational toxicology.

Now this is an ability to basically put our testing on steroids. It's basically testing now that we now finished. Not literally on steroids, because that would be putting our testing on another chemical. No, that would actually, I'd have to test those as well. This is actually basically using a robot. It's a robotized program that actually looks at testing thousands of chemicals at once for different characteristics, where we can use now computerized ways of establishing statistical links, so that we can determine whether it's likely to be a toxic or not. And for $30,000 a chemical, we can move forward to do thousands of them in a short period of time.

This is science EPA did, that EPA is going to change the face of science everywhere. And what this does for transforming things is we don't just do the data. We actually put it on the web. And because businesses now know that their chemicals will be able to have this really short turnaround time where we can decide whether or not it is a toxic or not, in all likelihood, they now are redesigning their chemicals to meet these standards even when they're not even regulated. So it looks like they've thought this through in ways that they can change behavior.

Well, there's tons of opportunities. Without creating a law that requires you to change your behavior. That's brilliant. And one other really neat thing is there's a lot of science that shows you that people who can be completely divided over what we call global warming are totally in sync on energy efficiency and on actually investing more in

renewable energy that there are liberals and libertarians who agree on that there's no red blue states when and yale did some studies along those lines so we're all purple with regard to this sort of we're all yes let's put it that way we're all yes instead of yes no yes no yes no so uh it turns out the epa has other stuff up their sleeves. Let's find out what's next with the EPA. One of the cool things we're doing right now is our scientists actually designed a park bench that we're dropping off in a bunch of cities. monitor on it that is solar powered so that you can pick up particulate matter and ozone standards just hanging around, right, in every location where you drop it. And people love this because you can localize it. You can make it personal. You can figure out not just what the ambient air quality is that EPA puts out that takes care of large counties, and you can personalize it and

figure out what the air quality is in your park in your community so that they can take what we do and then work with their own community to keep it safer so the park bench is a secret laboratory it's not so secret but it is a laboratory actually people think it's really cool so it's not secret okay so i i worry from a quantum mechanical point of view i worry that here's this laboratory you set up disguised as a park bench. Yes. And now people sit on a park bench and eat their hamburgers and spill things on it. Doesn't that contaminate the data?

Actually, the monitor is a little bit higher up. A little bit higher up. I'm going to tell you how to do your job. I'm just saying, gaseous effluences could influence the data. I'll tell you how to do your job. I'm just saying, gaseous effluences could influence the data. What she's talking about is information.

Smart meters are a really good thing. They can connect, they allow utilities to get a better sense on an hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute basis of how their power is being used. Smart power meters at your home. Yeah, smart meter in your home. And California's had a hard time getting them into people's homes.

Very liberal people and very conservative people hate them. Liberals think they're going to give them cancer because it's wireless. And the conservatives think that it's an intrusion into their rights to have the power company know how they're using their power. Oh, but who I have sex with is not an intrusion. Yeah, right. Well, there you go. So, you know, there's lots of potential to build a smarter grid if we go with the flow in a way. And we'd all be participant in that because the meters would be in our homes.

Yeah. Yeah. Actually, new people didn't want to cook their food in a microwave, so they thought they would make it radioactive. Yeah, they didn't know that if you just put aluminum foil in your head, it's totally fine. That fixes it. That protects you. Thank you, Maeve, for this insight. You're welcome. I'm actually not a trained scientist. I just know this stuff innately.

There you go. So when we come back, you knew it was coming. We could not have this conversation without going there. And yes, we're going to go there. Climate change on StarTalk when we return. StarTalk is back. The American Museum of Natural History. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. Maeve, always good to have you back.

Andrew, first time we've met this evening. Great to have you on the show. Great to be here. You've been writing about, in the environment, your whole life. Most of it. Most of your whole life. Yep. Yes.

And in there, you got to talk about climate and what impact humans are having on climate. Now, if my records are correct here, 2014 was the warmest year on record since 1880. Correct. So we've got these other data, 97% of climate scientists agree. Only on that global warming is reality and humans are most of it. That's an important fact. Yes. Okay. Now, however, there's a famous quote from Galileo who says, and I quote, in questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.

There you go. So I've never been happy with people saying, 97% of scientists agree, because that's like, so? So? Maybe they're wrong. What they should be saying, in my I-M-H-O, in my humble opinion, is that the

overwhelming consensus of experiments give these results. It's the experiments that, the results of experiments that matter here. This is a tough one, though, because we're not experimenting. Well, we're running only one experiment. Observations. Observations and experiments. That's what people report on.

That's what we should be looking at. In fact, we have data on the CO2 levels over time, and you see larger-scale variations in it, and then you see what's been happening recently. So this seems kind of convincing to me. And we know that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, meaning that it's one of these gases that's opaque to infrared radiation. Yes. So you know the planet will get warmer with more of that gas in the atmosphere. Yeah. So people just, I don't want to know this. I don't want to believe it's true.

I have interests that are not satisfied by believing that we should do something about this. We have data. We have evidence. And they're just, they don't want to agree. And that's a mystery to me. So to get to the bottom of this, we've got Naomi Oreskes on video call from Harvard to give us some insight into what the hell is going on out here.

Naomi, are you live with us? I am, yes. Oh, there you go. Thanks for being on video call with us. Oh, thank you. It was fun to meet you. So what's up with the deniers? What's going on? We just looked at a graph of CO2 levels that have all this data, and many of the most prominent deniers were actually scientists themselves. So it wasn't plausible to think that they didn't understand the science. There had to be something else going on.

And that was the mystery that we set out to answer and that we wrote about in our book, Merchants of Doubt. And the short answer is that these folks weren't interested in the scientific evidence. What they were interested in was a kind of political argument about preventing government interference in the marketplace, preventing the EPA and other organizations like the EPA from taking action to control the hazards and the damage of fossil fuels. Okay, so what all you're saying is that there's a subset of scientists whose critical thinking elements of their brain were overrun by their political leanings. Well, in a sense, although I wouldn't put it quite that way, it's more like they took on the view that the ends justified the means,

that they thought the threat of government intervention in the marketplace was so great. These were old Cold Warriors. In a sense, they're still fighting the Cold War even after the Cold War is over. It's we against the communists, basically. It's we against the communists, which helps to explain why you get these strange things. Like when you say there's climate change, you get accused of being a communist. Or Rush Limbaugh accuses climate scientists of being communists. So part of the mystery was trying to make sense of that. So the idea is that it's us against them, it's democracy against totalitarianism,

it's capitalism against communism, and any threat to democracy, any threat to freedom, any threat to the free market system is so profound that it has to be resisted. And even if that means misrepresenting the science, discounting the science, ignoring the science, these people were prepared to do that. I would have thought that conserving the environment would be a conservative issue. Where did I get that wrong? Well, you didn't. And that was true until the late 70s, early 1980s. There was a time in American history where conservatives were passionate about conserving the environment. But after the Nixon administration, the Republican Party took this

very strong shift to the right under Ronald Reagan and started to really turn against the whole notion of regulation and turn against the notion of environmental regulation as one aspect of being hostile to regulation in general. And Ronald Reagan began to spread the message that government was the problem, not the solution, that we needed to get government off our backs, and especially that we needed to get government out of the private sector to let the market do its magic. Even if the government has your long-term interest as its highest priority? Well, Ronald Reagan didn't believe that. He thought that the government, you know, that that was, the government might say that, but in the end, that wouldn't be what would happen.

And so the entire Republican Party really shifted in a very, very dramatic way from where it had been only 10 or 12 years before. And that put them on a collision course with science. I don't think Ronald Reagan set out to disrespect science, but the net result was that the political positions they took were incompatible with accepting what the scientific evidence was telling us about issues like acid rain, the ozone hole, and global warming. Okay. All right. Well, Naomi, thanks for joining us on StarTalk. Thank you very much. Pleasure. much. So climate change is that real? Presumably the EPA is ready to do something about it. I went straight to Gina McCarthy, the administrator of the EPA, to find out what are they doing about climate change? Let's check it out.

I'm moving forward to develop a standard that will lower carbon pollution that's fueling climate change from our power sector, the companies that generate electricity. It's extremely important for us to tackle it because they are the largest source of carbon pollution in this country. How are you doing this? We're doing it by developing a rule. We put out a proposal. It's called our Clean Power Plan. And basically, it's an effort for the federal government to look at the science, for EPA to look at the science, and to say what kind of standards we can achieve over the long term to send a signal to the energy world that we need to be shifting towards a low-carbon future.

But every state's going to translate that into their very own plan based on where they are today. And that plan is going to be done in a way that into their very own plan based on where they are today. And that plan is going to be done in a way that meets their energy needs, doesn't threaten reliability, doesn't change the affordability of energy for all of us. No lights are going to be shut out, but we're going to actually head towards a low carbon future and jobs of the future as well. Andrew, is that plausible? Is that hot air? Andrew, is that plausible? Is that hot air? Oh, no, it's totally plausible, and it's happening. And the Supreme Court gave the EPA the authority to do this. A lot of the challenge with climate is that the costs come in the future,

and we have this bad habit of discounting future costs. They call it a discount rate that you apply to the future. And again, as a scientist, you go, wait, wait. Is that like people who smoke, and you're like, that's going to take five years off, and they're like, don't care, love it. Well, in a way, that's right. The real-time benefit, whatever that might be, outweighs their sense of that future doom that someone is doing this about.

So you wrote a book that talked about the North Pole? I did. You've been to the North Pole. I was. Did you see Santa? Vatican, North Pole, pretty cool. So you wrote a book that talked about the North Pole? I did. You've been to the North Pole? I was. Did you see Santa? Vatican, North Pole, pretty cool. Did you see Santa Claus? I did.

Good, I just want to verify that. But he spoke Russian. If you go on YouTube, you can see proof of this, actually. I would have thought Santa would have been eaten long ago by polar bears. They had shotguns. He would be so delicious. The elves had shotguns. He would be so delicious. The elves had shotguns. Seriously. The elves had shotguns. Well, the camp workers had shotguns.

So he was Russian, but the elves were American. No, at the Russian camp, the elves were Russian. So at the North Pole, what's so, in your work, what was so particular about the North Pole? So many things are cool, wonderful at the North Pole. No, but as an indicator. Oh, oh, oh. Yeah. You were just going to be like, the food.

Well, the scientists, no, I was really. The restaurants. No, the food. The food was horrible. The nightlife. It was, yeah. The six months of nightlife. What was wonderful was scientists that I was there to report on,

this is 2003, from 2001 until now, every year they go fly onto the sea ice. The North Pole, remember, the North Pole is not like... There's no land there. It's not like Antarctica. You're in the middle of the ocean, and you're camped on sea ice that's about from here to the floor. So it's about eight feet thick.

And it's moving and shifting and cracking, and you're camped on sea ice that's about from here to the floor. So it's about eight feet thick. And it's moving and shifting and cracking. And they're camped there for a number of days, drop instruments down to the ocean to try to get a consistent. This is measurement, measurement, measurement. You've got to go to the same place, the same time, the same year, the same equipment each year by year. And you can start to get a sense of change. It's really hard to measure sea ice change, the thickness of it, without being there and kind of putting instruments under the ice and stuff. So I was reporting on the process of learning about change. They haven't actually concluded.

You know, we know about sea ice reducing and all that stuff, but the details are still hard. To measure. Scientists have to go. To set up that experiment properly to make the observations. And divers had to go under the ice to get the instruments back. It was just amazing. I love science. As you can see.

So, coming up, we're actually going to take questions from the public on the environments of other worlds when StarTalk returns. Woo! when StarTalk returns. We're back on StarTalk. So you know what time it is. It's time for the Cosmic Queries part of StarTalk. Maeve, do you have questions for me from our fan base, from Twitter, from Facebook? Okay. Okay. This one is from Ben Ariola in Sacramento, also California. Considering Earth's

current climate change and our dependence on fossil fuels, what would you say it would take for the planet to reach a runaway greenhouse scenario like the one that left Venus the way it is now? Okay, so it turns out we, as far as we can tell, will never be in a runaway tipping point greenhouse scenario. Yeah. Because all the carbon that is now underground was once above the Earth's surface. now underground was once above the earth's surface. So if we burned every bit of carbon fossil fuel that's down there, we will recreate the atmosphere somewhere around when the dinosaurs were hanging out. And in a period of when we had the dinosaurs, there were no polar ice caps. Water levels were really high and the world was very different. Coastlines were different. Of course,

continental drift had rearranged the shapes of the continents as well and the positions of them on earth. So no, it will not be a runaway greenhouse effect, but the world would be really different. In fact, you know the Statue of Liberty? If we melted the land-based ice, If we melted the land-based ice, principally on Antarctica and Greenland, the sea levels will rise up to the elbow of her hand that's holding the Declaration of Independence. That would be the water levels in New York. So nothing would be above water. This is serious.

This is a different Earth. So the problem is we built our civilization in a relatively stable period of earth's climate. Whatever that was, that's how we built out. We put our cities there on coastlines, on rivers, water and land. That intersection is a fundamental part of what it was to build civilizations for commerce, transportation, for irrigation irrigation for your crops. So you want to change that? You're going to have to move the greatest cities our civilization has ever created. You're going to have to move them inland 100 miles. This is not a productive way to run your civilization. And he's already in Sacramento. Come's like, come on, Ben. So, yeah, no, we're safe from becoming Venus, thankfully.

Thank you. Yeah, no, good, good. So what's interesting is right now we're just thinking about the solar system and other planets. But what is the transition, I wonder, especially directed to you as a journalist, the transition between thinking locally, I want to clean up my river, I want to clean my air, and thinking globally. I had to check in with Gina McCarthy to find out what's their take on how we're doing in the transition from thinking locally to thinking globally. Let's check it out. As Carl Sagan famously said, pollutants don't carry passports. Air will go everywhere.

Water goes everywhere. So do you have any sense of when people first started thinking globally? I'm not sure a lot of people have. You know, I think you may be a little bit, in this regard, a little more positive. They think about it, I think we're getting there. I think air quality is where that became much more apparent because everybody thinks of water locally. We still are challenged to figure out how to get our arms around that.

Air quality changed everything, I think. But it's still very challenging. And on a problem like climate, if you don't think of it globally, if you don't act locally and think globally, you're going to be in trouble. So we've been using that motto since the 60s. Great motto. But I'm not sure it comes to roost until people understand that they individually have impacts that collectively we need to resolve. Andrew, who's doing best in the world thinking globally?

What country? You can say I don't know. I guess Scandinavia. What? Scandinavia? Like maybe Norway? Well, yes, but Norway exports an awful lot of oil. So they have a very clean economy,

but they export the oil and part of their wealth. They said they're going to, I love this, Norway has what's called a sovereign wealth fund that was built on oil money, and they want to divest from coal. They're taking that money out of coal investments, but that money came from oil. So who's winning? Right now, coal is still actually, well, coal and oil are kind of in a race, unfortunately. They're kind of winning still.

And that's what makes this a real tough challenge. And by the way, that's what circles me back to science because, you know, we are going to keep using fossil fuels until something comes around that is as seamlessly plug-inable to our systems. And that's not there yet. Well, when we come back, we're going to talk about countries that are not thinking globally about their economies and their environment and wonder what is anybody doing about it

when StarTalk continues. Thank you. What is anybody doing about it? When StarTalk continues. StarTalk from the Coleman Hall of the Universe here in New York City. Maeve, love having you. Thank you. Andrew, we're all there. Andrew, there are countries leading the world in polluting the air and water. Who's at the top of that list? China leaped past us a few years ago to become, for carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas.

They're the dominant source now. We're not number one in that anymore? No, no, we're not. By the way, they're also tops. We've got to try harder. They're trying. They know that their coal use is unsustainable. And domestically, they realize it's unsustainable. They actually couldn't import it and mine it fast enough

to keep up with the rate at which they were electrifying. Okay, so they're the worst pollutants, but they're self-aware. But they're also aware of markets. They're building solar panels faster, more, cheaper than anyone else. So they could be leading the world and they're in a corner of the market in the stuff

that'll keep the world clean while they're making the world dirty. In fact, the availability of those cheap panels is partially what's facilitated a booming industry here in installing those panels. So it's becomeitated a booming industry here and installing those panels. So it's become affordable here. But also killing whatever industry that was nascent here. Well, you know, this is because there's a world economy. You balance trade issues with getting the right

technology out there, you know, it becomes interesting in a hurry. Well, in my interview with the head of the EPA, Gina McCarthy, I had to ask her, you know, environment is not just the United States. Are they thinking about the rest of the world? I had to go there and find out what she says. Check it out. China has some difficult air quality problems in their cities. One of the things that brought that to the fore was in Beijing, we put an air monitor in the U.S. embassy, and we started tweeting out what those levels said to our own staff because they were concerned about their own kids being out in an area where the air quality was so bad. That started getting picked up by the people who live in Beijing. And the people who live in Beijing

looked at what the federal government was telling them, the central government, and realized that our data didn't look like that. As a result, now you have China recognizing that problem. We're there. U.S. technology is there monitoring in a good system, and things change. Oh, I'd say China was delighted with that. Give it up for the power of the tweet. And so are there any examples of pollutions crossing? There was an estimate that a third of the smog in California was Chinese pollution. A third? Yeah.

And I'm quite sure of that number. I'd have to look it up on it. But convert it to Fahrenheit, and what do you do? This might be stupid, but in China, they're making stuff that's being used in America, though, right? Yes. Like they're manufacturing products that we use here all the time.

Yes. So isn't it sort of fair enough in a weird way that we get their pollutants also, not just their phones? Oh, I see. Interesting. But she's right. There actually have been studies that have measured the embedded energy or carbon in an exported good, whose carbon is that?

Is it China's or is it the country that sold China the coal? Or is it the person that's buying the toaster from China? You can do those analyses. And it turns out Europe got kind of cleaner the last decade or so, but that was because a lot of European manufacturing moved to China. And the goods still go to Europe or to wherever. So actually, you're on a point that people are trying to figure out. So nature is forcing the United States to share in the pollutants of the products made by China that we are consuming. Yeah. That's karma for you, right there, right?

So, Andrew, you haven't really left us with much hope in anything that's come out of your mouth. I don't even know if you know how to write about hope. So I asked Gina McCarthy, is there no hope for any of this? Let's find out what she said. I think our challenge is to make sure that people recognize that if you face the science,

if you have a problem, running towards it is where you want to go. Being afraid of it because you're worried about the actions you need to fix it just holds you in place and the world never changes. You never innovate. You never develop that next technology. What we have seen is the growth of technologies that never would have happened because we've identified a problem and begun to tackle it. Can you imagine in 50 years you are so effective that you put yourself out of business? Wouldn't that be lovely? But right now it's beyond my imagination. That's too much

of a fantasy. It really is. You can just fix all the problems. But life changes, right? Everything changes. And you know as well as I that the more you learn, the more you see. You know, you realize the challenges that next come up. You know, we've been able to reduce air pollution 70% since EPA came around. And at the same time, our GDP's tripled. Don't tell me that this is somehow going to be irrelevant to the future. Andrew. Yeah. is somehow going to be irrelevant to the future. Andrew, is there a... Is anyone still talking about the Gaia hypothesis of Earth,

where Earth will heal itself, that Earth is almost like an organism that has self-interest in mind? Are people still talking about that? That was all the rage back when... That was all the rage. But James Lovelock, who penned the Gaia hypothesis with others, he then... And Lynn Margulis, I think, was also a proponent.

Yeah, he later wrote a book called Gaia's Revenge, which was about us getting pounded by this force because we're messing with it. So Earth will kill us. That was his thesis. Although he's now... He's in his 90s and he's writing another book. He's just written another book that's more actually hopeful. So Earth will kill us, but not other life forms. This is an evil Mother Nature, right?

In that, well, he was seeing us as the sort of the disease that needs to be managed. So when we come back, we will find out where in the universe we will catch up with Bill Nye the Science Guy, my friend and colleague, when we return on StarTalk. We're back. StarTalk. We've been talking about climate, we've been talking about the environment,

and right now it's time to check in on my good friend Bill Nye the Science Guy, former resident of California. He lives in New York City now. We got him. And we got him. And I never know where he is, and I don't even see these until like right now. But he's going to share with us his reflections and his understanding of what environment means. Let's check him out. The birds, the bees, the butterflies, and the trees, they're all from the Earth, and so are we. We are all earth stuff.

And today is beautiful. Today is a walk in the park. It is a park. And it's right here in the city. Half the people in the world now live in cities. And so many of us think of cities as being separate from nature. But how can it be? Nature built us and we built all of this.

It's our home. But it's also our house. Here's what I mean. If you have a house, you can't just call the landlord and complain if something goes wrong with the lighting or the plumbing. You have got to get it fixed. No, everyone you'll ever meet is from the earth.

The earth is our home, but it's also our house. Andrew, what do you think about that being we're owners, not tenants? That's a pretty sensible perspective. Would you agree? Yeah. Way back in college, I remember a professor of comparative literature told me that in Italian, you don't own property, you hold property. I mean, I'm not from Italy, and he said historically, it was holding. And I think that's actually a valuable way

to think about it as well. I actually have a bias in terms of what kind of pollution I care most about. And I brought that up with Gina McCarthy. Let's check it out. You've had initiatives about trying to get people outside to explore nature. And to me, part of exploring nature is looking up. Without light pollution, we have a relationship with the night sky.

And with it, you don't even know it's there. I did do an initiative in Connecticut called No Child Left Inside. It was just an effort to connect kids with the outside world and families. So we did a lot of running around in parks, but one other thing we did was bring them out to the night sky. You did have telescopes. We did have telescopes. Okay, so you're in the club. But the other thing we did, and this is what impacted me, is we just made them go in a quiet place that didn't have everybody around and look up.

It gives you a sense of the breadth of the universe, how small you are. I want every teenager to do that who thinks their world is this small and who worries about the next email that they might see that talks about them. Go in the big world and see how vast it is and get a sense of yourself in it and what an amazing thing it is. It changes your perspective forever. And you're absolutely right. That's one of the reasons why we have to be worried about light pollution, because the way in which we disconnect ourselves from the natural world means that my job gets hotter and hotter. So she's really describing the early stages of a cosmic perspective.

Again, I'm an astrophysicist, and so we live big. All our numbers are big, and the sizes of things are big, and time scales are big. And when I look at Earthrise over the moon, I remember. I'm that old. I remembered when that photo was published. We all had to stop and take pause at the meaning and significance of that image. Here's Earth rising over somebody else's horizon, afloat there in the

dark vacuum of space. And I think it's possible to affect you emotionally, even subliminally. You're down here and you're saying, I've got to protect the whole thing, not just my stream, my pond. I want to protect the whole earth. And this is not a new thought. I dug up a few lines from T.S. Eliot, with which we will end this show.

We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all of our exploring will be to arrive where we started and to know the place for the first time. You've been watching StarTalk. And as always, I, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, bid you to keep looking up.