The New Yorker Radio Hour - Bill McKibben and Elizabeth Kolbert on the Pandemic and the Environment

Episode Date: April 17, 2020

Bill McKibben and Elizabeth Kolbert join David Remnick to talk about the twin crises of our time: the coronavirus pandemic and the climate emergency. During the COVID-19 national emergency, the Trump Administration has loosened auto-emissions standards, and has proposed easing the controls on mercury released by power plants, among other actions. With protesters no longer able to gather, construction on the controversial Keystone Pipeline has resumed. Still, McKibben and Kolbert believe that the pandemic could remind the public to take scientific fact seriously, and possibly might change our values for the better. Plus: Carolyn Kormann speaks with a disease ecologist who hunts for coronaviruses and other deadly pathogens in the bat caves where they originate. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. It's been a very strange spring, to say the very least. So many of us are stuck inside as tulips emerge from the dirt and birdsong erupts from outside, all those signs of life returning after the winter. So we'll start the show today with one of the great thinkers about the relationship between people and nature. Bill McKibben, who's at home in the woods of Vermont. I'm Bill McKibbon, and I'm a writer, and, you know, I spend a lot of my life working on the big crisis of our time,

the climate crisis. And so, of course, the last few months, the last few weeks, I've been watching with great sadness and great interest as we try to deal with this crisis. crisis that has befallen us right now, the coronavirus, and thinking about the ways in which it overlaps with the other bigger, ongoing dramas on our planet. Okay, we're just wandering down the driveway to the little marsh at the end because the last few nights, the wood frogs who have suddenly appeared their raucous spring ritual. And here's a little bit of the

just this little swampy marsh. Now the wood frogs will be quiet for a little while because they can hear us coming and they get a little nervous but I bet if we stand over there quietly for a minute the sound of the wood frogs will start to pick up again. Let's see. There's no possible way to get past the sadness of this moment. It, you know, haunts everybody all the time. But it is good sometimes to be able to remind yourself that the world, the planet,

at least for now, goes on about its appointed mission. I mean, the wood frogs are very intent on mating with each other. They have not thrown in the towel. And also to be out at night and be reminded that we're, a small part of something very, very, very large.

That doesn't make it any better that people are dying or sad or unemployed or so on, but it does maybe help me anyway get through to the next day a little bit. Bill McKibben in Vermont. Bill's joining us this week as we're marking an important anniversary. 50 years ago, April 22nd, 1970, people across the country gathered to demand government action on pollution. This was the first Earth Day and something like 20 million Americans, a tenth of the population at the time, turned out for it. Good evening. A unique day in American history is ending. A day set aside for a nationwide outpouring of mankind seeking its own survival. Earth Day.

It was as if Washington knew it was a special event and turned on Springs' brightest sun for the celebration of Earth Day and a march on the Interior Department. You probably know the story. The momentum of that first Earth Day helped lead to landmark legislation, the clean air and the clean water acts. Richard Nixon, of all people, created the Environmental Protection Agency that very same year. And now 50 years later, the situation is entirely different. The Trump administration has weakened the Endangered Species Act, withdrawn from the Paris Climate Accord, and much more. Just a few weeks ago, it rolled back auto-emission standards, and there's a move now to ease controls on the amount of mercury that's released by power plants.

But there's no protest march this Earth Day, because of course, people can't gather. And so as Bill McKibben said earlier, we now face two devastating global crises at once, the climate crisis that's been building for decades, and the coronavirus pandemic that's ripped through the world in a matter of months. I called up Bill along with staff writer Elizabeth Colbert, who's covered climate change and extinction for the New Yorker for more than 20 years. I asked Betsy about the administration's latest rollback of environmental regulations, and why now? They're actually up against an interesting deadline. So if there's a reg put into place, or in this case it would be a reg, you know,

unput into place regulation, in the last 60 legislative days of an administration, that can be overturned by a simple majority in both houses. So they're really racing to do as much damage as they possibly can in a short amount of time as possible. And the latest outrage was the fuel efficiency standards that the Obama administration had put into place to try to raise fuel efficiency standards for cars. It was all eminently doable. But when your goal is to maximize oil consumption, which we've also seen during this administration, that what they're concerned about is how do we get aid to oil companies, you know, obviously we're just not on the same wavelength. Let's put it that way.

Well, oil prices are at historic lows. Bill, are there specific ways that the oil industry is taking advantage of this crisis? I'll tell you that the thing that really just about knocked me to the ground in the last. week was watching what's happening out on the prairie with the Keystone Pipeline. You'll recall this story. A bunch of us fought for years to keep it from getting built. Obama said it couldn't be built. Trump overturned that as soon as he got into office, but the oil companies have never been able to build it because there have been too many people in the way. There are 30,000 people who have trained to do nonviolent civil disobedience to

stop them if they tried. Well, this is their moment. And so the government of Alberta gave the pipeline company several billion dollars. Chase Bank followed with a billion from some other banks. The company said they were going to work. And in fact, they're flying in people from around the country, construction workers into rural areas that already have badly stressed health care systems. And on the edge of Indian reservations filled with people who lost 90 percent of their ancestors to pandemic over the last 500 years. This is an out-of-control machine, and it's doing damage right now. And, of course, the bigger, larger damage it's doing is fueling the climate crisis that's going to just keep popping for decades to come, millennia to come. You know, it's hard to say this, but the kind of shutdown, the frozenness of the globe at the moment, has had some unintended consequences environmentally. You see these images taken from above about the way pollution has cleared up.

You see photographs of the canals of Venice that are now absolutely clear, and you see fish in which you never would have seen before. All kinds of images like this, stories like this. Do you think that will have any effect on the politics of climate change going ahead, Betsy? Well, I think that's a, you know, one of the, you know, one of the, the many big questions of our moment. We are certainly seeing what we can do when we want to mobilize against a threat. You can say we've done it, you know, inadequately and too late. But we are, we are doing a lot. And I think the question of our people, you know, really reexamining their,

their core values, what, what do we need and what don't we need? And seeing that we can live a lot differently. Now, the alternative argument can also be made that there'll be this huge rush to try to reinvigorate the economy in potentially the worst possible ways. So I honestly don't know, you know, the famous, I guess, Churchill never let a crisis go to waste. I certainly hope that we will not let this crisis go to waste, but I don't know that we won't let it go to waste. Bill, same question. Well, look, there's a bunch of things. that I think are sinking in. One, and this is really important, science is real and physical reality matters.

You know, Betsy and I have spent decades trying to convince people that physics and chemistry are real, and you can't spin them and make them compromise and negotiate. If that's true for the CO2 molecule, it's doubly true for the COVID-microbe, and it doesn't matter how much the guy in Washington stands at his little lectern and waves his arms. It's not a hoax and it's not going to go to zero in a few days and it's not going to be over by Easter and it's not, you know, on and on and on. The second lesson that I think people are learning, or maybe, since we're now all epidemiologists, is time really matters. Like, we understand now that when the U.S. and South Korea got the first death, the South Koreans went to work. You know, they disrupted life a little, told people to stop gathering in big groups,

started testing people. And, you know, six or eight weeks later, they're kind of looking at this through the rearview mirror. We did the opposite, and exactly as we did with climate change. We ignored the warnings for the 30 years. Now we're in over our heads. So maybe people will get the message that we have to go quickly if we're going to deal with these kind of threats. Betsy, we're in the midst of a radical reshaping of the economy, or potentially we are. Are there any lessons that can be drawn from how this transition is being managed that can be applied to climate change and how to avert the worst kind of catastrophe? Well, I mean, a lot of parallels are being drawn to the Depression.

The idea that we need a huge investment program in our country, whether you call it the Green, New Deal, whether you call it an infrastructure bill that has clean energy at its center and clean transportation, I want to say we need huge changes to our transportation system. If we took that lesson and didn't just pour money into dying and or should be dying sectors of our economy, we would be in a much, much better place 10, 20, 30 years from now. Bill, will the pandemic change the way the climate has talked about in the presidential election? We'll see if anything else other than the pandemic is talked about in the presidential election. But I do think that it reinforces what was already a growing political sense,

that you have to take the physical world seriously. For all of us, this period of staying at home requires some kind of personal deprivation. and we have to go without things that we've taken for granted here in the city, even just walking around is something that you think twice about. Is there some lesson for us in how we tackle climate change in terms of how we need to change our personal behavior to accept limitations?

I mean, there are huge, where are our major carbon emissions coming from? They're coming from the power sector and they're coming from the transportation sector. and one of the vastest growing parts of the transportation sector and one of the hardest to deal with in terms of getting us off fossil fuels has been air travel. And now we have no air travel. And so I think that is a really interesting question, whether our constant, you know, sort of flying around the world, which I am as guilty as anyone of, whether we just go back to business as usual or whether we do rethink some of those ways in which we've been living, that, cannot be sustained. I mean, they honestly simply just cannot be sustained. I do think for everyone, like it or not, you know, it has been this moment of reset and realizing, well, we don't need that.

Now, once again, that is for me sitting here. I don't work for the airline industry. If you do, you obviously say, well, we need that. That's my job. So these are huge questions that will play out over the coming years. Bill? Well, look, first thing to be said is, and it draws on what Betsy just said, like the climate crisis, the corona pandemic has made it clear just what a horrible idea it is to have a deeply unequal society. And so I hope that one of the things that we take from this, and I trust we will, is that we can no longer continue to have a world where five or six people have as much wealth as hundreds of millions of other people. It doesn't work because those people, the poor people get sick and die, and it doesn't work because you can't have the kind of social trust you need to run a society. And that goes to the place that may be most important here. I mean, what's the thing I think that most people miss above all is just the chance to be gregarious, to be with other people.

Human beings are socially evolved primates. It wasn't that many generations ago that we were, you know, sitting on the other people. the floor of the savannah picking lice out of each other's fur, you know. And so it's hard to be told not to go touch people, hug people, be near people, talk to people, shake hands, all the things that we're used to. When we get out of detention, I hope that it will be a reminder to us about how much social distancing we've been doing already these last few decades, how much we've kind of retreated into a world of screens. And I think that we might, just might, prize each other a little bit more, and that if we do, we can begin to see how in that pleasure

we might begin to replace some of the consumption that Betsy's been talking about, and it drives every environmental challenge that we face. So who knows? I mean, it's also possible we'll just set up all the pins in the bowling alley again. You know, that's the other possibility. But let's hope not. I think we're better than that. Bill McKibben and Elizabeth Colbert, thanks so much.

Thank you. Thank you, David. Bill McKibben and Elizabeth Colbert. You can find both of their writings on the environment at New Yorker.com, and in the same place, you can subscribe to our newsletter called The Climate Crisis, which Bill writes. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. We've been talking this hour about the coronavirus pandemic and the environment,

how our current situation changed. changes the calculus globally, but also personally. This whole experience has been just bonkers on so many levels, but like, when the weather is nice, it changes the whole situation. I grew up around nature, and I pretty much took it for granted. Now when I walk, I'm really seeing the height of trees. I'm looking at their branches. I'm noticing the colors, the shape, the different textures. I've paid more attention to the stars while I'm out walking. That's definitely a thing. I saw a shooting star the other day.

That was super cool. I'm appreciative of the small amounts of nature that I get to see these days. Keep in mind, like, I live in a very densely populated area. And even still, it's like I need to be outside and go places and walk. And, like, especially on the weekends, like, go out and see something other than the room that I sit in seven days a week. All colors of green from lime green to olive green to hunter green. Yeah, I think I appreciate outside more and nature more because, you know, when you just do the same thing every day, you know, you get up, you get ready, you go to work, you come home, you do your daily routine, you don't think about those things. But now that we're indoors most of the time, it's like you just feel like the need to go.

it feels more deliberately hygienic. It's like, okay, now we are going to take a walk. You know, I think before this, my husband and I each had our own various ways of exercising, but now we make a point of making the walks together. We have a park, huge park, but I'm scared to go there. And no matter how I have a mask or something, it's not the same thing.

It's an uncanny feeling. So it looks the same as it did before, but it's not the same. It's not the same. The natural world has taken on a new edge where something we can't even see appears to be attacking us. When we talk about confronting the COVID-19 virus, it's with metaphors of war and battle. The president said we are fighting an invisible enemy, an evil beast. And yet we have to understand that the virus is doing what, all living things do naturally, reproducing as much as it can.

We don't know exactly how this novel coronavirus first infected humans, but scientists have done a lot of work to understand where these viruses came from in the first place. Staff writer Carolyn Kormon talked recently with someone who searches out coronaviruses in their natural habitat. So first could you just tell us who you are, your name, and your job, and what you do and how you hunt viruses. Sure. My name is John Epstein. I'm a disease ecologist with EcoHealth Alliance in New York, which is a non-profit, science-based

organization that studies epidemics and tries to figure out how they happen and how to stop them. So the job that I do, the research that I do is specifically on zoonotic viruses. Those are viruses that are carried by animals and jump into people or start. spread into people. Viruses like Ebola, SARS coronavirus, the current SARS-coronavirus-2 that's causing COVID-19. And one thing that these viruses have in common is that they're carried by different types of bats. And so I've spent a lot of my career working with different bat species and trying to understand the viruses that they carry. So as I understand it back in 2004, you got on a plane to China to track down the first SARS virus, which is a relative of the current coronavirus.

Where would you go? I mean, how did you decide which bat caves to visit and which markets to visit? And what was the experience like? How did you do the work? Well, the markets where SARS emerged were in major cities. And so we wanted to start near there, figuring that the animals probably most likely came from the surrounding area and then we'd worked a way outwards. and about two or three hours drive out of the city, you get to farmland.

But there are these enormous and beautiful limestone mountains or hills, and limestone formations are great for having caves. Some of them were long and tortuous, maybe 10 feet high at the ceiling, tunnels that were going into big caverns. And sometimes these caverns would open up, and they were the size of airplane hangers. And so we were in these enormous caverns. and the way that we catch that is that we set up nets.

And the nets are typically like a volleyball net that's strung between two masts or two poles. They could be bamboo poles. We were hand-carrying these in. And then we also had hand nets that look like big butterfly nets. And sometimes you can get close enough to bats that they're hanging on the ceiling that you can simply catch them with a butterfly-type net.

So the trick was to position our net in a flyway that would be heavily trafficked, congested, where lots of bats were flying through and that just simply couldn't avoid the net, even if they saw it. And about how many bats, though, are there in the cave? I mean, are hundreds of thousands? Yeah, there could be thousands, tens of thousands. It really varied on the size of the cave and the species.

We would go in during the day, bats would tend to be sleeping on the ceiling, but, of course, once you're in there and disturb them, they fly around. What we did was we would go into the caves and we would set up a sampling station. And so you take, in effect, nasal. swabs when you're taking samples? No, not, we take an oropherenial or oral swab. So we use tiny little pediatric-sized, you know, cotton swabs that can fit into the bat's mouth and ideally into the back of its throat.

And that's where we, you know, rub it a little bit, let the bat chew on it and try to collect saliva that way. And then bats will often, you know, help us out by providing a little fecal pellet when we catch them or put them into bags when we catch them. And so then we get a fecal sample. And, you know, on rare occasion, depending on the bat and the size of the bat, we might even get a urine sample. And then we collect the blood from veins on the arm of the bat. We're able to collect tiny amounts of blood, and then we release the animal right on site.

And what would you think about when you held the bats in your hand? Well, I mean, I love working with bats. I love working with animals in general. I've worked with the largest bats in the world, which is the Malayan Flying Fox in Malaysia, which is a giant fruit bat that has about a five-foot wingspan, weighs about two pounds. Yeah, it's like a flying chihuahua or flying squirrel. But they're really, they're adorable animals. You know, they have a sort of fox-like head, and these are very social animals, very charismatic animals.

Their temperament can vary. Some of them can be very feisty and bitey. Others can be very docile. Smaller insect-eating bats, they range from the really tiny to about the size of your thumb to a little bit bigger, maybe the size of the palm of your hand. And what did you discover from hunting down the first SARS virus? What does it tell us about, you know, its cousin or this new coronavirus? It was really interesting.

At the time, we didn't know which species we were going to find anything in or if we'd find anything at all. And after testing a lot of different bats, it turned out that horseshoe bats, which is an insect-eating group of bats, we were carrying. a virus that was closely related to SARS. And in fact, it looked to be ancestral. So what that told us was that we had kind of found a progenitor virus, one from which SARS likely came. And that was the first clue that bats were probably a natural reservoir for these viruses. How does the virus get from a bat into another animal? You know, how does the virus kind of jump this species barrier? Well, different viruses have

different abilities to infect one or more hosts. What happens is some viruses use a certain strategy for getting inside of cells, and they need to get inside of cells in the body to hijack the cell machinery and make more virus. And there's what's called a receptor on the cell surface that a virus uses, like a lock and key, where the virus might have the key, and it needs a specific lock that certain cells might have. SARS and SARS coronavirus too, which causes COVID-19, use a receptor called the ACE2 receptor, which is found in a lot of mammals. It's conserved across mammals, including people.

And we have ACE2 receptors in the cells in our lower lungs, which is why we get a lower respiratory disease when infected with SARS-CoV-2. And we also have some ACE2 receptors in our intestinal cells. So we know that SARS and SARS-CoV-2 can cause GI infections as well. And so that's why sometimes diarrhea is associated with this coronavirus. And so a virus's ability to jump host from its natural reservoir to other species

is really a product of, does it have the right key to fit into locks that are carried by different hosts? And is there opportunity for it to get out of its natural reservoir and into a different host? And that's really an important point right there for this whole conversation, is how do these viruses emerge?

It's because of activities that people do. It's human activities that change the environment around us and bring us and our livestock into closer contact with why. What's happening now more than ever in history is that the human population is at an all-time high and growing. We're putting incredible pressure on natural systems. We're deforesting.

We're clearing land for agriculture. We're moving our livestock and ourselves closer to what we're formerly pristine habitats. And so there's more opportunity to make contact with species that we haven't traditionally had contact with. We're starting to learn that bats seem to be particularly adept at tolerating viral and infection. And that would explain why they're able to carry so many different types of viruses. And does it have to do with the fact that they're the only mammal that flies? That's been a hypothesis that's developing. And it turns out that bats handle viral infection

differently than other mammals. When we get infected with a virus, part of our body's response is inflammation. That's part of our fever response. It's part of our body's way of sending white blood cells, to attack that virus, and the result is we have inflammation internally. And sometimes that's part of the disease process. Our own body's response can cause tissue damage in extreme cases, organ failure. So that can be a really important process. Bats, along the way somehow have lost some of the genes that are responsible for inflammation. So when a bat gets infected with a virus, it virtually doesn't develop any noticeable disease.

Now, that's not always true, but it's generally true that bats tend to get very, mild or no disease when they're carrying viruses like nepovirus or relatives of ebola virus. Now, the hypothesis is that this coincides with the evolution of flight. Bats are the only mammals that have powered flight. And the process of flying, of flapping those wings, sometimes hundreds of times a minute, is incredibly stressful at the cellular level in the body. It can cause oxidative damage, which damages cells and the DNA inside cells. And to cope with that, bats have evolved to have mechanisms that dampen the immune response

to that stress, to that physiologic exertion. And that might be why they don't also have inflammation when they're infected with viruses. Wow. In some ways, it's just remarkable to think about the virus. Having evolved to the point where it's so, so dangerous to people, it's remarkable, right? I mean, I would have that the virus would have everything it needed to be able to transmit so effectively between people and cause such severe disease. It's a lot like, imagine the lottery balls. This is big, you know, the balls with numbers on them and you turn the wheel and one ball comes out. Think of viruses that way.

There's an enormous spectrum of viruses, all slight variations on a theme. And most of those may never have the ability to jump out of their natural host and infect other species. And it's the ones that do, the few that do, that we notice because they cause trouble. Do you see bats as dangerous in any way or more, you know, more as a beautiful animal? The most dangerous thing about these bats is us tripping and falling in the cave when we're walking in there. Bats are, you know, they're a maligned animal, unfortunately, they have a really bad reputation, but they're the most important animals in the world to people for so many reasons. insect-eating bats

providing credible amounts of pest control. They eat moths and beetles that can damage crops by the ton. They eat mosquitoes. And then fruit-eating bats play an important role as pollinators and seed dispersers. In fact, half of the rainforest

in the old world in Africa and Asia exists because of bats pollinating and dropping seeds. So without bats, we'd be in a lot of trouble. So now I think they're terrific animals. Well, John, thank you so much. Thank you for having me. It's been a real pleasure. That was Jonathan Epstein, a disease ecologist, and he spoke with Carolyn Kormon.

You can find her article from Bats to Human Lungs at New Yorker.com. I'm David Remnick, and I hope if you can, that you can get some time outside this week with appropriate social distancing, of course. Be well, and please join us next time for the New Yorker Radio Hour. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Riannon, Riannon, Calli Leia, David Krasnow, Gauphin and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Alison McAdam, Meng Faye Chen, and Emily Mann. with additional help from Isaac Jones and Josh Swartz.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.